2008 ICMA Annual Conference
Assistants’/Early-Career Professionals’ Luncheon
Monday September 22, 2008, 11:45 a.m.
Rashad M. Young, City Manager
Dayton, Ohio

The local government profession is an incredibly rewarding yet tremendously stressful, exhilarating, diverse, fast-paced yet bureaucratically slow profession that shapes and forms the daily lives of citizens, businesses, and various other constituencies. It is a profession which calls its members to service. Those that dedicate themselves to public service do it for the commitment to their communities and for the opportunity to improve the quality of life for its citizens. So how do we navigate this schizophrenic profession (fast yet slow, rewarding yet stressful)? How is it that we can exist and excel in this fluid and rapidly changing system?

To be certain, the face of local government is changing rapidly. The Center for State and Local Government Excellence sponsored a paper written by Stuart Greenfield, "Public Sector Employment: The Current Situation” that dramatically emphasized both the critical nature yet the unparallel opportunity that faces the profession today. With 84 million baby boomers that account for 45% of the employees retiring and leaving the workforce, there is tremendous need for competent, capable, and committed individuals to take their place. Within state and local government, more than one third of knowledge workers will be able to retire over the next decade. Yet, the number of local government managers that would be the natural pool to transition to those jobs is at its lowest level ever. Zach Patton wrote an article, "The Young and the Restless” which indicated that in 1971, 45% of local government managers were in their 30s, while by 2000 that number had dropped to 16%. So given this massive departure from the work force from the baby boomers and the relatively low numbers of new entrants to the local government profession, there clearly will be tremendous opportunity for advancement all while governments at the local, state, and even federal levels struggle to fill the void.

So then, back to the original question I posed at the beginning. How should you best position yourself to take advantage of these demographic trends? As I reflect on my now 14 years in local government, I have thought about what is it that can most prepare those who have joined this noble profession for advancement and maximize our career development. In that regard, there are three lessons that I have learned along my journey that have served me well. These three lessons, or three points, while simple to understand, are not so easy to apply. These points are all about the Three P’s.: preparation, planning, and patience.

So let me talk about the first of these, preparationA: the action or process of making something ready for use or service. Preparation is the constant learning, experiencing, and developing of your mind and skills. It is thirsting for and seeking new knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It is getting and staying ready for life.

So now that I’ve given you the definition like you are in third grade, what exactly do I mean by preparation? It certainly is about more than formal education. Most of us, if not all of us, have college degrees. Many of us have advance degrees. Some of us have been to the most prestigious and preeminent schools in the country. In fact, public sector workers are generally more educated than their private sector counterparts, with approximately half of the public sector workers having college degrees as compared to about 25% of those in the private sector. Formal education is the basic foundation. Part of this puzzle, in terms of how fast you move in the profession, where you move, the type of position you hold is influenced by your educational credentials. However, I’m talking about preparation in the context of your overall competitiveness and marketability.

I recall a conversation early in my career (around 1998 or 1999) with one of my mentors, a former city manager in Dayton, Ohio. We were talking about career development and my ultimate career goals. She said to me, “Rashad, you’ve got to determine what it is about you that you can sell in this business. Communities want to know you have the expertise that fits the dynamics of their situation. To be a city manager, it will be about what skills and competencies you have to offer versus what it is the community needs to focus on.” That advice helped guide me to want to gain certain kinds of experiences that I thought would be relevant in the marketplace I was serving. So my preparation, my skill development began in a very focused and direct way.

Dayton, as a Midwestern, Rust Belt City, heavy in manufacturing history, has always been a union-oriented town. Labor unions are important to our community and state. They wield considerable influence on politics, community dynamics, and development opportunities. So as I thought about my career being based in the Midwest and particularly in Ohio, I set about learning how to deal with, negotiate with, and build relationships with labor unions. I positioned myself to participate on the negotiating team for the police contract. From that experience, I then led the negotiations for the next contract with the fire union, and within three years I had been a central figure in negotiating two police contracts, two fire contracts, the Public Service Union Contract, the New Mid Management Contract, and the Building Trades Contract. I developed an expertise in labor issues, developed a competency in labor relations by building credibility and integrity with the union leadership, senior management, and the city council. I also wanted to continue to diversify my skill sets beyond the labor area and I knew the economic development and the development issues were also going to be integral to my community as they probably are to most in terms of preserving, and growing the tax base. So I volunteered to manage a community and economic development grant fund that really no one wanted to manage or deal with in the organization as way to gain some practical experience in economic and neighborhood development.

The point I am making about preparation is this: It serves as the foundation upon which the rest of your career is built. This is the cornerstone of the three lessons I am sharing with you today. Your education, professional development, and career growth is a marathon not a sprint, rather, it is about lifelong learning.

If preparation is the foundation upon which your development is built, planning is the strength of that foundation. If you have committed to continuous development and lifelong learning, then you’ve accomplished the first step. The second is to develop a plan then work the plan. Challenges, deviations, and roadblocks are all a part of what will happen in your career and in your life. So the best laid plan about where you may go or how your next career move will play itself out may not happen the way you design it. You may not get noticed the way you think you should by the city manager or the city council. You may fail at your project, or make a mistake that reverberates through the organization. So you have to be flexible with the plan and be persistent in your pursuit.

This next “P”, planning, is about will, it’s about drive, and it’s about determination and focus. In career planning, you have to be purposeful. First, you must recognize your responsibility to manage and guide your career. Then you must think about career management and how you might begin the transition into other roles in the organization. Taking another page from my story to illustrate my point: I had been assistant to the city manager for three years and I was ready to move to a more senior leadership position within the organization as I started to get a little restless in my role (we’ll talk about patience and movement next) and began to think through what the next move should be. I knew that in order to be a department head or a city manager I would need some supervisory experience. I had worked pretty much as a generalist gaining experience all across the organization as the assistant to the city manager. Ultimately, I went after the deputy director position after there was a vacancy. I convinced the city manager that she didn’t need to look for someone that was an IT technician to do the job effectively. I told her what she was really looking for was someone who could relate to the “customers” and ensure the administrative functions of the job (budget, staffing, IT strategy). I ended up being offered that opportunity and I clearly saw that role as a means to an end; it was a very strategic move. I had no intention of being an IT director or being in the IT field for a long time. I did it to get into a senior leadership role, to gain the experience of being in a department, and to get supervisory experience. So the point is about career planning to be purposeful, be persistent, and be strategic. You must maximize the opportunity you have strengthening and building on your foundation of preparation and make sure you get the most out of each career experience and each project you work on. It will necessarily mean that you work a little harder, a little longer, that you reach a little further in the scope of your project or assignment.

While you may have master planned your career or have made the commitment today to start thinking about this notion of “career management,” you must also consider what sort of life balance you want, how and where you want to develop your niche. Determine when the right time is to move to a different position or a different community? Decide if you even want to be a city manager, or do you aspire instead to be an ACM or department head? Do you want to work in a large community or small one? Urban or suburban? These are the kinds of questions that require careful thought and consideration as you construct your plan and gain those critical KSA’s that will improve your marketability and competitive positioning. I knew I wanted to be a city manager and I wanted to work in an urbanized, core city. I wanted to be in a medium-sized city. I also know now that I don’t want to be in a “megatropolis” or a significantly large community. Defining those preferences though takes time, it takes self reflection. It takes consideration of family life and family balance. Most importantly, it takes enough of an experience base to determine what you like and what you won’t or don’t like.

This brings us to the last of the Three P’s, and that is patience. Patience is about timing. I moved up the career ladder very quickly and while I’m satisfied and happy with the result, I did pause at several points and evaluate whether or not a particular opportunity was right for me. You don’t want to be in a situation where you under-perform either because you don’t have the right skill sets and career experiences under your belt to be successful or because you can’t gain the credibility and respect of peers and colleagues to position yourself to be successful. I remember that when the opportunity in Cincinnati came up and I was offered the job as assistant city manager. I really had to give pause and think through whether or not I could be successful in this role. I was 25 years old and was being given the opportunity to help manage this city of 6,000 employees with a GF budget of about $350M. It was an intimidating thought. Some of the people I would be working with and quite possibly managing had been in this business, working professionally longer than I had been alive. They had children my age! I decided to take the opportunity, probably because I am more impatient than practical. While that leap worked well for me, you do have to recognize that good opportunities are not always the right opportunities.

A friend of mine who works in a large community in Ohio recently interviewed for a deputy director job in another community in Ohio. He had progressed through multiple interviews, became a finalist for the job. In his current position in the community, he is in is very similar to an assistant to the city manager. He was interviewing for a job in a smaller community but still a medium to large-sized city, and the deputy director job was in economic development. From a career progression standpoint, this job was seemingly perfect for him. It was high profile, well paid, was the number one priority area for the community with which he was interviewing, solid management team, and thoughtful elected officials. So he jumped on the opportunity, didn’t he? Well, no, he didn’t. He decided that even though this opportunity would likely fast forward his career, that it was in the field he thought he was interested in, he wasn’t yet ready for this from a professional perspective and he didn’t feel the passion and hunger for the job like he thought he should have. He wasn’t excited enough about it so he withdrew himself from the process and decided to spend some more time really thinking about what his next move should be. It takes a lot of insight and self awareness to turn down what most people would jump at. Knowing what is good for you as opposed to what is just good is the key to developing a career that is sustaining and long term.

There is one thing that will make your application of the Three P’s more effective, and that is the use of a mentor or some relationship where you can establish council and have a safe place to go and discuss your plans, learn from your failures, and celebrate your successes. As I’ve talked about my own career experiences, you may have noticed that I’ve talked about individuals that I could go to for advice and counsel. These relationships have been so integral to my success and personal development. I remember agonizing over my decision to leave Cincinnati and return back to Dayton. I thought it would be a serious if not fatal blow to my career because it would be viewed as a regression. My dilemma was that Dayton was half the size of Cincinnati, was in a weaker economic region, and was somewhere I had already worked. I was being asked to come back to Dayton as assistant city manager, where I was already assistant city manager in Cincinnati. Cincinnati was the home of an international powerhouse Proctor and Gamble, had a major league football team and baseball team (although some may dispute that fact. I still remain a Bengals fan). It had a host of Fortune 500 companies in its region. Dayton by contrast, again lost several corporate headquarters, had more regionally based companies than international diversified corporations, a minor league baseball team. It was just an overall smaller market. I remember talking to one of my mentors about this situation. At the time, he was the deputy city manager in Cincinnati and he suggested to me that I was over thinking the situation entirely. He said to me, “The bottom line is this: you are young enough in your career that if you decide to go back to Dayton and it turns out to be a mistake, you’ll just leave and go somewhere else. Mistakes at this point in your career aren’t probably going to be fatal. You’ve got a lot of time to experiment and experience. In the end, do what feels right.”

So I did what felt right and went back to Dayton and two years later became Dayton’s 16th city manager. He didn’t tell me what to do; none of my mentors ever told me what to do or gave me the answers but they were an important resource to help me think and clarify and find my own way.

I want to leave you with this near final point (I promise I’m almost done) and ask that you consider how you approach and how you practice in this profession. I attended for my undergraduate and graduate programs The University of Dayton. UD is a Catholic, Marianist school in Dayton whose motto is "Learn, Lead, Serve." This motto is rooted in the University’s Catholic Marianist tradition. The Learn, Lead, and Serve mantra is something that really has guided my leadership philosophy and has been a value that I’ve tried to hold true throughout my career, because it is about the concept of servant leadership. For those of us in the local government profession, we should strive to practice our craft with compassion, humility, and with a sense of doing the work for the greater good. So as we go about planning our career with aggressive tenacity and deliberate focus, we must ever strive to do it with a sense of service and with the recognition that we are in this business to help out others and improve the quality of life of our constituents and our communities.

So as I close, remember that the keys to success (I’m supposed to give you these keys to success for $25 per person) are rooted in the Three P’s: preparation, prepare to be great, seek knowledge for knowledge sake, and commit to lifelong learning. Planning: plan your career, be purposeful in your planning, pursue career growth and new opportunities with passion, determination, and vigor. Patience: be patient, evaluate your opportunities and learn to recognize what is right for you and what makes sense for your career development. Do these things with a spirit of service and humility, strive to attain that Zen-like state of level five leadership that Jim Collins talks about in "Good to Great" and approach that work as a servant leader. The opportunities in local government will be significant over the next several years and hopefully by following these principles you can position yourself for success!

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ICMA2008 Early-Career Professionals Luncheon (pdf, 66 KB)