The KUPMC Blog

Comments Delivered By Lieutenant Tracy McCullough, Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department
On January 20, 2012

Hello and Good Afternoon,
I would like to personally take this time to welcome you all to the 2012 KU Emerging Leaders Academy. We would like to thank our family and friends for their continued support and for their ability to bring out the best in us. We would like to thank our Supervisors for investing in us and for recognizing that we are Emerging Leaders. Noel, I would like to especially thank you for being a great instructor and for being an inspirational and motivational leader. You welcomed our ideas and our opinions. We were able to build a strong relationship with others because we all realize how important networking and communication can be.

A few weeks prior to the start of the Emerging Leaders Academy, my grandson was born. He was only two pounds and two ounces. I can’t express to you how many times one of my classmates or Noel asked me about his welfare. I immediately knew that everybody had a genuine concern for me.

We talked about our professional goals. Education is very critical to our success. Take the time to invest in your career. Seek out training opportunities. Display good work ethics and be willing to take the next step up the career ladder. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

We also talked about our personal goals. I don’t believe that I have ever told anybody, with the exception of this class, that one day I would like to have a monkey as a pet. For the most part, my classmates were very receptive of this idea; well, with the exception of John and Carol.

During this class session, we took the strengths finder test. The test was able to determine what our five strengths are. My strengths are self-assurance, maximizer, learner, activator, and arranger. I use these five strengths every day at my workplace. Focus on your strengths and sharpen up on your skills. Use your strengths to motivate and influence others to be successful. A good leader can inspire, motivate, and lead. Be the multiplier in your organization.

I especially enjoyed the Mentor Shadowing Assignment. We were given the opportunity to shadow someone whom we admire. I shadowed Mr. Jeffery Fewell, the Administrator for the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department. I was able to have a one-on-one conversation with him. I asked him some questions about his career, his success, and about his genuine concern for his subordinates. I remember asking him, “Mr. Fewell, how did you build the morale of your troops?” He answered, “I show them that I am human and I show them that I care.” He advised me that determination is essential. Set the example and be selfless.

For all of you Newly Emerging Leaders, continue to strive for excellence and bring out the best in others.

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” – Sam Walton

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” – Conrad Hilton, Hilton Hotels

Comments Delivered By Craig Weinaug, Douglas County Administrator
On November 18, 2011

As we approach another election cycle, I feel a mixture of excitement and dread as our attention is drawn again toward discussion of public issues. It certainly seems to me that at the state and national levels, some candidates base their entire campaigns on a baseless claim. They tell voters that government is responsible for virtually everything bad going on in the world today. Candidates for elected offices at every level compete to be perceived as the candidate who would eliminate the biggest chunks of this thing we call government.

Even in TV sitcoms and in almost all popular culture, any character part of a mayor, state legislator, or any other public job is almost always portrayed as incompetent, lazy, and/or just plain comically stupid.

Government is rarely presented in public debates or in popular culture as a positive force.

I once had a conversation with a young lady who was working toward her M.P.A. degree. She had interviewed the governor of the state where she went to undergraduate school. When he found out that she was pursuing a career in public service, he could not understand why a topflight student would seek a career in the public sector as her first choice when she could make so much more money in the private sector.

I am here to make an important point that seems to have been lost in public discourse: Government is the means that we have to collectively pay for and provide those services that we collectively need.

Government is not a boogeyman. Government is roads and bridges. Government is schools and libraries. Government is the military keeping us safe around the world, and government is public servants keeping our water and air safe at home.

The vast majority of government workers are public servants who have chosen a career in public service because they want to make better life for all of us.

Government includes our teachers who spend every day of their professional lives giving our children the opportunity to be all that they can be, regardless of the level of success of their parents.

It includes occupational rehab specialists that work with our neighbors with disabilities so they can live with dignity and be productive citizens regardless of the disabilities that they may have.

It includes law enforcement officers and fire fighters that are prepared on a moment’s notice to risk their lives so the rest of us can be safe.

It includes road engineers that devote an entire career in the continuing effort to make our roads as safe as possible and minimize the loss of life.

It includes public health officials who work to protect us all from the outbreak of diseases that would regularly threaten our communities, if it were not for their perseverance.

It includes the social workers at SRS who work to ensure that there is a safety net for the children of our citizens who have lost their jobs.

It includes the psychologists at our community mental health centers who work to meet the critical needs of our neighbors with mental health disorders. In many cases, the services of our mental health centers make the difference between a productive life and a life spent in and out of jail or worse.

It includes building inspectors who try to assure that our businesses and homes are safe and secure for us to live and work in. Government includes the emergency communication specialists that can quickly direct virtually any type of emergency personnel to meet a citizen’s need, and when needed, they can even give instructions to someone on the scene to clear the air path of a suffocating citizen.

It includes the garbage collector who picks up your trash and safely disposes of it in a sanitary landfill, and the public works employee that makes sure that when you flush your toilet that your human waste flows away from your house safely and does not flow back into our lakes and rivers until that sewage is clean and harmless.

It includes court officials who spend their entire careers balancing our constitutional safeguards against the need to incarcerate those who are a threat to our safety.

Government includes economic development specialists who work hard to make sure that our state retains and attracts jobs for all of us, including our children.

It includes the army enlistee who risks her life on the other side of the globe to keep us safe.

Government includes every member of this graduating class.

We are engaged in a great debate in this country and in this state about how much government we can “afford,” and it is an important debate. There are no easy answers.

There are always going to be people who want to distort the debate by characterizing what we do as somehow inferior or unnecessary or inefficient. Don’t let those charges go unanswered. Do your job well, do it with pride, and stand up for yourself and your colleagues.

We strive to find the balance between the services that we provide as public servants, the investments our communities need to make for the future, and the taxes it takes to support that vision without passing the bill on to the next generation.

And at every level of government, in every department or division or agency there are dedicated and determined public employees who are working every day to help our elected officials to strike the best and most appropriate balance.

Government is what we do. It is the work that you have dedicated your careers to and by earning this degree I know you are committed to doing it well.

Public service is a high calling. It is essential to who we are as Kansans and as Americans. Let’s perform that service with pride.

The following is reposted from the blog The Inspired Teacher. She offers some insights about the challenges of listening and speaking–even when we mean well.

I went to a conference recently. The first speaker was from the state department of education and I was ready to listen; in fact, I did listen, but I could not follow her remarks. Why? I simply could not understand what she was saying.

In her first sentence, she used two unfamiliar acronyms. While I paused to decode the first one, I missed several words which followed. The second acronym was completely new to me, so when she said it, I could not understand it all. Thus, in spite of a wide vocabulary, I could not grasp the meaning of her sentence.

The same problem continued throughout her remarks. I spent more time wondering if I had decoded the acronyms than I did absorbing her advice and information. As you can imagine, I was annoyed and frustrated. But suddenly I saw it as a learning experience: I was feeling the same sensations that students feel when they don’t understand the vocabulary or references that I use in the classroom.

In a related incident, I was the speaker at a staff meeting. After I presented an involved list of steps for meeting the goals in the school improvement plan, one of the teachers said, “I would really appreciate a list, so I could keep track of all these things.”

“She already told us we would get one!” said one of his colleagues impatiently, at the very moment that I held up the checklists I was ready to hand out. I paused to talk about his knowledge gap.

“You know, Justin’s comment brings up a common issue,” I said. “He has been here, and he looked pretty attentive, but he still missed, or didn’t remember, that detail. Everyone misses things. It’s human to miss things. Whenever our attention wanders for just a second, we lose a detail or an idea. It’s important to remember that when we talk to the young people in our classes. They will have the same gaps and not because of bad intentions.”

In both cases it was as if the listener was looking at a scene through a window with stickers all over it. He/she missed meaning because parts of the whole picture were obscured by blockages, whether of understanding or attention.

Add these two issues together and you get what I call the Swiss Cheese Syndrome.

Listeners are highly likely to have holes—big and small—in their comprehension of our words, just as Swiss cheese is normally full of holes. We are wise to expect gaps and do what we can to fix them, rather than let the situation make us angry or discouraged.

What can we do?

First, be aware. We have to stop assuming that if we know a given word ourselves, then everyone knows it. We can plan in advance to include simple words in explanations and descriptions. Generally, the more syllables the word has, the more likely for it to be unknown to someone. In addition, content vocabulary and scientific words must be explicitly taught, and then reviewed and used–up to a dozen times for full comprehension by all students.

Second, check constantly. Ask for a student to restate a point. Be sure to call on those average learners, not just those whose hands are usually waving. It is too easy to assume that if one person in the class knows something, then the whole class knows it. Direct your learners to summarize for an “elbow partner.”
Have each student write a summary as a “ticket out the door.” The methods are numerous once we recognize the importance of using them.

Most of all, remember that when you feel like moaning “but I TOLD them that,” it is pretty likely that some of the students are thinking, “I never heard her say THAT.” Just take a deep breath, know that it is the Swiss Cheese Syndrome in action, and try again.

The Green Tape Doctor

The Green Tape Doctor is Leisha DeHart-Davis, an associate professor in the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration. She conducts research on effective organizational rules, which she refers to as “green tape.” Feel free to email her with your questions on creating effective rules for public sector organizations (lddavis@ku.edu).

Is It Time To Write a Rule?

I once interviewed a public manager who told me, “I decide to write a rule when I’m becoming stressed from people coming into my office with the same issue or problem.”

The manager’s comment suggests that rules can solve workplace problems. But when to write a rule is sometimes unclear: on the one hand, managers need administrative capacity to empower action. On the other hand, they do not want excessive bureaucracy in their workplaces.

How do you know when a written rule is needed? Here are three questions to ask:

** What is the worst that will happen if you do not write a rule? Answering this question is a good way to figure out whether a workplace issue is important enough to write a rule. If the worst-case scenario is likely and imposes unacceptable costs on organizational integrity or operational effectiveness, then a written rule may be in order.

** Are you clear on rule objectives? Written rules are well-suited to clear objectives. Even general objectives – reduced personal Internet usage or increased employee professionalism – greatly simplify rule-writing and help focus the rule on what you are trying to accomplish.

** What is causing the issue? Written rules are like the practice of medicine: prescribing the remedy requires diagnosing the ailment. Take time to investigate the causes of a workplace issue before formulating the rule. If the issue pertains to depleted sick leave, talk to employees to find out what’s going on. Written rules are more effective when designed with root causes in mind.

If the worst-case scenario is unacceptable and if you have clear rule objectives and a good grasp on root causes, then your workplace problem is a good candidate for a written rule.

Is there a workplace issue that you solved using a written rule?  What was it?

When the Green Tape Doctor returns to our blog, look for advice on creating logical rules.

In an interview in the New York Times, Peggy Klaus, author of The Hard Truth About Soft Skills, was asked “What exactly are soft skills and why should we be worried about them?”

She replied that “the hard skills are the technical expertise you need to get the job done. The soft skills are really everything else — competencies that go from self-awareness to one’s attitude to managing one’s career to handling critics, not taking things personally, taking risks, getting along with people and many, many more.”

Basically, soft skills are those that enable you to put your technical skills productively to work.

Can you resolve a conflict with a co-worker about a work plan or about cubicle distractions? Can you sell the value of your approach to your boss and teammates? Can you write an email that gets the results you need? Can you challenge someone’s idea in a productive rather than destructive way?

Then celebrate and thank your soft skills. And as you mentally make note of everyone you work with whose lack of soft skills makes them unpleasant–or even unbearable–to work with, the pivotal role of soft skills in the workplace becomes very visible. Without the soft skills to support the technical abilities of a staff, projects simply don’t get very far. Even the US Department of Labor sees soft skills as “the competitive edge.”

This is a hugely important lesson that most of us have learned the hard way as we struggle to work with those who make everyone around them miserable. But having learned this lesson, make it work for you: make sure your hiring processes are designed to measure soft skills as well as hard skills.

There are some terrific web resources to help you do this. The Soft Skills blog offers questions divided by skill area to ask about. And if you’ve ever heard of or used behavioral-based interviewing, the focus is on soft skills. Here’s one good explanation and resource. And here’s another.

Meanwhile, don’t pass up any opportunities to improve your own soft skills. They’ll be key to moving into the next job you desire, and in the interim your co-workers will thank you for it.

One of the foundations of our Emerging Leaders Academy is the use of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment. The intent is to offer participants some insights into their areas of strong natural talent that can inform their process of setting professional goals.

Why? Because of the benefits that flow to both the organization and the individual when someone is working from their strengths. The person themselves feels energized and engaged and is able to make significant contributions to their projects and teams. When people are working from their strengths they often willingly give 100% because it’s intrinsically satisfying to do so.

In this age of shrinking budgets and payrolls, those organizations where most people are working at the top of their abilities instead of slogging through their work at 50% will perform better and will be more competitive in keeping their best staff.

But people can land in what should be their dream job according to their strengths and still underperform despite all motivation they may have to do their best. What makes the difference?

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown offers some important insights about this in their 2010 book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. As the title suggests, their extensive research and interviews with executives in companies around the world led them to identify the characteristics of managers they call Multipliers. These managers do more that just accomplish more with less. They get more by using more of people’s intelligence and capability and make them excited to contribute at 100%–or even more when they bring out abilities people didn’t know they had.

The authors contrast Multipliers with Diminshers, those leaders who stifle others largely due to their beliefs about the limitations of the people who work for them. Here’s how they describe the mindsets of these two types of leaders:

The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and scarcity; intelligence is thus a scarce commodity. Further, they see intelligence as static, that it doesn’t change over time or circumstance. As the authors note, their logic seems to be “people who don’t get it now never will; therefore, I’ll need to keep doing the thinking for everyone” (19). With this approach, they can easily create environments where people are, paradoxically, both overworked and underutilized.

Multipliers, however, have a rich view of the intelligence of the people around them and see it as continually developing. They assume that people are smart and can figure things out, and that they are smart in unique ways so can make important contributions and will get even smarter in the process.

Clearly, these two mindsets lead to very different ways of interacting with and directing others.

Wiseman and McKeown’s interviews with people who’ve worked for both types of managers in the same organization has led them to assert that Multipliers can do more than twice as much with the same level of resources because they bring out the best efforts and ideas in those who work for them. Importantly, the authors note that Multipliers do this not with some sort of touchy-feely approach but by driving their people to do their best–and creating circumstances that allow them to do so.

Among the findings of their research that surprised them, Wiseman and McKeown point to the fact that most Diminishers are what they call “Accidental Diminishers” who are not aware of the restrictive impact they have on others. Most of them “had grown up praised for their personal intelligence and had moved up in management ranks on account of personal–and often intellectual–merit. When they became “the boss,” they assumed it was their job to be the smartest and to manage a set of “subordinates”" (25).

That is, these Diminishers imitate what they have observed others do. It simply never occurs to them that more could be achieved by leveraging the strengths and intellects of those on their teams–because they don’t believe there’s much there to leverage.

The book is particularly compelling because of the way it dovetails not only with Gallup’s extensive research into working from areas of strength but also with the insights from work on emotional intelligence and the need for self-knowledge and self-management before one can build effective relationships with others.

Leaders must have the self-knowledge to recognize what effects their actions have on those around them if they are to be bring out the best in people. Multipliers suggests that they must also believe in what is present in others, waiting to be brought out.

“No service without proper ID!”

“No Outside Food or Drink.”

“DO NOT DISPOSE HYGIENE PRODUCTS IN THE TOILET.”

“Absolutely NO PARKING in this area.”

All government offices are filled with people whose work is, ultimately, about serving the public. But some offices serve the public more directly by providing direct service to customers who physically walk in the door.

Unfortunately, not all of the signs posted to communicate with those customers are written with the customer in mind. Instead, many are phrased in ways that highlight frustrations of staff.

While this is true of many businesses, too–just think of all the “NO” signs on the entry doors to some establishments–in those cases the customer is free to go to a competitor. In the case of government offices, the customer probably has no choice but to use that office and that service. When we greet people with signs that essentially say “here’s what we expect that you’ll do wrong and we find it very annoying so don’t,” there’s a huge missed opportunity.

Instead, we could write our signs in a reader-centered way to create a more positive impression of government services and the staff that provide them. Invite your customers to positively participate in what your agency is trying to accomplish.

“Please have your ID available so that we can assist you today. Acceptable ID includes…”

“Please help us maintain the plumbing by not disposing of hygiene products in the toilet.”

“Your patronage of our concession stand helps pay for pool maintenance.”

“We’re sorry you have to wait in line. If you use this time to make sure you have these 3 forms prepared, it’ll help us serve you more quickly.”

“Public parking is available behind the building.”

Once you’ve assessed the messages you’re sending to the public, you might also review the signs posted for staff and see whether some new wording might improve the tone of the workplace.

Have you ever been struck by a sudden bolt of insight that rearranging what’s stored where in the kitchen cupboards would better serve the way you actually use the kitchen? So you get out the step stool and started to pull things down, which leads to the realization that the cupboards need to be cleaned.

There are two main options at this point: put stuff back where it was since this is a larger job than you thought, or embrace the process and forge ahead because you anticipate the improved outcome being worth the hassle.

Even for those of us who opt to forge ahead, we’ll still find ourselves having to adjust to things being in new places. No matter how much better the new system, one that we came up with on our own, will function, we still struggle to unlearn old habits.

So if change is this hard when it’s our own idea, is it any wonder that most of us resist change in our organizations when the change wasn’t of our making and where our input may not have been considered?

Keep this in mind when you’re working to implement a change in a process or structure. No matter how beneficial the new arrangement may be, you’re still asking folks to give up something their comfortable with. Even if the current process is something they complain about, your colleagues at least know how to work the process. This gives them an experience of competence.

Change means giving up some of that competence so it brings on insecurity. To help the people around you move past the resistance they may have to a change, acknowledge what they’re giving up and make sure they’ll have the tools and resources they’ll need to become competent in the new system.

And be patient. Even if the mixer is now in the cupboard directly in front of where you’re standing, you’re still likely to go try to retrieve if from it’s old, inconvenient location multiple times before the benefits of the new arrangement work their way into your muscle memory.

What helps you embrace change?

With the current transition in state government, there’s quite a bit of upheaval in some public agencies and a good bit of reorganization of structure and/or priorities and focus going on in others. Meanwhile, local governments and nonprofits are standing by to see what the year will bring for them, both in terms of state policy and tax revenues.

It’s a rather hectic time.

But it’s most certainly a moment of opportunity for news ways of addressing old challenges to emerge. We need new ideas, new designs and new ways of serving the people who are at the center of what we do. We need to get off the assembly line and once again become artisans.

Seth Godin put it this way yesterday:

“Perhaps we’re entering a new age of craftsmanship, one where we can see craft in the way a new business is devised, a sale is made or a website is coded. A craftsperson might be particularly talented and connected in the way she deals with clients, or be able to meet deadlines with alacrity.

“Just because it’s not in a crafts fair doesn’t mean it didn’t demand craft.”

What shifts for you if you think of your work as craft?

With the recent reading recommendations of the Emerging Leaders Academy experienced public servants panel, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m listening to it this time, actually, on cd during my drive time and it seems particularly meaningful to hear the guidance in Covey’s own voice.

I’ve just gotten to habit 3, put first things first, where he discusses the value of planning your time so that you’re spending much of your energy in “quadrant 2″ (see graphic below), on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent.

They are the things that are most likely to get sidelined when we operate in a more reactive mode, organizing our time around oiling the squeakiest wheels rather than around our principles.

This reminded me of the terrific opening of a post on the Be Awesome Online blog from last week. Catherine Caine writes:

“Do you know, dearest, why to-do lists, vision boards and affirmation notes on your mirror work?

“It’s because of attention. We direct our attention to the things in our field of vision. If we don’t give ourselves conscious reminders then we default to whatever’s around: our inbox, the thousand-fold distractions of social media, the furniture… nothing meaningful, nothing long-term, nothing great.

I’ve deliberately added more reminders to myself as the study has become my work-centre. I have Charlie Gilkey‘s famous line Do Epic Sh** on a sign on the study door. I have artwork I bought because it reminds me of how I want to rock the world. And I’ll be daring the Wrath of the Real Estate Agent to put up some work on the wall behind my monitor. All of these small changes have helped, a lot.”

What Catherine Caine and Stephen Covey both want to remind us of is that we can all be pretty willing to be distracted from the Important Stuff when it can be hard and even scary to dive into it. But by scheduling our time around it, putting reminders in our field of vision, blocking out the “urgent” distractions (that generally aren’t quite so urgent), we can dip our toes into working on the Important Stuff and start to feel some of the satisfaction that comes from doing what matters.

For me, this has meant actually turning off my email for a couple hours at a time over the last week in order to get some writing done on my dissertation. It’s just too easy to attend to the urgent otherwise. And you know what the best part is? It’s working.

What do you do to make sure you’re spending some time on the important-but-not-urgent?