Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
November 28, 2007
Nobody likes to go to meetings. It is not uncommon to hear people complain about how meetings are keeping them from their work. Meetings may be the result of inefficient work environments in some cases, but I would submit that this complaint may stem from an overly narrow perspective of what they define as “work.”
In team meetings, I often ask employees how many of them work on tasks that require nobody else’s input from their department or other departments. Very few raise their hands. If that is the case, then how do we coordinate our tasks with others so work gets done efficiently? Meetings! Over the phone, in the conference room, in the hallway, in someone’s office, over email. It’s all about communication, and the better we are at it the better our organization will be.
Like it or not, meetings are part of work whether it is for information sharing, giving directions, deliberating, arguing, or brainstorming. I mention this because I spent the day recently with my department heads for our annual retreat. We were off site for the entire day in a meeting room to talk about the future of O’Fallon.
Did the meeting keep them away from their daily operational duties? Undoubtedly. Was the retreat essential to their positions as department heads? Absolutely. We talked about our effectiveness at working together as a team and in coordinating activities. We talked about how our long term visions of the community relate to action steps over the next year. We talked about positioning O’Fallon to be the premier city in the placeCitySt. Louis metropolitan area.
These are abstract and far ranging issues, but the fact of the matter is that if we don’t think about these things, no one else will. The City Council is the governing body, of course, and provides overall policy direction for the City but they serve part-time and are not involved in the day-to-day activities that make the City run. The Management Team takes the vision of the City Council and translates it into action steps to make that vision a reality.
Retreats are ideal for this type of work. It is important to remove yourself from the daily grind and get a new perspective. That’s why we devoted an entire day off site. Fresh perspective brings fresh ideas. The casual atmosphere also encourages creative thinking. In these retreats, we do not want to think about today or next week, we want to think about next year, five years from now, and twenty years from now.
While it may have been just another meeting, I am certain that a lot of work was done at the meeting and the organization will be better because of it.
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