The PerformanceStat Potential ─ A Leadership Strategy for Producing Results

It started two decades ago with CompStat in the New York City Police Department but quickly jumped to other public agencies in New York and to police agencies internationally. Baltimore created CitiStat ?the first application of this leadership strategyto an entire jurisdiction. Today, governments at all levels employ PerformanceStat: a focused effort to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning, feedback and follow-up ?all to improve government's performance.

Robert Behn analyzes the leadership behaviors at the core of PerformanceStat to identify how they work to produce results. He examines how the leaders of public organizations employ the strategy ?for example, how the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services uses its DPSSTATS to promote economic independence, how the City of New Orleans uses its BlightStat to eradicate urban blight, how the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses its FEMAStat to capture and apply lessons from each crisis response, recovery, and mitigation. How best to harness its full capacity? The PerformanceStat Potential explains all.

Contents

1. CompStat and its PerformanceStat Progeny

2. Searching for PerformanceStat

3. Clarifying PerformanceStat

4. Distinguishing CompStat's Effects

5. Committing to a Purpose

6. Establishing Responsibilities plus Discretion

7. Distinguishing PerformanceStat's Effects

8. Selecting and Collecting the Data

9. Analyzing and Learning From the Data

10. Conducting the Meetings

11. Carrying Out the Feedback and Follow-Up

12. Creating Organizational Competence and Commitment

13. Learning to Make the Necessary Adaptations

14. Thinking about Cause and Effect

15. Appreciating Leadership's Causal Behaviors

16. Making the Leadership Commitment

Robert D. Behn is a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is faculty chair of the executive program "Driving Government Performance: Leadership strategies that Produce Results." He is the author of Rethinking Democratic Accountability(Brookings) and writes the online monthly Bob Behn's Performance Leadership Report.