United States President Joe Biden has nominated Indian-American lawyer and rights activist Kiran Ahuja to head the Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that manages America’s more than two million civil servants.

If confirmed by the Senate, 49-year-old Ahuja, nominated on Tuesday, would become the first Indian-American to serve this top position in the US government.

Ahuja served as the Chief of Staff to Director of the US Office of Personnel Management from 2015 to 2017.

She has more than two decades of public service and nonprofit/philanthropic sector leadership experience.

Ahuja currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of Philanthropy Northwest, a regional network of philanthropic institutions.

She began her career as a civil rights lawyer at the US Department of Justice, litigating school desegregation cases, and filing the department’s first student racial harassment case.

From 2003 to 2008, Ahuja served as the founding executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, an advocacy and membership organisation.

During the Obama-Biden administration, she spent six years as executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, leading efforts to increase access to federal services, resources and programmes for underserved Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs).

Ahuja grew up in Savannah, Georgia, as a young Indian immigrant in the wake of the civil rights era, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Spelman College and a law degree from the University of Georgia.

The Washington Post said Ahuja would have a mandate to reverse course on former president Donald Trump’s policies on the civil service, which he and his top aides often derided as a ‘deep state’ of Democratic bureaucrats.

Many agencies lost experts in a range of fields during the Trump era, and Biden has pledged to revitalise the workforce, the daily reported.

Congressman Gerry Connolly, Chairman of the House Government Operations subcommittee, welcomed the nomination of Ahuja.

“Ahuja’s years of leadership experience and knowledge of OPM are much needed to rebuild an agency that was targeted for elimination in the last administration,” he said.

“Ahuja is a well-known and expert leader who will instill stability and confidence in OPM as it recruits, hires, retains, and retires our 2.8 million federal employees. I look forward to her swift Senate confirmation, and then getting to the hard work of transforming OPM into the human resources and leadership training organisation our nation needs it to be,” Connolly said.

President Biden has made an excellent choice in his nomination of Ahuja to serve as OPM director, Congresswoman Judy Chu said.

“With over two decades of experience serving in government, non-profit and philanthropic sectors, Kiran is uniquely qualified to lead OPM at this critical juncture as we work to build a federal workforce that reflects the full diversity of our country,” she said.

“As the former chief of staff to the director of OPM and the former executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders under the Obama administration, she will bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to OPM that will enable her to hit the ground running on day one,” Chu added.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said Ahuja is a civic-minded leader and an outstanding choice for this important job.

Her exceptional qualifications include more than two decades of nonprofit leadership and public service, including at OPM and the White House, and a track record of solving human capital issues through innovation and collaboration, he noted.

In a statement, American Federation of Government employees said Ahuja brings a wealth of experience in federal personnel matters and her record of advocacy on behalf of women of colour is reason to be optimistic that she will make it a priority to reverse the previous administration’s active undermining of diversity and inclusion efforts across the government.

“Ahuja has the knowledge and experience that OPM needs to guide human resource policy for the federal workforce. And importantly, she is committed to protecting the non-partisan civil service and ensuring that it reflects the diversity of the United States,” said National Treasury Employee Union president Tony Reardon.

“During the Trump administration, the agency was constantly disrupted by outside efforts to break it up and dismantle it, to the detriment of the federal employees who rely on OPM for independence and management of important federal employee programmes.

“We believe this appointment will result in steady, professional leadership at OPM that is committed to protecting its unique role in administering federal retirement programmes and other human resource management priorities,” he said.

In move many expect to signal U.S. reengagement in the world body, the U.S. Senate Tuesday confirmed Baker-native Linda Thomas-Greenfield to the cabinet-level position of Ambassador to the United Nations.

She was confirmed on a 78-21 vote , with one senator not voting. Both U.S. Sen. John N. Kennedy, R-Madisonville, and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, voted in favor of confirming Thomas-Greenfield.

“I’m proud she’s from Louisiana, but I’m more proud of her service to our country,” Cassidy said in a statement after the vote.

The 68-year-old LSU graduate is expected to be sworn in Wednesday by Vice President Kamala Harris. Then, she’s expected to travel to New York City, where the UN headquarters are located, to present her credentials to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday.

Thomas-Greenfield also will assume leadership of the global policy-making U.N. Security Council on Monday.

Almost immediately Thomas-Greenfield will be thrust into dealing with climate change and COVID-19 along with wars in Syria and Afghanistan and several humanitarian crises.

“This confirmation sends a message that the United States is back and that our foreign service is back,” U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., told the Associated Press. Bass chairs a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, and global human rights.

“We as a country and as a world are safer with Linda Thomas-Greenfield serving as the United States ambassador to the United Nations,” Bass added.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have voiced concerns that United States’ world leadership had slipped during President Donald Trump’s tenure because he focused more on U.S. concerns at home. In the breach, China stepped forward, pressuring diplomats to accept its wording on directives and hire its citizens to work in the body.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has claimed that Thomas-Greenfield could be soft on China and pointed to a speech she gave in October 2019 during which she did not scold the communist leadership on its human rights record. During her confirmation hearings, Thomas-Greenfield said she regretted the speech, which she said was mostly aimed at getting more students of color interested in the foreign service.

Thomas-Greenfield, who because of protocol couldn’t comment after the vote until she is sworn in Wednesday, told The Advocate and The Times-Picayune on Saturday how growing up in Louisiana informed her world views and helped her engage in constructive talks with leaders in other countries.

“I am truly excited about the opportunity to serve my country again and I am ready to get to work,” she added.

U.N. Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told Politico that Thomas-Greenfield and UN Secretary General Secretary Guterres had worked together in 2005. Thomas-Greenfield then led the state Department’s refugee and migration division. Guterres was then UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

“He has witnessed her effectiveness and dedication in action,” Dujarric told Politico news magazine.

Having served for 35 years in the Foreign Service, Thomas-Greenfield comes to the job with considerably more experience than most UN ambassadors.

Thomas-Greenfield grew up in segregated Baker, graduating in 1970 from an all-Black high school in Zachery because nearby Baker High School was all White. One of the first African Americans to attend LSU, she was there at the same time as David Duke, who later became a leader in the Ku Klux Klan for a while.

She went to the University of Wisconsin for graduate school and in 1982 was one of first Black women to join the U.S. Foreign Service.

In 1994, while serving in Rwanda during that country’s genocidal civil war, she had to talk her way out being killed by a solider.

President George W. Bush, a Republican, named her ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, moved Thomas-Greenfield to head the State Department’s office for African Affairs.

In 2017, she retired and worked for an international relations think tank.

Thomas-Greenfield’s husband, Lafayette Greenfield, also worked at the State Department before his retirement, as does their daughter Lindsay Jamila Greenfield. Her son, Lafayette Greenfield II, who the family calls “Deuce,” is a partner in the Washington, D.C. branch of the Seattle-based law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.

Tennessee Republicans sent a letter to all public Tennessee colleges and universities Monday, urging presidents and chancellors to take action against student-athletes kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem at their games.

“When they don the jersey of a Tennessee university, they step out of their personal roles and into the role of an ambassador for our state,” the senators wrote . “We expect all those who walk onto the field of play representing our universities to also walk onto the field of play to show respect for our National Anthem.”

East Tennessee State University (ETSU) men’s basketball coach Jason Shay had a statement on deck last week after his players and coaches kneeled during the anthem before their loss to Mercer. His team has also kneeled before games at Alabama, Furman, and Chattanooga.

“It was a decision our team made prior to the season as a call to action against racial inequalities and injustices. … Our intentions by no means involve disrespecting our country’s flag or the servicemen and women that put their lives on the line for our nation,” Shay said in part. He also mentioned that Black History Month is the “perfect time” for this type protest.

However, in their letter, the senators reminded the universities that fans and Americans interpret kneeling as “offensive and disrespectful to the very thing our National Anthem represents,” and encouraged the university leaders to adopt policies to avoid kneeling from happening in the future.

“They’re representing the school and the school represents Tennessee and Tennessee shows preference to our time-honored people and institutions who went before us. We respect our heritage and our history,” state Sen. Janice Bowling said during a joint House and Senate government operations committee meeting on Monday.

Sen. Mark Pody expressed concern that student-athletes would engage in protest while “they’re taking state money, they’re in our state schools, in our state uniforms.”

The decision of ETSU players to kneel has caused shockwaves throughout the state, with the center of the controversy falling on university President Dr. Brian Noland. Noland said he did not believe the students meant to disrespect the flag, veterans, service members, or their families, during the ETSU Board of Trustees meeting Friday but acknowledged “the hurt, the pain, and the emotion that been evidenced across this region,” that came from the players’ actions.

Noland told the Board he had lost friends over the team’s actions and had family members angry at him, and that the university had lost business partners over the controversy as well. He said the athletes carry the “hopes and dreams” of the region when they wear the university uniform, and said, “I know we have a lot of work to do to rebuild faith and I don’t know if it’s possible to rebuild that faith because this is such an emotionally charged issue.”

“You’ve got a little bit of a challenge to rebuild some trust here because I think things were handled very, very poorly,” Board of Trustees member Kelly Wolfe said.

In response to the community backlash across the state against the team’s decision to kneel, graduate students from the ETSU Department of Social Work and a group called The New Generation Freedom Fighters organized a march on Tuesday in support of the basketball team kneeling.

Authority more than empathy is a quality traditionally associated with management .

Yet empathy is one of those underrated attributes that receives minimal attention in most management textbooks but can be a key element in building employee loyalty.

One study concluded that most managers were not “proficient” at showing empathy.

Source: Tirachard Kumtanom / Pexels

I was recently reminded of this point in, of all places, a LinkedIn management discussion from Poland. One of the managers was circulating an article I’d written several years ago involving a DDI study showing that a boss’s empathy was strongly connected to positive employee job performance—but that only “40 percent of frontline leaders” were regarded as “proficient or strong in empathy.” The main point of the Polish management dialogue? With all the many hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, managerial empathy was now especially important.

Sign of weakness?

I was able to translate (through LinkedIn’s handy translation feature) the conversation and its insightful observations. To give a feel for it:

“An empathetic manager—do you remember such people in your career ?” asked Paulina Laczek-Ciecwierz , president of the board at Recruitment International Consulting Group. “Perhaps this person changed your perspective or your career direction? Among top managers, only about 40 percent show the characteristics of an empathetic leader who tries to understand, listen, and carefully answer employees’ questions. Unfortunately, empathy is wrongly seen as a weakness… Let us remember especially in times of crisis that employees are brand ambassadors… Empathy cannot be counted in Excel, but it helps builds the right atmosphere at work.”

Half a world away, I agreed on all fronts. Empathy matters. In hard times more than ever. But show too much empathy as a young manager and you may well be judged as not having “the right stuff” for management.

Positive difference-maker

Sure, an effective manager needs authority. No argument there. Management is no dinner party or walk in the park. Stay in the business long enough and you’ll likely have to make hard, wrenching decisions that affect people’s lives.  But on the other hand, a steady diet of nothing but authority for breakfast, lunch and dinner wears pretty thin too.

Though the value of displaying some level of empathy may just seem like common sense, the reality is that in the aggregate business tends not to attract the same sorts of personalities as does, say, psychotherapy or social work. Or, to put it another way, consistent with the findings of the study noted above, I’d have to say, truth be told, that a reasonable number of managers I worked with over the years showed about as much empathy as a good solid deck chair.

Which is worth keeping in mind in these crazy pandemic days. Of course, it’s not just a pandemic that brings the need for a little empathy to the managerial fore; it could be any number of common business stressors. Companywide layoffs, senior management changes, competitive pressures, etc.—all kinds of dislocations can send shock waves of anxiety rippling through an organization. But the wreckage of COVID-19 is surely a convenient example at this point in time.

So as my new management friends from Poland reminded me: A little empathy goes a long way. Their words were also a nice reminder that social media, for all the undeniable problems it can cause, can connect people in far-flung places in unexpected, helpful ways.