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Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
April 24, 2007
I spent four days recently at the University of Virginia at a conference on building high performance organizations. It was an outstanding conference, and for those concerned about spending taxpayer dollars for out of town training, I can honestly say that the training was intense, valuable, and of very high quality. (I was not at Virginia Tech, but as I mentioned in last week’s blog, I met several officials from Blacksburg at the conference.)
While there are numerous books and programs on improving organizational performance, improving the public sector is significantly different. For one thing, our customers (the citizens) are also the owners of the organization. In addition, we often are providing services that we cannot choose to eliminate if it is not cost effective (police, fire, streets). As a result, how do you improve public sector agencies that are constrained by resources and politics?
The answer is to turn problems into opportunities. High performance is defined as the simultaneous delivery of high product and service quality, outstanding customer value, and sound financial performance.
There are two primary functional elements in any organization: people and production. Production is the actual work, the “What” we are doing. People are the method of getting the work down, the “How” we are doing it. To be high performing, organizations must focus on both elements and integrate them in long range improvement plans and day to day operations.
Production involves developing a clear Vision and Mission from the Mayor and City Council so the organization knows where it is going. The management team then develops long range plans and operational plans designed to accomplish the Vision and Mission of the organization. Production is held accountable through measuring service performance and citizen surveys on customer/owner satisfaction. (Citizen surveys are being mailed this week to a random sample of O’Fallon households, so stay tuned for a future blog about that.)
On the People side, we are concerned about how the work is done. The Management Team has developed a Values Statement that includes honesty, integrity, accountability, professionalism, community, and people. A high performance organization promotes a values-based work culture to accomplish the Vision and Mission of the organization. Accountability of the People function is measured through our personnel systems and surveys.
This is a very condensed summary of the high performance model. Sessions of the conference went into detail on the various components of the Vision and Values elements, and I am still processing how we can work them into the O’Fallon network. Over and over, presenters emphasized this is not a “program” or a new “management gimmick” but is solely a way of doing business. We want to be high performing because we want better customer service and service delivery, we want employees to reach their fullest potential, and we want to make O’Fallon a better community. That doesn’t sound like a gimmick to me.
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