The Measurable Gets Managed

Thanks to Tom Shoop at Government Executive's Fedblog for the pointer to a thought-provoking paper by Eric Biber, an acting law professor at U.S. Berkeley. Biber's thesis is that "Agencies will systematically underperform on goals that are hard to measure and that conflict with the achievement of other more measurable goals. The lack of information about these hard-to-measure goals means that there will be fewer rewards to agencies for any success on those goals." This is not exactly a new idea. "What gets measured gets managed" is a cliche in leadership training. However, the idea could help us better understand ethics program objectives.

It's easy to count how many employees file financial disclosure forms, so OGE, and implementing agencies, tend to emphasize those. Similarly, it's easy to measure how many employees receive mandatory ethics training (in fact, the ease of counting is one of the attractions of the more sophisticated forms of online training).

What are the more difficult to measure parts of our jobs that deserve more emphasis?