The SES is fairly obscure, and its challenges may not seem unusual. Poor managers are found in every field, and the insufficient development of buzzword-y management skills may seem inconsequential. But members of the SES direct offices of the National Institutes of Health or regions of the Veterans’ Affairs administration, or lead policy teams at the Department of Defense. In Read’s words, career senior executives—which represent 90 percent of the SES and are the focus of the report—are “high-impact” employees. One-third of career senior executives run programs worth more than $100 million, or manage more than 200 employees.

When the SES succeeds, it succeeds big. The report credits the best career senior executives with improving national security and saving taxpayers billions of dollars. But its failures are even more dramatic: “Poor leadership can result in mission failure, a demoralized workforce, tarnished agency reputation, and public distrust of the agency or government as a whole.”

Read said one reason the SES isn’t living up to its original mission is that agencies often hire for technical, not leadership, skills. Many SES executives are more like the senior-most civil servants in a given agency, rather than a class of professional managers. That could be because of the realities of government work, in which executives’ jobs have become “increasingly knowledge-based.” No one disputes that some technical knowledge is necessary for particularly specialized departments. Tim Dirks, interim president of the Senior Executives Association, said it’s to the government’s advantage to hire executives that have both skill sets for positions in the Department of Health and Human Services or the National Weather Service, for example.

Read recommends that on the whole, though, agencies should improve the ability of the SES to function as managers by selecting for “less trainable” leadership traits—that they emphasize hiring employees who, for example, are motivated and entrepreneurial. And that agencies then focus on those employees’ executive training and development, teaching them the other skills they need.

He said that, based on surveys of different agencies’ employees, there’s a connection between how rank-and-file civil servants feel about their SES bosses—their faith in senior leadership—and agencies’ use of “robust” executive training and development programs. Agencies with lower scores in terms of employees’ faith “also tend to be just less conscious or active” in training and development.

Approximately 30 percent of career senior executives surveyed by the nonpartisan, independent MSPB for the report say their “developmental needs are not being met.” And roughly 42 percent said they aren’t fulfilled because the right training wasn’t available—a “perception,” the report notes, that could be the result of budget constraints that have curbed or cut certain programs.