Chief Operating Officer (COO) Ronne Froman’s resignation from San Diego City government offers Mayor Sanders an opportunity to hire a new COO with private sector experience running large, multi-faceted organizations. Here is hoping that he seizes it.
When Sanders announced Admiral Froman as his unofficial running mate, many San Diegans felt their partnership made sense. She had experience turning around troubled organizations and reforming byzantine management systems that stifled organizations and made them extremely inefficient. The reform efforts she led at Navy Region Southwest, the Red Cross and City Schools were well received and she brought a focus and expertise on, as she calls it, “fixing the plumbing”. Any organization, such as the City, that couldn’t tell the public what properties it owned or how many contracts it was a party to needed to have its administrative services overhauled and systems reworked. For helping the City right its administrative ship, Admiral Froman deserves thanks and recognition from the citizens of San Diego.
If the first phase of municipal recovery required attention to overhauling systems and reforming process, the next round of challenges that the City faces requires experience with making transformative management changes. As we have talked about in this column in the past, the City of San Diego doesn’t just need to become more efficient and develop better administrative systems. Additionally, it needs to fundamentally rethink how it approaches problems. For instance, in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has shown how flatter organizational charts, open offices, and a focus on informal team formation can fundamentally alter how government solves problems. The ability to bring different managers together quickly dramatically speeds up the exchange of information. Creativity is unleashed and, by being able to “walk the bullpen,” Mayor Bloomberg is able to assemble the kind of ad-hoc teams that help quickly solve and address small problems before they can fester and grow into large dilemmas. At the San Diego Institute for Policy Research, we believe in the value of these kinds of management techniques. Having a private sector COO can bring these and other lessons to the City and help San Diego realize its full potential.
Transformational thinking could help, for example, with employee retention, recruitment and morale. This remains a critical issue for the City. Only time will tell whether the raises provided to police officers in the FY 08 contract will ultimately help fill academy classes and stem the loss of experienced officers. That said, the acrimony evident during the dispute over the firefighter’s contract shows that the gap between management and labor remains large. Labor-management relations will be a particular challenge given that future salary increases are problematic as the City’s budget is under severe strain because of the failures and wreckless spending of the past.
A private sector view could help. While government usually looks at raising taxes as the first option, in the private sector there is often a need to keep employee morale high even when revenues are flat and salary increases are not an option. Faced with such challenges, successful private sector executives get creative. Even simple things, like setting aside significant amounts of time each day to meet informally with front-line workers, can go a long way toward helping keep morale up when financial times are hard.
Transformational thinking would also help the City improve Mayor-Council relations. In many ways, the Council is somewhat analogous to a private sector board of directors. Although there are obvious differences the Council, like a successful board of directors, has to be in the business of setting broad policies and providing oversight. They are partners with management, each serving an important role in the successful governance of the enterprise. As the dust-ups of the past year over budget making and oversight attest, there is room for improving the flow of information between the Mayor and the Council. A COO with experience in how to keep directors informed about a company’s activities could help shift the City’s management culture toward one of event greater transparency, openness and collaboration.
Would a private sector COO solve all the City’s ills? No. But a private sector COO could bring new approaches to an organization which, now that some of the plumbing has been repaired, needs to think about entirely new ways of organizing and running the municipal enterprise.
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