If I pass the baton, who will grab it? Creating bench strength in Public Management.

• Author: Lancaster, Lynne C.
• Position: Reprint

Reprinted with permission from the September 2005 issue of Public Management (PM) magazine published by the International City/County Management Association, Washington, D. C.

A Baby Boomer who is a city manager in Northern California was frustrated and perplexed. "I've got a talented Gen X assistant city manager I've been mentoring for several years," he says. "She's smart, organized, politically savvy ... just the right profile to take over my job when I retire. But when I recently told her she was the top candidate to inherit my role her response was, 'Thanks but no thanks. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy!'"

It took the stunned city manager a while to realize that the position he fought so hard to achieve and worked so hard to succeed in held little appeal for the next generation. Too many public managers are hearing similar responses from the next generation of talent, and for many it's a surprising situation.

After years of budget cuts and hiring freezes, the impending retirements of millions of Baby Boomers will create huge opportunities to hire the next generation of leaders, giving them important responsibilities and authority. Yet, too often, Generation Xers are doing anything but leaping at the chance to advance. In fact, some are running kicking and screaming from jobs many boomers deemed highly desirable.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHALLENGES

Public management now faces a war for talent many leaders never expected. First of all, the profession is being challenged by demographics. As 80 million Baby Boomers (born 1946-64) move into their retirement years, they are followed by a much smaller population of Generation Xers--just 46 million people born between 1965 and 1981 .That means the pool of workers available for grooming as managers is much smaller than it has been for decades. While the next generation following the Gen Xers (Millennials, born 1982 to 2000) are larger in number at 76 million, they are just beginning to enter the workforce and won't be available in this large number for some time to come.

To complicate matters, Generation Xers are harder to lure into public management. This is a highly independent and entrepreneurial generation. They are skeptical of large institutions and uncomfortable with layers of bureaucracy. By the age of 20, Generation Xers had already watched 23,000 hours of television. And in the media, they saw every major American institution called into question, from the presidency to the military, to organized religion, to corporate America, and yes, even state and local governments.

Too many Xers think if you can name the institution, they can name the crime. It will be tough to convince this cohort that they can have meaningful careers as public servants because the first question on their minds will be, "Can I really accomplish anything?" followed by questions like, "Can I be true to my values?"

Another aspect of the hiring challenge is that Generation Xers have so many choices. The 1990s saw the emergence of Xers into the U.S. workforce in parallel with both a decade-long economic boom and the tech boom. So this generation has had a plethora of options, ranging from working at a high-tech start-up out of someone's garage to joining private industry with a great title and big signing bonus.

Too often the option of working in the public sector wasn't even on the table. For one thing, many local governments weren't actively hiring; in fact, many were downsizing. For another, the Baby Boomers held most of the managerial jobs. And because boomers were relatively young and capable, there wasn't much room for the Gen Xers working in their shadows to move up.

In 1971, when boomers were emerging into the public workforce, 26 percent of appointed managers were under the age of 30. By the year 2000, appointed managers under 30 numbered only 2 percent. Clearly, when Xers complain they can't advance fast enough, they aren't just imagining it. But too many older managers have pigeonholed Xers as greedy, impatient, and even disloyal because of their desire to keep their careers in motion.

With workers on the leading edge of the baby boom turning 60 and public pension plans rewarding senior managers for retiring on time or even early, we are about to experience a massive workforce shift. As boomers retire en masse, will the next generations be around in sufficient numbers to succeed them? The answer is yes, but only if managers of all generations in the public sector pull together to create the right environment for this transition.

ATTRACTING THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS

One of the first steps in attracting the younger generations to public service will be to consider perceptions. Too often, local governments have been seen as slow moving and low tech. They are viewed as being too bureaucratic to get anything done, with a daily schedule of meetings about meetings about meetings that seems almost strangling to an outsider or to someone accustomed to lean and flat organizations.

Then there's the challenge of the hiring process. Prohibitive civil service exams, long waits to hear whether a resume has even been received, unresponsive personnel offices, and unclear career paths are just a few of the obstacles Gen Xers cite when asked about why they gave up and went to work somewhere else.

With tech savvy Millennials, the challenge will be even greater. The majority say the first place they go to find out about jobs is the World Wide Web.Yet far too many public institutions have out-of-date Web sites with limited use of color and unexciting messages on why anyone would want to work there. These...