How long have you been manager at Sarasota County?  Almost 12 years.

How much change has the organization undergone during your time as manager?
Pretty significant change.  I was brought in with a primary directive to create a more responsive and transparent organization that would change the nature of our relationship with the community.  Operating within the mantra that we will be a smaller, competitively compensated, accountable team.  The balanced scorecard provides the model for balancing these four sometimes components of organizational vision.  Within the context of accountability we have evolved our culture and also encouraged the development of a financial ethic based upon temperance and thrift.  And yet we pay at and above market salaries while having kept our workforce flat (and in fact reduced in these tougher times).

By first eliminating departments and reorganizing around purpose/function we went from 23 departments and a typical hierarchical organizational design to 7 Business Centers with an organizational design reflective of a neuron.  We are now evolving to a full matrix structure that we call “The Weave.”

While there has been significant structural change and accountability driven through the requirement to work around performance measures, the real change has been in culture.  Culture is the key to everything.  Changing culture, adapting culture to some vision or purpose is the hardest thing I have ever done and it has challenged my patience and my will.

How do you encourage innovation within your organization?
Trust, trust, trust.  You have to create an environment, a culture, where people are accountable AND have the right to fail.  By accountable I in part mean that their intentions are purposeful and founded in the same ethic that I project as part of a leadership vision, which in turn permits ”me” (or management) to trust them in turn.

Considering out of crisis grows opportunity, has these economic times been helpful in inspiring innovation?
Oh you bet.  But we have been able to take advantage of the opportunities because we prepared ourselves by taking a realistic and long term view of what sustainability means from a local government financial perspective.  

That means that we:

1) had to realistically accept the need to plan financially for emergencies (hurricanes), and

2) respect and incorporate the business cycle into our financial planning accepting that we may not be able to predict the frequency or amplitude, but we can do contingency planning.  

We also had to be willing to act quickly to trim costs and drop money to the bottom line when faced with an emergency, even if the choices were difficult (layoffs) because they were inevitable.

Anyway,  that mindset along with years of hard work that created a culture that nurtures creativity really put us in a position to see the challenge as an opportunity and to strike quickly and move some innovation.  In fact the crisis was the final kick in the pants that gave us the incentive to jump off the diving board and move to “The Weave.”

As a manager, how vital is innovation to you as a leader?
We like to believe that we can plan for a desired future, but the reality is that we live in a complex world where many things are out of our control.  I do not believe in traditional strategic planning as the means to overcome that uncertainty.  I instead believe that scenario planning is the best way to realistically develop contingencies for likely futures.  We have to be adaptive and organic and this mind set is in part necessary to be innovative.  

Jim Ley is the former County Administrator of Sarasota County, FL.  Jim is a retired member of the Alliance Board of Directors.  In 2009 the county was honored with the Muehlenbeck Award for Innovation for their Economic Stimulus Program.  Learn more about Sarasota County by visiting their web site at www.scgov.net.