Push Back From Administration at the May 17 Council Employee Committee Meeting Pts 1 and 2
Mayor Clark Pushes For Outside Assistance
Part 1
TalentMap, an outside agency conducted the Employee Engagement Survey (EES) consisting of 100 questions, covering 18 dimensions. The final response rate was 66%, that is HUGE!
So the results are in, what happens now?
Administration said they are going to create an anonymous online idea repository for employees so they can have some input as to how make changes to the organization. Administration also wants to hold some focus groups, suggesting that HR would do them.
This is where the meeting got very interesting.
Acting City Manager (ACM) Heggelund “It’s easy to focus in on lower scores and the negative, important to focus on to make sure there is a continued focus on the good things so its not just the lowest ones that will get the majority of our effort, just want to make sure there is a balance.“
Mayor Clark “I think it would be a good idea to have a third party do the focus groups.
(Again, not verbatim. This is NOT the entire exchange, I just want to show the tone of the discussion.)
Admin Rep G “We can deal with it through our existing processes”
Mayor “For some reason that hasn’t been done, why would it work now?”
G ”The intent of the focus groups is to hear the ideas to improve and suggestions for action plans.”
Mayor “That’s the process I’m talking about...if you keep doing the same thing you’ll get the same results, what’s changed?”
Nobody had an answer.
I agree with Mayor Clark.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Nothing’s changed, we definitely need outside help on this one. It appears that administration has lost the trust of the employees as evidenced by the survey results.
Thank you Mayor Clark, hold your ground!
Part 2
Recap – Employee Engagement Survey has a response rate of 66%. Mayor Clark wants outside help as to what happens next, she’s got a fair amount of push back from Admin and our Acting City Manager (ACM). Again, not verbatim and not the entire conversation.
Our ACM pushed back hard, saying “We have a whole tool box of interventions and initiatives we can take creating competent leadership and we use external experts and facilitators and investigators we can call on....we do investigate on a regular basis...leadership understanding and seeing what was going on in the organization.”
Mayor Clark refused to back down, saying “It seems to me if there is a particular culture in a particular department its hard within that division to change that culture without an external influence.”
ACM “But we did the investigation...”
Mayor “I’m talking about how difficult it can be without an external lens to, how to drive the culture change, it’s hard to change culture when you’re in it.”
ACM “It’s critical to have culture to come from the top and permeate down we’ve used (name redacted) for years, unless you set the tone from the top you’re fighting a losing battle.”
Admin Rep G “The survey is like a mirror, the survey and now we have the opportunities to look forward in, the City Manager’s point, we do all kinds of surveys that happen all the time, there’s always, okay where are we at, what do we need to move forward on?”
Councilor Robins “As an organization looking in the mirror, we’re still looking in only 2 dimensions, we need 3 dimensions. It’s the point to look at it from a slightly different picture to make sure its an accurate reflection.”
ACM “We are a very complex organization, we have a lot of these tools and we’re doing a lot of these things...”
I’ve always said when I screw up, I admit it and I try to do better, accepting any help that is offered. I'm very disappointed to see this much resistance an this lack of any responisibilty for how we got to where we’re at.
