As managers, we often have the tendency to look at our organizations as good, or even excellent, in terms of our service provision.  After all, we are professionals, as are our senior staff members, and we've spent a lot of time doing the important managerial work in our organizations--strategic plans, budgetary forecasting,  benchmarking, performance measurements, professional development, and the like.   We also have good ratings from our community surveys and our residents support our programs and generally seem happy.  Our employees are happy and do a good job.  We also don't have many people show up at Council meetings, so things must be pretty good.  Sound familiar?

Many years ago, I heard a presentation from a gentleman who was President of the Taft Broadcasting Company.  The message he delivered was "When you stop getting better, you cease to be good."   Many years later, Jim Collins made the argument that "Good is the Enemy of Great."   For me, these are powerful words for those of us in local government management. 

Ensuring that you are always "getting better" or not just settling for "Good," we have to take the time to assess our work, even in the best of times.  Assessment often involves being aware of new leading practices for local government managers, looking to our peers for innovative approaches to our work, getting involved in organizations and technical assistance experts that expose us to innovation and creativity (like the Alliance for Innovation and ICMA and its new Center for Management Strategies), as well as looking to our internal "experts" and "leaders" among our staff as well as our community members for new and different ways of doing things. 

Once we have learned about these innovative and effective approaches, we have to challenge ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and actually start doing things differently to ensure that our "Good" doesn't become the enemy of our "Great!

AFI and ICMA will be jointly sponsoring a forum session at the ICMA Conference on Sunday, October 7th from 12:45 to 2:45 on this topic.  Our service providers, the Commonwealth Centers for High Performance Organizations and the Center for Priority Based Budgeting will also be conducting free mini assessments for interested managers at the Center for Management Strategies booth in the Exhibit Hall at the Conference and both providers also have indepth organizational assessment instruments that can assist you in determining improvement steps for your organization.