The Bureau of Public Debt (BPD) was a government agency formed in 1940 and housed within the U.S. Department of the Treasury. For over sixty years, the BPD was responsible for helping to ensure the continued operation of the federal government by overseeing the complex financial exchanges involved with borrowing money from the public and managing trillions of dollars in investments. In 1987, Van Zeck was appointed Deputy Commissioner at the BPD, and in 1998, he was appointed Commissioner, an executive role he filled for the rest of the Bureau’s existence. Commissioner Zeck oversaw nearly 2,000 employees within the BPD and directed the agency through changing political, economic and technological conditions.
With decades of management experience, Zeck understood the fundamental importance of organizational culture on employee morale, employee performance, and overall organizational success. The BPD had implemented a Values Framework to help employees thoroughly understand and meet performance expectations.
Employees were instructed to align their behaviors with the strategically identified values to support the Bureau’s mission. With the responsibility of accurately accounting for a stream of intricate and substantial financial transactions, accountability, transparency, and ethical behavior of every member of the organization was of paramount importance.
In the early 2000s, Zeck and other members of BPD leadership were seeking ways to elevate the impact of their Values Framework program and strengthen organizational culture.
Around this same time, Commissioner Zeck encountered Arbinger’s book, Leadership and Self-Deception. He immediately recognized the relevance of the Arbinger principles and the importance of cultivating an organizational culture where employees are supported in seeing and responding to the needs of others. He learned how employee morale and work execution are inextricably connected. To deepen his own understanding of the effect an outward mindset has on employee performance, Zeck attended several Arbinger training workshops. The commissioner was enthused by the vision of how Arbinger principles and solutions could positively impact the work of the Bureau of Public Debt and boost employee morale. He opted to participate in Arbinger’s Train-the-Trainer course to better introduce and operationalize an outward mindset organizational culture throughout the BPD.
Zeck describes the Arbinger framework and principles as being “fundamental and foundational”, laying the groundwork for widespread and coordinated success across a complex organization.
Under his direction, all of the Senior Executive Service (SES) leaders received training in Arbinger methodologies. As part of their professional development, the SES leaders would all later become trained as Arbinger facilitators as well. The implementation continued to spread as mid-level managers received Arbinger training. Eventually, over 1500 employees at the BPD would receive training in Arbinger principles, and the Arbinger leadership framework was incorporated into the onboarding of all new employees.
Commissioner Zeck described the decision to incorporate Arbinger in this way, “We realized the importance of this material in our culture and decided to make the core Arbinger workshop a required part of our new employee orientation program. We didn’t decide to do that with just a snap of our fingers. We thought, is this a good thing to do? Is this meaningful, the right thing to do? And it was.” What initially started as a single executive reading Arbinger’s philosophy gradually became a movement for improving work culture. The outward mindset became part of the very fabric of the BPD’s organizational culture, interwoven into the day-to-day work of the entire agency.
As the Arbinger framework, vocabulary, and practices became widespread within the Bureau of Public Debt, the changes were met with overwhelmingly positive responses from employees at all levels. Arbinger training prompted an organizational culture shift noted by executives, managers, and entry-level employees alike. Commissioner Zeck even received phone calls from outside the organization inquiring how the changes had taken place as employee performance had improved dramatically. While the importance of value-informed behavior had already been recognized and promoted within the BPD, Arbinger’s work helped to address the even deeper determinant of behavior: mindset. Employees were helped to redefine their job responsibilities and take greater accountability for the impact they had on peers, supervisors, and their client contacts. They began to recognize situations where they had been neglecting to see the full humanity of others. The increase in self-awareness helped to illuminate different ways they could choose to interact with each other, ways that would be more helpful and results-oriented.
One clear indicator that Arbinger principles were benefiting the BPD was the dramatic increase of the Bureau’s ranking in the Federal Government Best Places to Work list. Compared to thousands of employees from 224 different agencies across the federal government, employees at the BPD reported greater satisfaction and more influential work execution within their jobs. Consequently higher level of approval for their organizational culture and increased employee morale followed. After the Arbinger training, the BPD was ranked in the top 10 best places to work in the federal government for three years in a row from 2008-2010.
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