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Parks & Rec Business
| Team—Together Employees and Managers A working script for empowering employees By Don Bessler The Setup As a child of the 1960s, student of the ‘70s and management product of the ‘80s, I found myself on the leading edge of a management-style shift away from the Authoritative or Benevolent Dictator philosophy and towards the Employee Empowerment philosophy, sometimes referred to as “Power to the People.” This new philosophy was anchored in the belief that shared decision-making and collaboration were desirable processes that led to better outcomes. Of course, being on the leading edge meant that I was on the frontlines of the transition, and, by definition, transitions are messy. As was to be expected, many of my early managerial contemporaries were “Old School” and believed management was about “command and control, paying your dues, getting yours and outlasting the system.” I saw how these “Old School” people managed through their positions’ authority and, rarely, at least in my experience, looked for any meaningful input into the way things could be. The term” Chain of Command” meant a lot, and weak links in the chain were likely to break off or be cast off. My dad, Lt. Col. Felix Bessler, was a very accomplished and highly decorated helicopter pilot who served on the Flight Staff of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as well as doing two tours of combat duty in Vietnam so I understood there was a value in this style of management. I understood there were situations, like the military, where “Chain of Command” was a highly productive way to run an organization, but in our world, I believe a team approach is more effective. The Plot Over the years I have had both successes and failures in trying to achieve a state of participative empowerment with our staff; always well intentioned, not always well thought out! I would like to share one example of a success that I feel merits professional attention and might serve as a model for organizational change; it did for us. When I started working in parks and recreation in Longmont, Colorado, I went about interviewing all of our full-time staff, at the time about 50 people. I had several motivations: One, I wanted to be able to say hello by name and with the familiar recognition and respect that all people want. Two, I wanted to better understand how the department ran, at least according to the people doing the work. Three, I wanted to make my own first impressions and not rely too heavily on other insiders and outsiders with their own agendas. Finally, I wanted to know what the staff would do if the members were in charge. The effort took about a month and went pretty well; some people opened up, some did not, and some wanted to “stick it to the Man!” After hearing this I asked one staffer, “Just who is the Man?” He replied, “Well, Don, I thought it was you!” The two most common themes I heard in the interviews from the labor trades folks were that they were still upset about how they had lost overtime in the big winter storm of 1987; never mind that it was now 1993 and a couple of city councils and a new city manager later. The second issue and the one that I wanted to sink my teeth into was our organizational structure. At that time, a parks labor trades person had no real career ladder because the structure was too flat, either a Parks Worker 1 (PW1) or a Parks Worker 2 (PW2). You were a PW1 if you took care of a group of neighborhood parks, and you were a PW2 if you had a community park. Unfortunately, for most of the parks staff, we only had three community parks at the time, so most of them were PW1s and rightfully felt dead-ended. While I know all things happen for a reason, I couldn’t see the logic in it either. Action, Roll Camera I took this situation as a golden opportunity to make change, but I wanted to make sure that it would be meaningful and sustainable. I resisted my youthful urge to save the day or be “The Duke” (a John Wayne reference) as my boss Phil called it, and instead went about the business of soliciting support from our management group. My strategy was to change this from a me-thing to a we-thing. With the aid of the management group, we created “TEAM, Together Employees and Managers.” Most organizations have some variation of this group, typically a cross-divisional and multi-layered membership set in place to do good deeds. Often, we leaders give these groups mundane tasks or exercise such command and control that any long-term benefit is marginal. We wanted this to be a different kind of team so we suggested the TEAM take on the organizational problem identified by the Parks group, but clearly related to Forestry and Golf Services as well. The TEAM membership included all service areas including Recreation and Aquatics. This is an important point because the activities of TEAM for about the first year focused mainly on the labor trades issue in Parks and had relatively little to do with the Rec heads. Fortunately, they saw the importance of their contribution and hung in there with us. The process of getting TEAM going and focused was laboring. Fortunately, we found agreement around some important things: we needed to create a career ladder, which had to be measurable and meaningful; it needed to be rigorous but not unattainable; and it needed to be relative to what we did or what we aspired to do, beyond keeping the parks “clean and green.” For instance, we wanted to recruit more women to the labor trades, so we created an entry-level position that allowed candidates with little experience to have a reasonable chance to attain employment in a competitive recruitment environment. We wanted to create a situation where we were sharing the responsibility for promotion between the supervisors and the labor trades staff. Whoa there! What? Peer review for promotion? Yes, we actually relinquished the responsibility and authority to promote employees to the TEAM committee. This single facet of the program is, I’m guessing, fairly unique in local government and gave credibility to the notion that the crews had their destiny in their hands. No more complaints about dead-ends or favoritism with this system. We also wanted to create a system that had pride! We wanted to look at our labor trades folks the same way you look at a master plumber or electrician, and allow the staff to excel to a master level. We call that level a Senior Grounds Maintenance Tech, not a foreman or lead workers, but highly skilled and knowledgeable crafts people. Ultimately, we developed a four-level system that allowed promotion based on the following criteria: 1: Time in grade 2: Consistent on-target or higher performance 3: Safe work history 4: Specialized education and training 5: Peer review for promotion The current version of the Grounds Maintenance Tech Series has three positions: a GMT I, GMT II and a Senior GMT. The GMT III was consolidated with the GMT II during a citywide reclassification about five years after the program started. In that reclassification, the outside consultant reviewed the Tech Series and commented how unique, but defensible, this system was. The Tech series now covers the Parks, Forestry, Golf and Open Space and Ranger work groups. Our current goal is to include the recently acquired facilities work groups as well. Roll Credits The responsibility for promoting through the Tech Series is a joint venture between the supervisor and the employee. Together, they develop a training plan that will direct the employee to a craft or skill set that we need within the service area and one to which the employee aspires. To date, we have promoted 26 people a total of 34 times. The average pay increase when promoting has been about nine percent, a far cry from the two to three percent raises most government employees have. So, what I am proposing is that empowering your employees is really a means to an end. That end, I am sure, is pretty much the same for all of us: to provide the best possible customer service given the limitations of our resources. I believe that relinquishing authority along with responsibility and accountability to the people closest to the action can give us the best opportunity to serve our customers. I have sometimes said, “Take a chance on some very important things; they call them long shots, but long shots pay off big when they hit!” The efforts of our staff in creating TEAM and the Maintenance Tech Series is a viable example of how we administrators can put some important decisions into the hands of the workers and need not fear the outcome. As well, I credit our City Manager, Human Resources Department and other department executive directors for supporting this atmosphere of effective collaboration. Don Bessler is the Director of Longmont Parks, Open Space and Public Facilities. If you are interested in learning more about his TEAM system, please e-mail him at don.bessler@ci.longmont.co.us. |
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