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unstable era, values provide identity, continuity, and stability.[4] And for the management
professional in situations of political and technological flux that question the traditional role
expectations, values are an anchor for legitimacy and credibility.[5]

Competencies

In summary, the contemporary challenges of local government management can be described as
follows: He or she must lead facilitatively and collaboratively in order to help build and maintain
a sense of community and respect for public life, as well as to modernize an organization of
divergent perspectives and conflicting values. This is a mouthful, but we think it captures in one
sentence the essence of what local government professionals do. What competencies are needed
in order to respond effectively to these challenges?

Donald Wolfe has invested fruitful effort in thinking and writing about the nature of professional
competence in the applied behavioral sciences.[6] Wolfe has drawn these conclusions about
competence:

 Competence always has a context. Producing a desired result always involves a
relationship between factors in the person and in the situation. What a person may be able
to accomplish in one situation may be more difficult, if not impossible, in another. Thus,
aspiring learners—whether managers or their staff—need models that can lead to
understanding in a wide variety of environments. They need exposure and practice in a
variety of situations.

 Competence is rooted in a knowledge base and in analytical skills. The able professional
thinks hard about what he or she is doing and must be able to move back and forth
between concrete realities and the abstract theories that give meaning to the situation. On
this point, Donald Schon has observed that effective professionals are not experts because
they diagnose, apply knowledge, and evaluate. They are experts because they can engage
the complexity, uncertainty, and uniqueness of a situation and probe and ask questions
until a decision-making framework emerges.

 Competence and values are inevitably interdependent. Wolfe argues that we value what
we can understand and that our values are modified by changes in the way we construe
the world. Most likely, what is meant here is that untested values are more rhetorical than
behavioral guides and that a person’s values are indeed shaped by his or her experiences,
even as they provide guidance to ways of thinking and acting. There also is an
instrumental relationship between competence and a value system that guides the use of
that competence. ―We value the competence because it enables the creation of valued
outcomes.‖ And it might be added that valued outcomes are those that give an
individual’s life meaning.

 Competence involves the whole person. ―To treat knowledge and skills as tools to be
picked up and added on would be to miss the creative adaptation and incorporation of
such skills into a unified personal style. The development of a professional identity
involves the integration of many different factors (knowledge, skills, values, personal
strengths, and propensities) into an organic whole that gives the professional’s
competence fluidity and creativity.‖