Getting Your City Council and Staff Leaders on the Same Strategic Page

Working in any government organization where there is a combination of elected (or appointed) leaders and career/staff leaders can be difficult. In the Federal context there can be the tension between political appointees who serve the current administration (and voters’ most recent whim) and career employee-leaders who tend to have the long view of an agency’s mission.

The same can be true in city government where an elected board or city council and city staff must work together to help a municipality fulfill its mission. On the one hand, each council or board member may serve a separate constituency with distinct wants and needs. On the other hand, city staff are (hopefully) engaged in execution of a long-term city strategy that may have been put in place before the current council members were in office and have a time frame that will outlast their terms.

So, you could have multiple council members with distinct goals and then city staff with a whole other set of goals or objectives.  How does leadership make sense of this and get everybody aligned?

Try not to perpetuate an ‘us vs. them’ mentality

I have heard some people suggest that the facilitator (whether it is an insider or an outside consultant) meet with each group separately to see what their strategic priorities are and then bring the groups together to reach consensus.  However, this reinforces the “us vs. them” mentality by perpetuating the belief that each group has their own separate, and incompatible, strategic focus areas.

Instead, I find it more effective to interview each council member and staff leader on an individual basis.  This immediately breaks up the two groups of “council” and “staff leadership.”  Rather, by treating every person as a distinct individual, it enables the facilitator to find commonalities across the entire population of participants and focus on areas of consensus as “quick wins” – or strategic goals that the whole group agrees to.

Perfect is the enemy of ‘good enough’

In my experience, this tends to be about 70% of the organization’s strategic goals, and there is really only disagreement over about 30%.  The key here is that if the organization’s leaders agree to 70% of what they need to do, that’s a lot, and there is a lot of value if they start executing on those goals with strategic initiatives.  In the meantime, they can work on the other 30% and it does not have to be a barrier to getting anything done at all.

When leadership focuses on areas of consensus and realize they agree on most things, the areas of disagreement seem a lot smaller and a lot more manageable.  I often tell clients in this situation, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” It is more effective to start executing on some strategic goals or objectives while working on the remaining ones than to wait until everything is perfect (which rarely happens) before executing at all.