Decisions At The Government Level

Decisions at the Government Level

I've seen many decisions made in my twenty-three years of work life. Some of these decisions have been made by high-level executives, some by middle management, and some by groups and subordinates. The outcomes have been varied, with no particular style being more or less successful than another. Ironically, that is also the common thread between them.

I worked for the United States Postal Service for almost seven years, and that was definitely a place where delegation would have been a good thing to put into practice. Very few decisions in this organization are made at the local level, and the postmasters are basically glorified babysitters, there to enforce regulations with the public and also with the employees. They work very hard, but ultimately don't have a lot of power to make their own decisions based on the needs of their particular office.

I found that most decisions at the post office were made using the "decide and persuade" style, at both the national and regional levels of the organization. Things such as hours of operation, amount of work hours available, and even decisions about who to hire are all defined by general guidelines set at the national and regional levels. The postmaster has little to no control over any of these things. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, he or she really should.

To hire a clerk in the post office, a postmaster first receives a list of potential employees from the regional main office. This is a list of candidates that have passed the postal exam with an acceptable score. The candidates with the highest exam scores are the first to be called to interview, which makes sense. It's after that point that the whole system loses all sensibility.

During my time there, one of the other clerks quit, and the timing dictated that we needed to fill the position again as quickly as we could. It was July when she quit, but the post office is not exactly quick on the draw when it comes to hiring. There is a whole series of steps that need to be taken to fill a vacancy, just like everything else. So, needless to say, in order to get someone in and trained by the time November rolled around, we needed to get a move on things. My postmaster got the vacancy approved, and about three weeks later he received the hiring list. He called the top five people and