What problem facing the United Nations is as challenging as Cyprus, as intricate as the Middle East, and as erratic and unpredictable as El Niсo? According to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the answer is human resources management, a make-or-break issue that needs to be “at the heart of our efforts to make the United Nations as good as it can be.”

Annan’s inauguration in 1997 heralded an era of UN reform. While UN leadership had long recognized the organization’s shortcomings, real solutions had been sorely lacking and, within a year of his inauguration, Annan broke the mold by replacing rhetoric with action. At that time, reformers set the horizon for real outcomes at three to five years. Five years later, however, action has led to ambiguous results and the need to reconsider the path forward. While the leaner, more efficient organization UN reformers have struggled to build is a laudable goal, it is only a fraction of the whole. Structural changes guided the reform effort’s first sure footsteps, but they have since faltered, and it is evident that the United Nations is in need of a more holistic approach to healing. The United Nations will find itself on much more solid footing in the future should it learn some recent lessons from the private sector and capitalize on its most crucial asset: its people.

Swimming Against the Tide

Reform has been far from easy in the difficult UN environment. Conservatives are quick to point out that private sector reform strategies are not easily employed at the United Nations, where reform must reckon with the organization’s unique combination of historical, political, and cultural pressures. The United Nations is a far cry from a publicly traded corporation, where the Chief Executive Officer exercises direct control over personnel and budgetary policies. The UN Secretary-General, on the other hand, is subject to the whims of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) and the Fifth Committee, which can tie up budgetary initiatives in a politically charged environment dominated by North-South tensions. While the United Nations is widely touted for its highly meritocratic selection process, hiring and placement decisions are severely restricted by geographic quotas, and the Secretary-General is similarly hog-tied when it comes to firing staff. An extensive pension system makes widespread or even targeted lay-offs a prohibitively expensive proposition. Instead, cutbacks have taken the form of regressive hiring, as they did in the mid-1990s, when 1,000 posts were permanently eliminated after they had been left vacant for several years. As a result, reformers repeatedly knock their heads against redundant or even useless subsidiary bodies preserved as reservoirs for pensioned underperformers.

Such brick walls also linger as ghosts from the past. The Cold War, for instance, bequeathed a heritage of redundancy and dissonance to the United Nations, which, in its effort to maintain global inclusiveness, was faced with resolving the competing agendas of the world’s superpowers. This schizophrenia resulted in the duplication of purpose of the Security Council and the Special Political Committee. The largely Soviet-controlled Security Council bore the official mandate for handling security issues, but the Special Political Committee, under the sway of the United States, exercised greater effective influence in such matters. Not only did this situation leave a legacy of redundancy that has taken over a decade of careful work to dispel, it also bred an organizational culture that discourages horizontal communication, a problem that has not proven as easily curable.

Efforts to pull aside the foggy curtain of miscommunication and to eliminate many of the redundancies have repeatedly run afoul of the intensely political nature of the organization, where back-scratching among member states is rampant. One UN official bemoaned a late 1990s effort to identify and weed through subsidiary bodies within the organization. More than 90 individual bodies were identified, and though no one had even heard of many of them, none were eliminated. One participant inevitably pointed out that some delegations were not represented and that participants should caucus with their absent peers before reaching a decision. Upon reconvening the committee, one or more representatives would assert that while they themselves did not know the function of the body, another delegation they had spoken with swore to its vital importance.

It is not surprising, therefore, that UN insiders are skeptical of reform based on private sector practices. ACABQ’s caution that “outside practices are not necessarily applicable to the United Nations,” is a common argument among UN conservatives. Even reform-minded Annan notes that “practices of human resources that had worked for others would have to be changed to work for the United Nations.” Many UN staffers felt that when the US consulting firm McKinsey & Company was hired, it failed to appreciate the intricacies of the situation. According to one staffer, McKinsey showed a tendency to believe that a given set of policies and structural realignments would cure a problem that ran deep within the organization. Plagued by an inability to appreciate “how hard the United Nations has to swim to keep its head above water,” McKinsey and many of its peers ultimately proved ineffective.

The private sector’s inability to add appreciable value to UN reform, however, is largely due to misdirected efforts, not to an intrinsic lack of applicability. Thus far, reform has largely focused on structural changes, a situation that may stem from a similar tendency in the private sector, where problems of system and structure, easily identifiable and quantifiable, are often seen as the low-hanging fruit for change. UN reformers’ efforts in this regard have been commendable and extensive, if not wholly successful. With only marginal improvements in efficiency and productivity, many fear that the possibilities for further gains are modest at best.

The UN Diet

Under political pressure to slim down, the United Nations had already begun to shrink its staff and budget before Annan took office. Zero nominal growth over much of the last decade means that real resources at the United Nations have been decreasing year by year. Since Annan’s inauguration, significant efforts have also been made to resolve coordination and redundancy problems across the organization. Several departments have been consolidated, and country teams have been encouraged to share common office space in “UN houses.” Despite its cutbacks, the United Nations seems incapable of shaking its reputation as a “bloated” organization, and many complain that consolidation has not gone nearly far enough. Others, meanwhile, claim that early rounds of cuts hampered later efforts by ignoring differentiated needs and imposing uniform retraction requirements across the organization.