The Critical Need to Prepare Future Administrators to Engage with Vulnerable Clients

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Hannah Lebovits
August 19, 2024

“I didn’t really see any value in being here anymore,” Deric began.

“A lot of times when you’re homeless, most people feel invisible,” he explained. “Even though you’re a part of society, you feel like you’re not integrated anymore—or that people don’t have any empathy for you.”

Recounting the ways his case manager at the local nonprofit assisted him in his pathway towards housing and mental health recovery, Deric listed several behaviors that struck him: Ophelia talked and listened; made him feel wanted, needed and valued; helped him to recognize that he had something to live for and wake up to. “Ophelia told me, you can’t control everything in your life—try to control the things that you can. That took a lot of weight off of my shoulders in my life. It made me feel that we don’t have to control everything in our life, just the small things. How we feel, who we love, who we don’t—these are the things we can control. But most everything else,” he shrugged, “we just gotta let it be what it will be.”

While listening to Deric share his story, it struck me that I was entirely unprepared for the task I’d be asked to perform. As a local professor and a scholar of homelessness, I’d been invited by a local homeless service agency to participate in their annual luncheon as a judge for the Case Manager of the Year awards ceremony. But as I sat at my home computer and watched the video prepared for the virtual event, I realized that despite my expansive training in public administration and urban affairs as well as my years of teaching MPA and PhD students, I didn’t have the capacity to evaluate the capabilities of direct service providers who engage with highly vulnerable individuals.

How could I tell if one individual was higher performing than another? What were the measures which would be used to assess and evaluate this performance? When I was asked to serve in this role, I expected to see a spreadsheet with hard data showing the number of individual interactions between clients and the case manager, the amount of time a client was unhoused before the case manager assisted in transitioning them into housing, the number of resources the case manager could secure for their client, a rating chart to determine how well the client was treated and other similar data. I was even prepared to hear a short speech about the case manager’s resourcefulness, dedication, leadership skills and creative use of discretion to assist their client. But listening to Deric, I realized that those metrics were not the ones that would be used by clients and organizations to truly identify the best performers. Instead, the soft skills of understanding, intuition, empathy and responsiveness were the difference between a good social service administrator and a great one.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the skills typically developed in the MPA classroom.

Though the traditional focus on effectiveness, efficiency, economical governance and social equity and the standard NASPAA-approved competencies are highly applicable to government and non-profit managerial positions, there is little focus in a standard MPA training on the skills needed to be an excellent non-manager—an administrator who spends most of their time providing direct services and engaging with individual and organizational efforts without any oversight duties. As a result, the student experiences an overemphasis on development of the vision and aspirations of a great leader—a fantastic manager—and an underemphasis on the development of the vision and aspirations of a great subordinate, a great direct service provider. Certainly, an ethics course serve as an anchor for every kind of public sector and nonprofit employee, and discussions of street-level bureaucrats are helpful. But the impression a student gets upon leaving an MPA program is that a great subordinate is simply one who is successfully promoted to a managerial role.

Moreover, as I thought about Deric’s words, I realized that there is insufficient focus not only on non-managerial positions but on those who work with directly with highly vulnerable clients, which often requires one to navigate extremely flawed systems that are difficult to change and offer very few opportunities for resourcefulness and discretion. Certainly entire books have been written about those who serve in these roles but the active training is lacking in the MPA classroom, which is particularly concerning as client interactions in public sector and nonprofit positions very frequently occur within a context of vulnerability and are often fraught with power imbalances and deep distrust.

It would be easy enough to simply wash our hands of this and send any student interested in direct service provision to a social work program, but that simply isn’t an option as an MPA should not be a degree that only assists with one’s current or first job. As many students will likely change positions over time, their departments and agencies may become more or less service provision focused, and the political landscape may add new complexities to client-provider interactions, they will need to gain the skills Deric described while in their MPA programs.

One way to prepare students may be through a service-learning effort, which can provide first-hand experiences for students and assist in their skill development. A required internship might be another way. However, the most critical factor in the cultivation of these soft skills is a consistent focus on the vision and development of the excellent subordinate- the best case manager, nurse, teacher, police officer, health and human services worker, DMV employee, etc. Not an exploration into the topic or a nod to it in an HR or organizational behavior course, but a complete integration of this role into the framework of the MPA educational experience and its essential competencies. If we want to ensure high-quality and fruitful encounters between citizens and the state, particularly our most vulnerable citizens, we must actively prepare, train and assess our students’ ability to act with understanding, sensitivity and compassion.  

---

Author: Hannah Lebovits, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at University of Texas-Arlington. She studies the relationship between governance, spatial structures and social equity. @HannahLebovits

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...