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.
The legitimacy of an individual council member’s power comes directly from the electorate, but respect and influence cannot be presumed; they have to be earned through action. The manager’s position, however, comes from professional qualifications to manage and provide policy guidance. In contrast with members of the council, the local government manager and professional staff benefit from a long-term familiarity with issues, specialization, and technical expertise and also from an organizational structure familiar to all.
As we know, linking politics and the work of a governing body with the management of government involves an ongoing set of tasks and challenges. The idea of council-manager government is that political and administrative realms can be in partnership and not dependent on the system of checks and balances that characterizes our state and federal governments, where separation of legislative and executive powers is valued.
The relationship between the manager and the elected officials sets a tone for the entire local government. Although some elected officials shy away from acknowledging a team or partner relationship between and among members of council and between the council and the staff, it is critical that the professional manager prepares the council for its work.
In part, this takes place as the manager helps the council build its capacity to work as a body, earning respect for one another and in an effective partnership with staff. In this article, we set out some of the ways the manager can facilitate the building of council capacity.
