Bringing solutions into focus
(Note: updated on July 8th, 2011)
The Novak Consulting Group filed a Municipal Financial Recovery Act Recovery Plan with the city clerk of Harrisburg, PA today. The Executive Summary can be downloaded here, or you can read the full document by clicking here.
You can read the full article here.
You can read full article here.
by Julia Novak & Steven Burkett
Employee empowerment. Collaborative decision making. Servant leadership. These are the leadership buzzwords of contemporary management. With each of these phrases, a manager is provided a mental picture of how a good leader leads an organization.
These phrases describe styles that are effective and important for managers to adapt to their own settings. We cannot, however, use them or anything else as an excuse not to manage. Our profession is, after all, local government management.
The goal of management and the role of the manager are to achieve a balance between ensuring day-to-day services are provided by employees, and creating the optimal environment. The common denominator of all the approaches to leadership and management is to create an organization that attracts talented employees and leads to high performance and quality services.
As local government managers and advisers, we have seen managers being apologetic about doing just that—managing the organization. They are concerned about being labeled micromanagers because they ask questions about operations. They have been told to focus their attention on building relationships, and they interpret that mandate as requiring them to be soft and hands-off.
