“If there is no transformation inside each of us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.” (Peter Block)

That insight, along with the recommendations of The Vail Agenda and other strategic documents, has inspired the National Park Service to encourage personal and organizational change in order to better meet future challenges. Training and development are important components. One of the first steps was to bring new leadership concepts to NPS supervisors and managers through a series of seminars, and 124 leadership seminars were held between 1995 and 1997. There were 3,458 participants representing 355 parks and 50 offices. The total cost of the program was $2,024,400.

In August 1997 more than 40 facilitators gathered at Albright Training Center and shared what they had learned. The facilitators, who had bonded through the struggles, progress, pain, and satisfaction of many seminars, admitted that they always felt anticipation, anxiety, excitement, and a bit of trepidation when wondering what the next leadership seminar would be like. They always knew that it would be another week of unusual and unexpected experiences, and yet many of the same issues and questions that had surfaced at nearly every seminar would be discussed again. Each time, the facilitators wondered how the new participants would react — maybe open and honest discussion would start early and naturally, but (more likely) one to three days would be spent just laying groundwork. And would the seminar end with a feeling of general satisfaction? In rare cases hostile participants dominated, and the facilitators felt that they had failed. The reward for the facilitators was in the challenge, in the hope that they could make a difference, and in the knowledge that they were guiding an important step in organizational change.

A servicewide strategy for supervisory, management, and leadership development is being planned. The recommendations of this report will be taken into consideration, as will the Benchmarks™ Composite Group Profiles (see p. 44) analysis, the recommendations of employees and leaders in the career field, and formal needs assessments. Training and development in the immediate future will focus on supervisory skills, as many seminar participants suggested.

The NPS design team for supervisory, management, and leadership development will make recommendations for the realignments needed to integrate new knowledge and skills into the workplace. Leadership competencies for all employees will be incorporated into the universal competencies curriculum as well as the supervision, management, and leadership curriculum. The training managers for the two career fields have agreed on that approach, and curriculum design is underway.

At least one leadership seminar will be offered each year to ensure an ongoing opportunity for new supervisors and managers and those who did not attend before. Benchmarks™ should be repeated every 2-3 years to measure the impact of the leadership seminar program and to allow individual participants to gauge whether their leadership behaviors and skills have changed. The concepts of the seminars will be incorporated into future training — concepts such as personal responsibility, empowerment, accountability, and assumption questioning. The long process of organizational change has begun — one employee (and one seminar) at a time.

This report outlines the activities, accomplishments, observations, and recommendations of the seminars.