Public Leaders Matter. Hire Them Wisely.

Outcome-oriented government starts with a focus on leadership and leaders

There were nine of us at the long table — mostly techies like me. We all wanted to understand how local and state government works, and if there are ways we could help to improve it.

We all listened carefully to a political staffer who has a job that sounds like the definition of hell for many of my friends in Silicon Valley. He works in City Hall, trying to enact policy while dealing with angry residents, borderline corrupt government contractors, and people who care more about getting credit than accomplishing things.

We barraged him with questions. What is the city spending so much money on? Why is so little getting done? What’s personally keeping you working there? How can we make government effective?

His answers were fascinating, and gave us a clear mandate: help elect competent, ethical, outcomes-oriented people for public leadership jobs.

State and Local Government Need Effective Leaders

Over dinner of risotto and asparagus, I turned to my right to listen as the political staffer patiently explained the complex governance systems of a medium-sized city.

Good ideas, he told us, couldn’t get implemented because of well-intentioned layers of red tape put in place over decades. There were too many places and ways to say no, too many places where someone (a government contractor, a special interest group) could apply leverage to benefit themselves. Money was being wasted, smart city employees couldn’t apply their skills, and both staff and residents were frustrated.

Amidst all the frustrations, he stayed in his job because he believed that the city had an important role in improving people’s lives.

What, someone asked, would make things better?

He had lots of answers, but there was a clear winner: elect better legislators¹.

As with federal politics, many local campaigns are financed with donations from activists who are more ideological than practical. Winning candidates are elected to office in low-information, low-turnout elections where loud voices defeat nuanced voices. These leaders then feel accountable to the handful of activists who helped them into office, rather than a broader base of residents.

In many cases, that leads to legislators who take symbolic actions (changing school names, announcing opposition to something that won’t happen) while blocking meaningful action (turning parking lots into housing). Sadly, with rare exceptions, that focus on symbolic actions is often a sound political strategy: it tells the ideological donors that you’re on their team and is good fodder for fundraising emails.

Not taking action on important things means a city’s considerable resources are often under-utilized. Many of the city’s non-political departments are staffed with talented, ambitious employees, but the city’s current legislature is not lead city government in executing on projects that can make a difference in most people’s lives.

The city is like a tech company blessed with great engineers but saddled with leaders who opt to make flashy vaporware instead of meaningful products.

With the legislature in place today, letters and phone calls from residents or impassioned speeches at City Hall would make little difference. A strong Board of Directors inside a company can help a solid team of leaders; that same Board of Directors will be far less effective if there is a weak leadership team. And in many City Halls and other government centers, the leadership team is weak and the Board of Directors (the voters) can best affect change by finding a new leadership team.

If we want our government to focus on delivering outcomes for us, we need to elect better public leaders who are explicitly outcome-oriented. 

Prioritize Hiring

Yishan Wong wrote an excellent series of essays about engineering management in 2009.

His first essay was about hiring, and it started by asserting that Hiring Is Number One:

This means "make hiring your number one priority, always."

This means that it needs to be your organization's first priority, it needs to be each manager's first priority, and it needs to be each engineer's first priority.

Yishan’s assertion always sits in the back of my head when I’m building organizations or advising leaders². Many organizations pay too little heed to hiring, relegating it to a second-tier priority or something that is beneath them. And they hire too slowly or they hire people who are ineffective.

Teams that operate with the belief that hiring is vital will likely outperform those that don’t prioritize hiring; the strongest employees will tend to gravitate toward teams that prioritize hiring and thus hire effectively.

We Are Not Investing Enough In Hiring Good Public Leaders

Government public spending in the US is about 40% of GDP. Governments at all levels spend over $8 trillion per year, or around $24,000 per American resident per year.

The dollars that are directly spent on elections are by comparison tiny. In 2020, candidates and independent expenditures spent $14 billion on elections – about $42 per American resident per year.

In other words, American government is spending about $500 each week for the average American, while that same average American is putting less than $1 per week toward deciding which people we should hire as elected officials³.

In races where one Democrat runs unopposed in a Democratic primary, and one Republican runs unopposed in a Republican primary, voters are electing candidates almost entirely based on partisanship, and barely considering effectiveness. That is not a recipe for effective governance.

Companies like Google spend immense amounts of time and money hiring effective leaders and employees. Google has 2300 employees with the title of recruiter on LinkedIn, meaning they are directly spending many hundreds of millions of dollars per year to find great people for their organization. They have extensively researched what makes teams effective. Those sorts of outcome-focused analyses are rare if not unheard of in the public sector.

Analytical, data-driven approaches facilitate improvement in hiring processes. Rigorous answers to questions like the following would be enormously valuable:

• What are the professional backgrounds that voters tend to prefer? E.g., all else equal, do they vote for lawyers, small business owners, former athletes, people who grew up in the place where they are running?

• Which professional backgrounds among legislators are predictive of legislative successes?

• Do cities with mayors of certain professional backgrounds have better outcomes (higher growth, lower crime rates, higher resident satisfaction, etc.) than those of cities with other professional backgrounds?

• Are there personality characteristics of elected officials that are predictive of legislative or policy success?

• Are there personality characteristics of elected officials that are predictive of high ratings by voters?

• Are there personality characteristics of elected officials that are predictive of high ratings by their peers?

The Funnel of Public Leadership

There are many talented, driven, ethical people in public office in the U.S. – and we need a lot more of them. Given the impact and importance of public leadership, the country would be better off if we could increase the average caliber of people who serve.

In speaking to dozens of people who have run for office, held office, worked with candidates for office, or worked for officeholders, I’ve identified five areas for improvement: 

1. Build A Stronger Top of the Hiring Funnel. Improving the caliber of people in public office starts by increasing the number of talented people running for public office. This is in part a marketing opportunity (e.g., by reading this post, you think harder about running, and you choose to do it yourself!) and in part a recruiting opportunity (someone reaches out to you about running and convinces you to do it).

   Choosing to run for office is, in some ways, like choosing to start a company: it’s an ambitious move that a lot of people understandably shy away from. One political consultant explained how a candidate needs “fire in their belly” because campaigning is like “crawling over broken glass.” Given the importance of the job, it would be extraordinarily valuable to be able to find ethical, competent, driven leaders to run for office even if they don’t want to crawl over broken glass; that might mean changing the way that people are elected to office. 

2. Make Running for Office More Attractive. Per the above, the actual process of running for office is a slog, even if it’s also a great opportunity for personal growth. Candidates work extremely hard, put themselves on the line to be attacked, and they usually are forgoing income while they’re campaigning. Offering emotional support, technical and professional support, and personal support (watching your sick kid while you go to a candidate forum!) can be enormously valuable. Organizations like Emerge California are a big help to candidates who go through them. In the past two decades, the startup ecosystem has been shaped by accelerators like Y Combinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups. A tech-forward, politically savvy, broadly YIMBY candidate accelerator that (like Y Combinator) helps with both candidate psychology and campaign nitty gritty could be extraordinarily impactful.

3. Make Officeholding (and Staffing) More Attractive. There is an elephant in the room here: most elected officials are not very well paid. In most states, legislators are paid less than $50,000 per year, a stingy salary for a professional (California pays about $115,000). Politically, it’s toxic for legislators to give themselves pay raises. Instead, many forgo salary increases, planning instead to leave office to become highly paid lobbyists. That leaves out many talented professionals who want to earn a salary that can support their families, but not tie themselves to a future in the lobbying industry. Lee Kuan Yew, President of Singapore from 1959-1990, laid out his approach as follows:

   But Singapore will remain clean and honest only if honest and able men are willing to fight elections and assume office. They must be paid a wage commensurate with what men of their ability and integrity are earning for managing a big corporation or a successful legal or other professional practice. They have to manage a Singapore economy that yielded an annual growth rate of 8 to 9 percent in the last two decades.⁴

4. Help Voters Make Good, Informed Decisions. Most voters know very little about both the offices they are voting for, and the candidates who are running for office. I have spent the last five years running a business that works closely with political campaigns, and still lack knowledge as a voter! How much do you know about California’s State Board of Equalization, for which there was an election a few weeks ago? Even after five years in politics, I don’t know much about it, nor can I honestly say I know a lot about the candidates running for that position. Civic tech companies might be able to make a real difference here, by making it easy and engaging to understand what and who you are voting for.

5. Create Positive Feedback Loops. More outcome-oriented people running for office will mean more effective officeholders. More effective officeholders will lead other potential candidates to run, to be part of something great; this will lead to better outcomes for everyone. We certainly see this in startups: successful companies find it easier to hire great people than unsuccessful ones. One modest step you can take as a voter is to be constructive in your engagement with governments and elected officials: assume positive intent and don’t attack officeholders personally⁵. Snarky communication scares good people away from running for office; constructive communication makes it more likely that good people will run.

Big-Time Leaders For Big-Time Problems

We need a post-industrial government for the next phase of the American story. 

The U.S. collectively spends $8 trillion a year on public projects and services – more than 20 times the yearly revenue of the world’s largest company. Democrats and Republicans can argue on whether we’d be better off spending $6 trillion, $8 trillion, or $10 trillion, and whether we’re better off spending more on policing and less on Medicaid or vice versa.

Our city, state, and federal governments enact laws and put in place systems that have a massive impact on the success or failures of both individuals and organizations. The laws and structures our governments put in place will determine our future on everything from education to climate, from front-and-center issues like reproductive rights to the obscure zoning laws that only a few housing geeks really understand.

As that political staffer shared, hiring or electing competent, ethical, outcomes-focused public leaders is one of the highest leverage things we can do to make our government effective.

1. At the city level, the “legislature” is likely called something else, e.g. the City Council or Board of Supervisors.

2. I don’t literally agree with Yishan’s assertion that you should always make hiring your number one priority. There are companies and teams that aren’t growing and hiring shouldn’t be their number one priority right now, and there are great engineering organizations where some engineers never are involved in the hiring process.

3. This is an imperfect measure, and there are indeed other places where money is spent on training, or finding candidates for office. Still, relative to the level of importance and responsibility, the amount spent on recruiting candidates — particularly for state and local government — is vanishingly low.

4. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, Keeping the Government Clean, Page 166. This is an excellent book!

5. Mea culpa: I have not perfect here, and there are some past comments I’d word differently if I could do it over.