Cheese

The City Manager’s role could be defined as Medium Cheddar which is the area between new and aged cheddar cheese. Mild and Sharp cheeses have completely different tastes, Councils and staffs have completely different roles and views. City Managers are involved in facilitating vision, building community, developing policy concepts, championing ethics and being a social reformer with the council. The City Manager then becomes involved in translating the “policy message” from the Council level into clear, actionable and passionate implementation strategies that align with the staff’s culture, performance targets, output capacity and real-life challenges that staff runs into every day.  You have to be the one that can turn their “I can’t” into “I know how.”  To be translator, advocate, driver, caring mentor, performance monitor, communication specialist, planner, and the thousand other roles necessary to keep two very diverse team elements functioning.

COUNCIL

As with any goal oriented organization, the performance of a municipality is based on its ability to function as a team. The council-manager form of government was designed to blend the political and administrative realms into a team by reducing the system of checks and balances that characterize 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 municipality. Although some elected officials prefer to be combative and attempt to frustrate the team relationship between and among members of the council and between the council and the staff, it is critical that the manager prepare the council for this role.

The Council’s role expectations, decision making process and program performance evaluation system will define the quality of the municipal organization. The Council’s roles within an effective team are as political values advocates, policy-makers and feedback system.

Secret Knowledge

Today I read about secret knowledge. I find that secret knowledge and the illusion of knowledge are very similar yet different. The illusion of knowledge is a lack of understanding the facts, secret knowledge is a deliberate ignoring of the facts and or creating stories that project your solution without any intention of using the truth. More information and less fact makes for strange decisions.