The Quiet Excellence Among Federal Workers—and What Corporate Leaders Could Learn From Them

The employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are among the most high-performing teams on earth. They explore the farthest edges of galaxies, photograph cosmic events millions of years old, dream up some of the most advanced technology humans have ever made—and build vehicles to go where no one has gone before.More milestones are on the way. In 2027, the JPL will launch into space the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—the most sophisticated to date—and, as the writer Dave Eggers puts it, they’re “within striking distance” of identifying not just the existence but also the location of life elsewhere in the universeThis is a world-changing pursuit for everyone born on terra firma, yet most of the folks at JPL don’t seek praise for what they do. When the writer Dave Eggers visited the lab in Pasadena, Calif., to write about its workers for the Washington Post, he noted that “no one at JPL—no one I met, at least—was willing to take credit for anything.”This work ethic, too, is worth some deep exploring. How can people making history by their excellence shun conventional appreciation? Corporate leaders in HR insist that a culture of recognition is essential to a healthy and productive workforce. True enough, yet Eggers found more dimensions of worker satisfaction that many corporate employers could learn from. Among them: an embrace of intrinsic motivation (curiosity and collaboration) rather than only extrinsic forms (compensation and celebrity); the challenges of answering big questions and solving societal problems; and the sense of leaving a generational legacy.“Yes, we are in the space business and in the knowledge business,” one manager told Eggers, “but I’ve always believed that we’re really in the inspiration business, the inspiration that we have lent out and inspired generations of engineers and scientists. It cannot be underestimated.”What’s even more remarkable, writers like Eggers have discovered: the JPL isn’t an outlier. It’s not an exotic planet among federal agencies, but representative of similar values across the workforce of 2.4 million civilian federal workers.At a time when the Trump administration has cut almost 59,000 federal employees and given buyouts to 76,000 as of mid-May, all the while vilifying the federal workforce as lazy and low-performing, a cadre of journalists have taken a closer look at who does the work that makes the U.S. government, and the country, run. The author Michael Lewis got curious about this at the dawn of the first Trump administration, when the incoming president and his team decided to skip the traditional briefing given by the previous administration on the complexities of the executive workforce. Lewis’s reporting produced a series of Washington Post stories and a bestselling book, The Fifth Risk, which explored what happens when the government is controlled by people who have little idea of how itworks.As a follow-up in 2024, Lewis and six colleagues, who include Eggers, the comic W. Kamau Bell, and Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, followed federal employees as they hammered through their day-to-day duties. The often-arcane pursuits included engineering structures that save miners from dying on the job, investigating cybercrime (and nabbing the criminals), burying and memorializing veterans, meticulously calculating the health of our economy, protecting our most treasured national relics, dispensing knowledge to the public, busting monopolies with verve.The series of profiles, called “Who Is Government?,” ran in installments in the Washington Post in 2024 and was published this year as a book by the same name, now a bestseller.Lewis and his co-authors describe a culture within the federal workforce that most business leaders, and HR teams, might only dream of: a high regard for management, routinely doing more with less, a painstaking commitment to measurement, high retention despite comparatively low pay, creativity and innovation with slim budgets, and a deep personal commitment to the cause of the organization. But there’s still that missing piece—no one’s singling them out for praise.One former assistant secretary of foreign affairs at the Veterans Administration tells writer Casey Cep, without apparent resentment, that to be a civil servant is to be invisible. “No one ever knows about the good you do.” What, then, takes the place of that?How Corporate America Is Different, But Could ChangeCorporate America tends to mingle with its own kind. Private-sector conferences seldom invite public-sector speakers, there are few federal bureaucratic influencers on LinkedIn, Fortune isn’t likely to profile cybercrime teams at the IRS, even though they’ve recovered billions of dollars for the American public.Yet, in many ways, the public sector has achieved what the private sector still grapples for.If anyone in the private sector knows about excellence, it’s Lawrence Price. He’s a West Point graduate, an Army veteran, and the holder of a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology. In the private sector he has worn titles like “director of organizational development and continuous improvement” and “vice president of organizational excellence.” He’s currently the VP of people and culture at Brink’s, the company whose armored trucks transport wads of cash and diamonds.There are three types of corporate excellence, he said. Efficiency, innovation, and proficiency. The federal workforce, which is so large and so diverse in its purposes, contains all three.Companies that create the same product or service repeatedly want to be efficient. Bereaved families can call the National Cemetery Administration (part of the VA) most times of day or night to make funeral arrangements. Though every military member who dies is unique in their way, their burials are democratically the same: Republican and Democrat, male and female, black and white, officer or enlisted. It’s worth noting that they have so mastered efficiency with strict process and deep respect that the NCA ranks above any organization—public or private—on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.Those that make new things want to be innovative (and are seldom concerned with efficiency). It makes sense that the JPL satisfies this criteria, but, as Sarah Vowell’s story in Who Is Government? shows, so does the Food and Drug Administration, whose CURE ID website allows doctors all over the world to report cases of rare disease and log the treatments that work and don’t work. It’s the first of its kind. And they did it on a shoestring.Companies that gather groups of experts—like a hospital or a robotics firm, for instance—want to be proficient. Most federal departments are proficiency hubs in one fashion or another. IRS cybercrime investigators are experts in digital forensics, archivists are experts in preservation and knowledge dissemination, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division is a concentration of experts in monopolies and mitigating them.All companies want some level of financial sustainability, Price noted. The same is true for government agencies, which need to meet their budgets even as they make difficult decisions between competing programs, dreams, and expectations.And all organizations want engaged employees, a goal easier for those that prize proficiency and harder for those that prize efficiency, but not impossible. Casey Cep writes that the private sector could learn a thing or two from the National Cemetery Administration, especially in the way of commitment. “There is no mission more sacred than honoring these heroes and helping their families through such a hard time, and it’s a job that [the NCA does] with excellence and compassion every single day,” Denis McDonough, the former secretary of Veterans Affairs, told Cep.Price believes that intrinsic motivation and sense of duty–a feeling that it’s a privilege to serve–are far more powerful than what corporate America might call a culture of recognition. “It’s stickier,” he said. “I’m ex-military, and it’s amazing to me what a piece of tin going on a person’s uniform—how it will motivate them, how it makes them feel seen.”Finding Motivation in the Mission It’s easy to imagine self-generating motivation if your mission is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States–an oath sworn by both military and civil servants. But what if you make windshield wipers, or build software, or paint houses? Where–and how–will employees find motivation?It may be a matter of identifying the human dignity in what the company does. Adam Weber, an executive coach in the private sector, told From Day One that organizational excellence begins with a clear vision for the future: “That flag on the moon, that deep understanding of why the business exists and where it’s headed,” he said. This needn’t be some altruistic dream nor a sappy myth about changing the world, but a clear-eyed description of the effects of what your employees do.A commercial painting business beautifies homes simply and efficiently. A sportswear brand helps keep people active and healthy. A payments software company helps people get paid on time. And a cybersecurity company ensures those paychecks stay in the accounts where they belong.The federal employees profiled in Who Is Government? are acutely aware of the downstream effects of their work, and they’re aware of who’s footing the bill. “The scientists I met [at JPL] were exquisitely aware that they’re spending taxpayer money, and they were determined to justify the faith put in them,” Eggers wrote. The sense of dignity in their work is immensely high. In corporate speak: They’re engaged with the company mission, and accountable to their stakeholders.Even so, long before the Trump administration declared open season on federal workers, their advocates decided that they could use a little more limelight in their own interest. Each year since 2002, the Partnership for Public Services gives out what’s called the Oscars of their field. At the award ceremony this week, the top price went to David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department who “was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system,” as the New York Times reported.In accepting his award, Lebryk noted that “most of my career was spent trying to be unnoticed.” But now he was in the spotlight and wanted to encourage his successors. The night before the awards, he addressed a group of incoming federal interns, encouraging them to pursue public service, the Times reported. Eventually, he said, “things will break,” and the administration “will have to turn to people who know how to fix things.” He said he tells government colleagues to “take care of yourself, and take the long view; your skills are going to be needed in the future.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo: a portrait of employees at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, from left, Tiffany Kataria, Bertrand Mennesson, Vanessa Bailey, and Kim Aaron. Photo ©Jay L. Clendenin)