The KUPMC Blog

This special report from American City & County highlights an exciting project we’ve been working on with the City of Olathe so we’re reposting here.

Olathe, Kan., builds a collaborative culture to improve service delivery
By Jeff Johnston

Nowhere is the image of a silo more familiar than in America’s heartland, where the tall structures that contain harvested grain function as essential hubs in the spokes of agricultural commerce. But, silos take on negative connotations when they describe government departments that function independently with limited interaction or coordination with other organizations.

As resources become more scarce and service demands increase, many cities and counties are breaking down their organizational silos to foster cooperation and collaboration among their internal departments. By coordinating the use of limited funds, equipment and staff, cities and counties are finding new efficiencies and maintaining or improving their service levels.

Olathe, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, recently embarked on a journey to eliminate the organizational silos between its departments and build a culture of collaboration instead. Knowing that they could not just tell departments to work together, City Manager Michael Wilkes and Assistant City Manager Susan Sherman sought to develop department heads’ collaborative leadership skills and recognize those skills in their performance reviews. The city worked with the University of Kansas Public Management Center and the School of Public Affairs and Administration to develop a supervisory training program for its managers that, among other things, included practical exercises designed to teach supervisors the skills they need to be effective collaborators. Researchers at the university are measuring the effectiveness of the training program and tracking the city’s transition to its new culture.

A ‘Shift in Thinking’
For the last decade, Olathe has been on a quest to deliver exceptional public service and has been measuring its progress toward that goal with annual citizen surveys. The surveys, administered by locally based ETC Institute, gauge residents’ satisfaction with city services, including emergency services, parks, water and wastewater, street and building maintenance, and communication. As all departments have been working toward improving their survey results, however, each became inwardly focused on their individual operations. “We were doing so much as a rapidly growing city, a lot of people were just focused on what they did and not what other departments were doing,” Sherman says.

Although collaboration was essential for certain tasks, such as emergency planning and response, elsewhere it was not pursued. “Everybody is so task-oriented, and collaboration really takes time,” Wilkes says. “We get so focused on the task and accomplishing the task and checking the stuff off the list that we don’t look for those opportunities to collaborate with others.”

So, when Wilkes and Sherman set out to create a new supervisory training program for city managers, they wanted to incorporate collaborative leadership skills training into the program. “We’re not going to get [all] the people that we’d like to have; we’re not going to have all the resources that we need for all of the stuff that we need; so, we’re going to have to figure out different ways to deal with and address our problems, and collaboration and innovation are the ways we’re going to get there,” Wilkes says.

The city began working with the University of Kansas Public Management Center to develop the program that would start with the city’s executive leadership team and, over one year, bring together managers and assistant managers in groups representing each department for three days of training. The main goals of the program were to link the supervisors’ responsibilities to the city’s stated vision, values and mission, and to teach collaborative leadership skills.

“When we talk about collaborative leadership, what we’re really talking about is that we have to learn to align very different goals at times; we have to coordinate multiple partners; we have to learn to share information effectively; we have to learn to work through conflict so that we can achieve the best possible solution to these pressing public problems that are not isolated to any one sector,” says Heather Getha-Taylor, assistant professor in the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration. “We’ve realized that producing public value is best achieved when we overcome the fragmented and siloed approaches – when we can take an integrated approach and solve problems using expertise, resources and information that spans boundaries.”

The training program also aimed to change the mindset of department supervisors who were focused on being direct service providers and building up the capacity of their departments internally. “It represents a need for a shift in thinking,” says Jonathan Morris, instructor and program manager for the University of Kansas Public Management Center. “If local government has traditionally been the direct service provider, what we hope to address in this training is to get the leaders and supervisors to rethink their role and see themselves instead as the convener of multiple providers, as the collaborator of public and private entities or intergovernmental collaboration. So, as you begin to rethink that role, it requires new skill sets.”

A small group setting and specific exercises created an environment that encouraged collaboration. After the three-day training, participants met with their small groups independently to discuss how they were putting their new skills into practice and making progress toward a collaborative project with another department. Also, collaboration was added to the performance goals of managers, who needed to show how they were engaging other departments, Wilkes says.

Collaboration Pays Off
To measure the results of the training program, University of Kansas researchers are conducting a long-term survey of city supervisors. Participants not only report their immediate reactions to the training, they must report on changes in their behavior and results over time.

A final report is due in October, but preliminary survey results show that the training has been successful in showing managers the value of collaboration. “Those who participated in the training perceive collaboration as key to getting their jobs done, and they agree that collaboration is worth the extra effort involved,” Getha-Taylor says. “We see a strong positive relationship between participation in the training and self-awareness, listening and communication skills. Those are the key collaboration skills that we need to be developing.”

In practice, collaborative efforts paid off for Olathe last winter when it experienced some of the heaviest snowfall and winter storms in recent history. In preparing its snow response plan last year, the streets department for the first time worked with the fire and police departments to develop a snow-clearing strategy. Previously, the streets department created its plan independently and had divided its crews to focus on different types of roads.

By working with the emergency departments to prioritize route clearing and by strategically directing plows during and after storms, the city improved its performance even during one of its worst winters. “We were good at snowplowing before, but we were outstanding in the winter of 2010-2011,” Wilkes says. “We had more snow than we usually have in Kansas City, and we got better results from our customers than ever before. And, I think it was because we worked together in a way that we had never worked together before.”

Although collaborative efforts might take more time and the outcomes might not be clear at the beginning, Wilkes and Sherman have seen that the risks are worth the effort. To break down the silos, they say local government leaders need to brush up on a few skills and then arm themselves with a little courage to take the first steps. “The first thing to do is to jump in and try something. Take a little risk and try something you haven’t done before, and hope it is successful,” Sherman says. “But if it isn’t, learn from it and try again, and try again.”

Jeff Johnston is an Atlanta-based freelance writer.

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.

The nationally ranked Department of Public Administration at the University of Kansas has joined the Alliance for Innovation, an international network of progressive governments and partners committed to transforming local government by accelerating the development and dissemination of innovative practices. Click here to read more about this new partnership.

KU Public Administration was well-represented by both faculty and doctoral students at the June 2-4 Public Management Research Association conference held at the Maxwell School in Syracuse. Check out the topics they’re delving into:

• Student Erin Borry presented her paper, “Ethical Climate in the Public Sector: Its Influence on Red Tape and Rule Bending.”

• Student Cullen C. Merritt presented a poster at the Doctoral Poster Session on his work entitled “Predicting Executive Turnover in Public Organizations.”

• Dr. Leisha Dehart-Davis presented her paper, “Rule Formalization and Rule Effectiveness: Further Explorations into the Construct Validity of Red Tape.”

• Dr. Heather Getha-Taylor presenter on her current work with Ricardo S. Morse, University of North Carolina, “Leadership Development for Local Government Executives: Balancing Existing Commitments and Emerging Needs.”

• Dr. Holly Goerdel presented her paper, “Democratic Rollback and Contracting for War: Managing the Intent of Accountability with Technical versus Adaptive Solutions.”

• Dr. Barbara Romzek presented on her current work Kelly LeRoux, University of Illinois-Chicago and Joycelyn Johnson, American University, “Informal Accountability Dynamics within Service Delivery Networks: A Theory and a Test.”

• Dr. Chris Silvia presented on his current work with Michael McGuire and Robert Agranoff of Indiana University, “Putting the “Public” Back into Collaborative Public Management.”

To learn more about what all of our faculty are doing, visit http://www.kupa.ku.edu/faculty/.

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?

Last year Professor Leisha Dehart Davis was interviewed by KU’s University Relations team about her research on bureaucracy and making good organizational rules. She calls this line of her research “green tape theory.” Once you hear it, it makes perfect sense–rather than struggling to define and overcome red tape, why don’t we define what works to make public sector organizations function well?

As we have watched and listened to the news from Japan for the last few weeks, our hearts go out to the people and we marvel at their perseverance in the face of such tremendous challenges. We also are clearly reminded of our professional obligations to do our part in preparing for such events in our backyards.

A recent article published by Public Administration faculty member Chris Silvia is directly relevant to this need. Since natural and man-made disasters rarely occur within a single jurisdiction and the ability of any one organization to effectively respond by itself is frequently exceeded, a collaborative approach to emergency management can best address the resulting needs.

But organizations cannot wait until the moment of crisis to establish these collaborative relationships. Effective collaboration requires that the collaborative partners have the time and opportunity to:

• see that their ability to achieve their individual goals and mission can be enhanced through teamwork,
• build a shared understanding of the resources that each partner brings to the table,
• establish a shared vision for their work together,
• engender the support of stakeholders, and
• build trusting relationships.

To read more about this research, see Chris Silvia. 2011. Collaborative Governance Concepts for Successful Network Leadership. State and Local Government Review 43 (1): 66-71.

Is there a more often longed-for yet less often achieved workplace goal than bringing change to one’s organization?

The desire to shift the way things are in some large or small way likely reflects an innate creativity that’s part of the human condition. We long to leave our mark, and we can usually imagine some change in the conditions around us that would allow us to more effectively do so.

And yet, we simultaneously resist – consciously or not – many of the efforts those around us make to bring about organizational changes. What’s up with that?

Fortunately, many able thinkers have taken on this question. Here are a few resources for those interested in pondering this conundrum and putting their own change propositions in the best position for success.

First, a talk: on Wednesday this week (3/2), Dr. Marlesa Roney will present a talk on Effective Organizational Change at the KU Edwards Campus in Overland Park. Click here for details.

Second, a fabulous post from Heidi Grant Halvorson’s “Succeed” blog on the tendency to believe that whatever is older is better and the way this interferes with embracing the new.

Third, from Psychology Today: a leadership researcher and consultant’s look at the psychology behind habits and what managers need to know about brain research to help them work effectively with staff to overcome old habits and embrace the new.

And finally, a new book from ASTD called The Change Book, which invites us to “change the way you think about change.” Looks promising.

What tips can you share about successful organizational change projects you’ve observed or implemented?