Help Him Lead To: The City Manager of Zenith City From: Bob Behn Re: Fixing the Building Department Date: April, 1999 To improve productivity and eliminate the backlog at the Building Department, you need to set performance targets, organize the work force into teams, create friendly competition among these teams, establish a sense of accomplishment, and help Reyes become a leader of his department. SET PERFORMANCE TARGETS To improve productivity, you need to know what real productivity looks like. This means that you and Reyes have to establish a set of performance standards. How long should the plan-review process take for a garage? How long should it take for a 10-story office building? Reyes needs to create a group—call it the “performance team”—to create permit categories and establish performance standards for each category. From the beginning, you and Reyes need to make it clear to this team that these performance targets have to be “stretch” targets. The Zenith City Building Department needs to improve its productivity so that it ranks with the best of the building departments in similar cities. The performance team has to set targets that will significantly improve productivity. This team also needs to set a timetable for eliminating the backlog. Until you know precisely how big the backlog is, you can’t create any final targets. But you do have enough data now to get a rough estimate; so let the team work this information. Again, these have to be stretch targets. You can’t promise the citizens that you will eliminate the backlog by 2009. ORGANIZE THE WORKFORCE INTO TEAMS Don’t assign permit requests to individuals. Assign them to teams. You can create teams for different sections of the city, or you can create teams for different types of permits. It doesn’t make much difference as long as you and Reyes balance the workload among these teams. Then give each team a set of monthly and annual targets: targets for its productivity, and targets for eliminating its backlog. Don’t even keep data on individuals. Only collect data for teams. This smooths out any unfairness created by specific targets for broad categories. The plans for some office buildings are more complicated to review than are the plans for others. But if targets are set correctly for each category, these differences will average out. And the team members who draw the more complicated plans wouldn’t be penalized. CREATE FRIENDLY COMPETITION Post the performance of all teams against their targets where everyone will see it. Create a series of simple tables: What was each team’s backlog-reduction target for last month? By how much did it actually reduce its backlog? By how much is each team ahead or behind the trajectory needed to achieve its annual target? You can post this information by the coffeepot, in the elevator or on the Building Department’s Web page. Such a table will give everyone three pieces of information: (1) It will tell each team how well it is doing. (2) It will tell each team how well everyone else is doing. (3) And it will tell each team that everyone else knows how well it is doing. This last piece of information will create friendly competition. Once one team starts to make its monthly performance target, no team will want to miss its own goal. No team will want to look bad to their colleagues. ESTABLISH A SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT Promote the accomplishments of the Building Department and its teams. Schedule Reyes to make periodic presentations to the city council about the reduction in the backlog. Make sure that he personally congratulates each team that makes its monthly targets—not just the team that does the best, but every team that makes its targets. At the end of the year, you should hold a ceremony in your office, the city council chambers or wherever is appropriate. Congratulate each team that made its annual productivity goal. Again, don’t just recognize the best team; publicly praise the accomplishment every team that achieves its stretch target. HELP REYES BECOME A LEADER Don’t just tell Reyes what he should do. Explain to him why you are doing it. Help him understand how he can motivate the members of each team by creating competition—team competition, friendly competition, competition against a goal, competition in which every team can win. Explain to him how this kind of competition among teams creates performance incentives within each team. Help him understand how a clear sense of accomplishment can motivate both teams and individuals. And make sure that Reyes gets credit—with the city council, with the public, and with his department—for creating the management system that improves productivity. Agree or disagree? If you think you have a better way to deal with this month's Manager's Choice dilemma, or would like to expand on Bob Behn's approach, share your thoughts with other readers here. Send your solution to mailbox@governing.com. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes). To see responses posted by other readers, click here. Manager's Choice | Governing home page Copyright © 1999, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing and City & State are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.