Rowman & Littlefield Publishers It's Time for High-Performance Government: Winning Strategies to Engage and Energize the Public Sector Workforce

Leadership teams taking the reins of government in 2017 will have to overcome the demoralizing effects of years of budget deficits, a heavy loss of talent, frequent criticism, and mounting pressure to 'do more with less,' all of which have contributed to declining interest in public sector careers and deteriorating performance. Over the past twenty years there has been a widening gulf between the "people management" practices in the private and public sectors. Change is badly needed but it does not have to start by canceling existing civil service rules. This book argues for rethinking the way public employees are managed. The changes will contribute to a healthier, more productive work environment that once again enables public agencies to attract and motivate a highly qualified workforce. Written by leading experts with decades of experience as managers and consultants, It's Time for High Performance Government provides executives, managers, and elected officials at all levels practical advice to improve government performance. Review "Delivering quality public service requires labor and management to find the best ways to engage the workforce and to effectively solve workplace issues. By putting in practice the strategies proposed by Risher and Wilder, the public's confidence in government can be restored."--Michael B. Filler, National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations "The contributions by Howard Risher and Bill Wilder provide a tremendous guide for public sector leaders to use in improving government performance. Their recommendations are sound, practical, and are applicable for every level of government. This is a timely reference of best practices and critical thinking that favorably responds to our day-to-day and future performance management challenges."--Fagan Stackhouse, Human Resources Director, Charleston County Government Ever since the publication of Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992), interest in effectivity and efficiency of the public sector has been growing. As a result, in the past few decades various attempts have been made to improve performance of the public sector, mostly with mixed results. Consequently, public sector organizations are looking for alternative ways to increase their performance. But Howard Risher and William Wilder are not content to propose just another new improvement method. No, they are much more ambitious than that: they want to create a high performance government! As a researcher into the factors of high performance I can only applaud this in the strongest way possible, as government is too important to society and us civilians to let it perform in a mediocre manner. And especially when the ideas to achieve high performance in governmental agencies are written down in such a accessible and practical way, there is no reason for public sector organizations to not use this book to achieve the high performance status.--André de Waal, Academic director HPO Center the Netherlands, Associate professor Maastricht School of Management the Netherlands, and author of "What Makes A High Performance Organization" In their insightful book, It's Time for High-Performance Government, Howard Risher and William Wilder address the urgent need for performance improvement in today's government. Their approach to performance management recognizes the importance of metrics and structured systems but shifts the principal focus to managers and, as the authors use the phrase, day-to-day "people management" to improve government processes and services.--David N. Ammons, Albert Coates Professor of Public Administration and Government, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill It is a management cliché to say that 'people are the greatest asset of an organization.' But only few public leaders internalize it; even fewer of them operationalize it. All of them should read this book. Howard Risher and William Wilder go beyond the clichés and give solid