There is a special time of the year when the early mornings and late afternoons become oddly familiar to us. A cool breeze that accompanies a rising sun or the subtle tones of the early evening as the stars begin to appear: It is indeed a sight and setting that in an instant can cause us to ask if we are beginning or ending our summer. It may be late August, but it feels like early June.
Interestingly, in public service, there are also seasons. Those to which we prepare for, immerse ourselves into, or wind down from. To each industry there are those most demanding, often frenzied times when projects or programming are at their highest peak and offer the opportunity for the highest returns or successes and strongest definitions for our annual performance.
While few industries outside of competitive sports & athletics have ‘off seasons’, we know there are brief yet equally important time frames in which organizations and those who lead them must make candid assessments and evaluations of a just-completed cycle, and, establish a clear and attainable set of goals for the upcoming performance period.
Leadership is of course a skill that facilitates group and individual talents and effort to a future state, vision, or idea. Leaders, too, must assert themselves to new levels and forms of engagement and purposeful direction for their team members. But from where does that next vision come from, and from where does the leader find the energy that will be needed to inform, inspire, and involve each person within the group so that they can quickly understand their role, their new objectives and their purpose to achieve the new goal?
First, public agencies have the advantage of the broadest of markets: the entire community is theirs to serve. While that same advantage can also become a challenge when seeking to meet the demands of a diverse and nuanced set of constituencies that vary widely from one community to another. And the fact remains that a public agency—be it a public policy group (city council, school board, etc.), administration (city managers), or department (public works, police, fire)—typically has all of its peers immediately accessible within the city/county/district/region organizational structure to leverage multiple resources to meet a service need or expectation.
Public services, while necessarily compartmentalized to best align strategies & resources to service needs, are also in many instances unnecessarily and artificially limited in the alignment and composition of service units to departments. For example, a Parks and Recreation Department traditionally functions fairly effectively as a stand-alone department in a city or country structure, but would have little if any continuity if placed under the direction of the Fire Chief and Fire Department. Likewise, an Information Technology unit/service area may suddenly find itself as having outgrown its place among a city or county’s Administration or Management Services Section, and require a new and fully dedicated department to oversee and support the agency’s portfolio of technologies.
The overarching challenge to this of course is, “When do I as a leader in this organization determine that?”
In many communities, a tourist season is fairly clear and concise and planning processes can be initiated and vetted to align with a time frame to allow services, departments and programming to be reconstructed and implemented in advance of a new season. In a school district, particularly in a traditional academic-year schedule, the summer months offer a reliable period to prepare for and develop action plans to serve the upcoming school year. While more difficult in a year-round/track system school, there are intersessions can provide administrations and departments to develop new methods in time for the resumption of classes and campus activities.
As public agency leaders, the demand to provide accurate forecasting, visioning and strategic planning processes that will bring important and valuable contributions from among the department directors is imperative. As leaders, the ability to share a post-heroic culture in which the members of the organization who provide direction towards realizing the vision and goals of the community is indeed essential to a community’s progress.
The contemporary and learning chief executive who seeks to understand prevailing expectations in many forms will be most successful, and in turn, serve a community that is most successful in expressing its quality of life, business and recreational assets.
