Steve began his professional career in 1981 at the Bonneville Power Administration in the energy conservation division. He held a number of positions within BPA, including 12 years as Administrator/CEO. Steve then served as General Manager at Chelan Public Utility District in Washington from 2013-2021. Steve was appointed to the Southwest Power Pool Board in 2022 and is the chair of the Interim Markets+ Independent Panel, overseeing SPP’s day-ahead market developments in the West.
Steve was a member of the boards of the American Public Power Association and the Alliance to Save Energy, on the steering committee for the Large Public Power Council, and past chair of the Public Generating Pool. He has been awarded the Presidential Rank Award for distinguished service as federal government executive, the Alex Radin Distinguished Service Award (APPA’s highest honor), ASE Charles Percy award for public service (ASE’s highest award), and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Washington PUD Association, Oregon PUD Association, and Northwest Public Power Association. He earned a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Oregon.
Steve recently released a book, Inspired Public Service, which is available on Amazon and from InspiredPublicService.com.
Excerpted from an interview on the Public Power Now podcast.
How did you come to work in the public power community, and how did your roles inform your decision to write the book?
I decided in college that I really wanted to work in the public sector. I was fortunate enough to come out of school just as the Northwest Power Act had been enacted, creating a bunch of jobs at Bonneville Power Administration. I got started at BPA and ended up spending a long time there learning about a lot of different things.
As I look back on it now, I probably was not prepared to be a CEO when I was only 42 years old. A big part of writing the book was thinking about how I might be able to help other people who find themselves either thrust into leadership roles or thinking about going into leadership roles to avoid some of the mistakes that I've made and hopefully accelerate their learning process.
That's been the fun part of writing this, having to admit the things that I could have done better and thinking about ways that, if I had been more prepared, I might have been more able to get things done quicker and earlier in my tenure.
What are the key takeaways from your book?
There are three things that I've tried to focus on. First, there are management structures that can be put in place that improve performance of public sector organizations. There certainly are disadvantages working in the public sector, but we have a lot of advantages too. The key one is that employees today are looking for meaning and purpose. They want something that makes a difference in people's lives to motivate them — and we bring that in the public sector, and particularly in public power. We frequently don't think about how to build it into our management systems so that we are constantly trying to encourage people to do their best on behalf of others, their friends, their neighbors, their relatives, to people that we serve.
If you focus on how to get public sector organizations to perform at the highest levels, it does something really important. You look at the trust in government scores over the last 40 to 50 years in this country, and they have fallen dramatically, where numbers today are below 20% in terms of the general public's trust in their government. That's a real problem for democracy. People have to trust in their government in a democracy. We can lament that as public sector employees, or we can seek to do something about it, particularly as public sector leaders. This is really a fundamental issue: How do we do something rather than be victims of a culture that that does not treasure public service?
When we build pride and meaning and purpose into work, we help to build organizational success, we build operational excellence. As we build that operational excellence, it leads us to being more successful and therefore building more trust in government.
Second, there is a lot of frustration out there about the lack of bipartisanship and a lot of blaming of elected officials that it doesn't occur. We can, I believe, make a difference at the grassroots level. Particularly for those of us who work in the public sector, we have the opportunity because we have so much knowledge inside our organizations. We have the ability to build bipartisan solutions from the grassroots up, and building bipartisan solutions will also lead to greater trust.
The third and final theme of the book is about how individual potential leaders or existing leaders can develop their own skills. There are tools that we can use in a variety of different ways, communication being one of the most critical ones. We rely on our commitment to public service as a way to describe to people what's in our hearts. When we really connect with people, it builds confidence in them that we are trying to do the right things and not focused on self-interest.
Who is the intended audience for the book?
It’s really for people in various stages of their public administration careers. For students at the public administration level, there is introductory material that can help to explain how it is that you can begin to think about structuring your career to be successful in the public sector.
For those who are early or mid-career, there's an opportunity to think about the types of tools that you can use and the ways that you can structure your own interactions with fellow employees in a way that helps to motivate people and bring out the best in them.
Even if you are later in your career, there are tools that we developed both at Bonneville and when I was at Chelan that are unique and could help further round out an official’s set of opportunities that they have available to them that they could use to be more effective.
How does this all relate to your role in the SPP markets plus effort?
It's often not well understood how radically different the SPP governance structure is [compared to other markets]. It helps to exemplify the strong theme of if democracy is well-implemented, it can actually bring out the best in people. The SPP stakeholder engagement structure really focuses on a bottom-up, grassroots-level approach. It relies on voting by individuals coming together collectively, trying to resolve issues rather than presenting material to a decision maker, having the decision maker attempt to create the balance between various stakeholders. That stakeholder process is one that is at the core of what has become the markets plus approach to the day head markets.
When things are based on the decisions of a vote, you know that you need to not just try to get the ultimate decision maker to come around to your point of view, but you're trying to share that point of view or find an in-between with your colleagues, the other stakeholders in the process. That has been really fun to be a part in that process and to see the potential value that it can bring to market development.
