Imagine you’re in an interview for your dream job: making pies at a top-notch bakery. You are excited because you know you have what it takes to be the best pie-maker they have ever seen.
The interviewer starts by asking how many years of experience you have making pies. “I’ve been making pies my whole life,” you answer. “How many of that was paid?” she asks. “Well,” you say, “It was all volunteer, but I’ve had a job making cakes for the last 5 years.”
The interviewer furrows her brow and writes a “0” on her paper next to the question.
“What is your training?” she asks.
You explain that you have a master’s degree in bakery management.
“What about pie engineering?” she asks.
“Nope.”
Again, she writes a 0.
Finally, she asks why someone with your background would want to be a pie-maker.
You explain that you grew up in a pie community – making pies, eating pies, selling pies. You’ve seen the joy on someone’s face who is eating a great pie, and the disappointment when the pie looked better than it tasted. You tell her it’s your personal mission to spread as much joy as possible in your community by delivering the best pies imaginable.
The interviewer folds her hands and smiles.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “But what we’re really looking for is someone with a masters in pie engineering, 5-plus years paid experience making pies, and a passion for using technology to most efficiently make pies. Thanks for your time.”
You leave feeling dejected and undervalued.
Then you go home and eat a pie and feel much better.
~ ~ ~
So, what does this silly story have to do with public service? If you’ve ever worked in government, you might already be making the connection. Like the bakery, public agencies have a lot to learn about what makes a great employee.
Just like the bakery missed an opportunity to hire this highly valuable pie-maker, government agencies overlook people with relevant lived experiences or professional training in related but different fields. They are often so focused on deep expertise within a silo that they don’t see how someone’s slightly different background could be even more valuable to the organization and the community.
Marlon Williams believes that if government is to succeed in its mission – to serve the people – this mindset needs to change. I recently sat down with Marlon to discuss what makes a great Herocrat. Among other things, he shared:
“What I've come to believe is that Herocrats are people who live at the intersection of things, right? I think there is a danger to specialization because when you become too specialized in the work you do, the cliché of when you're really good at hammering things, everything looks like a nail. And anything that doesn't look like a nail, you either pretend that it is, or you don't even see it.”
Marlon’s own resume checks all the right boxes: Masters in Public Administration from New York University and 10+ years climbing the ranks at the City of New York. And he has some unconventional Herocrat credentials: he’s a dancer and a veteran Burning Man attendee (aka “burner”).
Marlon contains multitudes.
He’s appropriately sober about the structural racism inherent in our systems, and also upbeat about efforts to change it. Regarding the promising but still-emerging trend of government agencies approaching racial equity from a healing perspective, he says “everything starts little.”
He tells me that the best compliment he ever received in that he “speaks frameworks like poetry.” I can second that compliment. As we chatted I was struck by his eloquence in describing his observations of the problems and potential solutions. Even the interview transcript reads like a carefully crafted essay.
And he’s much more than a good talker. I’ve met many academics and foundation folks who mesmerize with words but ultimately lack the practical experience to make them useful. Not so with Marlon. He came to his wisdom the hard way: through his years of experience learning and growing as a Herocrat working in government.
One of his hard-earned lessons is that bringing one’s full self to work is the way to go. But that wasn’t his thinking when he first started:
“I kind of took the messaging that is largely out there for all public servants that when you show up for work, you put your humanity in a box and leave that in a locker and then you go into a system of which you're a cog and you process paperwork and you try to serve the public good mostly by trying to exclude the public from the services that you're charged with providing.”
For Marlon, who is African American, this meant leaving his racial identify and experiences at the office door. In meetings in which staff discussed neighborhood data, he would hold back from sharing his insights from living in the predominately African American neighborhood because he felt it would threaten his authority. His position felt tenuous, like his “ability to stay in those rooms was contingent on me making people comfortable with [him], making them forget the fact [he] was a black individual.”
This didn’t stop colleagues from asking him to be the spokesperson for all black people. In one particularly painful incident a colleague turned to him and asked “why are black men not getting married? Marlon, do you have any insight on this?” In this moment he was asked to represent the people they were trying to “fix or change,” which carried the implication that he didn’t belong in the room.
Over time Marlon began to integrate his identities of African American man, community member, and city employee, and today he proudly proclaims that at heart he’ll always be a “black bureaucrat.” As he began to bring his whole self to work, he grew into his power and became even more effective, at one point organizing a network of public and nonprofit changemakers who changed the system of workforce development in the city.
Today, through his job at a foundation, Marlon travels around the country to inspire Herocrats who are reforming their agencies to better serve the people, with a focus on advancing racial equity. He urges them to reconnect with their humanity to transform their institutions. He’s interviewed racial equity directors and other changemakers to understand what makes them extraordinary.
The common thread?
They work at the intersections of issues, not necessarily deep down in them. They have often lived and worked in many different of communities. Many of them have changed careers in their lives. They’ve learned the rules of a system and found ways of innovating within it.
In short, they’ve moved to the beat of more than one drummer. This allows them to make connections that others might miss.
Likewise, Marlon says the best parties are those in which highly skilled dancers from different genres come together and improvise to a new type of music. A similar dynamic happens in government when you bring together people from different disciplines, like finance and housing, then put them to work on a new question about medicine – effectively changing the tune and clearing the stage for new moves. When you’re used to rolling with questions about how a system can be more efficient, questions about how a system can enable longer life expectancy can use different muscles – with refreshing and surprisingly effective results.
Marlon finds that these kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations hold the most promise for rethinking our systems and better serving the people.
Here are some other ways Herocrats use their superpower of connection to move their work forward:
Herocrats focus less on the cult of specialization, and more on the cult of getting things done with the community.
Instead of giving employees plaques for their years of service, Herocrats give employee awards for the number of new partners they brought into the work.
Instead of making a program so complicated that nobody else can run it, Herocrats aim to make their programs so collaborative that any number of co-workers can support and grow it no matter who might be heading it up.
Herocrats evaluate themselves and each other on their ability to translate and adapt information, not to recite it.
Herocrats talk less and listen more, and they support their co-workers to do the same.
To be clear, Marlon’s message applies far beyond the actions of government employees.
It’s about how the public sector defines “expertise.”
It’s about what counts as data, and whose perspectives matter in making decisions about how and where to invest public money.
Reflecting on his own journey, Marlon says:
“Why did I think that I had to minimize my voice as the only way to be on the agenda? And who do we allow to legitimize things, particularly for the government? Shouldn't it be the public and the entire public that legitimizes our actions, or legitimizes our strategy? But for too long only part of the public, generally white men, have been listened to and seen as having a legitimate voice. What I do in my work is to live closer to the shared value where everybody's voice matters in that conversation.”
~ ~ ~
What’s a time in your life when a skill or experience from one part in your life made you more successful in another? What was it? How did you apply it? What happened?
How have you communicated the value of your background to someone who doesn’t initially see the connection? How would you handle the pie-maker interview?
How can government attract employees who have different types of expertise? How can it reward employees who are creative and make connections?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below!