Impossible Job

A leader of a public organization holds an impossible job when external stakeholders expect that organization to accomplish goals that simply cannot be fully accomplished given the available means, technologies, and constraints. Most public organizations face a persistent discrepancy between formal goals and actual performance, but societal and political stakeholders understand and expect this. When stakeholders do not accept a performance deficit, the job becomes impossible.

The impossibility problem afflicts all public organizations to some degree. Most public organizations were initiated to solve intractable problems or pursue grand ambitions. They serve multiple, mutually contradicting, and highly controversial goals. Most lack the technology and the means to accomplish the imposed goals and labor under many constraints. When stakeholders do not consider these factors, it becomes hard, if not impossible, to defend persistent underperformance.

Some public organizations receive little empathy or sympathy from their stakeholders. This happens when an organization serves a clientele that many consider intractable and irresponsible (think of drug addicts and career criminals), when an organization harbors questionable expertise, or when there is doubt that the organization's activities will contribute to the public good.

The job of prison director provides a typical example. The prison director is expected to keep inmates inside, to provide a decent living environment that deters others from becoming a criminal, to offer rehabilitative programs, and to protect them against violence—all this with minimal funding and little political support. Routine incidents (an escape, a violent incident, a corrupt guard) underscore the dominant notion of a permanently failing operation. In a politically volatile environment and in the absence of objective performance indicators, it becomes hard for a prison director to command a minimal degree of legitimacy for the functioning of the prison(s).

The holders of these impossible jobs can apply two strategies to increase their chances of success. They can actively engage with their stakeholders to find common ground, to create a minimal consensus, to engineer coalitions, and to enhance the perceived authority of the profession. This strategy works best when it is accompanied by the second strategy of creating a strong-agency myth, which convincingly explains how the organization's activities contribute to the public good and the long-term health of society.

An impossible job requires from its occupant a high degree of institutional diplomacy: the ability to relate the organization and its goals to society's needs and ambitions without sacrificing organizational capacity.