By Mike Conduff

Under the able guidance of former mayor and current Executive Director Clarence Anthony, the National League of Cities is reimagining its annual conference pre-training as The NLC University. I was honored to represent ICMA this year by providing a half-day training session on council-manager relationships with my friend and colleague Jim Hunt who is a former mayor, past president of the National League of Cities, and 28-year elected official.

As part of our opening remarks, we asked attendees to give us their “elevator speech” of who they were, where they were from, how many years they had served in either elected or appointed office, and why they had come to our session. These were people who had self-selected to attend, paid a fee, and invested at least an extra day in the conference. We were pleased that there was full attendance, and that it was evenly divided between the policy and administrative components.

Jim recorded the years of service as people introduced themselves on the two halves of our flip-chart pad—one side for elected and one side for appointed. The results were extremely interesting in that the elected half of the room had tenures ranging from 10 months (essentially newly elected) to seven years, along with plenty of two-, three-, and four-year responses. The numbers for professional administrators ranged from a low of five years to a high of 28, with several more than 20.

Governance Glue

We used that flip-chart pad as exhibit number one for the need for a good governance structure. Clearly, the elected officials are the link with residents, and just as clearly, they are the ones who use that linkage to determine the outcome and value proposition direction for the organization—in the language of Policy Governance®: “What good, for which people, at what cost?”

On the other hand, the clear responsibility for implementation and achievement of the outcomes rests with the much longer tenured professional managers and their teams.

It is this governance structural interface that so clearly acts as the glue that keeps everything working. When it is strong, understood, and implemented well, things operate fairly smoothly. When it is weak, misunderstood, or poorly implemented chaos results.

It was also why folks had come, the essential responses being these: “We have no cohesiveness between our council and our manager.” “We haven’t done a performance appraisal of our city manager for several years, and I have no clue what he does.” “We have several new councilmembers who are younger than most of our senior staff, and we are having a hard time relating to each other.” “I just survived a close vote for termination of my contract, and I need to understand how to do things differently.”

Again, we used the flip-chart pad as a springboard into a discussion of how a good governance system allows for clarity of roles, eliminates misunderstandings, and empowers all parties in the equation. Jim likes to call it “dancing in the fishbowl.” It takes skill, practice, and a great script.

Using our book The OnTarget Board Member – 8 Indisputable Behaviors as our framework, Jim and I used lots of stories to illustrate that, as a group, the councilmembers must connect with their citizen owners, understand their roles, set targets for the staff, assess risk, delegate achievement, determine progress, stay disciplined, and report back to their citizen owners.

Being Understood

On the staff side, we used additional anecdotes and examples to demonstrate that helping the elected officials develop and understand this framework, and then, as an appointed professional, to act within the framework, creates the powerful connection necessary to build trust and accelerate accomplishment.

As we closed the session, we thanked everyone for attending and encouraged them to take the learning home. This is, of course, the old Covey adage that, if one of us gets smarter, all of us should benefit from that.

If any of the reasons that these folks invested in this training apply to you, remember that, as the typically much longer tenured and experienced partner in the governance process, we have a responsibility to elected officials to help them understand what they have gotten themselves into and how they can enjoy their public dance more by developing their skills, practicing these skills productively, and staying on script with their governance process.

We can’t govern for them, but we can help them learn to govern well.