Governor needs to own the mess at Cultural Affairs
Firings reflect desire for lackeys, not leaders
From 1985 to 1991, at what is now the Department of Cultural Affairs, I oversaw the rapid growth of an obscure branch of the state’s museum system and led its re-establishment as the Office of Archaeological Studies. At the time, one of my star employees was Dr. Eric Blinman, who went on to direct the program. I know him to be brilliant and knowledgeable. I have watched him dedicate his life to advancing our knowledge of this nation’s past and to serving the people of New Mexico. I have seen him make an enormous positive difference, in part by giving his job all he had to give. If I want to point out one person as a model of what a state employee should be, I need look no farther than Blinman. Yet now he’s been removed from his leadership role at the Office of Archaeological Studies and is out of a job. It’s not that uncommon to see excellence punished, but it’s rare to see it punished so severely.
If Blinman’s removal was the only decapitation within the Department of Cultural Affairs, it would be easy to lay his dismissal at his own feet. However, his removal is part of a pattern. There’s a problem at DCA, and based on my four decades of working in a variety of programs, private and public, it’s easy to see what the problem is. Whenever a large program is performing well, a closer look reveals mid-level leaders who are encouraged to have thoughts of their own. Those leaders are also “encouraged to encourage” the people they supervise to do the same. The resulting can-do, will-do, letme-do-it attitude can permeate the entire program. Instead, we have an agency obsessed with top-down control. For those who equate leadership with control, giving others spheres of responsibility and letting them make decisions within those spheres isn’t a sign of strength but of weakness. Attempts by professionals to exercise their judgment become a threat.
Those who continue to be leaders rather than lackeys are purged. Finally, the agency is left with mid-level staff who are predictably subservient, therefore nonthreatening. When this happens, I don’t blame those who remain; each of them has bills to pay. But when a program is debased by an obsession with control, the problem can always be traced to the top. Sadly, once the source of the problem disappears, it can take years for the program to recover.
It is distressing to see the long-term damage done to the Department of Cultural Affairs, and to the career of a talented and dedicated public servant, by one of the governor’s appointees. For all administrative branches of the state, however, the buck stops at the governor’s desk. Moreover, the successes and failures of those programs reflect either positively or negatively on the governor herself. Michelle Lujan Grisham currently has a hot mess at the Department of Cultural Affairs. If she does not fix the problem, it will be her hot mess to own for the rest of her political life.