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Making Paper Airplanes Fly
By Melanie Hoff
Leadership training is an important aspect of career development for young
professionals in both the private and public sectors. While this training is
memorable for many, the leadership story of retired Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) executive Mike Cook offers one valuable lesson that carried over
throughout his very successful career.
As a fairly new and young branch chief in a federal agency tasked with
developing the infrastructure for issuing municipal wastewater permits under the
1972 Clean Water Act, Mike was sent to a management training course. His
experience during an exercise framed his leadership style and provided the
single most important leadership insight he gained from training during his
career.
During this one exercise, he and his co-students were split up into several
groups and each group was given the instructions to build paper airplanes. His
group worked diligently over the next hour or so to build as many paper
airplanes as they could. When the time allotted was up they felt pretty good
about their efforts, as the team had built 8 airplanes. Most of the other groups
built a similar number of airplanes.
The next part of the exercise had the instructors test each airplane against
the instructions (ie. specifications). To everyone’s surprise, only one airplane
out of the 40 met the specifications. Mike took away a single lesson from this –
“The leader’s job is to ensure the goal is achieved.”
And indeed, Mike followed this approach in 1974 when his branch was tasked with the goal of developing and implementing a permitting system for
regulating municipal and industrial point sources of pollution as required by
the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA). With his goal clear – issue permits to all
(several hundred thousand) municipal and industrial dischargers – Mike and his
staff worked to define permitting parameters, resolve complex policy issues,
develop boilerplate language for permits, make regulatory interpretations for
secondary water treatment, and establish relationships with Regional and State
permitting offices. By the end of 1974, the Agency and states had issued permits
to 90% of all municipal dischargers.
During this time, Mike developed a results-based and open leadership style.
In order to achieve his permit project goal, he capitalized on the high interest
of EPA’s senior leaders, including EPA’s Deputy Administrator (DA), who was
briefed every two weeks on the progress of the project. This visibility and
importance of the effort encouraged a “let’s get this done attitude” within
Mike’s sphere of influence. At times, the DA also became actively involved in
the project by using the position’s ‘bully pulpit’ to encourage regional action
or to take other high level management action.
The leadership approach of his office director also played a significant
role in how Mike managed his own staff during the project and how he approached
future leadership roles. His director encouraged open communications, provided
well-deserved recognition of individual and group efforts, built strategic
partnerships with stakeholders, did not ‘second guess’ nor micromanage workgroup
recommendations, and followed the strategic plan that was established. The
office director
issued regular memos that outlined both the good work and accomplishments on the
project while also acknowledging the challenges that Mike and his team faced.
Learning from a role model, Mike adopted many of these leadership practices and
was grateful for the leadership lessons learned.
Mike also noted that an organizational construct must sometimes be adjusted
to support the mission. A good example of this was how his direct supervisor at
the division level allowed direct access to the office director when needed for
time-critical decisions and actions. This “little” empowerment played a key role
in ensuring project success. By streamlining the management decision chain,
Mike’s branch had the flexibility to take work and decisions directly the top as
needed (while keeping his boss informed). While this did leave some colleagues a
bit disgruntled, it helped move efforts forward in a timely manner.
Recognizing the necessity to establish relationships with key stakeholders,
Mike also actively sought the involvement of other EPA offices, regional
offices, and state agencies. In particular, he needed to demonstrate to other
stakeholders that his office and branch did, indeed, have the lead role in
developing and implementing the permitting process and that “we knew what we
were doing and that we were going to get it done.”
Mike attributes some of the success to the nature and culture of the agency
at that time. In 1973, the EPA was only two years old and filled with an
exited staff ready to “protect human health and the environment.” The staff
across the entire agency set about to, as Mike puts it, “make things happen.” He
did not need to spend much effort motivating his staff – it was part of the
culture. Mike even incorporated his commitment to the environment into his daily
commute by riding his bike to work every day, something he did during his entire
EPA career. While getting wastewater permits issued by 1974 was only one of the
many early successes of the agency, it was a big step forward for the EPA and
the nation’s environment.
Mike’s work on this project was the beginning of a lifelong career with the
EPA where he led many environmental protection efforts and influenced the
leadership style of many current EPA staff and managers. He retired from EPA in
2006 with 41 years of federal service with 28 years as a senior executive at
EPA. Although Mike was not successful with the paper airplanes in a leadership
exercise as a young leader, he learned his lesson and eventually made those
“airplanes” soar!
©2008 GovLeaders.org
