Management Training Program Has Its Benefits

By Bill Cotterell
Reprinted with permission from tallahassee.com originally published June 11, 2007.

The title "certified public manager" sounds like something Charles Dickens might have rejected as too much of a caricature, the bloodless embodiment of government squared - not just a faceless functionary, but one officially examined and guaranteed to be the next best thing to a machine.

So, when writing about another graduating class from the Florida Certified Manager program, it's easy to take cheap shots about "bootcamp for bureaucrats" or "Beancounting 501." I know, I've done so.

But it's really a neat program, a win-win-win proposition for employees, employers and taxpayers. Certainly, it hasn't rooted out political patronage or favoritism. Nothing can assure that your next boss won't be a campaign aide to some governor or Cabinet member.

Still, the idea of professional training for managers is a good one.

More than 250 managers from across the state will graduate in ceremonies at the Civic Center on Friday. Shawn Baldwin, director of the CPM program at FSU's Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, said that's probably the biggest class of newly certified managers since the program started in 1979.

Since then, nearly 3,000 state and local employees have gone through the curriculum - currently 32 days of training, seven exams and six outside project assignments - that it takes to earn the CPM designation.

It's a lot of work, especially considering that employees have to keep up their day jobs and family obligations. Baldwin said about 20 percent of CPM students don't finish in two years, which is all right. One of this week's grads started in 1995, she said.

The CPM concept began in Georgia and has spread to about half the states.

"What a good job it's done in teaching us to always keep reinventing ourselves," said Barbara Ford-Coates, the Sarasota County tax collector who is scheduled to be this year's graduation speaker. "No matter how good an operation we become, we have to periodically take a look again and see what needs to be change. You don't institutionalize a good office, you keep improving it."

She's a 1992 graduate of the CPM program and, like Baldwin (a 1990 CPM), a big believer. She said she has 13 CPMs in her office now, plus five more taking courses.

Ford-Coates said the curriculum "was a lot like going back to college," with one big difference. Studying public administration in the classroom doesn't offer immediate opportunities to apply what you've learned in a real office; the CPM program requires such real-life participation.

"It's just the class of all classes," she said.

She also said there are important differences between managing a large public agency and running a business. Public employees can't get the same kind of salary incentives or bonuses (real bonuses, not the $1,000 thing this year's Legislature enacted) that employers can devise in the private sector.

And most companies don't run into as many legal strictures as a government workplace contends with, Ford-Coates said. In managing people and delivering an agency service, she said, part of the challenge is "creating an atmosphere in which you can meet the requirements that the law has put there, but you can still enjoy yourself, enjoy your coworkers, enjoy your customers."

With state and local governments increasingly forced to do more with less, with competition for good workers rising, with much of the public convinced—right or wrong—that government everywhere is bloated and unresponsive, it's good to have a system for professionalizing management. It's like the staff NCOs and field-grade officers in the military.

Besides, it's sure better than sticking some legislator's campaign aides in decision-making roles.

© Copyright 2007, American Association of Certified Public Managers®