Federal Drive

Federal Drive interviews – June 7

This is the Federal Drive show blog. Here you can listen to the interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day and links to additiona...

Federal News Network Staff

June 7, 2012 8:43 am

3 min read

This is the Federal Drive show blog. Here you can listen to the interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day and links to additional resources.

Today’s guests:

Steve Shih — Deputy Associate Director for Executive Resources and Employee Development, OPM

Senior executive service members have given their agencies a report card of sorts. The Office of Personnel management surveyed them as part of an effort to restore the SES as an elite cadre of government managers. The good news is that most career executives say they’re proud to belong to the SES and of the work that they do. Shih says most members have been in the government a long time but are still investing in their careers.

Michael Bromwich — Managing Principal, Bromwich Group

GSA’s Acting Director Dan Tangherlini — or Allison MacFarlane, the George Mason professor who has been nominated to chair the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — may want to listen to this interview. For that matter, it’s relevant to anyone who finds themselves tapped to clean the slate after some agency troubles. Bromwich became head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement just two months after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. With Bromwich at the helm, the new agency set out to distinguish itself from its controversial predecessor, the Minerals Management Service. But Bromwich may have seemed an odd choice because he had no experience with the energy industry.

Lloyd Dugan — Network Architect, Deputy Chief Management Office, Defense Department

If you could understand and manage your agency’s data better, you could improve and streamline business processes. That could lead to better program execution. That’s the theory behind new training offered by the Defense Department. It’s called the Equip-The-Workforce initiative. Dugan spoke with the Federal Drive’s tom Temin at the 2012 Management of Change Conference this week in Cambridge, Md.

More interviews from the 2012 Management of Change Conference.

Farah Pandith — Special Representative to Muslim Communities, State Department

Last month, we spoke with the State Department about its guidelines for employees traveling abroad. It’s been cited as having the best, most complete, policy — one that other agencies can learn from. Now the State Department is setting the bar in another area — diversity policies. All agencies have been revising and implementing changes to diversity policies, including State. Today, the department is hosting a “wisdom session” with more than a hundred diversity leaders in both the public and private sector.