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Notes from a Reflective
Practitioner of Innovation
Part 2 of 4
Front Line
Very quickly, the executive staff at DJJ learned that the staff was a
great untapped resource. When asked to tell their story, staff frequently
explained that they were once "a kid in trouble," that some adult had
helped them, and that they wanted to be that adult for another generation
of kids in trouble. DJJ's line staff took their jobs because they cared
about kids. My task and that of my executive staff was to reconfigure the
organization so it could support, instead of block, the staff's work. In
attempting to do that, we learned the following lessons:
Support Your Staff. In any service agency, whether in the public or
private sector, staff are likely to treat the clients or customers as they
believe themselves to be treated. Staff who are treated harshly will, in
all likelihood, turn around and impose that harshness on the people over
whom they have some power--the clients or customers. Staff who believe
that their basic needs are not being met are less likely to work hard to
meet the needs of children in their care. We realized that, if we wanted
staff to nurture the children in DJJ's care, we could not mandate it; the
only way we were going to get there was to make the staff feel nurtured
themselves. We looked for opportunities to acknowledge the difficulty of
the work that staff was asked to do and sought to catch staff doing things
right.
A sad illustration of the depth of our staff's neediness came early in my
tenure at the holiday season. A famous local celebrity had a custom of
giving children in institutions a goody bag with a scarf or mittens, an
apple, and a box of raisins. When DJJ's staff was asked by the celebrity's
organization how many children were in detention, they doubled the number
so as to include themselves.
Managers whose goal is to change the way clients are dealt with have to
work through staff on the line. The underappreciated tool here is the
reverberations that flow almost inevitably from the way staff themselves
are treated. Staff magnify and pass on what they receive from the people
who manage them. This truism seems too often missed in public life as
managers are quick to blame and punish staff and then wonder at the abuse
staff devolve onto clients.
A caveat belongs here. My "pass-along theory"--if managers support and
nurture staff, staff will be more likely to support and nurture kids--is
premised on the notion that it is hard to give what you do not get, that
staff will not be as likely to give nurturing if they do not get
nurturing.
8 This seems true in my
experience. Top management, however, may have to solve this problem for
themselves. Leadership means, among other things, figuring out how to give
to managers and staff the support and attention they need. Leadership
means doing this even if leaders do not receive that same support and
attention from their own superiors, be that the office of an elected
official, such as the mayor, or an appointed executive, such as a cabinet
secretary.
An illustration might help. DJJ was often ignored as an agency. In New
York City terms, it was small. It dealt with issues that, in the absence
of scandal, did not command attention. And it had no major outside
constituency. Mayor Koch was known for a focus on himself ("How am I
doing?"), and his memoirs boast of the times he reduced others to tears.
9
Even after DJJ won the Innovations award and received other significant
national recognition, we received little attention or support from the
mayor. We had to invent our own sources of support, Help here can come
from peers in other agencies, from colleagues in similar roles, or from
any other group the leader relies on. I had an understanding husband; a
close group of friends, some of them in city government; and a set of
colleagues both practitioner and academic I had developed through my
Kennedy School connections (the executive programs and the Innovations
network). I also had ongoing relationships with outside consultants who
helped me keep perspective and served as safe sounding boards. Each of the
executive staff coped differently, but we each relied on others for some
sense of support,
Our general counsel, for example, who played a complex and important role
at DJJ, created her own group of general counsels of small city agencies.
They met monthly at each others' offices over a brown bag lunch and talked
about the role dilemmas they shared.
Whether such support from the top exists, has to be supplemented or
finessed, or the equivalent invented wholecloth, leaders need to keep in
mind the critical importance of finding ways to attend to staff. This is
particularly true in the public sector, where other incentives are less
available.
Chunk the Work. The expectations of public sector service agencies are
enormous and potentially overwhelming. For example, telling staff that
their responsibility is to eliminate juvenile delinquency, even for a
limited group of clients, is to invite chaos or collapse. The task is just
too overwhelming. Thus the manager has the responsibility to organize the
work so that staff have clear, reachable milestones--specific objectives
that can be identified and achieved.
In the Aftercare program, which provided services on a voluntary basis to
children released home from detention, the needs of the families served
were both deep and wide. So we narrowed the task and defined a clear goal:
returning children to school. Work that helped achieve that aim was on
target. Work that went beyond those boundaries was not encouraged. So, if
a client was not going to school because he or she was kept home to
babysit a younger sibling, getting day care for the younger child was
within the scope of appropriate work. Without that specific connection,
however, getting siblings into day care would have been nice but not
useful. With clear objectives set by management, staff can more easily
manage and organize the overwhelming demands from their clients.
By selecting a concrete and available goal and "chunking" the work into
doable pieces, agency leaders make success both clearer and nearer. And
they create opportunities for staff to get recognized for their work and
accomplishments.
Celebrate Small Wins. Karl E. Weick of Cornell developed the notion of
celebrating small wins in an article called "Small Wins: Redesigning the
Scale of Social Problems."
10
Arguing that the "massive scale on which social problems are conceived"
deters innovation, he suggested that reformulating broad social issues as
"mere problems" allows for a series of "small wins" that can be built into
a pattern of effective action.
Weick's article, which a consultant brought to our attention approximately
a year into our effort, inspired the ideas of chunking the work and
focusing constant attention on the need to recognize and celebrate small
wins. To us, this meant everything from celebrating the day more children
were enrolled in Aftercare than in detention (a long-held dream) to taking
the fiscal staff out to dessert when the bills were paid on time for three
months in a row. We had a party (cookies in the shape of buses) when the
new vans to transport children to court were delivered (staff had worked
on the specs for those vans). We had another when we opened a separate
intake facility as a first step in bringing case management to our network
of group homes.
In general, we looked constantly to find people doing something right and
then created opportunities to acknowledge their work.
Create Appropriate Forums. In the public sector, satisfactory work is not
generally a solitary experience. We learned early on that everyone needs a
group at work: Everyone needs not only to feel part of some larger effort
but also to have the opportunity to meet and talk regularly with others
doing related work. We learned that creating groups that work in the
organization's interest is critically important. Left on their own, staff
will invent their own informal groups, which are much less likely to be
working in the organization's interest. Some staff in one unit, for
example, were unhappy with the decision to establish a group home for
intake in the nonsecure detention program. They began to attract others to
their informal group of disgruntled employees, and the unhappiness began
to spread. When we included some of the original people who had opposed
the decision in the work group to establish plans for the intake house,
their complaints got aired in a setting where they could be directly
addressed, and the energy previously directed to complaining shifted into
more productive discussions of how to resolve real differences.
Leaders need to inventory what groups, both formal and informal, exist:
standing meetings, task forces, special ad hoc committees. Much can be
learned from seeing what is in place and where the gaps are.
Over time, and at least annually, we checked to see that, given the
organization's current needs and state of development, the existing forums
made sense. And we did not hesitate to end or redesign those that were no
longer useful or to create new ones.
For example, we had an ongoing and useful weekly executive staff meeting
that consisted of my five direct reports and myself. In addition, I led a
monthly senior-management staff meeting with three levels of staff and
about fifteen people; this meeting was deadly boring and generally
ineffective. Little new thinking emerged, and few concrete issues got
raised or resolved. When I removed myself from the senior management staff
meeting and turned leadership over to the remaining members of the
executive staff, the meeting improved greatly and much more was
accomplished. With this new arrangement, the staff who worked two levels
down no longer had the urge or opportunity to bypass their boss and try
out their ideas directly on me. Moreover, as the authority of the
executive staff was reinforced, their stature grew.
Another example of rethinking our organizational structure was the
creation of a wider management staff meeting. We wanted all those who had
any supervisory role--even those who, because of civil service regulations
or budget and personnel policies, did not have managerial titles--to think
of themselves as managers and to identify with the agency as a whole. Our
goal was to encourage the staff's identification with the agency's mission
and goals and to maximize the potential of those already on board.
Put Energy into Hiring. More discretion is available in the public sector
for hiring and firing than executives use to advantage. Leaders need to
view hiring--and selective firing--more strategically. These aspects of
leadership are significant and too often overlooked.
We used the need to fill major vacancies as an opportunity to rethink
where we were going. We were careful not to assume we needed to replace
whoever had left. Instead, we thought hard about where we were
organizationally and where we were going, so the person we hired would fit
the future not the past.
11 We were
lucky enough to have an executive search firm, then Isaacson Ford-Webb and
Miller, now Isaacson and Miller, working on our behalf.
12
The early search for a new director of Spofford, the secure detention
facility, offered the opportunity to learn what was for us a new approach
to hiring.
13 We learned to scope
the job, talking to internal and external stakeholders to develop a sense
of the short- and long-term tasks of the job and then the qualities
necessary to accomplish all this. Then we learned to think creatively
about the kinds of places in which such people might be found. All this
forced us to focus tightly on what we hoped to accomplish and how we
intended to work together.
In interviewing candidates, we learned to solicit what could be called
"work biographies." We learned to look backward--to peoples'
experience--to find those who had risked, failed, learned, and gone on. We
found that how people have dealt with challenges in their past was the
best indicator of how they would handle the inevitable challenges and the
inevitable failures at DJJ. Particularly when looking for managers, we
looked for people with what executive search consultant John Isaacson
calls hunger, speed, and weight:
- Hunger can be understood as drive, that internal connection between
a person's self esteem and accomplishment at work, that self-regulated
push to excel, to succeed, to prevail.
- Speed is the ability to juggle many things at once, to master large
quantities of new material quickly, and to pick out the important from
the trivial or irrelevant.
- Weight is the ability to handle authority fairly, with maturity, and
to tell the truth up (to the boss), down (to subordinates), and sideways
(to peers).
We took our hiring interviews seriously, often having someone go through
multiple interviews. Just as we initially had carefully analyzed or scoped
the job, we paid attention to reference checks, a task too often done so
perfunctorily as to be meaningless. Learning something from reference
checks involves going beyond the usual, two-minute conversation; it means
developing a clear sense of what you think you know about the candidate
and testing that out on the person with whom you are talking. It also
means saying what you think you do not know and asking for specific
examples that will help fill in the parts about which you are unclear.
Good reference checking also involves going beyond a list and speaking to
people "up, down, and sideways"--people to whom the candidate reported,
people he or she managed, and peers. We made mistakes in hiring, as does
everyone, but we were much less often surprised by what unraveled.
Moreover, this process helped us find and attract people of great talent.
The Brookings Institution Press ©1997.
