Mission: Impossible?

Azmi

While some turnover can be healthy--a sign itself of constructive change--the FBI's hemorrhaging of talent over the past five years has worried Congress and the bureau's many overseers. "The turnover has definitely hurt accountability and effectiveness and the pace of reform," says Glenn Fine, who as the Justice Department's inspector general has assessed and reported to the attorney general on the FBI's performance for nearly a decade. "We'll deal with a certain individual on an issue, and then six months later, we're dealing with another individual, and then six months later, another."

There's a tapestry of explanations for the frenetic turnover. It's surely a function of the mandatory retirement age of 57, for one thing--instituted at a time when it was thought agents should be "young and vigorous." These days, too, FBI executives can attract rich pay in the private sector for their expertise in security. Former agents and executives say that stress and burnout, especially since 9/11, has only fueled the phenomenon.

The good news: The quality and quantity of the agency's new job candidates has never been higher. In the year before 9/11, the FBI attracted 7,100 applicants qualified to become special agents. A year later, it got 64,000. Today's candidates for intelligence analyst jobs are far more likely to have advanced degrees and experience in foreign languages and cultures than before 9/11, the bureau says. "For every [FBI] executive who's left for double and triple their salaries, we have people who've come here whose salaries are cut in half or thirds," Miller says.

Great--except that the bureau's hiring and training systems are overwhelmed. The hiring process is cumbersome to begin with, requiring dozens of steps and nearly 10 months on average to fill each position. Once on board, new recruits are shipped to a training center, at the FBI's famous Quantico Academy in Virginia, that is badly in need of renovation and simply hasn't been able to easily accommodate the growing numbers.

What's more, the bureau's increasingly better educated employees come with much higher expectations about the organization and their opportunities. A recent Justice Department survey of the first few waves of intelligence analysts hired since 2002 hinted at troubling levels of job dissatisfaction. One out of every three of the most-recent hires reported that they intended to leave the FBI within five years; only 16% of all analysts hired since 2002 said they were "very likely" to stay in their jobs for the next five years. The FBI says the integration of its new analysts is a work in progress, and that it has held town-hall-style meetings recently with analysts to understand their concerns and ideas.

Among the most praised of Mueller's actions so far was his recruitment in 2005 of British Petroleum executive Donald Packham as the FBI's chief human resources officer. Besides marking a rare grab of a top executive from the private sector, it signaled the importance of the bureau's talent and of the intent to invest in hiring, training, and development. Not a moment too soon.

Making change, Kotter observes, comes down to this: understanding the awesome power of tradition. "Leaders underestimate it, and they don't find enough ways to bar the old culture from seeping into the new," Kotter says. "The bigger the organization and the older the organization, the tougher it is."

Troubling anecdotes continue to surface at the bureau. Outside auditors, for example, have found that the process around translation of electronic surveillance and intercepts--a critical step in effective counterintelligence and counterterrorism--takes up to three months, far longer than the FBI's post-9/11 internal policies were supposed to allow. The FBI says that it constantly reprioritizes backlogs in translation and interpretation, but that it never fails to review materials in its highest priority cases.

"The FBI's shift to a counterterrorism posture is far from institutionalized, and significant deficiencies remain," the 9/11 Commission concluded. "Reforms are at risk from inertia and complacency." Part of the challenge facing Mueller is rooted in the FBI's vast bureaucracy, laced with the qualities that make bureaucracies what they are. It possesses impressive pools of talent, determination, tools, and dedication. But it tends to be a risk-averse, plodding, highly politicized work environment with a bunker mentality that doesn't easily absorb outside criticism and input.

What makes the change effort especially difficult, of course, is the pressure of operating under intense public scrutiny. "Listen, what the FBI is trying to do can be done, but it's truly hard to grasp the significance and visibility of what they have to do--and they have to do it under the gun," says Warren Bennis, the author of Leaders and distinguished business professor and change expert at the University of Southern California.