Lessons learned from my decades running a front office
When I saw my NSF office in the old Arlington Headquarters, I was so impressed that I sent my mom a photo. It was roughly double the size of my dean’s office at my home institution and had a conference table suitable for a small hockey match. Several weeks later, sworn in and on the job, I realized that the door wouldn’t really close. Oh, it had hinges. But it was meant to be open. All the time.
That was a shock. For sixteen years as a dean, my door had been closed an awful lot. I was used to privacy. I’d read, think, make my calls, and when the door opened again, I’d made up my mind.
At NSF, the door stayed open. And outside that doorway stood the front office of NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate.
In an earlier post I wrote about the rules that change when you’re the one moving the pieces. This one is about execution. Whether you’re a newly minted chair, center director, dean, or agency head, the scientist in you tends to think of the front office as overhead for the real job at hand. Those budget people, schedulers, and speechwriters handle the paperwork so you can get the ‘vision’ done.
That’s so wrong. The front office is a principal’s primary tool. Your front office filters what reaches you and in what order. It also decides who gets fifteen minutes and who gets forty-five. It shapes how your decisions land three levels down. A PI can survive a mediocre lab manager. A principal with a mediocre front office is, in effect, governed by it.
Why do we scientists get this so wrong? Because our careers are usually ego-centered. We choose our graduate students. We choose our postdocs, our lab managers, our collaborators. If someone isn’t working out, we don’t renew them. The lab reflects the PI because the PI picked it.
As a dean, I ran my office the same way. I hired my COO and my CFO on merit, and both were extraordinary. What made them extraordinary wasn’t technical skill, though they had plenty of that. It was situational awareness and strategic thinking. They knew what was happening in the building before I did, and they knew what it meant. With people like that, a closed door is a luxury you can afford. The office runs, and it runs the way you would run it.
In that world, selection is the management.
Then you go to Washington.
As a rotator at NSF, you don’t select your front office. You inherit it. Career staff, federal process, taskers coming down from the Director and up from Congress. People who have watched Heads of Directorates come and go, and who will watch you go too.
So what replaces selection? That’s the question nobody prepares you for. Very few scientists have ever had to make an inherited team work. It’s a different skill, and frankly a harder one.
My answer, worked out the hard way, came down to two moves. If I couldn’t choose the people, I could change what the office was for. And I could control how it spent my time.
When I arrived, the National Ecological Observatory Network wasn’t being managed out of the Division of Biological Infrastructure, where it belonged. It was being run out of my front office. The previous AD, and particularly the deputy AD I inherited, had sensed NEON was already in trouble and pulled it close. That’s why my boss, in what was supposed to be a pro forma job interview, told me to “fix NEON.” I’ve written about that rescue before. This is a different part of the story.
Pulling a troubled project close feels like control. It isn’t. A front office that runs a program stops serving the whole directorate and becomes an operating unit with its own project to protect. Worse, it controls the information about that project.
Which is exactly what happened. NEON’s front-office program management sat on the stream of bad news from the project, which eventually led to crisis.
Moving NEON to DBI fixed two problems at once. It put competent, certified program managers in the cockpit. They were now flying the plane. It also put the project where NSF’s forensic and infrastructure specialists could actually see it. They surfaced the problems the front office had kept hidden. The structural fix was the information fix.
Could I have just demanded better reporting from my own office? No. I’d be asking the people doing the filtering. I had to move the project.
Deans, take note. Every signature initiative that reports straight to your office carries a small version of the same risk.
The second thing I did was probably unusual–at least at NSF. I created a secret veto over my own Outlook calendar. My scheduler booked meetings the normal way. I could strike them. No one really knew. The meeting would simply go away.
Why the hush-hush? If I’d been open about it, the larger directorate and the NSF would have had a second channel–people would have learned to lobby me directly and go around my scheduler. The front office that I was trying to win over would have read it as distrust. The secret veto let the office run smoothly.
But the real reason was simpler. It was my replacement for the closed door. In a job where the door stayed open, the calendar was the one place where a decision was mine alone.
That’s not a small thing. At the top executive level, your calendar is your strategy. How you spend your hours is your priority statement, and the organization reads it that way whether you intend it or not.
It’s also where I made my worst front-office mistake. I vetoed an interagency meeting with Vice President Biden. I thought the VP was a lower priority. It wasn’t. Biden phoned my boss and relayed the pain to me. I was suitably chastened.
Think about how that error surfaced. Nobody in my office could catch it, because nobody in my office knew. It came back down from the top via a phone call from the Vice President of the United States to my boss. That’s the most expensive channel there is.
Afterward? I kept the veto secret and simply got more careful.
I see the symmetry now. With NEON, someone in my office kept information from me. With Biden, I kept information from my office. Both times the system corrected itself, but at the highest level and at the highest cost. Concealment in a front office fails no matter who’s doing it.
So what would I tell a scientist about to become a chair, a dean, or a government science principal?
Treat your front office like you would treat a Zeiss laser-scanning confocal microscope: you can’t do your job without it. Decide how your front office will let you execute your vision before you worry about the people who sit in it. Selection is a luxury. Make controlling function and time a priority. Move projects out of your front office and into line management, where they belong and where professionals can see them. Treat your calendar as strategy because everyone else will.
And keep your door if you can. You’ll need it. But put one person on the inside. Someone like my University COO or my CFO, with real situational awareness, who would have looked at a canceled meeting with the Vice President and asked, “Are you sure?”
If I did it again, I’d tell one person.
The front office isn’t overhead around the job. It’s where the job happens.
