What was your initial interest in Collins’ work, “Good to Great”?
Every year, prior to our EMT retreat, we select a book to read, the content of which forms the structure of our “ice breaker” initial conversation at the retreat.  In this case, our then Deputy City Manager, Bernice Duletski (now ACM for Johnson County, KS), had read and was recommending the Collins book.  “Good to Great” was more the seminal study than his first book, “Built to Last.”  

“Good to Great” was clearly more substantive on the issues of values, ethics, and building a great and sustaining corporate culture.  And, so, at our 2004 retreat, we concluded unanimously (18 readers) that it was singularly the best, most applicable and most transferable business book any of us had read.  (It may be the only unanimous decision ever reached by this strong-minded group of independent thinkers!)  And we were clear that it was already past time to unleash our revelatory group-think on the organization.

How did you introduce the “Good to Great” work to management and the workforce?
As the executive management team, we first thoroughly discussed, to the point of achieving our own clarity and conversational comfort with, the six (depending on who’s counting) most elemental concepts of “Good to Great,” if they were to become the foundation for reorienting organizational thought and cultural reconstruction.  

We brain-stormed through to what should be our “hedgehog” concept.   We unfolded the conversation to, and with, our MMT (mid-level management team) and very soon thereafter conducted a series of optional attendance “lunch and learns” (brown bag affairs) with and for our employees (problematically, we, like everyone, have a large number of remotely located and shift workers, but we needed to start somewhere).

What was the initial reaction when you decided to adopt the Level 5 Leadership throughout the organization?
It is pretty clear, in retrospect that the management team suffered from “ivory tower syndrome.”  While we were thoroughly enamored with the obviously intrinsic and tangible value of our “good works” with “Good to Great” (G to G), and its fundamental truths, a detailed professionally conducted (Sommerville, Inc.) sequel to our cultural survey, conducted years earlier, revealed that, at best we were operating on the margin, that the employee body, including the first line supervisors were definitely not on board, that we were perceived to be profligating another “this-too-shall-pass” management system.  

Our very immediate reaction was to back up a couple of steps, rethink, repackage and remarket the G to G concept.  The city manager visited with every work unit and shift over the next six weeks to deliver a succinct message:  we’re jettisoning the book and the jargon of G to G, but we are 100% committed to the principles, values, ethics, culture, standards and discipline of organizations which aspire to be value-added, to be great.  That message has seemed to resonate and sustain.

What were some of the immediate changes/benefits the city realized after implementation?
There were, and are, many.  The organization, while resistant to what was perceived to be too academic, was swift to adopt and adapt to what seemed to be intuitive, common-sensical, appropriate.  “First who, then what” was enthusiastically (as much as organizations are “enthusiastic”) embraced as a concept which should have always been endemic.  Focusing on newly articulated “core competencies,” we emphatically changed our recruitment and selection process to focus on “core competencies” and the best (was it Daniel Pink’s?) public sector interview question ever:  “Are you lucky?”  Even in a highly competitive environment for skilled employees, our hiring authorities became dramatically more selective about their new recruits; on the flip side, they also lasered in on energy-sapping, negative employees who were unfortunately positioned in certain critical places in our organization.  

We dramatically reworked our new employee orientation to emphasize the G to G principles and the value-added nature of public service everywhere, but especially in Arvada.  We’ve focused on nurturing our rising stars and promoting from within.  Succession planning found its place as we tried to keep our people with our values, skills and core competencies in the organization.  We began to identify, nurture, and reward pockets of success, elevating great work, by example, inside the city, to the public and to professional associations (think, AFI!).  

Our organizational conversation (buzz, as it were) intensified dramatically.  And the focal points of that conversation were many, but they remained centered on what we no longer called the “hedgehog,” but rather, the three-legged model of passion for the work, partnerships, and intelligent, thoughtful and creative application of limited resources, surrounded by a stew of effectiveness, efficiency, innovation and technology acceleration.  Fast-forwarding, while we are suffering similar fiscal malady as our sister agencies, the bank of good will that this conversation created has had a certain momentum and positive value that remains (somewhat diminished) through to today.

What were some of the long term goals in implementing the Level 5 Leadership initiatives?
Our goals for our Level 5 leadership initiatives are several:  immediately raise the individual and collective awareness that leadership is intrinsic to almost everyone and may be called upon by circumstances at any time; to shine a light on the great work that’s being done all over this organization with humility, grace, through personal will and diligence; to define the available paths for personal and career progression; to establish an obvious and efficacious succession plan for the organization.  

The foundational and singularly compelling motives for all of our training are:  continual organizational improvement (we can always do better); adding value everyday to the lives of our residents, property and business owners, their employees, and for our visitors (our municipal raison d’etre, no?); fulfilling our role, our part in continuing to build, on the works of our predecessors, a great community (stewardship).

Perhaps paradoxically, we believe that the quickest and surest path to organizational improvement is guided by individual self-awareness, by personal empathy, by building partnerships, senses of interdependence and collaboration, and by leveraging limited resources.  The realities of public sector management and governance mean, among a myriad of other challenges and opportunities, that the preponderance of organizational improvement will be accomplished by people who are already here, and have been for a long time.  

We recognize that creativity, thoughtfulness, problem-solving, leadership (yes, Level 5 leadership), strategic thinking, and tactical excellence have always flowed through our organization like a guerrilla movement that simply needed nurturing in order to blossom into full-fledged organizational change.  That nurturing comes in the forms of training, focused conversations, and “permission.”

How would you describe some of the lessons learned?
Most importantly, we absolutely concur with Jim Collins conclusions that Level 5 Leaders “exist all around us,” among our workforce, our volunteers, our seasonals, temporaries, on our boards and commissions.  We agree that once we achieved even a modicum of understanding of the character traits and behaviors of Level 5 Leadership, these folks are not even that hard to spot, that their actions and outcomes, and the behaviors of those around them, call them out.  We’ve learned that there is an achievable, almost tangible, plane of mutual respect and collaboration among Level 5’s that occurs when they collect around creative and strategic thinking, or tactical and problem solving tasks:  presented with a problem, we bring the right people together to address it; bring the right people together for a conversation and we’ll profit from great collective wisdom.  

In either case, there will be credit all around and credit enough to spill over to the entire organization, city council and, often times, the community as a whole.  We’ve learned that there are key people all around the organization who intervene to keep the flywheel moving, and to overcome counter-productive inertia.  

There are people who, given “permission” and acknowledgement, will form the habit of “speaking truth to power,” initiating the “crucial conversation,” “confronting the brutal facts” that are critical to the health of our culture, to looking ourselves in the mirror, and to the processes of organizational renewal.  Conversely, one of the biggest mistakes that new managers and management teams may make is to assume that the capacity for change, the brilliance for change, does not exist within an existing workforce.  My best guess is that is never the case.  Other lessons learned the hard way include:

In rolling this out to the organization, we would not again use all the jargon from the book.  It may be fine in other organizations, but it failed us here.  We would have taken the lessons and translated them into language already used in the organization so it would not seem like the “flavor of the month management trend.”

We should have involved middle managers and front line staff much earlier in the evolution of the thought process so that they could also own the concepts and learning process from the beginning.

In retrospect, it would have been better if we had prioritized the concepts and put a full implementation plan in place for each individual concept.  For example, we might have started with the “First who, not what” idea and built a recruitment, discipline, and succession plan around that idea.  We might have implemented that idea before jumping into the next concept.  Perhaps in firing all of our ammunition at once, we tended to skim the edges of some of the ideas and marginalize others.

Perhaps we should have identified some metrics near the start of implementation on which we could have better measured the success of our initiatives.  It would have been motivating to everyone to see how our successes were building.

Any other thoughts?
We did find that applying some of the principles out of the book did not work for government; they were geared more toward business and for-profit agencies.  We had the advantage of being able to run up the road to Boulder to discuss our dilemma with Jim Collins.  Collins subsequently published a monograph help us all with this issue.  It is called “Good to Great in the Social Sectors” and is well worth the read.  

One critical instance is with the third circle of the hedgehog concept — the economic engine.  Most government structures are not motivated by profit; this monograph addresses the switch from an economic engine to a resource engine.  “The critical question is not ‘How much money do we make?’ but, rather, ‘How can we develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission?’”

However our results to this point may be judged by an outside observer, we are gratified, but not satisfied, for the effort.  We have improved as a municipal community and the vast majority of citizen feedback reinforces that notion.  We continue to be a work in progress.