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“I never since I was born imagined that such a lot of poltroons and apes could be gathered together from the four corners of the Globe as Old Abe had succeeded in bringing together in his Cabinet.”
This view, expressed by one of Abraham Lincoln’s contemporaries, has occurred to me often as I’ve struggled with perhaps the single greatest challenge in leading an effective government performance audit function - managing conflict within the audit office.
I’ve directed a government performance audit shop since 1981, first in the Tennessee state auditor’s office, and since 1988, the city auditor’s office in Kansas City. Each audit shop experienced both persistent internal conflict and consistent external success. I first thought that the conflict was because of the type of people who were attracted to performance auditing. I wrote in a 1986 article on staffing the Tennessee performance audit group that performance auditing required
“individuals who thrive in demanding and sometimes undefined contexts and who develop and produce best in more collaborative, participative and synergistic modes of decision making. Such individuals are hard to find, sometimes difficult to manage, and almost always rewarding in the quality and productivity of their work….highly capable but exceedingly temperamental.”
This view was not well-received by my staff. By the early 1990s, I decided that conflict existed because I was a bad manager. But as I got to know more audit directors through ALGA, I found (often after a couple of beers at the annual conference) that many of those from the best audit shops also had significant amounts of conflict within their audit shops.
I don’t think we are all bad managers, and I don’t think our staffs are especially difficult or temperamental. I now think that conflict arises from the combination of the types of questions we are trying to answer and the diversity of strengths, styles and approaches required for an audit staff to answer these questions successfully.
The quote that begins this column is from a fascinating piece entitled “Lincoln’s Practice of Cabinet Alchemy” written by Amanda Noble, of my office, and Arthur Williams, in Abraham Lincoln Contemporary (1995). Their fundamental thesis is that Lincoln deliberately selected men for his cabinet whom he believed were the strongest performers despite the fact that some were bitter rivals of each other and several made little secret that they thought themselves more fit to be president than he was. He did this despite the prevailing thinking of the time that harmony among the cabinet members was the ideal the President should seek. History has proved Lincoln right. Three of his cabinet members – Seward, Chase and Stanton – are now regarded as among the best Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense who have served the nation. Williams and Noble write, “Modern management theory has shown that group decisions are superior to individual ones when pertinent information is distributed among group members, when problems are unstructured, and when group members share a common goal.” Lincoln’s group of contentious, strong-willed individuals, very different from one another, working together under his leadership, succeeded in their principle objective – preserving the Union.
Excellent performance auditing seeks to arrive at normative judgments regarding difficult and important questions. Normative judgments are personal because they involve not only the facts uncovered by our audit work, but opinions drawn from our life experiences and moral code or sense of right and wrong.
Audit standards require us to collectively possess the skills, knowledge and ability to accomplish the audit tasks we set for ourselves. Organizations that seek to do excellent performance audit work are going to look a lot like Lincoln’s cabinet. They will comprise very bright, high-performing individuals whose success in the use of their brains and talents have accustomed them to being “right.” Talent usually comes with matching ego. These individuals need to have complementary – not similar – audit strengths and approaches. They will be analytical, discerning and critical thinkers. And finally, they will be moralistic, motivated much more by public service, the desire to do “good” and similar intrinsic values than by external recognition or monetary reward.
Individually and collectively the auditors who have worked with me over the years are good people. It is not their natures but the nature of the tasks they have had to accomplish together and the fact that they had to work together to accomplish the tasks well that led to conflict. The leadership challenge is to manage the conflict. It cannot be eliminated but it cannot be ignored either. Conflict must not be allowed to become disruptive or destructive. Audit directors who think that conflict can be eliminated by firing or silencing someone are usually deluded. For one thing, the conflict probably won’t go away, and for another, talented individuals willing to work for government pay are rare. Competence, integrity, and commitment to the core principles of auditing are the criteria for retention.
Leadership involves engaging people in conversations that matter, and success in leadership is in keeping the group together, keeping all the members engaged and getting the mission accomplished. Leading a high performing performance audit shop requires that the audit director be as engaged with the staff as possible. Leaders must acknowledge and discuss conflict, but must not condemn individuals. Silence is not assent, and dissent is not disloyalty.
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Funkhouser on Auditing