Power – Page 2

Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

July 15, 2014 By Otis White

I’d like to persuade you to stop badmouthing the “c” word. The word I have in mind is “compromise.” Done right, a compromise is a way of opening the door to change by reducing the objections of interest groups. And it is the closest thing in politics to an art form.

That doesn’t mean all compromises are good, of course. Some satisfy interests but don’t create much change. In fact, some compromises are designed just to paper over problems. (In Washington, this is called “kicking the can down the road.”) Others appear at first to be ingenious solutions but come apart because they aren’t sustainable. And some look so ungainly that even participants call them “ugly babies.“

But just as you can admire the creative process while sometimes not liking the art, I encourage you to step back and look at how your city hall arrives at these deals. Yes, by all means write about the bad deals and car-wreck compromises. But also develop a little curiosity about why some compromises DO work. Look for patterns in the way they are arrived at in your city. Figure out who your city’s compromise artists are. And by all means, don’t denigrate the art form.

Before we begin, though, a little perspective: If you’ve read the introduction to this series and the first three installments, then you can see some themes developing. Projects and policy ideas tend to flow into city hall from the outside. The city council is at or near the center of decision making, sometimes in the lead role, sometimes in the mayor’s shadow. And the central issues of cities have to do with land and how it is used by people.

This lesson is about the most important work that mayors and city councils (and sometimes others) do, which is creating compromises that allow projects and big policy ideas to move forward.

Now, please don’t charge out the door looking for these things. Major civic projects and big policy changes don’t come along every day. Most of what mayors and city councils do is routine: creating and amending budgets, approving small policy changes, making appointments or approving personnel changes, reviewing contracts, and acting as quasi-judges on zoning matters and development decisions.

But that’s why you should sit up when one of these difficult decisions does come along. That’s when talented politicians do their best work, bringing the interests together, finding hidden areas of agreement, plotting the way forward, and figuring out how to present the results in ways acceptable to other politicians and the public.

And they do this in one of two basic ways, by personality or process. That is, they personally hammer out a compromise, or they send the dispute through some sort of process that the combatants and larger community feel is fair.

Here are two examples of the personality-driven compromise. First, a small but telling compromise authored by Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle allowing ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft to operate in his city while offering taxi owners just enough to quieten their opposition. (Why is it “telling”? Because a mayor who can knock out a compromise like this in his first six months in office demands our attention.) 2023 update: Ed Murray was, indeed, a talented mayor who was undone after three years in office by a sex scandal.

The second, more sweeping example is Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s 2012 plan for reforming his city’s schools, which required that he get state legislative approval and the governor’s support after reaching a series of compromises with local business interests, educators, reform advocates, and labor and ethnic leaders.

The personality-driven approach seems to be the way most compromises come about, and in cities with strong mayor forms of government that’s what you expect to find. (Story idea: If your city has a strong mayor system and there are big disputes not being resolved, why? Does the mayor not consider these things important, does he not consider fashioning compromises as part of his job, is he bad at this work, or is there some other reason? What do others in the city say?)

The other way of reaching compromises is with a process. San Diego’s “ugly baby” compromise on housing was a “locked-room” process. Basically, the city council president sent the interests to a room and told them to come back with something they could all support.

Other processes involve task forces, which involve broader community interests, and mediation. Mediation was how Minneapolis resolved a difficult dispute over a light-rail line. In this case, you see the importance of fairness in a process. The compromise was reached after the mediator proposed it, but it was pretty much the same set of ideas others had suggested. When it came this time from a neutral party, city officials took it to heart.

Finally, there are those compromises that are so complex they defy easy description. Detroit’s “grand bargain,” by which it will exit bankruptcy in the months ahead, is a web of compromises involving a federal bankruptcy judge, the governor, the city’s emergency manager, state legislative leaders, foundation leaders, the mayor, business executives, Wall Street interests, labor leaders, and a host of others. Which parts of the bargain were contributed by leaders and which came as a result of the bankruptcy process? Hard to say precisely, but the biggest elements (including the foundations stepping in to support the art museum) were clearly the work of creative leaders.

So, how can you report on compromises in your city in new ways? Well, you can start by reverse engineering them. That is, you can begin with the deal, which is almost always announced publicly, then ask who was involved at each step and how each element of the compromise fell into place. I promise you this will make a great narrative that will tell you and your readers much about how your city works.

Then you can ask not only how the compromise came about but why. People usually agree to things involving sacrifice only because they fear an alternative. So what were the alternatives? And how were they presented to the different interest groups? (This alone may be a fascinating story, as you may see that the alternatives presented to one side were the opposites of what was presented to the other.)

Finally, you can revisit some earlier compromises. Some likely will have failed. Why? Were they too ambitious, not ambitious enough—or were they designed (consciously or not) for failure? If they were designed for failure, what were the design flaws? For those compromises that succeeded, again . . . why? Did the interests find the alternatives so frightening that they stuck with the bargain through good times and bad? Did participants discover over time that there was hidden value in this new way of doing things? Or did the interests just move on to other issues?

What about the personalities and processes behind these compromises? What makes some leaders good at crafting deals? Do they use a standard way (some leaders use anger and threats, others tend toward calmness and reason) or does each situation demand a different approach? If they sent the dispute through a process, what was the process? Why did it work? Why did people accept it as a legitimate way of deciding these things?

This is the heart of civic decision making as it plays out inside city halls. And it’s what makes talented politicians so valuable. Perhaps the best comparison is to business leaders who see markets others can’t and ways of reaching those markets that don’t exist yet. A book ghostwritten for Donald Trump called this “the art of the deal.” (There’s little evidence Trump was much of a dealmaker, but others in business are.) In politics, the compromise that allows progress while sustaining itself is the work of art.

Footnote: So why do reporters denigrate compromises? I’ll let others do the full analysis, but let me offer one theory. It has to do with nonzero-sum contests.

Huh? Most city hall reporters also report on political campaigns, and elections are zero-sum contests. (Google the term.) That is, every vote I get is a vote you have to overcome and exceed in order to win. There aren’t that many zero-sum contests in our lives. Sports, conventional land wars, card games, a few others.

Most of our lives is spent in a nonzero-sum world, where both sides can gain from a transaction and, sometimes as a result of cooperating, the pie grows. I hope your newsroom is a nonzero-sum environment, along with your family life, your relationships with friends, even your dealings with merchants. (If you’re happy with the car you bought and the dealer is pleased with the money, then voila. Nonzero sum.)

The problem for some reporters and politicians is that they have trouble making the transition from the artificial world of zero-sum elections to the more common world of nonzero-sum government. Put another way, they can’t believe that a compromise where no one walks away with a clear win isn’t . . . well, fishy.

If that is so, then every successful marriage, enduring business, and long-term friendship is fishy. Because like good compromises at city hall, they too live in a nonzero-sum world.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Cabinet Office licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Three: Seeing the Unseen City Council

June 24, 2014 By Otis White

Here’s where I deliver the poli-sci lecture I never got in college, the one titled “Introduction to Local Governments.” There are two types of local government, and if you are as puzzled by your city council as I was as a young reporter, it may be because you are looking at one type and expecting the other.

The type you most likely have is a council-manager form of government, where there’s a full-time city manager and a city council that includes someone called “mayor.” The one you may be expecting is a mayor-council form of government (sometimes called a “strong mayor” system), where the mayor functions both as political leader and government executive, the way the president does in Washington.

What’s the difference? Well, to begin, there’s that city manager person, who is probably a professional (in the sense that she went to college, possibly studied public administration, and may hold a certificate or two). But in truth, mayor-council forms of government have such professionals as well.

The real difference is the manager’s relationship with city employees and the city council—and the city’s council’s role in public policy.

In council-manager governments, city managers are hired—by city councils, of course—to run governments the way CEOs run corporations or superintendents run school systems. That is, with a free hand, more or less. If things work as they should, a council member’s only contact with city employees will be through the city manager or at city council meetings. (Story alert: If council members are phoning city employees directly, that’s a management problem and could be an ethics violation. Call your state’s city managers association or a nearby university’s public management department to find out why.)

Another important feature: When it comes to proposing budgets, suggesting changes in city policies, or offering new ways of structuring city departments, it’s the city manager who proposes and the council that disposes. That’s why she sits at the dais along with the council. She is constantly bringing them things to consider.

Let’s turn now to the other type, the less common mayor-council (“strong mayor”) form of government. Here the mayor is the one who is the full-time employee with responsibilities for administration and proposals of policy and procedure. AND he’s elected—not beholden to the city council for his position.

I won’t get into the strengths and weaknesses of the systems. It’s an interesting subject but not relevant for most city hall reporters. After all, you have the system you have; your job is to understand it. (If you are interested, I can point you to a good book: “More Than Mayor or Manager: Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America’s Large Cities.”)

Where I would focus your attention is on the city council, which may be the least analyzed yet important part of city government. This may seem like an odd statement because, as a city hall reporter, you’ve probably sat through countless council hearings and meetings. (I did as well.) And you’ve reported what council members said and did. You may have interviewed every council member at one time or another.

But here’s where your reporting may have fallen short: You probably haven’t tried to understand the council as a political body—how it makes decisions, who brokers compromises and deals, how the deals come about, how rewards are offered to those who go along and punishments meted out to those who don’t. And here’s a key insight: These things happen differently in council-manager systems than in mayor-council ones. And they happen differently in places that elect council members by districts than in those that elect them citywide.

Places that elect their councils citywide (and until recently that included such big cities as Detroit and Seattle) tend to have councils that work on consensus, a bit like the ruling party in a parliamentary government. After all, everyone represents the same interests and has pretty much the same power.

District elections change that calculation. People in the southern parts of the city may be very different from those in the northern, with wholly different concerns and interests. So consensus becomes more difficult in councils elected by district, and brokering becomes more common (these are deals where you get what you need, and I get what I need—even though what you get and I get may be different and unrelated).

When you have brokering, you have brokers. Who are they on the city council you cover? How do they work? When the council casts split votes, are the splits predictable? (City council votes are one of the easiest things to analyze since they’re public record.) What do the patterns tell you about politics in your city? Are the divisions ethnic, economic, geographic, generational, ideological, partisan . . . or some combination? If you go back further in time, have some council members drifted from one faction to another? If so, why?

Interview the council members. When they are divided, whom do they look to for compromises or deals? Is it the presiding officer, the mayor (who may or may not be the presiding officer), a factional member or two, a senior council member, or someone outside the council?

There’s something else about district elections that’s important. Districts often usher in something called “council member prerogative,” where the council defers to the district representative on issues relating exclusively to his district. (For a glimpse of how prerogative works in Philadelphia, read this.) What does it mean? It means the council member is pretty much the boss of his ward. If you need the city’s permission to do something in that district, such as rezone property, you need that member’s blessing or you can forget about it. Does this suggest any stories to you? It should.

If district elections change how city councils work, then mayor-council governments change things even more. This has to do with the mayor’s independence, which comes from two sources. First, he’s elected separately from the council. Second, the city charter in a strong mayor form of government almost certainly spells out the mayor’s duties, and they’re likely to be . . . well, strong.

Hold on, though. Don’t council-manager governments also have mayors? Yes, but they usually fail one or both of the independence tests. That is, they’re either not elected independently (they are selected from among the council members), or they are given few powers other than presiding at city council meetings and representing the city at ceremonies.

Compare that to a strong mayor system. These mayors manage the city bureaucracy, propose budgets, and may even have veto power over council decisions. But their greatest power may lie simply in their sense of the job and the council’s sense of its job. To understand, let’s go back to the poli-sci lecture.

In a council-manager government, the responsibilities for leading the city are divided between the council and city manager. The manager is usually the “inside” leader and expected to offer proposals on improving government performance. But it’s not common for a city manager to accept responsibility for the larger city—the place whose central issue is people and places and the interaction of the two. That usually falls to city council members who are, after all, elected by that larger city.

In a strong mayor government, the mayor assumes both sets of responsibilities. That is, he’s both inside manager and outside leader, the one who worries about government efficiency, police procedures, and budgets, but also downtown renewal, neighborhood revitalization, the city’s image, economic development, social unrest, and a dozen other things.

Where does that leave council members in a strong mayor system? Some seek to be issue entrepreneurs, searching for problems or opportunities the mayor isn’t working on. A few take up the role of political brokers within the council. But most are happy just to tend to their districts and let the mayor worry about the big things. (If you’ve ever wondered what Chicago aldermen do with their time, read this to find out.)

And what does this mean for you as a reporter or blogger? I hope it leaves you with newfound interest in your city council as a political body. Why do people run for council in your city? Where do they devote their time once elected? If the council has at-large members, do they work in different ways than district members? What happens to council members when they leave? Do they run for higher office, and are they elected? Of the past five mayors, which served on the council at some point? How does that compare with cities similar to yours? (Call a local government expert at a state university—or just do a little Internet research.) If your city’s council is a dead-end political body, why?

If it’s a council-manager form of government, who looks for projects to improve the larger city, the realm outside the city government? (As I explained in Lesson Two, most of these ideas originate outside of city government, but at a point someone in government has to become their champions.) Do members play predictable roles when a big project is proposed? Is one a blue-sky thinker, another a bottom-line worrier, another a let’s-get-it-done sort, and yet another the one who worries about its impact on the disadvantaged? How do they come to agreement?

If nothing else, consider this good training as a journalist. What you’re doing is making the obvious apparent—looking at something everyone knows something about but few truly understand or appreciate. This is what great journalists, like Robert Caro and, before him, John Gunther, did so well. And who knows? If you get really good at understanding how your city council works, we may ask you to move to Washington . . . and explain Congress to us.

Footnotes: One of the most interesting stories in council-manager systems is the role of the mayor. If she is given the title by a vote of council members, it signifies something. But what? That this person is a good representative for the city? That she’s good at presiding (which usually means she’s viewed as fair)? Or is it something else? Good questions for the mayor . . . and her fellow council members.

And nothing is more fascinating than a mayor who doesn’t know what kind of government he has—or knows but won’t accept it. You see this sometimes in cities with council-manager governments that elect their mayors independently or on county commissions with an elected chair. The mayor or commission chair comes to office thinking he’s in charge of management and policy development, only to find a council and city manager who won’t defer to him.

In Dallas, Laura Miller spent one miserable term acting like a strong mayor and berating the city council for not making her one. Miller never accepted her role. Occasionally, some mayors do and we say of them, after a while, that they’ve “grown in office.”

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by John Ramspott licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Two: The Switching Yard of Change

June 3, 2014 By Otis White

If you accept that the central issue for cities—and their governments—is people and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better, then there are two obvious questions:

How can people and places be made to interact better?
How will those changes come about?

Let’s deal with the first question. If you read Lesson One, you know my answer is that cities must find ways of using land more intelligently and creatively. What does that mean for your city? Answering this is your job as reporter or blogger. I gave you some starting points. Now go forth, observe, question, and write.

Now, about that second question: How will changes in land use (or, really, anything important to a city) come about? In other words, setting aside the changes themselves, how does change come to a city?

This is a big subject and one I’ve spent years writing about. This blog is filled with entries about how communities change, who is involved in the process, what aids change, what hinders it. I’ve written a multimedia book about a civic project that changed a city. If that’s not enough, you can consult the podcasts I did with the Georgia Municipal Association, which were interviews with people who’ve changed something big in their cities, focusing on how they did it.

I got interested in this subject in 1990 as I watched the greatest civic long shot I’ve ever seen take shape: the campaign to bring the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. I was editor and publisher of a business magazine at the time, which gave me a perfect position from which to watch this crazy idea and its nearly anonymous father (a mid-level lawyer named Billy Payne) work their way methodically through a city’s complex decision-making process and eventually through the even more Byzantine processes of the International Olympic Committee on the way to a stunning result. Honestly, the games themselves were not so exciting.

One of the things I’ve learned since is that this crazy process wasn’t all that uncommon and maybe not even all that crazy. To explain, it helps to divide change processes into three parts. First, where do big civic ideas come from? Who comes up with innovations and big civic projects (say, to pursue a streetcar line, create a major new park, or bring the Olympics to a city)? Second, what happens to these ideas as they move toward resolution? Who gets a voice along the way and how do they exercise it? And, finally, what determines whether ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected?

I’ll give you a few ideas here about these three parts. If you want more, click on “Archives” at the top of this blog, then try searching through some of the tags to find exactly what you’re looking for.

To begin, where do big civic proposals come from? Usually not from city hall. That is to say, big (and especially disruptive) innovations typically don’t come from mayors, city managers, or city council members. They come from broad based civic organizations such as chambers of commerce or more narrowly focused groups like downtown associations, parks conservancies, and transit affinity groups. And sometimes they come from preternaturally determined individuals like Billy Payne—a group I’ve taken to calling “visionistas.“

This is not what I thought when I was a city hall reporter. If you had asked me then for an analogy that explained the public-policy process, I would have hemmed and hawed and said . . . “it’s like a factory.” That is, somebody (the mayor, the city manager, a council member) comes up with an idea or improvement, then runs it through the bureaucracy and city council . . . you know, like an assembly line.

I know now that’s not way it works with most truly big ideas. Turns out, city hall isn’t as much a factory as a switching yard, where political leaders wave a few proposals through, rearrange the cars on others as they load them up with additional freight, and send still others off to the sidetracks.

That’s not to say that politicians don’t have important roles; they do. It’s just that they aren’t (and we shouldn’t expect them to be) the originators of ideas. At their best, they are the recognizers of needed civic innovations and, at the right time, their champions and facilitators. (For a paper about how three acclaimed mayors created change in their cities, please go here.)

So where do the ideas that steer your city in one direction or another come from? That’s for you to find out in your reporting. And here’s a way to get started: Take a look at the three biggest proposals that city hall has considered in the last five years. (If you’re not confident in your ability to do this, poll city council members.)

Then do some reverse engineering. Where did these ideas come from? Who were part of the early discussions? How did they attract enough support to move forward? Were these borrowed ideas (in the sense that they were things other cities had tried first)? If so, how did they come to the attention of civic leaders? (If your city does “intercity trips,” where groups of political and business leaders visit other places, this could be the source.)

Then move along the timeline. How were these proposals modified over time? Who was consulted? Who had to say yes? Did anyone say no at first, only to change his mind later on? Why? At some point, the cost of the proposal had to be considered. When was this done and who were part of those discussions? (If your local government has a city manager, he or she was almost surely in the room . . . probably with the dominant voice.)

In a democracy as tight as a city’s, public reaction had to be considered. When did supporters think about how to explain their ideas to the citizens? Who were part of those discussions? Did the messages change over time?

Finally, the proposals had to be resolved. Who had to say yes to them formally (that is, at an official meeting) or informally (such as among interest groups)? Did a state or federal agency have to approve it? Was there a referendum? And who managed the approval process? Was the same group involved at every step or did its composition change?

This is a big piece of reporting, but it will change the way you cover city hall because you’ll understand that what happens at city council meetings is only the most visible part of processes that stretch across the city and originate months and maybe years before. Not to diminish public decision making, but a city council meeting in some ways is like a performance. This reporting will take you backstage to where decisions are made, the cast recruited, and roles assigned.

What you’ll learn along the way is that your city has political fault lines, interests that, depending on the issue, must be consulted before decisions are made. You’ll find out who these interests are, how they are consulted, and what they want for their support.

And something else: You’ll learn the joy of writing a political narrative. Most of what city hall reporters write about are events, with an occasional issue backgrounder, investigative article, or profile. They rarely get a chance to tell a real story with a beginning, a middle (filled with complications and near-misses), and an end. Writing about how your city makes big decisions by tracing several of them will give you that opportunity. You might like it.

One thing is certain. Once you get a peek backstage, you’ll never look at your city or its government the same way. Nor will your readers.

A postscript: When I was a city hall reporter, there was a flurry of “power structure” studies, where a newspaper would name the “10 most powerful people in . . . (fill in the name of your city).” Most reporters didn’t know this, but the power-structure idea went back to a book written by sociologist Floyd Hunter about Atlanta in the 1950s called “Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers.”

Hunter’s premise was that the same 40 people were involved in decision after decision and that these 40 Atlantans made up a “power structure.” (Hunter used pseudonyms for the 40, but it has long been a sport in Atlanta to figure out who they were.) Hunter’s thesis has its passionate defenders and its passionate critics. Yale political scientist Robert Dahl wrote an entire book, “Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City,” disputing Hunter’s premise, nearly line by line.

So is there a cohesive power structure in your city? Or is power far more free-floating, as Dahl argued, with some people involved in some decisions, others in other issues, with little overlap? That’s for you to determine. But I’d urge you to go into your reporting with as open a mind as possible. Otherwise, you’ll discover only what you believe as you start out.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Sookie licensed under Creative Commons.

Civic Work and the Importance of Relationships

June 21, 2012 By Otis White

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.

Why You Should Learn to Think like a Politician

January 17, 2012 By Otis White

In his engrossing new biography of John F. Kennedy, Chris Matthews tells us that, in 1958, after he won re-election to the U.S. Senate and was preparing to run for president, Kennedy dropped by Congressman Tip O’Neill’s office. He wasn’t there to talk about public policy; he wanted to know from the congressman’s political aide, Tommy Mullen, precisely how neighborhoods in O’Neill’s Boston district had voted.

Together, Kennedy and Mullen went over the vote totals from Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods, precinct by precinct. Years later, O’Neill was still amazed by the sight of the future president and his own aide combing through the numbers. “I’d never seen anybody study the voting patterns of ethnic and religious groups in a systematic way before,” O’Neill told Matthews, “and I don’t think that most people realized then, or appreciate now, that Jack Kennedy was a very sophisticated student of politics.”

The key word is “student,” because Kennedy wasn’t a natural politician the way that, say, Bill Clinton was. Before running for office in 1946, Kennedy’s social world was pretty much confined to Harvard, Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, and London. He knew little of working class Boston and, surprisingly, not much about Irish Americans. He also knew next to nothing about how people got elected to office. So he set about learning by visiting local politicians and asking their advice.

Along the way, Kennedy wrote what he heard in a notebook. Here are some of the things he jotted down:

“In politics, you don’t have friends, you have confederates.”
“You can buy brains but you can’t buy loyalty.”
“One day they feed you honey, the next (you) will find fish caught in your throat.”
“The best politician is the man who does not think too much of the political consequences of his every act.”

Of all of the things that made John Kennedy a compelling figure, perhaps the least appreciated was his devotion to the craft of politics, something that became, in Matthews’ words, “an essential part of him.”

What does this have to do with cities and leadership? Just this: As we’ve grown in recent decades in our knowledge of urban economies, street-level planning, city design, the value of diversity, government finance and management, we’ve lost an essential leadership skill—the craft of city politics. Put another way, we now have a great storehouse of what ought to be done, but less and less knowledge of how to do it.

We’ve tried to fill in for that missing knowledge with citizen engagement, by asking citizens what they want, and how they’d like it delivered. (I know. I’ve been part of a number of citizen-engagement projects.) But while engaging citizens is helpful, it’s not enough. That’s because, at the end of the day, we still need someone—elected officials, mostly—to put together specific initiatives, explain these proposals to the public, sell the initiatives to other decision makers, work through the details with bureaucrats, make compromises, get the initiatives enacted, and oversee their implementation. You can use any term you want, but I’m pretty sure that JFK would have called this “politics.”

I’ll offer some ideas about dealing with our political knowledge deficit, but let me begin with two caveats. First, city government is not the same as a city. Cities are complex human environments made up of many dynamic parts, from economics and demographics to technology and culture. And cities are themselves nodes in much larger environments—regional, national, and global.

But if local government isn’t the sum of a city, it is surely the most influential part. That’s because only government has the mandate, platform, and most easily mobilized resources for addressing the issues facing a community. Think of government, then, as the rudder of the ship and some of the sails. And politics? That’s how we decide who gets to be helmsman . . . along with a good portion of the crew.

My second caveat is that politics is about two things. First, it’s about electoral politics, which is what brought Jack Kennedy to Tip O’Neill’s office in 1958. In other words, how people get elected. But second, politics is about legislation, which is how groups of elected officials, government regulators, and other decision makers come to consensus (or don’t) about what to do.

Everyone who wants to be a serious civic leader at the neighborhood, city, or regional levels needs to know both kinds of politics: How people get elected, and how government decisions are made. And not in a textbook way. You need to know how your current mayor ran for office, how she put together a winning coalition, and who was part of the coalition. And you need to know how your city’s most important ordinances were crafted, who was part of the discussions, and how the proposals changed as they moved through the process.

Why is this knowledge important? Because you need to be involved in picking the right helmsman to steer your city. And if you’re going to serve on the crew—along with people from government—you better know how they work so you can do your part.

But how can you learn about the two kinds of politics in your city? First, you can learn it as JFK did, by visiting politicians and asking them. (You’ll be surprised by how candid they’ll be if they trust you.) Second, you can hope for more media attention to the craft of politics. This probably won’t come from the traditional media but it might from new media, such as civic websites, podcasts, or even some alternative weekly newspapers.

Finally, you can create your own discussions. I have some experience with this. For a number of years, I moderated a panel of mayors for the annual International Downtown Association conference called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Politics But Were Afraid to Ask Your Mayor.” We got together three or four mayors from around the country and let downtown executives ask them difficult questions.

My favorite came from a woman in Iowa who said, “Our new mayor ran on a platform of putting our organization out of business. How should we deal with that?” I was amazed by how candid the mayors were, offering advice for dealing with politicians, advancing ideas, talking with the public, and a hundred other practical tips on politics. They were so candid that I worried a little about how it might affect their careers. (I’m happy to report that, of the 20 or so mayors who appeared on my panels over the years, two are now governors, one is a U.S. senator, and several are still mayors. To my knowledge, no one suffered from participating.)

Every civic organization could do something like this—put together panels that teach politics to people who don’t want to run for office but want to be effective in their communities. And let me make a distinction here. This is not the same as candidate forums at election time or issue forums at other times. These forums are more like seminars in practical politics, where three or four elected officials talk about how politics really works—and civic leaders learn how they can work better with their elected officials. (If your current political leaders are too cautious, invite some former politicians.)

And it’s not just civic leaders who need to know how politics work. So do people who work in city halls, many of whom are surprisingly uninformed about their mayor and city council. Every college planning department and government management school ought to have seminars with politicians who explain how they got elected and how they put together legislation. And every government professional organization (yes, I’m talking about you, American Planning Association) needs to offer refresher courses at its annual conferences.

Finally, it would be a good idea if politicians talked more about politics among themselves. The thing I noticed about the mayors on my panels was how attentive they were to each other’s stories and advice; it was as if they were taking notes. This kind of peer learning is important because, if we had better politicians, we’d have better cities. And it’s particularly needed on the legislative side of politics because it’s hard to get big things done in communities. Many well-intended politicians aim too high and fail—or too low and accomplish little. Get the politicians together, let them talk about what worked and what didn’t, and they’ll improve each other’s winning percentages—and that of their cities.

John Kennedy would have understood the value of peer learning. For all his eloquence and glamour, JFK was a cautious politician who left little to chance. If someone said he’d vote with Kennedy on a major bill, JFK wanted to be absolutely sure he could depend on it. Apparently, this was something he had learned early in his career from talking with Boston politicians. Something about being fed honey but winding up with a fish in your throat.

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Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

Lesson Three: Seeing the Unseen City Council

Lesson Two: The Switching Yard of Change

Civic Work and the Importance of Relationships

Why You Should Learn to Think like a Politician

About Otis White

The Great Project

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