Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Rules for Reformers

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I’m beginning a series of short postings about how cities decide things and how leaders can help their communities make smarter decisions. I’m calling these brief essays “Rules for Reformers.” Each will have an illustration, some scribbled key words, or a hand-drawn chart that, I hope, will make the ideas stick a little longer with you. (If the drawings seem a tad childish, feel free to blame the artist, who is . . . me.)

The rules come from conversations I’ve had over the years with civic leaders. The best leaders I’ve known—from mayors and county executives to chamber executives and CEOs—operate mostly from tacit knowledge, a set of understandings about power, change, and human nature that they accumulate over a lifetime and which becomes instinctual. As a result, they know how to get things done, they just can’t explain how they do it, and they certainly can’t teach it. This is fine with me because I’m in the explaining business.

My caution is that this is that these brief postings are meant to be simple, and maybe even overly simple. They’re general rules, not a guide to every circumstance. More than anything else, I hope you’ll turn to them when you’re stuck on a civic problem or obstacle. By reading a few of these rules, you may come across something that helps you figure a way through the problem or around the obstacle.

And about the name . . . Some of you have already figured out it’s a play on the name that the legendary Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky gave to his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” I’m not a fan of Alinsky’s or of his book. For one thing, I’m no radical. For another, his book isn’t actually helpful for people wanting to learn about community organizing. It’s more of a collection of war stories with a few philosophical musings (and even a sexist joke) thrown in. But it’s a great name.

So, with apologies to the late Mr. Alinsky, here are my “Rules for Reformers.” I’ll start with a few, add a few more, and we’ll see where things go from there. Please let me know what you think.

Here are the first Rules for Reformers: Three Ps of Public Policy, A Formula for Change and “What” Before “How.” Others will follow.

The Leader as Strategist and Persuader

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I’ve met a lot of mayors over the years. Some were smart, a few were philosophical, many were shrewd, but only a handful were strategic. One of the few, Frank Martin, died a few weeks ago.

Martin was the mayor of Columbus, Georgia who, in a single term in office in the early 1990s, changed his city. Yes, you read that right: He served a single four-year term. (It was his decision. He finished his term to acclaim but chose not to run again.) And in that single term he set in motion changes that are still being felt, 20 years later.

I met Mayor Martin when I was researching a book about the remarkable turnaround of Columbus’ downtown, which was a desolate and hopeless place in the 1970s, only to be reborn three decades later as a thriving business, cultural, entertainment, and educational center. I wanted to know how these things happened, and that led me to the political leader who had changed the arc of the city. (If you’re interested in the book, you can find it here.)

We had three long conversations, one by phone, one in his office, and a third for a podcast. Each time we talked I was impressed by how his mind worked. He had the ability to look at something familiar (the city he had lived in his entire life or the government he presided over), see assets and opportunities that others couldn’t, and move decisively toward them. And, in a nutshell, that’s what great strategists do.

And one more thing: He knew how to change people’s minds. That’s important because, in civic work, it’s not enough to see the right thing to do. You have to bring others along with you. Martin knew that words weren’t enough. If you wanted to change people’s minds, you needed actions as well. Bold actions.

When he became mayor in 1991, Columbus was at a very low ebb. For 15 years, a handful of business and civic leaders had been searching for ways to turn around the downtown, without much success. For one thing, there was the sheer size of the problem: Block after block of empty storefronts, sleazy bars and porn shops, and some of the tackiest retail imaginable. The good stores had moved out of downtown in the 1960s, and many of the offices had joined them in the 1970s. (No one lived downtown then.) A few new projects had been built—a convention center, a hotel, a new office building or two—but the tide was still running out for downtown.

And beyond that, there was a huge impediment to change, which was the citizens’ deep-seated cynicism. After seeing decades of decline, they thought the downtown was hopeless and any effort to help it was throwing good money after bad. In fact, they thought the same of the city itself. In the citizens’ minds, Columbus was, if not declining, going nowhere and nothing could change it.

So, where do you begin when you’re trying to save a city that doesn’t believe in itself? Martin’s answer was to start with a bang, with what he called his “man on the moon project,” a project so ambitious and difficult to achieve that, when it does succeed, the civic self-doubt fades away. He found such a project on his first day in office, when he opened a closet in the mayor’s office and discovered a complete set of plans for a civic center. A previous mayor had commissioned the plans and then quietly rolled them up and stowed them away, defeated by the project’s politics and finances.

That, Martin decided, would be his “man on the moon project.” He would build the civic center that a line of mayors had talked about but been unable to deliver. To make a long story short, he did just that, and Columbus has an impressive new civic center today. But Martin didn’t stop there. While he was working on the civic center project, he put together a huge bond referendum that in addition to financing the civic center would make sewer improvements, build sidewalks and parks, and construct a major new softball complex near downtown. He campaigned furiously for the referendum and got it passed.

From the outside, this may not seem like much, but in the sleepwalk that was Columbus in the early 1990s, it was a huge awakening. And Martin was just getting started. The sewer project had an interesting feature, he came to understand. It involved running miles of storm water pipes alongside the Chattahoochee River. And here’s where Martin’s knack for strategic thinking came in: Why not turn this sewer project into a major new public asset by placing a river walk on top of it? (The idea wasn’t his, but he once he heard it, he grasped what it could mean.) He approached the city’s foundations and businesses, and they agreed to put up the additional money. The result is one of the largest and most attractive urban river walks in America today, stretching more than 20 miles.

And the softball complex? It became the way that Columbus got a share of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when it served as host for the women’s softball competitions. The city that doubted itself was suddenly seeing itself on international broadcasts, with its beautiful new riverfront improvements as a setting.

I could go on and on about Martin’s accomplishments and how they laid the groundwork for the downtown’s revival. (Again, if you’re interested, read the book.) But at the center of things was a civic leader who combined the mind of a strategist with a shrewd understanding of human nature and what it took to move people.

And these are the things the best leaders do: They see unnoticed assets, find ways of making them greater and far more apparent, and bring others along on the journey. Cities need an army of such people, but sometimes it takes only a few. Or, at the right time and in the right place, just one.

Photo of the Columbus Riverwalk from The Great Project, used with permission

Civic Work and the Importance of Relationships

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In early 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an all-out effort to deal with his city’s traffic problems by proposing that the city charge drivers who entered the most congested areas. Mayors don’t have that kind of authority, so he asked the New York State Legislature to give it to him. Over a week’s time, Bloomberg turned on the charm, with dinners for legislators at the mayor’s residence, a team of lobbyists working in Albany, and elaborate presentations showing lawmakers how their districts would be affected by the changes.

Didn’t work. Legislators barely considered Bloomberg’s proposal, and some seemed to enjoy snubbing the mayor. Why? One reason was the hurry-up nature of Bloomberg request; legislators thought the mayor was being disrespectful by asking for a quick vote. But another reason was Bloomberg himself. As one legislator, generally considered a friend of the mayor’s, told the New York Times, “All politics is relationships, and if he hasn’t built the relationships over time, he can’t suddenly create those relationships with 48 hours to go in the process. It just shows that six and a half years into his term, the mayor just does not know how to approach the legislature.”

Ouch. And, yet, unquestionably true—both about Bloomberg, who clearly isn’t comfortable rubbing elbows with politicians, and politics in general. All politics are relationships, but then again so are most human endeavors. And nowhere is that more true than in civic work, as I’ll explain shortly.

But, first, a word about relationships in general. It goes almost without saying that we need other people to have productive and meaningful lives, but we sometimes don’t appreciate how much. Here’s a hint: Academics who’ve studied natural disasters, like hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, earthquakes in Italy, and tsunamis in Asia, have found that the people most likely to survive and later restore their lives are those with the greatest number of relationships. Partly it’s because they have support systems that others don’t, and in times of great trauma, being surrounded by those who care about you makes you want to go on. But it’s not just psychological, researchers have learned; the well-connected have access to a storehouse of knowledge about getting things done. One researcher who had studied a tsunami’s aftermath in India explained it this way: “Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals, and weddings, those were the individuals who were tied into the community. They knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid.”

And it’s not just during disasters. Researchers who’ve studied corporate CEOs have consistently found that those promoted from within companies do better, on average, than those hired from outside. This isn’t true in every case, of course, but it’s true in the aggregate: Those hired from within last longer in their jobs than those recruited from other companies. There are many explanations for this, but one that researchers point to again and again is that home-grown executives know from day one how the company really works—what academics call “private knowledge” (unlike information you could get about the company from looking at its financial statements and organizational charts or looking things up on Google). And private knowledge—about how decisions are made, who is reliable, where and why initiatives have failed in the past—can be decisive in a CEO’s career.

Or in a civic leader’s career. Why is it so important to have a big and diverse network in civic work? Two reasons:

  • Power and resources are diffuse in cities. You can’t make major changes in cities by having one or two people, or even a small group, say yes; you have to get large groups to agree. The only way to do that is by knowing the decision makers well enough to win their commitments at the right time. And that takes long-established relationships. (Are you listening, Mayor Bloomberg?)
  • Communities are incredibly diverse: economically, politically, religiously, ethnically, in educational attainment, in years spent in the community, and on and on. As a result, you have to work harder at building relationships in communities than in companies or most other human activities, for the simple reason that the people whose help you’ll need won’t always run in your circles. The first task of community relationship building, then, is to consciously seek out people who aren’t like you.

But on the other side of these obstacles is a big reward for those who overcome them: Because communities are so diverse and power so diffuse, there’s a great deal of private knowledge in cities—basically, information about getting things done that isn’t widely known. The result is that the person with the best relationships—deep in trust and broad in diversity—is the one best positioned to accomplish things. If a project is stalled, she’ll know how to get it back on track. If a crisis blows up, she’ll know the critical constituencies who’ll need to be reassured and how to do it. If there’s financing problem in an important project, she’ll know those most likely to step in with resources.

This leads us to the next big question: If relationships are so important to civic work and the benefits so great, how do you form them? How do you meet people and turn acquaintances into friends? And once you’ve deepened your relationships, how do you use them to benefit your civic work and the city?

Sociologists who’ve studied the connections between people say there are four things that strengthen relationships: the time people spend together, their sense of identification with one another, the trust that’s formed between the two (especially how free they feel in sharing confidences), and how they reciprocate, which is an academic’s way of saying trading favors.

When you look at this list, you can see how things work pretty much in that order: First, people spend time together, then they see things in the other person they identify with (even if, on the surface, the other person seems different), they begin confiding in one another, and finally they help each other out. By the time you get to that final stage, trading favors, you have a deep relationship.

As a side note, don’t let the term “trading favors” turn you off. It’s one of the oldest and most beneficial human instincts. If someone helped you move from a dorm room to an apartment in college, and you later helped him move, you’ve traded favors. If you swapped turns driving the carpool to soccer practice, you’ve traded favors. If a civic leader helped you raise money for your project and you did the same for hers, you’ve traded favors. Trading favors becomes a bad thing only when it involves trading things you don’t actually own, such as government resources.

Still, I haven’t actually answered the question. It’s important to understand the stages of relationships, but knowing them doesn’t explain how to move through them. Here’s where civic work becomes the answer to its own problem: You do it through volunteering. It’s the best way—maybe the only sure way—of meeting large numbers of people and working alongside them. Want to know who’s reliable? Work on a Habitat for Humanity project. Want to know who’s wise? Serve on a nonprofit board. Want to know who truly knows their parts of the community? Raise money with them.

And this brings us, finally, to the reasons for the relationships. For friendship, sure. To be a more civically engaged and culturally aware person, of course. But the reason you set out to build those civic relationships was to get things done in your community. And for that you have to ask people to do things: to serve on a committee, donate money, or turn out their friends for an important event.

I understand why some are reluctant to ask; they fear it makes them seem pushy. In fact, just the opposite. It makes you look like a leader. Rather than thinking less of you, people will think more of you when you ask for their help. And when they agree, they’ve invested in your success. And that may be the ultimate stage of a relationship.

Chris Matthews, the television commentator, wrote not long ago that this was something John F. Kennedy learned early in his political career: You have to ask. Matthews says it’s what has been missing from President Obama’s administration. Yes, he raised enormous hopes (and donations) among his followers in 2008. But once in office Obama didn’t ask them to do anything other than cheer for him. (Unlike, say, the Tea Party, which has continuously asked its followers to do things in opposition to President Obama.) “There are certain basics to becoming a leader,” Matthews wrote in an essay for Time magazine. “The first is asking people to follow you. Kennedy asked. Obama used people to get elected.” Matthews supports Obama, but, he adds, “He needs to start asking.”

So do you. If you want to create loyalty, which is the deepest level of relationship you can have in public or private life, you need to ask people to do things for you. But first, be prepared to spend time with people who aren’t much like you. And be quick to help them with their projects.

Photo by United Way of Greater St. Louis licensed under Creative Commons.

The Difference Between Privatization and Magic

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I’ve spent my entire adult life working in business, as an employee, manager, business partner and owner. I also spent a fair number of years as a business magazine reporter and editor, interviewing executives around the country. I like business so much that I still read the Harvard Business Review, more or less for fun.

So I feel qualified to offer this caution to friends who’ve spent most of their working lives in government: Business isn’t magic. When you outsource a government service to a private company, you don’t always get rid of your problems. In fact, most times the problems just come back to you in new forms.

I offer this caution because outsourcing seems to have gained a new life, thanks in large part to the terrible financial crisis local governments have been in since 2008. Today we find cities and states creating public-private partnerships to manage highways and toll bridges, and take over municipal parking services. States are contracting with private prisons to house inmates, and cities are thinking about privatizing water services and sanitation departments.

And then there are charter schools. If you had told citizens in the 1980s that, in a few decades’ time, we’d be using taxpayer money to pay nonprofits and even for-profit companies to educate public school children, they would have thought you were crazy.

Some of this outsourcing has worked reasonably well, some of it has created only headaches, and some of it is so mixed in its results that it’s hard to make sense of it. (Nearly every comprehensive study of charter schools, for instance, says they perform about as well as regular schools.)

This doesn’t mean cities shouldn’t outsource some of their services, but it does mean they should do so with clear expectations about what will happen. The key thing is this: Businesses have to find a way to pay back their investors and make a profit. And as far as I know, there are only three ways of doing that when you are privatizing an established public service. One way can be relatively painless and may even win the city some credit with voters. The other two are likely to stir up a hornet’s nest.

The painless way is through some kind of innovation, which could include changing the service’s delivery process or use of technology, or by repositioning the service in the public’s mind. How could that happen? Think about the rise of self-service gas stations. Until the mid-1970s, it was unusual for people to pump their own gas. (To this day, it is illegal in New Jersey and Oregon.) Why was it so rare? Because most people thought it was unsafe. And, besides, who wanted to stand around on a cold and rainy day pumping gas?

But with the help of a little technology (swiping credit cards at the pump) and some small incentives (slightly cheaper prices at self-service) gas stations gradually coaxed people out of their cars. It worked so well that today you’d be hard pressed to find a gas station still offering full-service even at a higher price.

Could a private company, taking over a city service, do something like this? Sure, if there were obvious inefficiencies and if citizens could be persuaded to change in small ways how they used the service. Take curbside recycling, which is still so new that customer habits aren’t deeply formed. If a company could think of a highly efficient way of hauling recyclables, helped by a change in customer habits, it could take a money-losing service off a city’s hands, pay back its investors, make a profit . . . and leave the citizens pleased with the city’s decision.

Alas, most city services don’t work that way. Yes, there are always more efficient ways of running water systems, patching streets, or managing landfills. And you can change citizen habits with incentives over time. But for most city services, the improvements and resulting savings will be incremental. They won’t be enough to pay back investors in a reasonable period and turn a profit.

So that brings us to the other two ways that companies succeed with outsourcing: They raise prices, cut costs, or both. Don’t get me wrong: This may be exactly what’s needed in many cases. Every three months, I mail my company’s tax returns to the state revenue department and the IRS. (Remember, I’m a taxpayer.) And as I stand at the post office counter, I always think that the price of certified mail is ridiculously cheap. And as for cutting costs, particularly labor costs, which government in America does a good job of this?

But they could. Governments might never be as good at managing labor costs as Wal-Mart or as aggressive at pricing as Microsoft, but they could be much, much better than they are. (And some are getting better. If there’s a silver lining to our hard times, it may be that governments are finally dealing with their unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities . . . and maybe getting serious about worker productivity as well.)

In other words, everything that businesses could do to generate more cash, governments could do as well. There’s no magic here: Innovate, raise prices, cut costs . . . or all three. That’s it.

So why don’t they? Because businesses offer governments what looks like an easy way out. Take the deal former Mayor Richard Daley signed in 2009 privatizing Chicago’s parking meters. The business consortium that won the deal offered the city a cool $1.18 billion to take over the city’s parking meters for the next 75 years. The city was in the midst of one of its perennial budget crises, and the money helped bail it out for a year or two.

That’s not what Daley said at the time, of course. He told reporters the city shouldn’t have been in the parking meter business to begin with. “This is not the core business of the city of Chicago,” he said. Really? Managing city streets isn’t the city’s business? Then what is?

What Daley really meant, in all likelihood, was that doing what came next was too hard for his government. The new owners dramatically raised parking rates. The public reaction was fierce, and it only grew only fiercer when the company was slow to deal with jammed or vandalized meters . . . and cars were ticketed or towed as a result.

Sometime similar happened in Atlanta, where the city privatized parking enforcement and meter maintenance, and citizens and store owners howled about the blizzard of tickets coming from the private company.

In these cases and others, there was no magic. The businesses that took over public services did nothing that the governments themselves couldn’t have done, had they set their minds to doing it. So why didn’t they? Because innovating, cutting costs, and raising rates is hard and sometimes unpopular. Governments turned to businesses because they didn’t want to take the heat.

But, of course, they took the heat anyway, in terms of citizen complaints about the privatized services. Today it’s hard to find a politician in Chicago who will defend the parking meter deal. And Atlanta’s city council is desperately looking for ways of making its parking deal work better.

In the end, then, these cities have the worst of all possible situations. They catch the political heat, lose an opportunity to take on the government’s underlying management and cost issues, and give up control of incredibly valuable public assets . . . in Chicago’s case until 2084.

As I said early on, there are cases where privatization and outsourcing work reasonably well. If it’s a small government, outsourcing of back-office operations may be cheaper because of economies of scale or the cost of expertise. (Why manage your payroll if it’s cheaper to contract it out?) But for large governments, that’s usually not the case. Too often, they privatize for short-term financial reasons or for fear of political backlash.

Then they get the backlash anyway. And the money’s quickly gone.

Photo by compujeramey licensed under Creative Commons.

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

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The best thing about writing a blog, I’ve come to learn, is that you sometimes surprise yourself. I’ve been writing one since February 2010, a little more than two years’ time, and I can already see small changes in my thinking about the things that interest me: how communities change, how people become leaders, how citizens figure into civic progress, and how local politics works. Don’t get me wrong; in re-reading my postings, I largely agree with the central ideas, but I see changes in how I’d put things today.

Here’s an example: the core skills of community leadership, which I wrote about in April 2010. I still believe that leaders who want to be effective in civic work have to master a set of skills, and the five I listed—empathy, facilitation, strategy, learning and motivation—are the right ones. But I’d call some of them by different names today and place them in a different order.

What has caused my thinking to evolve is the work I’ve done in how change happens. In a set of postings, beginning last August, I mapped out how deliberate change comes to communities. (Literally, I called it a map, with starting points and steps along the way, ending in adoption and implementation.) There’s a lot to the map—it took seven postings to explain it all—and one result of spending so much time studying the process was a new appreciation for what it takes to move things through it. That’s the role, of course, of leaders.

And that brought me back around to looking at those five core skill sets. Here’s briefly how I described them two years ago:

  • Empathy: These are the skills that allow leaders to understand others and work with them, “particularly those with whom you have the least in common.”
  • Facilitation: These are the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies. Think of this as putting empathy to work.”
  • Strategy: These skills “help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward.”
  • Learning: These are the skills that “help you search for, find, and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources.”
  • Motivation: These skills “help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.”

As I said earlier, I agree that these are the key skills, but I’d put them in a different order, using different words to describe them. Here’s how:

The first skill set is still empathy, but I’d call it relationship building. And, yes, empathy is still important to relationships. But the aim of civic relationships, I’ve come to know, is not to understand people but to enlist them in civic work, and it now seems to me that “relationship building” is a more purposeful and action-oriented term. I’d still put it as the first skill to be mastered because relationship building is where community leadership begins. Without a group of people to call on for assistance and advice—and, ideally, a diverse group—it’s impossible to be a civic leader.

The second skill set is the one I put as number four on the list two years ago, learning. It’s not a great name, but I’ll stick with it for the time being. These skills are about seeing community problems and finding their solutions. Why have I moved it up? Because this is the engine of community change. Change begins when people with strong community relationships meet problems they believe they can solve. So mix relationship building with learning and you have ignition. My caution is that learning is a process and not an event, and the process has two parts: seeing the problems and finding workable solutions. As I wrote in this posting, leaders sometimes get the order reversed. That is, they fall in love with a solution they’ve seen elsewhere—a river walk, say, or a streetcar line—without thinking much about the problem it’s meant to solve. If they did, they might realize that plunking a river walk or streetcar in their community may not improve things . . . and could make things worse.

The third skill set is strategy, and I think my description two years ago still works. It’s about seeing the “critical path” that the change process must follow—the necessary steps of citizen meetings, private consultations, fundraising, committee meetings, public hearings, and government approvals—and marshaling the people and resources to make the journey. If relationship building and learning starts the engine of change, then strategy gives it a map.

Facilitation is the fourth skill set. It’s not a great name, but I can’t think of a better one. I was right to say two years ago that it was the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies” but wrong to describe it as “putting empathy to work.” It’s more focused and strategic than that. At various points in a change process, leaders have to work with groups of people who are more or less peers, and facilitation teaches you how to do that with good results. Think of the best committee chair you’ve ever seen—the one who kept the group moving forward and pulled the best from its members—and you have the idea.

The final skill set I now call persuasion, which seems a bit more hard-edged than motivation. And that’s on purpose. Change, I’ve come to learn, does not come easily to communities, especially change that requires us to make conscious choices (unlike changes that are mostly beyond our control, such as economic change due to globalization) and meaningful sacrifices. Machiavelli described the problem with change rather well in 1513:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

Let me paraphrase: People who might benefit from a change have trouble valuing what they don’t yet have, but those who are asked to give something up know to the penny what it will cost them. Given this “order of things,” it takes something forceful to push change forward. And that force is persuasion, done in a hundred ways.

These, then, are my new core leadership skills, in the order in which they come to bear on community change: Begin with relationship building, followed by learning. When you have ignition, you bring in strategy, and facilitation. If all goes well, they will bring you to the 20-yard line. And to get over the goal line you need that final skill, which is persuasion.

Photo by Julie Faith licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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