TALK BY THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR SUPPORT AT THE REORIENTATION IN SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP78-06365A001200020021-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 8, 2000
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: June 9, 1964
• Content Type: REPORT

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`.Calk by the
Deputy Director for Support
at the
Reorientation in Supervisory Responsibilities
9 June 1964
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I have long felt that one of the most important uses to which this
auditorium might be put was to assemble supervisors in large groups such
as this and talk about supervision. I had always thought that the bene-
fits would by-and-large be long-range. I'm pleased to note this course
is a success already because if you "know thyself" you can get by with
a ten-minute break instead of a twenty-minute break.
Since we are for the most part DDS supervisors I want to try to
conclude the final presentation with the exception of the panel by talk-
ing with you rather informally and rather personally about some of my
own philosophies of management and some of my own beliefs about where we
fall down as supervisors and where we may improve ourselves, because, in
the final analysis, I as the Deputy Director for Support am responsible
for everything you do as supervisors whether it's good or bad. I can
delegate to Office Heads, they in turn can delegate to you the author-
ities which have been entrusted to me by the Director; but I can not del-
egate one iota of my responsibility. So whether you are a good super-
visor or a bad supervisor or a successful supervisor is in large measure
a reflection upon the Deputy Director for Support.
I don't want you to get the idea that we think everything we do
around here is bad. It wouldn't serve much useful purpose to assemble
you here and pat you on the back all day. The criticisms which we are
offering for your consideration are constructive. We know we have many
fine supervisors. We know there is room for improvement in every super-
visor and we know there is tremendous room for improvement in many. I
have the very greatest admiration for our people; certainly i underscore
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as strongly as I possibly can the remarks made by the Director in which
he has praised us as people. By our standards of education, social
status, motivation, patriotism, and many others, we represent a very unique
group of Americans and I for one am extremely proud to belong to that
group. I also believe most sincerely that the praise which has been heap-
ed upon you as professionals, professional intelligence officer, profess-
ional operations officer, and profession support officers of all varieties,
it is well deserved because I believe in this unique business of ours and
in the several specialist, fields which you represent you are indeed with-
out peer.
I am equally convinced, however, that we are not as professional as
managers as we are in the field of intelligence, operations, logistics,
communications, training, or you name it. I am convinced that we have
many supervisors who perhaps through lack of training or lack of exper-
ience and perhaps through no fault of their own in many instances are in-
adequate to meet the demanding responsibilities which this Agency places
upon its line supervisor. I alluded in my introduction of Mr. McCone to
the very heavy responsibilities placed upon a supervisor in this unique
business. Coming from a military background I sometimes think that a
supervisor in this Agency has a great and possibly a greater respon-
sibility than a military commander in combat and I wish many times it
were as easy to determine who is the good supervisor, who is the strong
leader, and who is the weak in this business of ours as it is in a mil-
itary unit in combat. I can assure you that after about the second good
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fire-fight a military leader in combat can separate the men from the
boys with relative ease. It's much more difficult in the environment
in which you work because you deal with so many intangibles. Pretty
easy to see in combat if a fellow turns tail and runs--it's not so
easy to detect the weaknesses which supervisors in this Agency have.
A military commander cannot and will not be successful if he
merely is a dictator who teaches his men how to shoot, march, and
obey. Nor in this Agency can you be successful if you merely lay out
the work and expect it to be carried out when you issue the order.
The military commander must know his soldiers, he must accept total
responsibility for their training, for their welfare, for their moti-
vation; he must know their fears, their aspirations, their ambitions,
something about their family background, what makes them tick, what
makes them fight, and what gives them the will to win.
Your responsibility in this Agency is no less. Who can say that
the responsibilities of the Central Intelligence Agency would be any
greater if today we were engaged in a hot war? You are on the firing
line right now; you are not in a training capacity for a war which may
come; you are in the front line on the cutting edge everyday of our
lives and your responsibility is great indeed. You must accept
responsibility for your employees well beyond the eight-hour working
day. It's not enough to know whether our people are turning in a good
product at the end of an eight-hour day. We have to know a great deal
about the individual; again, what are his fears, what are his aspirations,
what are his ambitions, what makes him tick, what kind of family life does
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he have, what kind of a fellow is he, and how do I handle this parti-
cular individual, because no two of us are alike and the supervisor
who tries to treat everybody alike is doomed to failure, and that is
for sure.
Now, our Support offices, particularly the Medical Office, the
Security Office, and the Personnel Office are here to assist you as
supervisors. They are not here, however, as offices to which you can
pass the buck and avoid your supervisory responsibilities. Every
personnel problem, whether it has security, medical, or other over-
tones, is also your problem as a supervisor and these offices are here
to support the command line, the command channel, to bring about effec-
tive supervision. They are not here, I repeat, as offices to which we
can pass the buck and avoid our supervisory responsibilities. The
strength of any organization can come from the command line, from the
top down to the bottom and back again if you will, and it is no different
in this Agency even though the Medical Office, the Security Office, and
the Personnel Office play heavy roles in the lives of our people every
day.
Now there are two broad theories of supervision which I would like to
invite your attention to for a minute. One is a pretty old fashioned
theory which assumes people dislike work, that they must be controlled,
directed, coerced, threatened in order to be made to produce, and that
in fact they'd rather have it this way. They want to avoid responsibility,
they have very little ambition, and above all they want security. As
I say this is pretty old fashioned. It might still apply in a shoe
factory where people are doing piecework or might still apply to the
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assembly line of an automobile plant or some other place of this kind.
It certainly has not much if any advocation where we're dealing with
human beings and where our product generally is an intangible one.
The theory which is most applicable to us, I would like to think,
is that work for people is just as natural as play or rest and that
people will work hard toward objectives to which they are committed,
and I emphasize to which they are committed; that the well motivated
individual not only accepts responsibility and leadership, but he
seeks it; and that most people have imagination, ingenuity, creativity,
and intellectual potential far in excess of that which is being used in
their daily activities. This is the kind of supervision which we must
have in this Agency. There is no place in this Agency for the theory
which believes everyone has to be directed, that no one has any ambition,
that all they're looking for is security. If we have any supervisors
like that in this Agency they have long outlived their usefulness and
should look elsewhere.
So one of your great problems as supervisors is to motivate people,
to produce, to work effectively, harmoniously, and successfully with
everyone else. What kind of thing is it that makes people produce, what
kind of things motivate people? Did you ever stop to ask yourself
that question about people generally or have you ever stopped to ask
yourself that question about the individual employees you supervise?
They are all different. But generally speaking it's not the parking
place, it's not the cafeteria, it's not the status symbol, it isn't
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even pay for the most part which makes people well-motivated toward
turning out a useful product to national security. Generally speaking,
it's job satisfaction, the feeling on the part of an individual that he
is doing something important, that he is achieving some success and that
his success is earning him some recognition, that he works in an atmos-
phere where mistakes are a basis for growth and not recrimination. These
are the things which normally motivate people to work hard and to do a
good job. It is not, as I have said, these things that are peripheral.
I have made a trip recently and if I had any doubts about this
before I certainly have no doubts now. Some of the highest morale
that you find in our overseas stations, some of the people who are working
harder to produce are the people you find in outlying stations with very
very few creature comforts. As a general rule, you'll find far more
complaining by our people in the bigger cities where life is fairly
luxurious, certainly in comparison to some of the more outlying stations.
Yet where you find these people doing something which they think is
important and they think they are doing it pretty well and their super-
visors are recognizing that they are doing it well and patting them on
the back when a pat on the back is deserved and criticizing them when
criticism is deserved, this is where you have good motivation. Not
that the parking spaces and the cafeteria and these other things are
not important, they are. If they are allowed to deteriorate, certainly
these can act as negative motivators, but they are not nearly so
important as the things which I have mentioned which motivate people to
work and to produce.
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So what is your role as a supervisor? Well first and foremost
you should try to provide conditions which are favorable to motivation.
This tests your own skill in organizing and planning your work, knowing
your people, matching jobs and requirements. And, as I've said, main-
taining an atmosphere where communication lines are open, treating each
individual no matter what his job is in such a manner that makes him
feel that what he is doing is important to the whole; serving orientation
needs if you will, making sure that the people who work with and for you
know what the role of the Agency is, what the rule of their component in
the Agency is, what their individual role is, and how all of these things
mesh together in order to have the Agency produce with maximum effective-
ness. The serving of orientation needs, if you want to call them that,
always being available to your subordinates, within reason of course, to
discuss their problems, not only their work problems but their personal
problems, is one of the most important things, I think, in a supervisor-
subordinate relationship. If this relationship is to be a successful
one, in most cases a supervisor must have the technical competence which
commands the respect of his subordinates; he must also have the personal
qualifications which command respect by that subordinate. And the subor-
dinate in turn must accept these technical qualifications as the example
which he is trying to follow and these personal characteristics as some-
thing which he admires and respects.
And if there is the proper kind of supervisor-subordinate relation-
ship these orientation needs, which usually require supervisors deeply
steeped in Agency history and lore, serve a very useful purpose in keeping
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communication channels open and this is extremely important. I'm told, and
I believe it, that our psychologists today have pretty well established
that people only hear a maximum of 25% of what is said in a talk of this
kind, in conferences, or at other places. So if this is true, and I think
it is, it's extremely important that we work hard to become better commun-
icators. The biggest block to personal communications is our inability
to listen understandingly and skillfully to another person. And one of the
principle reasons we find it difficult to do this is because we think we
know a lot, we have a pretty good opinion of ourselves, and we have a
tendency to evaluate everything which a person says to us. If someone
says to you, "I didn't like what that person said," almost instantly you
react by saying, "Well, I didn't like it either, I thought it was terrible,"
or you might say, "Well, I don't know, I thought it was pretty good." It
is a very natural tendency on the part of all of us to evaluate what this
person said rather than to try to listen with understanding, rather than
to try to put ourselves in his position and try to see the problem as he
sees it with his background and his experience and through: his eyes. This
is the gateway to communications. If we learn to listen with understanding--
and many of us as supervisors are too busy to try to do this--or when we
are in a consultation with a subordinate we think we have to do all the
talking and we expect him to say "Yes, sir" when we finish, and if you
are that kind of a supervisor and he is that kind of a "Yes, sir" subordi-
nate you can bet your bottom dollar that in about nine cases out of ten
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he doesn't have the slightest idea what you said to him when he leaves
the room. He just knows that this interview was something which was un-
pleasant and he wanted to get it over with and get out of there and get
back to his job as soon as he possibly could.
Another reason which makes it difficult for us to communicate with
each other is the emotional feeling that we have about problems--most
difficult to communicate with each other when we have emotions involved.
The next time you have an argument with a friend or with your wife or
with a group of friends, let me suggest just for the fun of it that you
try an experiment something like this: you agree with your wife or your
friend or your small group of friends, and maybe you should do this in
reverse order because it's more difficult when yoiim trying to agree with
your wife to start out with, that those involved in the discussion or
argument can speak up only when they have stated the other person's pos-
ition on the point under discussion to that person's satisfaction. If
you can state the other person's position as he has expressed it from
his own feelings and through his own eyes to his satisfaction, then you
have a common basis for which to start and you are probably in real com-
munication and the chances are that you'll come out with some real solu-
tion to the problem.
It takes courage to do this, it takes courage to listen because we
as supervisors and we as people have a tendency to think that we have
figured out all the answers, that we are pretty infallible, and these
subordinates of ours are people who take orders and get the job done and
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if they can't do that pick up the pay check on the way home. We need
to learn some simple truths, we're not infallible, everybody has a con-
tribution to make, and if you will only learn to listen you will find
that most of your subordinates can help you no matter how big or how
small your supervisory job may be. But this takes a lot of courage,
because if you put yourself in his position, you try to look at the prob-
lem or look at the world through his eyes, you run the risk of being
changed, and we don't like to change because we're pretty self satisfied,
so this takes courage and we don't always have it. But too frequently we
communicate at our subordinates and not with them. So one of the first
and strongest suggestions I'd like to make to you is that we as super-
visors try desperately to be better listeners.
Now we must recognize that most human beings have a different set
of human values, and I for one would not attempt to put everybody in the
same mold on this subject because different values on different ideas at
least are healthy, up to a point. However we must have standards in hu-
man values and we must have the courage to deal with those people whose
human values are not satisfactory,whose human values are incompatable
with our own, whose human values are not consistent with the principles
of supervision and the principles of personal conduct which this Agency
must insist upon. We must recognize that we can not afford to be a re-
habilitation center for the delinquent and a home for the indigent. We
must accept our supervisory responsibilities, we must establish human
values, we must make clear to everybody what they are, we must insist
that they be adhered to within reasonable limits, and we must have the
courage to do something about it if we fail.
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I'm not suggesting for one aoment that every supervisor should
take a hard-nose approach to this problem. Far from it. I think that
there is plenty of room for tolerance and plenty of room for flexibility,
but when we have set out our standards, and particularly in so far as
they refer to integrity, fair dealing with one another, it is pretty
definite where we have to draw the line. As I say, it is extremely im-
portant that we have our subordinates committed to the right set of hu-
man values. If you've done that you've won 90% of your battle. If you
haven't done that and you find it necessary to really take pretty se-
vere action and discipline an employee or even recommend his separation,
I am convinced that this individual will probably be better off by rea-
son of having had this experience and certainly the Agency will be far
better off. And this you must face up to as supervisors.
I've had many personal experiences which have brought me to this
prediction through the years and if you will pardon me using a per-
sonal example I would like to refer to two to illustrate the point I am
trying to make. During World War II, I was a Regimental Commander. An
infantry regiment in those days consisted of about 3,000 men., Because
we'd been overseas for a long time and in combat for a long time we were
permitted to rotate to the United States 5% of our strength each month.
This meant a half dozen officers and about a 150 enlisted men. After
consultation with appropriate officers in the regiment, but always with
the chaplain and the doctor, I personally selected the few officers who
were to be rotated to the States. The 150 enlisted men were selected by
drawing names out of a hat. Whoever was lucky enough to have his name
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drawn, regardless of how badly we needed him, was allowed to rotate over-
seas. On two separate occasions I made an exception to this rule for en-
listed men--two separate occasions where I was convinced there were ex-
tremely compassionate reasons why an enlisted man should go home to his
family I selected him with out putting his name in the hat. No one of
the 3,000 officers and men in the regiment knew this except me and one
other person. That was my adjutant, a very brilliant young captain, Phi
Beta Kappa, came into the war from Northwestern University having been
editor of their school paper, very brilliant record, and I had complete
confidence in this young captain without any question whatever. Much to
my surprise, a little later the captain launched a very concerted cam-
paign to be rotated to the States. His mother was very sick and would
probably die unless he came home, as he put it. I offered him every
chance to submit medical evidence to this effect without any commitment
that I would or would not honor it. But in the final analysis I turned
the young captain down because he was young, he was single, he'd had rap-
id promotion, he was in relatively little danger of getting shot much
less killed, which was the exception rather than the rule in the regiment
which I commanded. With my permission this young captain appealed his
case to the division commander. Much to my surprise the principal argu-
ment which he used in pleading his case with the division commander was
the precedent that I had set in selecting two single enlisted men for
compassionate reasons. In his judgment his compassionate reasons were as
good as their's and he asked no more and he asked no less. The division
commander did not honor his appeal and after he had denied it I worked
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this young man over quite considerably for taking unfair and undue ad-
vantage of confidence and trust which I had placed in him. I had no
objection to his appealing his case but I did have objection to his us-
ing what I regarded as privileged information which no other of the 3,000
men could have used to plead his own case. I made it very clear to him
that I thought this was wrong and that if he ever violated my trust and
confidence again or did any one of a number of other things it would be
very simple to convert him to a patrol leader 25 miles in front of our
lines instead of working with personnel records at the regimental head-
quarters. I don't tell this to be amusing. This young captain was a
fine young man, he was young, he was a little immature, but he was a very
dedicated young man. And he did in fact see my point of view and I think
he was in fact sorry for the undue advantage which he had taken of his
position. I said, "Your human values and mine are just too far apart
and I cannot tolerate you or anyone else abusing the trust and confi-
dence which I place in him." He did in fact accept my point of view; he
remained with the regiment throughout the war, did a splendid job, and I
count him today as one of my very close friends. Incidentally, his
mother is still living and she's in good health.
Coming a little closer to home, when I first came to the Agency
about 17 years ago I was in charge of a component which had some over-
seas activities and I hired a very competent radio engineer to go to
one of our overseas stations to serve. About a week before he was to go
to this overseas assignment I discovered that he had taken a station
wagon and used it for his own personal purposes over the weekend. He
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had taken this station wagon from an Agency installation of which he was
in charge, nearby, and had driven it a few hundred miles over the weekend
because his fiance was in town and he needed a car and after all he was
going overseas in a week and this was the simplest way to do it. On
Monday morning when I found out about this I called him in and told him
I would be very happy to accept his resignation, but if he did not choose
to submit his resignation I would of course see that he was dismissed.
He was utterly shocked to think that this was the kind of punishment which
would be meted out for simply using a station wagon which belonged to the
government over the weekend. I told him he was certainly correct that
this indeed would be stiff punishment if that were his offense, but this
was not his offense. No other employee at that station, and there were
many, could have done this without his permission. By taking undue ad-
vantage of the competence and the trust which I had place in him, he had
violated my standards of integrity, his human values and mine were simply
too far apart. And, if I couldn't trust him with a few station wagons ten
miles from headquarters I certainly wasn't about to trust him several
thousand miles across the ocean. I'm convinced that not only did this
individual change his way of thinking but I can assure you this had a
very healthy effect on the component with which I was then charged. I
think a lot of people examined their human values and their standards.
This individual submitted his resignation, although he was certainly
shook up and could hardly believe that he had to do this. He was out of
a job two or three months; he finally got a job with the Voice of America.
The Voice of America called me and asked me about this young man and I
gave him a good recommendation; I told them exactly what had happened and
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why he left the Agency. He took the job and as he was leaving the coun-
try for his overseas assignment with VOA he called me on the telephone
and said he wanted me to know that he'd had a lot of time to think during
the past two or three months and that he wanted me to know that he felt
that the decision which I'd made in this case was absolutely right and he
hoped that if he ever were placed in a similar position that he'd have
the courage to make the same decision.
So you must face up to these things. I appologize for using per-
sonal examples, but you must do it if you are going to be an effective
supervisor.
Now the weaknesses of our supervisors show up most glaringly in per-
formance ratings and fitness reports. So let's talk about the fitness re-
porting system to elaborate a little bit on what Mr. Echols has said to
you. What's the sense of it all anyway? What are we trying to do? What
are our objectives? Is this a chore which you as a supervisor feel that
you've got to do once a year? Do you put it off as long as you possibly
can and when you make it out do you say as little as you possibly can
to make sure you don't offend anybody, and then do you send it down to
old Joe to initial? Or do you sit down with him and talk with him about
Well, what are our objectives? Well the first objective is the im-
provement of performance in the job which the individual now holds. So
this in itself then suggests that you do not confine your conference with
this individual to discussing just how he has done during the past year
but that you also talk about the future a little bit. And the second
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goal is the development of people, in two senses: first, we need to de-
velop people to provide the Agency with the talent that it needs to fill
positions as they open up, and second, we need to help this individual
qualify himself for these more senior positions as they open up. And al-
ways we should try to provide the answers to two questions which are on
everybody's mind including yours and mine. How am I doing? And where am
I going?
There are still people in this Agency who do not believe that one
should show a fitness report to a subordinate, there are still people who
do not believe that one should discuss his fitness report with a subor-
dinate. Gentlemen, this is 1964, and the days when supervisors behave
in that way are long since behind us. We cannot expect to develop an
atmosphere of approval, an atmosphere of recognition, an atmosphere in
which imagination is stimulated, creativity is stimulated, and motivation
encouraged if we are not willing to sit down and talk frankly with the
people we supervise. There is no reason in the world why one should dread,
which many of us do, to talk with a subordinate about how he is doing and
where he is going. If you are one of the people who dread that, fear that,
who are afraid to face up to it, then you have a very fundamental problem
with yourself right now and you better take a look at it because there is
something very fundamentally wrong with your supervisor-subordinate relation-
ship if you have this kind of fear about making out a fitness report.
Fitness reports should be no surprise to anybody if you have the proper
kind of subordinate-superior relationship. If you are in communication
with your subordinates throughout the year on a day to day basis and
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you counsel them and criticize them constructively and let them make a
profit from their mistakes, there is no reason why this fitness report
which comes around once a year should be any surprise to anybody.
I'd like to suggest, I know that fitness reports are a problem, and
I'd like to suggest a very simple approach to getting over some of the
hurdles which we have. First, an employee should know exactly what's
expected of him, he should know what his job is, he should know what your
standards are, and you should have a clear understanding with your sub-
ordinate at the beginning of the rating period as to what he's respon-
sible for and what he's accountable for and what you expect, and so forth,
and this should be very clearly understood. You should have a small con-
ference and talk about this in most cases, and in that conference you
should encourage the subordinate to make a plan for himself. Lay out
what you think you are going to accomplish, what are some reasonable tar-
gets to accomplish during this period. Ask him to go think this over and
then come back and talk with you when he has sort of laid out a program
for himself. Then when he comes back, look at his targets, look at his
objectives; some of them may be over ambitious, some of them may not be
ambitious enough, but this is a chance for you to come to some common un-
derstanding as to what you are trying to do, what you are trying to accom-
plish. And if you can, establish two or three or more check points
throughout the year in which he is to be rated, at which time you get to-
gether again and sort of review this program and see how it's going. Are
you ahead of schedule? Can you move your targets up a little? Are you
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behind? What is the problem? And then at the end of the rating period
discuss the whole thing and it probably can be done in a very few minutes
and, as in most cases it will be that he has done well, you don't have
any problem. At the same time if he has not done well, you have had
an understanding in the beginning on what he is supposed to do, you have
checked with him periodically and talked with him about how he is doing
and this certainly can't be any surprise. He knows the basis on which
he's going to be judged, both of you agree on what his job really is, and
this whole program takes place whithin a supervisory-subordinate relation-
ship which should be healthy and should promote that relationship. It
has a self correcting characteristic at each of these check points. It
gives you an opportunity to spot training needs for this individual,
which I emphasize to you is extremely important. One of your responsi-
bilities is to make sure that your people get the training they need, that
they are made available for training, given the opportunity to improve
their skills and to improve their knowledge so as to be ready to fill the
jobs which the Agency has open and so as to give them a leg up on the
other people with whom they maybe in competition. It treats as a total
process this individual's approach to an organizational problem. It
allows him to devise ways and means of attaching it and it translates his
ideas into action, incorporates new information as it arises, and carries
the plan through to results. This is not very complicated if people
would only take this approach.
If you've been in communication, as I said, during this rating per-
iod, then we're not going to have the kinds of things which we have had
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in the past where an individual has gone along for five, ten, fifteen
years without one word of adverse comment in his fitness report and,
as Mr. Echols alluded to in his talk with you, supervisors made it a
point not to say anything bad to Old Joe and supervisors made it a point
not to let anything adverse get in his file--otherwise what chance did
they ever have in getting rid of this fellow if they put anything un-
complimentary in his file? Not so much recently, but in prior years I've
had literally hundreds of people referred to me in the Support organ-
ization who were really no good as operations officers, they were really
no good as intelligence officers, but they would make a wonderful log-
istics officer because he was a supply sergeant during the war, or he'd
make a wonderful personnel officer because he loves people. None of them
are any good. Very rarely do you find one of these people who has been
around all these years and has all these glowing reports and then finally
some supervisor decides to do something about him and as Echols has sug-
gested he throws the book at him and then the fellow says to the Agency,
"N,y goodness, I've been here all these years, I've worked my heart out,
nobody ever told me I wasn't doing well." If you are this kind of super-
visor you are not measuring up to your responsibilities.
So what kind of supervisor are you anyway? We all have a tendency to
say, "Well, you know, I know what he's saying is really right but it doesn't
apply to me." I suggest that everything that's been said here this morn-
ing applies to all of us in some way or another. If all of it doesn't
apply to you perhaps some of it does. So what kind of a supervisor are
you?
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Do you believe that people must be controlled and directed with the
iron hand of dictator, or do you believe that people have the capacity
to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, creativity, which
they will apply generously if they are properly motivated under good
supervision?
Do you realize that it is a challenging job which allows the feeling
of achievement, responsibility, growth, enjoyment of work itself and
earned recognition which motivates people? If so, are you giving your
people that kind of supervision?
Are you a good listener? Are you in communication with your people
or do you communicate at them?
Have you obtained the commitment of the people you supervise to the
right set of human values and do you have the courage and the persever-
ance to take a positive and determined course of action against those
whose human values or substandard performance makes them unacceptable for
this Agency as long term career employees?
Are you an honest appraiser of people and do you have the strength of
character to sit down and talk with your people truthfully, about how they
are doing and where they are going?
Do you really know your people and do you accept the total responsi-
bility for their welfare as well as their performance that this Agency ex-
pects of its supervisors?
How many of your supervisors have ever had a management and super-
visory training course? Have you ever had one? They are available in an
abundant supply and good ones.
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These are some of the questions that I would ask each of you to ask
yourself most searchingly. These are some of the areas in which we know
there is tremendous room for improvement. And these are some of the short-
comings which top management is determined to change.
THANK YOU
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