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Crestview Leaders Release New Management Book

In Brief:

โ€ข๐Ÿ‘ฅ Who: Tim Bolduc (Crestview City Manager) and Jessica Leavins (HR Director).

โ€ข๐Ÿ“˜ What: Released a book, A Solution Focused Culture, combining narrative and instruction for municipal reform.

โ€ข๐Ÿ—“๏ธ When: Published in November.

โ€ข๐Ÿ“ Where: Based on experiences in Crestview, Florida.

โ€ขโ“ Why: To guide other municipalities in shifting from a regulation-focused to a resource-oriented culture, improving services and community outcomes.

Crestview’s City Manager and Human Resources Director have released a new book that they hope will revolutionize the way cities do local government.

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Crestview City Manager Tim Bolduc and HR Director Jessica Leavins came up with the idea as they implemented a new form of government for the city, called the council-manager form of government, after a referendum in 2018.

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The book, called A Solution Focused Culture is half narrative and half instruction manual. The narrative half tells the story of Clearview, Florida, and a manager’s quest to change city employees’ mentality from focusing on regulating actions in the city to becoming a resource for residents and businesses.

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The instruction manual portion of the book outlines the steps needed for a city to implement the changes that the City of Crestview made that they say created a better place to live for residents and a better place to do business.

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“One day, I was stomping around the office, like I do from time to time, complaining about the way that sometimes we handle things,” Bolduc Remembers, “Jess came in and said, ‘Well, if you want us to do better, teach us to do better. What do we need to do?’ And so, that day, we wrote a training program for how to convert the culture in an organization from being regulatory to resource-based.”

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The pair outlined the five steps they say are essential to making the changes necessary to improve internal culture so that the organization can positively influence the rest of the community.

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The Five Steps to Creating Positive Organization Change

According to Bolduc and Leavins – these are the steps that need to take place to make the changes that help city employees make a significant positive difference in their communities.

  1. Evaluate (the Organization). The pair say that many groups skip this part but that it is the most important. Leaders of an organization must do ride-alongs and other methods to observe what’s happening on a frontline level. They should ask questions and make no changes in this process. They are there to listen to the pain points in an organization and understand why things happen the way they do.
  2. Establish (The Organization’s Values, Mission and Vision). In this step, the leaders of an organization work with other team members to establish the core values that will matter to an organization. Without a shared understanding of the goals of an organization and its values, you will not be able to change the culture because people will not be able to move in the same direction. “We all talk about buy-in. We need to get the team to buy into something. The problem is that I’m a fairly decent salesman, so I can sell you just about anything. If I get you to buy in, that’s great, but then if I’m able to sell you, so will the next salesman,” Bolduc said. He notes that the individual employee has to do more than buy-in – they need to take ownership – as it insulates against negative employees or other actors reverting employees back to their previous state. “When Mr. Negative comes in and starts to talk to them, they’re gonna defend it because it’s not a product they bought, it’s a product they own or they developed.”
  3. Explain (The Core Values). At this point, the leadership needs to solidify the organization’s general orders so that employees understand their parameters, regardless of their job. “if they don’t understand how all of those connect to their water operator job, then it’s nonsense, right? It’s a waste of time and effort. And so what we’re doing is we’ve evaluated the problems, we’ve established core values. And then we’ve gone back and said, ‘now these core values connect to every individual job this way.’ And so in this step, you’re empowering each of the middle management or, you know, supervisory to middle management people with what the answers are so they can relate to their team. This is the why behind what we do.”
  4. Engage (Employees in Evaluation). The fourth part in the process, is where Bolduc and Leavins say that you bring in employees to the change process. Here, managers shoud tell the organization’s members what they think the neccesary changes are. Then they ask members of the organization to evaluate the organization’s old policies and your proposed new policies to see what needs to be changed, what can be done better and what trade-offs need to be made to optimize the workforce.
  5. Empower. The empowerment portion tend to be the scary part for most managers – After getting the ducks of an organization in a row, it’s time for leadership to empower the line-level staff to make the decisions they feel are the best to accomplish the mission of the organization while staying in the established parameters of the organization’s mission, vision and values. Bolduc brings up an adage of the municipal government field: “Water clerks don’t get overtime,” he says – referring to the fact the water billing department has strict hours. “We start to empower the frontline staff or whatever level is appropriate to start making some of those decisions independently. To know that they are empowered to get that ten minutes of overtime to make sure that the customer gets what they need because they know what our values are, they know the policies and parameters in which they can safely work between and still accomplish the goal.”


Implementation

Bolduc and Leavins say managers should plan for implementation of this program to take at least a year from start to finish – longer for larger organizations.

But, the pair warns, successful program implementors should be warned against complacency after cycling through the program once. “You gotta go back and rechallenge yourself, because new things come up and new policies get created,” Bolduc said.”

The Book

A Solution Focused Culture is available on Amazon in audio, paperback, hardcover and for your e-reader. You can purchase the book here.

The book was released in November.

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