It was great seeing so many members at the conference last month! I was honored to be asked to speak at the Career Development Lunch on the subject of seizing opportunities rather than dreading them. Afterward, I very flattered to be asked to share the outline and talking points I used for the presentation. Please let me know if you have any questions about it.
Career Development in the Profession: Seize it: Don’t Dread it
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this session! I’ve attended it for years and have always been engaged by the presenters – it is a high bar to face for comparison’s sake!
Since this is the career development lunch and I haven’t met all of you, let me give you some background: at age nine, I announced to my family at a dinner party that I’d charted my life: the audience was great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and siblings. I informed them I would be a city manager like my dad, and then be governor of California followed by president of the United States. I’m O for 3 as they say in baseball, but that’s okay!
I told Mike Sittig when he hired me that I’d give him five years and then leave to work my way up to city manager somewhere. But, I’m having too much fun working with all of you; working on behalf of the 410 cities and 67 counties.
Did I lose ambition somewhere along the way? Have I failed because I realized being a manager might not be the right choice for me? I like to think my ambitions were modified in part by the places I worked and in part because I was given the opportunities to play to my strengths – and for today’s talk, I’m focusing on how we can seize the opportunity to do just that, while staying within this profession.
I want to cover three points today – around a theme of “seize the day” and don’t dread it. The first point will be on innovating in tough times – and you are already the experts in doing more with less—I just want to make a few points.
Point Two is the increased assaults on public service, and to me that means we have to seize this time in our careers in order to hold on. We need to not dread our public interaction, but use each opportunity. We have to find the best ways of combating the naysayers!
Thirdly, just a few comments on what I see in the profession right now from a 30,000 foot view.
Point 1: Innovate as you navigate – you can do nothing less in today’s competitive climate. Focus on 3 R’s: refine your mission, refresh your tools and team, and rethink your priorities and perspective.
What does that mean? Are you and your team playing to your strengths? There’s no time to waste nor resources to waste; so when you refine your mission, you strip out what isn’t important and help your team to do the same.
Do any of your efforts duplicate some other team’s work and mission? Talk to each other! It is great to partner and to coordinate, but not to duplicate. Communication is essential here – you don’t know if there’s duplication unless you have up/down and left/right communication. Our resources won’t get much better any time soon, and we’re never going back to the way it was in the late 80’s and mid-90’s. Seize this time to partner, to share resources with your neighbors or with public-private partnerships!
Refreshing your tools and team: easy to say and harder to do. I’ve put aside some of my old favorite inspirational books and training methods and am on the hunt for new ways to do it. I learned last year that on average you have seven minutes to get someone’s attention and hold it. Beyond that, they will reach for a cell phone or tablet. Seven minutes. Yikes! It looks to me like we’ve all become ADD, but the reality is we all multi-task and limit our focus. We have to stay current in order to think ahead – and if we’re not doing that, we fall behind exponentially because there is so much competition for our team’s– and the public’s– attention. I asked my team to read Daniel Pink’s “Whole New Mind” a few years ago because it is the right side of the brain we’ve been denying, and we desperately need the creativity! But, it takes more than seven minutes to read the book, so I’ve got to find new and better ways of equipping myself and my team. I don’t have an easy answer to the ‘refresh’ point: I’m on the same search as you, and I will share what I find in my FCCMA column. Also, I recommend using Peter Senge’s “Fifth Discipline” recommendation: practice inquiry. Your team is more engaged and will stay that way if you are asking questions. Ask more; talk less.
Rethink your priorities and perspective: why does Florida have cities and counties? Are they performing what they really need to be doing? I’m challenged by these two questions because we’ve had counties and cities in the U.S. since the 1600s and the lines between them get blurry; citizens don’t know which level does what. I think these are great questions for a time with limited resources. Why do we have 67 counties? Why do we have 410 cities? I am a strong supporter of Home Rule, but are we doing the best by our local governments being structured the way we are? These are big governance questions, but we need to ask them now. There was a blue ribbon panel in the 1980s called the Zwick Commission – appointed by the governor and Legislature; worked on Florida’s future for several years and issued a report filled with recommendations – many never saw the light of day. But, the closing paragraph haunts me: “Florida needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a state for all people with mega services and programs, or a haven of protected environmentally sensitive plants, waters and wildlife. It would be difficult to have both.” What should Florida look like in five, ten and 20 years? We need to talk about this now.
Like refining your mission, we all need to look at duplication and finding the best partners we can; but we also have to step back and realize we may not need to be, or have to be the ‘be-all-end-all’ for service delivery.
I’m also not a huge fan of consolidations as I believe each of these governments has a distinct function. Also, I’m not so much on privatization except when it can be very well managed; but I am talking about selecting the right service the right way. I am a big fan of city and county utilitie When you are doing your strategic planning, do you stop and ask ‘why’ each time you bring up a service? After the ‘why’ do you ask ‘why not and fill in the blank with the alternative?’ That is helpful with priorities.
Point 2: Public service: we find ourselves defending our public service instead of being able to just go about our work. I’m not talking about standing around asking why you aren’t getting a parade, a statue or a raise – I mean the ones who think local government is evil or, maybe worse, just like the federal government! Especially with social media the attacks are factually untrue in most cases and vicious. My advice: teach, then persuade. We often try to persuade first, and without a solid civics foundation, you can’t persuade because they don’t understand.
If we don’t do this, we’ll never grow the next generation! You should know, if you don’t already, that 26 associations across the state representing the professionals within our cities and counties have formed the Florida Local Government Coalition. We’ve selected civics and citizen engagement as our project for this year…so critical to reach Floridians at all ages to help them understand the benefits they get from their cities and counties, especially since so much of what we do is invisible on a day-to-day basis. Some of you already work in your citizen’s academies, youth programs and are guest speakers in classrooms; but I hope ALL OF YOU will get involved locally when the Coalition’s projects are kicked off this summer.
Before I leave the subject of public service attacks, let me also make a point about negoholics and the energy they suck: We all know the people who suck energy out of the room. I know some of you would rather have root canal work done than deal with these folks, and so would I. You have to give yourself permission to set boundaries with these folks – and in public service we don’t often do that because it isn’t a servant mindset-but in this case, I believe an exception can be made. Set a timer, have an appointment waiting or learn to walk away; but before you leave them, get in a positive comment so that YOU leave the conversation with a higher note than it began on. That has been my boundary of choice lately; and I feel a little better, but not always great, when I stick to this rule.
Point 3: What I see in the profession from where I sit: Depending upon where you live, you’ve started growing again…or you will soon. I’m always amazed at the statistician’s numbers because they don’t match up to what we see in SOGANOFLA – south Georgia and north Florida…and, remember: this growth won’t be the wealthier pre-boomer retiree. It is more international, less fiscally endowed and likely to be a bit younger, which can mean more needs. The boomers we hoped would come here are still working because they lost too much of their pensions and because some of them have opted for the Ozarks and the Carolinas. So, we welcome the retirees who head here, but for the younger folks moving here to work, just remember most of the jobs are in the service industry with little to no benefits and at fairly low pay.
I worry for the infrastructure, especially water, wastewater and storm water, which are still way behind in some areas of Florida. I worry for Florida’s split personality of resort and leave it that way versus six-lane the roads. Of course, as expensive as concrete and asphalt have become, larger roads might not happen. Maybe we’ll go back to coquina shell-based roads!
Local government will lag 18 to 24 months behind national and statewide recovery. Even with extra sales tax dollars the state earned this year with its first hints of economic recovery, I don’t think we can say that any of our revenue sources are secure, really, or growing – so we are still smart to plan for doing more with less. Changes to the communications services tax will happen, and I don’t believe the national sales tax reforms will help us because the Governor has pledged that any adoption by our Legislature will have to come with other tax cuts – and the state won’t cut itself, in my humble opinion.
For cities and counties: I wish I could say the employment picture is getting better, but at least I’m seeing fewer furloughs. The Legislature’s leadership doesn’t like the severance and accumulated leave time pay-outs, either, so watch your contracts carefully. Every one of those headlines stating “manager leaves with $100,000 plus” are going into the files, and we have a Senate president who wants to take all public sector severance to ZERO. We are going to have to get creative with both cashing out earned leave and on requiring some leave to be used. It cannot be an alternative to a savings account in this day and age of blogs. Transparency in government is a good thing, but this is one of the areas that beats good government to death: the public only sees the dollar figure and not the explanation behind it.
What your elected officials tell me in training classes (no names will be mentioned): you think you can over-communicate with them, but you cannot. These officials win, don’t know much, have fears and insecurities and need YOU for information – talk to them. Workshop with them. Meet one-on-one with them – communicate. They want to be asked what they think; ask them. They want to tell you their expectations of you and the team – so ask them! While you are doing that, let them gently know your expectations of them (like no surprises; which they always agree should be said up front when we discuss it at training).
So, how can we seize these opportunities and not dread them? I’ve played with my own meaning of SIEZE:
S= Strategize
I= Inform before you persuade
E= Energize yourself and help your team to do the same
Z= Zeal. Don’t leave home without it
E=Engage with your colleagues; YOU are the brain trust for Florida’s local governments!
Thank you for asking me to speak; it is a “first” for me within FCCMA, and I am honored.