The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships that Make Government Work

Government reform efforts usually focus on macro-level change heralded by new policies, programs, structures, and systems. Yet they tend to ignore that these reforms do not succeed without people. Public managers who form healthy working relationships built on trust are the micro-level change levers―the necessary pre-condition to improving government.

Buttressed by their real-world experience on the frontlines of a range of cases, the authors demonstrate the importance of values-based leadership. Chapters then focus on tools; the concrete ways in which leaders can improve themselves, their organizations, those they coach; and the teams they establish to build effective relationships and the trust essential to success. Surveying agencies both horizontally and vertically, The Trusted Leader also addresses how public managers can collaborate with political appointees and the legislative branch, all the while engaging with citizens through modern technologies to build exceptional customer experiences.

Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. He has also served as dean of faculty at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. His publications have addressed such issues as values and ethics in leadership, organizational change, and diversity and its effects on organizations and leaders. Newell has also worked at the U.S. Department of Education, where we was director of training and managed innovative grant programs for teacher education and training as well as for educational reform.

Grant Reeher is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the political science department at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is also a Senior Research Associate at Maxwell’s Center for Policy Research, and on the adjunct faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. In addition, during 2004-2005 he was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet. He is the author or coauthor of, among other works, First Person Political: Legislative Life and the Meaning of Public Service;Narratives of Justice: Legislators’ Beliefs about Distributive Fairness; and Click on Democracy: The Internet′s Power to Change Political Apathy into Civic Action. He has also published numerous editorial essays in newspapers around the country, and frequently appears on television and radio news and public affairs programs.

Peter Ronayne is the dean of faculty at the Federal Executive Institute where he also directs the Leadership for a Democratic Society program and co-founded FEI’s Center for Global Leadership. He is the author of Never Again?: The United States and the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide since the Holocaust and co-authored the most recent update of Biography of an Ideal, a history of the U.S. civil service for the United States Office of Personnel Management. He is currently writing a biography of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and is at work on a project that chronicles the history of Generation X.