Working Under the Senior Executive Service: A Survival Guide
Sixteen Rules for Surviving the People Above You
A friend of mine spent years working in the federal government, reporting to members of its executive corps. He agreed to share the lessons of that experience on the condition of anonymity, and I have edited his account for clarity, adding brief explanations of government terminology for readers outside the public sector.
The Senior Executive Service (SES) is the corps of career executives who hold the top leadership positions in most federal agencies as the layer between political appointees and the rest of the career workforce. Within many agencies, SES positions are grouped into tiers, with Tier 1 the most junior executive rank and Tier 3 the most senior.
His overall assessment is not a flattering one. In his experience, genuinely good executives exist but are the exception. Most junior executives are preoccupied with reaching the next tier; the most senior are preoccupied with protecting their standing; and those in the middle are doing both at once. The result is a working environment shaped by ambition and self-preservation.
The sixteen rules below are how he learned to operate inside it.
1. Speak less, observe more. In meetings and hallway conversations alike, volunteer little and absorb everything. Information flows toward people who are not competing to talk.
2. Listen beyond the words. Pay attention to tone, stress, and hesitation. An executive's delivery often reveals more about their priorities and pressures than the content of what they say.
3. Provide structure and certainty.Executives frequently issue vague direction but expect precise results. Translate every assignment into concrete steps, sequences, and deadlines, and confirm them in writing, so that ambiguity never becomes your problem.
4. Do not tell them they are wrong.However diplomatically it is framed, contradiction is rarely rewarded. In his words: agreement is survival. Rule 5 covers the situations where the stakes are too high to stay silent.
5. Know the regulations better than they do. When an executive is about to cross a line, like a procurement rule, a personnel policy, find an indirect way to bring the relevant regulation to their attention rather than confronting them directly. Then send a follow-up email summarizing the discussion. The written record protects you if questions arise later.
6. Connect everything to strategic goals. Federal agencies operate on formal strategic plans, and executives are evaluated against them. Frame every proposal, request, and report in terms of those goals.
7. Lead with the conclusion. Government writing follows a convention called BLUF, for "bottom line up front": state your main point in the first sentence and keep the whole document as brief as possible. Assume nothing past the first paragraph will be read.
8. Manage expectations about timelines. His rule of thumb was to assume everything takes thirty days. If a task would take him two days, he quoted ten. Once leadership learns your true speed, it becomes the new baseline, and the only reward for efficiency is a heavier workload.
9. Document everything. Keep dated notes of meetings, decisions, and instructions, even notes no one else will ever read, especially when a rule is bent or broken. In government, a paper trail is not paranoia; it is basic professional protection.
10. Understand your place in their world. To many executives, staff are interchangeable resources: if one breaks, another can be requisitioned. Behaving as though you are indispensable invites disappointment at best. Do excellent work, but keep your expectations of loyalty realistic.
11. Anticipate their needs. Learn what your leadership will ask for before they ask, and have it ready. Preparation is the most reliable way to build a reputation for competence.
12. Present data simply and visually. Analysis matters, but presentation matters more. One clear chart accomplishes more than ten pages of thorough prose. If leadership has to work to understand your material, it has already failed.
13. Maintain professional skepticism upward. Do not assume your executive's interests align with your own. Think through the tactical, operational, and strategic implications of everything you are asked to do.
14. Maintain it sideways and downward, too. Colleagues and subordinates each answer to their own executive, and when interests conflict, expect them to protect their own chain of command rather than you.
15. Protect sensitive information with a simple test. When he needed to share something delicate, he told each person a slightly different version of it, changing one small detail per listener. If a particular version later circulated back to him, he knew exactly who had repeated it. Intelligence agencies call this a canary trap.
16. Stay alert. His own phrasing of the final rule was blunter, but the substance is this: the environment rewards the vigilant and exploits the naive. Do not let familiarity or flattery lull you into forgetting rules one through fifteen.