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How a Leader Assembles a Winning Team

April 4, 2019 By Otis White

The Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in Buffalo, New York is so successful today, it’s hard to imagine it didn’t always exist. But it dates only to 2002, when five institutions agreed to collaborate in planning their adjacent properties and recruiting others to join them on the 120-acre campus.

How successful has BNMC been? Matt Enstice, its president and CEO, recites the numbers off the top of his head: from 4.5 million square feet in 2002 to 9 million today; from 7,500 employees to 16,000; from five institutions to nine anchor institutions plus 150 nonprofits and companies. Fueling all this has been $1.4 billion in private and public investment.

So when Enstice and others began talking about the campus idea in 1999, everyone could see its merits, right? Well, no. The five original institutions, which included a hospital, a cancer research and treatment center, a university, an independent research institute, and a large medical practice, didn’t exactly oppose the idea but weren’t convinced it would work, either.

“It took a huge amount of volunteer time,” to get the medical campus idea off the ground, said one of the founders, Tom Beecher, an attorney and veteran civic leader. Assurances were made to the institutions: This would not be a governance organization and would not replace existing boards. Skeptical neighborhood organizations had to be convinced that these institutions would welcome their ideas. Foundations and political interests had to be persuaded.

And then there was the sheer weight of cynicism. You see, the idea of a medical campus in Buffalo wasn’t a new one in 1999. It had been tried before. Several times. At one point Enstice gathered all the failed plans. “I had a stack of plans up to my waist,” he remembers, “and I’m six feet tall.”

So how did Enstice, Beecher, then-Mayor Anthony Masiello, and consultant Richard Reinhard turn the idea of a collaborative, entrepreneurial medical campus from repeated failure to success?

They did it the way great civic leaders always do these things: They saw the way forward, creating not just a plan but a strategy. That’s a critical distinction. Lots of people, it seems, are good at creating plans, but it’s a rare leader who knows how to move from plan to reality.

This was the case in Buffalo in the 1990s, where many could see the city’s needs. (A big one: What could replace our fading manufacturing economy?) Some could even see solutions. (How about building around one of our bright spots, the city’s medical and biosciences economy . . . perhaps by centering it in a campus?)

But only an experienced and respected leader could see how to put the pieces together by assembling a team of planners, advocates, and strategists, anticipating the objections they would face, shaping the arguments, finding money for starting the effort, identifying early wins, and building momentum.

Fortunately, Buffalo had such a leader in Mayor Masiello. His talents lay in three areas: He had relationships with the right people, he knew how government worked and what it could do, and he was a natural cheerleader. He also had a good sense of timing. He recognized that, in 1999, there were changes at the top of the medical community, so there was a little more openness to trying something new.

His first step was probably the most important one. Masiello picked the right people for this project. Beecher had deep relationships in the philanthropic and health care communities (he had chaired one of the hospital boards). Enstice and Reinhard, who had been Masiello’s chief of staff, were natural organizers with a deep understanding of communities. And Masiello was comfortable leading from behind, as cheerleader, early funder, and remover of political obstacles.

Along the way these four made smart tactical choices. Example: How they invited people into the planning effort. Their rule: You could participate only if you brought money, which they called “skin in the game.” This built commitment to the project and cleared out the time-wasters and political hangers-on who had bogged down earlier efforts. Another example: When they created the BNMC board, they suggested each of the large institutions have two representatives, one of whom must be the institution’s chair. Their thinking: While the CEO would be focused on the institution, the chair would have a longer, broader view of the city’s wellbeing. Again, it built commitment to the idea of a collaborative campus.

There were a half-dozen other things the team did well, from finding and exploiting early “wins” to involving the neighborhoods in exactly the right way. Knowing that Buffalo was, as Masiello puts it, a “seeing-is-believing town,” they led leadership tours of successful medical campuses around the country.

But none of this would have been possible without the decisions made early on by Mayor Masiello: When is the right time to get started? Who are the right people to lead this effort? What obstacles will they face? And what can I do to help them succeed?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo of the medical campus and downtown Buffalo, courtesy of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

A Mayor’s Test for Good Decisions

February 12, 2015 By Otis White

Decisions are what government executives, elected officials and civic leaders do. They may make them in groups or alone, in public or private, but they spend a great deal of time preparing for, making, and carrying out decisions. Which begs the question: How do we know if we’re making good decisions?

We certainly know what good decisions are supposed to do: Solve problems or fulfill opportunities without creating equal or greater problems. These unintended consequences often take time to develop, so it’s hard to judge decisions right away. As time passes, though, we can usually see the good and the bad more clearly. That’s why support for past decisions either grows or melts away.

This is good news for historians, but not so good for decision makers, who need something quicker: a real-time test they can apply hours before making a decision, something that tells them if they’re on firm ground or about to step into quicksand. Is there such a test?

I’ve searched for one for years by wading through books on decision making and asking people who make decisions. And I’ve found it: a checklist you can use to steer clear of most bad decisions and have confidence in good ones. Most impressively, it came not from a book . . . but from a mayor.

Before I share it with you, let me tell you what I’ve learned from the books. First, we are filled with hidden biases, and if you know the most common ones (“confirmation bias,” “sunk-cost fallacy,” “anchoring,” and so on), you’ll avoid traps and, in general, make better decisions. Any book by Dan Arierly will tell you about your biases. Second, there are disciplined ways of thinking that will lead to better decisions. You’ve almost certainly used some of them, such as SWOT analysis. Some you probably haven’t, like PEST analysis (Google it) and Peter Drucker’s Five Questions (Google it, too). Read up on these and other strategic planning techniques; they’ll help.

Still, this wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted a test you could apply the day before a big decision and sleep better that night. That’s why I sat up when a mayor offered hers.

The mayor was Teresa Tomlinson of Columbus, Georgia, and she described her test while I was interviewing her for a podcast about why she ran for office and what she had learned along the way. The test—she called it a “pep talk—was a checklist she had developed as a young lawyer before going to trial. (Click the media player at the top of this post to hear Mayor Tomlinson describe it in her own words.)

The mayor’s test is simple but demanding. It asks four questions:

Am I doing this for the right reasons so my motives are pure?
Have I done my homework so I know what I’m talking about?
Have I sought out, listened to, and respected others in coming to this decision?
Have I been reasonable in my approach?

If you have done these four things, as Mayor Tomlinson says, “then you are OK and you need to stay the course just as hard as you can.”

What Tomlinson’s test won’t tell you, of course, is how history will judge your decision. Nor will it tell you what might happen in the future—whether circumstances could change in a week’s time causing you to rethink things. But most decision makers understand that. What they need is a way of telling if, knowing what’s known at this time, this is the right decision to make. The mayor’s test, answered honestly, will do that.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Sasquatch 1 licensed under Creative Commons.

How Collaboration Happens

July 3, 2013 By Otis White

I’m fond of saying that there are no silver bullets for cities but there are some bronze ones. Here’s a bronze bullet: a healthy cooperation among governments. City councils sitting down with school boards. County governments managing projects with cities. Cities contracting with one another for services. State legislators working with mayors, school superintendents, and county commissioners on legislative strategies. That sort of thing.

The benefits of healthy cooperation are so obvious—lower costs, greater effectiveness, public approval—that it makes you wonder why it’s so rare. My theory: It’s because many leaders do not know how to create the conditions needed for collaboration. And because the conditions don’t exist, neither does the collaboration.

I’m going to set out four things that I think must precede collaboration, but first, a definition. Collaboration is cooperation by interests that don’t have to cooperate. That is, they could go it alone but choose to work together because they see clear benefits or because cooperation is, for some reason, expected. Often collaborators are organizations of equal or nearly equal size. To be a true collaboration, it can’t be an easy, one-off act, it has to be a sustained set of activities. (If I do something for you that’s unexpected and nice, I’m not collaborating. I’m doing you a favor.) And, again, it’s voluntary. If the cooperation is forced by an outside interest, it’s not collaboration; it’s compulsion.

The reason collaboration is so rare is that it requires us to think about things in different ways, and that’s hard. First, we’re not all that good at calculating the benefits of things that don’t exist, such as how things might be if we worked together. Second, we’re suspicious of interests that might be considered rivals. How can we be sure we won’t be taken advantage of? Finally, there’s inertia. If something seems to be working as it is, why change . . . especially if the change involves time or money?

To collaborate, then, requires an act of will. In local government, it has to be initiated by someone who truly wants to collaborate and sees the value of community institutions and governments working together. It takes, in other words, a leader. But it need not be a top leader. It can as easily be a city council member as a mayor, a commissioner as well as a county administrator, a school board member as well as the superintendent. What it requires are diligence and a sense of how one thing leads to another.

And that involves seeing collaboration as a process that depends on three things happening in sequence and then connecting with a fourth element. The sequence is understanding, trust, and transparency. I’ll go through them in reverse order:

Transparency is the key ingredient. You can’t have healthy collaborations if one of the parties feels it may be taken advantage of. So how can you guard against this? By being as open as possible. If your city is supplying a service to others, you have to be open about your costs and revenues. If the city is working with the school system on a joint project, it has to open its books. If the legislative delegation is meeting with local governments, legislators have to be honest about what they can accomplish, and the localities have to be honest about what they need most and what they can contribute to the cause.
But no one wants to be the first to lay his cards on the table. So in order to have transparency, you must have trust, the feeling that you know the person or organization you’re dealing with and that your openness won’t be used against you. Trust, then, precedes transparency.
And what precedes trust is understanding. Understanding takes time. It doesn’t come from a single meeting, it comes from a number of encounters, often in different settings. There’s a reason so many business people play golf. It allows them to size up potential partners and vendors outside of the office. As much as a pastime, then, golf is a vetting process. Your vetting process might include golf, but it could just as easily involve lunches, cocktail parties, or baseball outings.

So think about this in sequence: First, you seek to know those who might be potential collaborators and become known by them. Those understandings allow you to build trust. And trust opens the door to transparency, which is needed for collaboration.

But these things only make collaboration possible. Collaborations don’t actually happen until there’s a fourth element, which is the recognition of mutual interest. This involves someone spotting an opportunity for collaboration, calculating its benefits to all, and persuading others to give it a try.

Here’s the best part of seeing collaboration as a process: Anyone with standing in an institution can start it. If we’re talking about governments collaborating, that means any elected official or relatively well-placed appointed official. All it takes to begin the process is seeing a potential partner and picking up the phone.

Once you do so, don’t be in a hurry; understanding, trust, and transparency take a while. Often there are bruised feelings caused by years of government officials pointing fingers at each other. Be patient, don’t take things personally (when you start talking with your counterparts in other governments, be prepared for an earful about transgressions past and present), and try to be a voice for understanding on both sides. That is, explain your government to potential partners as calmly and objectively as possible, and be quick to speak up for other governments among your own colleagues. Nothing builds trust as quickly as the feeling that somebody over there understands us.

But what about that fourth element, the recognition of mutual interest? How do you prepare for that? Basically, you just keep your eyes open. As you build understanding, trust, and the willingness to be open, the opportunities for cooperation will present themselves. Some may offer great potential benefits, others will have only modest benefits. A good strategy may be to start with some modest collaborations and build toward the big ones, deepening understanding, trust, and transparency along the way.

It can be a long journey, so it may help to keep in mind how some unlikely collaborations came together in the past. Look around. There may be some great examples in your city. If you can’t find one, you can always look back to 1787, when one of the world’s most unlikely collaborations began. It started in Philadelphia that summer, as a group representing 13 bickering governments produced a document beginning with these words: “We the people of the United States . . .”

On Her Majesty’s Town Council: How Local Government Works in the U.K.

March 6, 2012 By Otis White

I met Martin Rickerd six years ago. I remember the exact day. It was July 4. It’s easy to remember because we met at an Independence Day party in a large meadow near the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta, and, it turned out, Martin was the consul general for Great Britain. Yes, you read that right: a representative of Her Majesty’s Government was at a celebration of our separation from Her Majesty’s Government.

I learned then that Martin had a good sense of humor and a fair amount of curiosity, which is a wonderful trait in a member of the Diplomatic Service. I, too, have a lot of curiosity, so we had several lunches to fill in the gaps in each other’s learning. And then Martin was gone, transferred back to U.K. and, in time, he retired.

Not long ago, Martin got back in touch through email. He is now a writer, a professional proofreader (yes, there are such people), and a civic volunteer in a small town not far from London with the delightful name of Leighton Buzzard. (You can learn more about him and his work as a diplomat by reading his memoir.)

And once again, I fell back into my habit of peppering him with questions—this time about local government in the U.K. His answers were so good that I suggested we share them on my blog, and Martin has graciously allowed me to do so. I’ve included my questions to give his answers context and have lightly edited his answers so they’ll make sense to American readers. In a couple of instances, he used a word like “tenders” that might confuse Americans, so I’ve inserted its U.S. equivalent in parentheses and italics. But I left his British spellings intact. After all, who’s to say which are the proper spellings, neighbor or neighbour, center or centre? Final note: Her Majesty’s Government refers to the central government in London. It is sometimes abbreviated as HMG.

Otis: If you get a chance, please tell me about Leighton Buzzard. Is it a suburb? A town? A village? As you may remember, I am curious about communities and how they work.

Martin: Leighton Buzzard is a town of about 38,000 located on the Bedfordshire/Buckinghamshire border, about 35 miles northwest of London. That means it’s in the heart of rail commuter territory—several thousand inhabitants travel by train to London every day (as I used to in my pre-Atlanta days). Hardly anybody would consider driving to London daily for work—there’s nowhere to park, the fuel costs the equivalent of $8.00 a gallon, the traffic is terrible on the motorway and there’s the “Congestion Charge” to pay in central London. By contrast, an annual season ticket on the train to London costs about £3,770 (about $5,970).

I actually live in Linslade which, although not recognised by the Post Office as a separate entity from Leighton Buzzard, has a distinct history (it was part of Buckinghamshire until the 1970s) as the Grand Union canal—a major trading waterway in the 19th and early 20th centuries—separated the two communities. When the railway from London to Birmingham was built in the mid-1800s, the people of Leighton Buzzard insisted that the station be built on the Linslade side of the canal as they didn’t want the “wrong sort of people” visiting Leighton Buzzard!

The whole of Leighton Buzzard (i.e. including Linslade) has grown quite fast over the past 10-15 years as it’s in a popular part of the “greenbelt” around London—we are surrounded by the gentle Chiltern Hills—and the town struggles to find a balance between growth and preserving its character. Leighton-Linslade Town Council deals with very low-level issues such as trading permits for retailers and organising local events; but for all important matters including planning (zoning) it plays second fiddle to Central Bedfordshire Council, which covers a much bigger area (of course, “bigger” is a relative term—the whole of Central Bedfordshire’s area is only 275 square miles, about the same size as Atlanta’s suburb of DeKalb County. There’s a big difference in population, though—about 255,000 in Central Bedfordshire, compared to over 660,000 in DeKalb).

Central Beds is responsible for things like police and fire services, roads, education, and environmental services including rubbish collection. Homeowners pay their annual “Council Tax”—equivalent of property tax—to Central Beds, not to the Town Council. Like all county councils, Central Bedfordshire’s funding is topped up (subsidized) by the UK national government.

The mayor of Leighton-Linslade is essentially a ceremonial position, which goes with being leader of the largest political group on the Town Council. To give you an idea of the relative local importance of all this, a by-election held last week to replace a councillor who had failed to attend a single meeting in more than a year attracted a turnout of only 17 percent (which included me and my wife, as we feel quite strongly about these things—if our troops are dying to protect democratic rights in unsafe parts of the world, the least we can do is exercise our own democratic rights).

Bedfordshire is divided up differently when it comes to representation in the UK Parliament—the county as a whole has six MPs, while Central Beds the local government area has three.

I hope all this isn’t too bewildering as a “101” to the local government scene here. If you are a glutton for punishment, you could have a look at the Central Bedfordshire website and the Leighton-Linslade website.

Otis: This is wonderfully helpful. I’ve tried for several years to get my arms around how local governments work in the U.K. I know that, under former Prime Minister Tony Blair, there was a greater emphasis on local government, but I could never get the 101 explanation of who did what, who paid for what, and who decided what. My interpretation from what you’ve written is that local governments function (as they do in the U.S.) by dividing responsibilities, with the “sub-counties” like Central Bedfordshire doing the heavy lifting of basic services like police, fire, sanitation. By the way, what is the common name for these jurisdictions (i.e., Central Bedfordshire)? I see why they’re used—you can get economies of scale by having a larger tax base and managing services over a wider area than a town could—but why not use the counties (Bedfordshire, for example) for that? Are they simply too big—sort of like asking the state of Georgia to manage trash pickup?

And then we have the towns like Leighton-Linslade. In reading your description and visiting the website, it sounds sort of like a U.S.-style “business improvement district” rather than a full-fledged government. That is, it is in charge of making sure a place looks good and develops appropriately, along with providing some fun and games from time to time. Which makes me wonder what the Town Council does when it meets. Event planning and low-level business regulation don’t make for great public policy-setting. Is this why some members go AWOL? (If I counted correctly, there are 20 members on the Leighton-Linslade Town Council. That’s a big governing body, especially if it doesn’t have much to decide.) Of course, Leighton-Linslade has one thing that Atlanta suburbs like Roswell and Decatur don’t: a town crier. Still, managing the town crier, even if you have to sometimes press the robes and tune the bell, can’t take that much time.

Here’s an important question: Who sets land-use policy and decides how specific parcels of land are developed? It looks like it might be the Central Bedfordshire Council . . . it has information on its website about planning and applying for permits . . . but it wasn’t absolutely clear. I don’t know what this is called there, but in the U.S., it’s called zoning, and it is one of the central powers that’s reserved to local governments. If someone wants to build a hotel or a small shopping area in Leighton-Linslade, who decides where it will go? Who draws up 20-year urban plans (where sewers will go, which areas will eventually be commercial, etc.)?

And speaking of large governing bodies, the Central Bedfordshire Council has 59 members. That’s bigger than the New York City Council. Most cities or counties in the U.S. have between five and 15 elected members. Do you have any theories about why there are such big local councils?

Martin’s first response was a laugh that could be heard across the ocean.

Martin: Two points you make would go down really well in the pub here (and have the regulars paying for your drinks), with a variety of colourful answers:

“Makes me wonder what the Town Council does when it meets.”
“Central Bedfordshire Council has 59 members. That’s bigger than the New York City Council.”

I’ll let you have a considered response to your email in a day or two, but those two observations are priceless from a British perspective!

A few days later, he wrote back with detailed answers.

Martin: You asked what is the common name for local government jurisdictions. The answer is simple “local government.” This term is widely understood and accepted to mean everything that isn’t “central government,” i.e. Her Majesty’s Government (David Cameron, et al.) with UK-wide responsibilities. (It doesn’t include the “Devolved Administrations” for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are different again; don’t get me started on them!)

“Local government” covers a wide range of bodies covering a broad range of services. The two extremes of local government could be illustrated by, for example, Liverpool City Council, in the northwest of England, which covers a dense urban area of 445,000 people (see the Liverpool government website for an idea of the services they provide) and our own Leighton-Linslade Town Council, as previously described.

Most English counties have a single council covering non-urban areas, while the towns often have their own bodies. The County of Bedfordshire comprises several discrete areas, with very different characteristics (urban/rural, industrial/residential, etc.), so it makes sense for it to be administered to reflect the diversity of each area. Thus Bedfordshire is divided for local administrative purposes into:

Borough of Bedford: the county town of Bedford, pop. 80,000, plus one or two smaller immediately adjacent towns, with a fairly high industrial/commercial base.
Luton Borough Council. Luton is in the east of the county, fairly industrial (the British General Motors subsidiary, Vauxhall, was based there, and the town was an important hat-making centre in earlier times) and home to London’s fourth airport. Population, including abutting towns, around 250,000.
Central Bedfordshire Council, for all the rest (it’s actually far more than “central,”covering the middle, south and west of the county, but they wanted one word.)

Bedford and Luton boroughs are “unitary authorities,” signifying that that they cover several towns, bound up as one, due to proximity.

A characteristic common to many English councils, large and small, is that many services are contracted out to private service providers—such as highway maintenance and environmental services such as rubbish collection, drain clearance, school buses, etc. This started under Margaret Thatcher as a money-saving thing (and as a way to reduce the power of the public sector unions) and has become standard practice—and a major source of income for the lucky businesses that win the tenders (contracts)!

Area zoning (planning) issues are dealt with by the Bedford/Luton/Central Beds councils as appropriate, as planning regulation is delegated by national government—although in rare, controversial cases HMG can overturn a local council’s decision. The bigger towns such as Bedford and Luton have their own planning priorities but would coordinate with Central Beds on the basis of friendly neighbourliness (we hope!). There is a major consultation on at the moment by Central Beds to decide the shape of development (residential vs. commercial, etc.) over the next 20 years or so—that’s a Central Beds issue because it covers multiple smaller (town) council areas. It’s a public consultation (period of public comment), and anyone living in the Central Bedfordshire Council area can comment online, by mail or at a public meeting. (HMG is currently proposing a major overhaul of planning regulations, reducing 1,000 pages of guidance to 50. It’s very controversial since “presumption of approval” becomes, for the first time, the starting point for all applications.)

So while permission for an individual supermarket in Leighton Buzzard to expand can be decided by Leighton-Linslade Town Council alone, the question of how many supermarkets would properly serve the population of the county as a whole rests with Central Beds.

Each county (and most large conurbations) has its own police and fire services, and are partially funded by the local “Council Tax” (property tax) paid by every property owner, but the majority funding comes from HMG. Each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales is watched over by a police authority comprising a mix of people appointed by the local council, independent members and magistrates. (HMG wants to introduce elected police commissioners for each force in England and Wales; the scheme is highly controversial, but the first elections are due in November this year.)

As for the size of the councils, it’s important to note that a council like Central Beds represents dozens of small towns and villages, each of which (or perhaps two neighbouring ones) have their own representative/s. Our town council is broken down into eight wards, each with two or three councillors. Councillors are unpaid, voluntary part-timers with full-time day jobs. That also partly explains why some of them don’t turn up all the time! (They can claim expenses and some allowances, but it’s not a way to get rich or famous.) Finally, you asked what do they do at their meetings. I haven’t been to one yet, although I intend to at some point. I attach a sample agenda—this probably won’t be the one I go to, but it will give you an idea! Not a mention of the Town Crier.

Want to know more about local government in the U.K.? You can download an agenda and find other information about the Leighton-Linslade Town Council by clicking here.

Photo by DH Wright licensed under Creative Commons.

How a Leader Assembles a Winning Team

A Mayor’s Test for Good Decisions

How Collaboration Happens

On Her Majesty’s Town Council: How Local Government Works in the U.K.

About Otis White

The Great Project

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