Presented by:
Frederick D. Isler
Associate Administrator for Civil Rights

The participation of leadership in FHWA’s workforce planning endeavor is critical.

The following are just a few questions that, as leaders, we need to consider to promote and accomplish our objectives.

Questions, as Leaders, We Should be Asking

• How can we obtain a clear representation of the workforce needed to accomplish FHWA’s strategic goals?
• What kind of progression and succession plans are needed to accurately predict when people will retire?
• What skill sets need to be replaced and/or enhanced, and what training is needed at various levels within the organization? 
• For example, will FHWA need more project engineers than design engineers?
• In what geographical areas will most of these engineers need to be located?
• Will we need more skilled personnel at the division level, or at headquarters?
• What personnel recruitment strategies and efforts are likely to be more successful to meet FHWA’s needs?
• What is a convincing rationale for acquiring new authority and marshalling resources to implement the human resource management policies and programs needed to accomplish FHWA's strategic objectives?
• What constitutes our primary activity at present, and what will it be in the future? For example, is it building roads, managing roads, etc.?
• How can we use our time effectively and efficiently to ensure that FHWA’s strategic objectives are achieved?
• How should we communicate our intentions, including the strategies we intend to use to achieve FHWA’s goals? What communication vehicles would be most effective to accomplish our leadership objectives?

As Leaders, What Road Should We Take to Find the Answers?

• Recognize the difference between leadership and management.
• FHWA’s mission – aligned with, and drive all our activities.
• Ensure all within FHWA understand our organization’s mission.
• Ensure all within FHWA understand our organization’s mission. 
• FHWA stakeholders-both internal and external-- should understand FHWA’s mission.
• Adopt “principles of stakeholder management”:
  • FHWA managers serve diverse constituencies in a global network of knowledge and learning—where diverse groups of parties have a “stake” in our organization.
  • FHWA’s culture should embrace diversity, open dialogue, mutual respect, and a common standard of fairness.
• Enhance FHWA’s mission: Enhancing Mobility through Innovation, Leadership, and Public Service.
  • Provide clarity about FHWA’s values:
    • Creativity
    • Diversity
    • Family
    • Integrity
    • Personal Development
    • Professionalism
    • Service
    • Teamwork
• Promote innovation and advancement as ways to shape and create new opportunities.
  • This requires that FHWA employees be well versed/trained in current and emerging technologies.
• Embrace a philosophy of corporate responsibility.
  • Practice, as well as instill in our organization, the importance of ethical and socially responsible behavior -- the basis for nurturing and productive work environments.
• Commit to engaging in open communication and dialogue.
  • Not equivalent to endorsing collective decision-making; not all information can be appropriately shared with all stakeholder groups.
  • Rather, an understanding and appreciation of varied perspectives and concerns of affected stakeholders—preferred way to resolve difficult situations.
• Clearly articulate our organizational and/or functional strategic intent – and communicate it to all levels to shape what activities FHWA wishes to carryout, and how FHWA will do it.
• Recognize that workforce planning should always take place within the framework of human capital strategic planning:
  • At least four separate processes: cultural shaping, organizational design, workforce planning, and performance planning.

Changing the Culture of the FHWA Workplace: Some Conditions

• Before FHWA can begin to pursue systemic change, we must first know where we are going:
  • A vision of what the system will look like when it is in place.
  • A set of guiding principles that can be operational in all aspects of the work that occurs within the FHWA.
  • A means of knowing when FHWA is being true to those principles and when it is not.
• Principles to consider may include:
  • Purpose -- the highest guiding principle of individuals and organizations--eventually absorbs, sustains, and glues together our mission and values.
  • FHWA’s purpose should be agreed upon by all individuals participating and making up our enterprise or organization (leaders, managers, directors, staff, partners, customers, etc.)
  • A sustainable purpose must be: unending, based in truth and fairness, and serve others.
  • Innovation: Find ways to turn our people’s imagination and best practices into successful technologies and products—and innovation that helps create healthy environment.
  • Consistent excellence in FHWA services and relationships at all levels within the organization: ensures sustainable organizational success.
  • Acknowledging that changes in practice occur, and are sustained when FHWA staff:
    • Believe they are doing the right things.
    • Believe their practices are the right ones.
    • See that their practices connect them with their own values.

Consider three areas of focus for FHWA leadership:

• FHWA Staff must not only be trained, but new behaviors and new practices must be reinforced.
  • Primarily from front-line executives, but also by peers within the agency;
  • By other agencies with whom we interact;
  • By leadership’s expectations of FHWA employees in terms of performance.
• FHWA should focus attention on changing its culture by:
  • Building an infrastructure that supports changed practice—one that permits staff at the front lines to act.
  • Involving the full partnership of those outside FHWA — and on whom we are dependent to serve our stakeholders effectively.
• FHWA should build its capacity for quality assurance:
  • There must be an ongoing quality assurance process measuring things that are important—on outcomes practices we’re trying to support.
  • New and sustainable practices must be important enough to monitor or to be used as a basis of evaluating performance.