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Manager: City needs to work as a team

John Brown talks about managing employees and serving a divided City Council

By
ARGUS-COURIER STAFF
Published: Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:10 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:10 p.m.

(Editor’s note: The Argus-Courier recently conducted an in-depth interview with City Manager John Brown. This third and final excerpt concerns management issues at City Hall.)

Argus-Courier: One of your chief goals at the time you began serving was to engage in team building, to forge consensus among City Council members on an overall vision and set of goals for the city. How has that effort gone, especially with the new City Council that was seated earlier this year?

John Brown: We did come together as a group in early January of this year and conducted both a team-building and a goal-setting session, which the council spent the better part of a Saturday engaged in. I thought it went very well.

I was surprised to find how many points of commonality the council members have, and how much of the time they agree with each other on the majority of issues. We found that about 80 percent of the time, there really was not a lot of difference of opinion amongst that group, at least as expressed for the purposes of that exercise.

The council came out of that session with goals I consider to be set at the appropriate global-policy level, rather than at the project level. There wasn’t a lot of micro-managing going on in the goal setting. Their goals were broad, community-based kinds of goals.

A lot of them had to do with growth management here in the community — prioritizing development was one, streamlining the development process was another, implementing the Central Petaluma Specific Plan, creating an investment-based redevelopment strategy, creating an overall economic development strategy. So the council was really in the place where I think the council needs to be, coming out of a goal-setting session.

With respect to the team-building part of that, they agreed on a set of ground rules for how they would behave as individuals and as a group, and by and large I’ve seen that set of ground rules adhered to. I think it’s the sort of thing that requires some re-affirmation from time to time, but on the whole I felt like it went pretty well.

AC: Since that time, there’s been a number of 4-3 split votes on key issues, as well as some very prominent philosophical splits, most recently on the matters of shopping center development, the abolishment of the planning department and the proposed abolishment of SPARC.

During a recent budget meeting at which council members were sparring over the Regency shopping center issue, you cautioned them against arguing and stated, “What I really need right now is everybody pulling in the same direction.” Do you think that’s going to happen with the current council?

JB: It would be unrealistic to think that’s going to happen on an every-single-issue basis. The City Council people come from different places philosophically; they do represent their constituents and the constituents don’t all agree with each other.

I think that on the issues that really matter, the council has the ability to come together as a group and pull in the same direction.

The outcome of that particular vote, which was the determination of this coming year’s budget — as difficult as it was for the council to have to make some of the decisions regarding cutbacks and layoffs, and despite the reservations that had been expressed by some of the council members about the way the budget had been built and some of the major policy choices that they’d had to make, at the end of the day, they voted to adopt that budget because they understood that for the greater good of moving the process along, that was what was necessary.

At the time, we had digressed somewhat from what I thought was the real purpose at hand, which was to be discussing budget policy. We had gotten more into a discussion regarding development approvals, and part of what I was getting at was, let’s come back to the issue at hand here — let’s talk about what it takes to get this budget balanced.

I definitely did need them all pulling in the same direction and more generally, that’s where we need to be. I view us as a city team; they and I and my staff. We’re all a unit and we all need to see ourselves that way. The more that we can present a united front and understand what it is we’re doing, the better kinds of decisions we’re going to make.

AC: Do you ever find yourself disagreeing with the direction you’re given by the City Council, and if so, what do you do?

JB: Well, my basic tenets are, if it’s not illegal, immoral or unethical, my job is to serve.

What I bring to the City Council is a recommendation based on both professional opinions and skills of my staff as well as my own experience in that regard. I try to make recommendations to the council about how they should handle a specific issue.

The choice, of course, is theirs. They set the policy; I implement the policy. I would not say that I have disagreed with any of the policies the council has asked me to go out and implement, because I do view myself as a servant here, trying to bring to bear whatever talent I may have in order to forward their goals. They haven’t asked me to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical.

I’m not a shy person and if I felt that the council was moving in the wrong direction ... for example, we talked about the fair lease roughly a year or so ago, and I felt that they were moving in the wrong direction or perhaps they were moving too quickly. As you’re aware, I expressed my concern about that, and I would continue to do that.

AC: You’ve said you wanted to build more teamwork among city departments so they work “in a more coordinated and efficient manner, rather than as individual fiefdoms.” What did you mean by fiefdoms, and have you been able to achieve this goal, especially given the budget crisis?

JB: What I meant by fiefdoms was, these departments appeared to me to have been operating pretty much in voids, very much self-contained and provincial in the way they were working with each other, holding things close to the vest.

I’m not criticizing and I’m not even sure I’m right about this, but as I understand it, my predecessor’s style was more one of communication with a particular department head, and then a different one.

It was more of a sequential style of decision-making, as opposed to the style I prefer to use, which is to bring all the resources together in the same place, hash it out, listen to what people have to say and try to form some sort of conclusion that we’ve all participated in and have bought into, or at least we all understand the reasons why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve chosen to do.

The task there was to get people to stop thinking so much about themselves as a protected group and to start thinking about themselves as a city family. I’ve done some things since I’ve been here, like “all hands” meetings; I began meeting with all of the mid-level managers in meetings of their own, different managers have been invited into the senior-level staff meetings.

I’ve gone out and I’ve met with the entirety of represented employees, the whole AFSCME union at one point, and I’ve done that a couple or three times — I talk about what I’m doing, what I need from them and how we all interrelate.

What I’m trying to do here is create a values system that values cooperation, coordination and communication, and I think that we’ve made some progress in that area. One of the things we did this budget round was to cross all organizational lines; I invited anybody who was interested in participating in “good idea” meetings to come in and talk to us.

I had every level of the organization represented there, not just the representatives of the unions, but regular rank-and-file guys, managers, department heads — the whole gamut — and everybody’s idea was as good as anybody else’s idea, and we used what looked like it was implementable regardless of where it came from.

I think those kinds of things might show people that there’s some value in working together. Part of that exercise had to do with trying to find ideas for consolidation, and in fact we’re doing some of that. Some of that is based on the employees’ own views on what seems to fit or what might work. I’m hopeful that’s an ongoing process.

Given the kind of economic times that we’re dealing with and the uncertainty that comes with “Am I going to be employed tomorrow?”, that is entirely counter to what it is I’m trying to do here. In those kinds of instances, people become more withdrawn; they are more comfortable with those that they see on a day-in, day-out basis, and I feel like I lost some ground in that regard.

As I began talking with the employees unions about concessions, in particular I was very hopeful that we could pick up some momentum and that if one was willing to make some concessions, that the rest would see the value in that and come along with that, and we never quite made that hurdle. And that just underscored how far we really haven’t come when times are tough.

What I failed to mention earlier, when we were talking about the goal-setting session, is that one of the things the council adopted was a set of core values. And those core values are out there, and those are something I don’t know that the organization has had.

I intend to evaluate people’s performance, in part, on how well they express the core values. I intend to hold people accountable when they don’t. And if everybody practices those, we’re going to have more teamwork and more coordination and get exactly where it was I said I wanted to be.

AC: You were hired last year on a 4-3 vote, and there are only two council members left (Harris and Rabbitt) who voted to hire you. Do you feel you have the support of the entire City Council?

JB: I’d like to think that I do. The fact that they bit a very tough budget bullet that I was pointing in their direction suggests that I have the support of the entire council, at least part of the time. I feel like I have a good dialogue with the City Council people. We communicate with each other on an honest level.

I’d like to think that if that vote were taken again today, it might not be quite so narrow a margin for me.

AC: The challenges facing all city managers in California today are extraordinary. Did you ever anticipate it could get this bad? How has the job been on a personal level?

JB: No, I never anticipated it could get this bad. The funny thing about it is, I spent a lot of years managing in a county, and we had some real tough budget years, the mid-’90s in particular, when the first property tax shifts took place. It’s sort of funny now to me that I was trying to balance a $2 million problem in a budget that was about $80 million at that time, and it seemed like a huge hole. I would give anything to have a $2 million problem instead of a $5 million problem. With respect to how that has affected me personally in the last year, I try to take each day as a lesson, and I try to learn something from that. I think that I’ve grown a great deal as a person. One of the things I think I’ve come to understand more than I used to is that I need to exhibit more patience, because things are going to be what things are going to be, and they take their time, and you really can’t force an outcome. It really needs to work its way through. I’m having to come to grips with the fact that I can’t really control everything as much as I would like. Some of that, I guess, is just a function of getting older, but some of it is clearly what’s happened during the course of the last year — so many things being out of my control and just trying to play catch-up; catching up to the problem and hoping that it’s enough. I try to maintain some balance in my life, try to get out and use my free time to my advantage. I like to recreate as much as I can, get outdoors and get some exercise and fresh air. Being where we are here really offers a variety of opportunities, so I feel pretty fortunate. If I were living in more of a bigger city environment, I’d be having to go farther in order to get that relief. I get to walk out my door on a Friday morning and go take a walk or take a hike. I try to do that as much as I can.

AC: What have been your greatest frustrations, and your greatest rewards, in the 15 months you’ve been here?

JB: I would say my greatest frustration is seeing just how little progress I’ve made with respect to getting people to see themselves as a member of a citywide team. That’s been really disappointing to me, that some people haven’t come as far as I’d hoped that they would. I’m not trying to be critical of staff; I understand where they’re coming from, the fears and concerns that they have. I have the same set of concerns myself. But some of the things we’ve taken away from departments, as a means to reduce costs here, were harder given than they should have been. I would have expected people to say, “For the greater good, I give up my bottled water.” They did give up their bottled water, but that shouldn’t have even been an ask, it should have been a “Here, get rid of this.” It doesn’t amount to much, but all those things do add up.

With respect to my greatest rewards, when everything works like it’s supposed to, that’s a real reward. When we put together a staff report and we want the council to do something and it goes through cleanly and they say, “Good work.” The housing element a few weeks ago was a great piece of work, and of course due to the lateness of the hour it may not have gotten as much conversation as it might have otherwise had. But the council recognized it for what it was, everybody got their thanks — getting that thanks has been rewarding, seeing the City Council recognize that staff is making a contribution. Seeing them give us our due when we deserve it — that’s always rewarding and we can certainly use more of that.

There isn’t particularly a single project that I’ve worked on that I would say, “Wow, that’s really the one,” but there are small victories on a day-to-day basis.

(Contact Corey Young at corey.young@arguscourier.com)

VIDEO OF INTERVIEW WITH CITY MANAGER JOHN BROWN

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