The question of “Why do it?” comes to mind when a manager considers making the necessary changes and going through the pain needed for an organization to become a high-performing one. Change always has been a factor in how organizations and societies behave. One significant difference, however, that has arisen during the past century and particularly in the past 25 years, is the pace of that change.

To help put things in perspective, consider that a greeting card that plays “Happy Birthday” today holds more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950. One of the outcomes of this rapid technological advancement is the similarly rapid globalization of the economy. As recently as 20 years ago, our business competition came from adjoining states or regions. Today, it comes from South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Pacific Rim.

Businesses that operate within our jurisdictions and regions—and that employ citizens—are competing daily with increased pressures from outside influences. If our business environment is to remain competitive and to help employ citizens with a high-quality-of-life wage, local governments need to be made high-performing and competitive in providing services. In this way, businesses can remain viable in the marketplace. If we as managers do anything less to help with this effort, we won’t be doing our part.

This article will focus on five principles that the author believes are crucial to implementing high performance in local government. Descriptions of the meanings of the principles are followed by an illustrative example of what has been done by Campbell County, Virginia, over the past five years to make itself a high-performing organization.

Five Principles for Implementation
Here are the principles that need to be implemented for high-performing
success:

Embrace change. Localities working toward high performance will have to undergo fundamental cultural changes to move from technical thinking to adaptive thinking.

Achieve alignment. In order for high performance to exist there must be a shared vision among the democratic process, the political environment, and the organizational climate.

Develop your people assets. Focus on energizing the organization through developing personal, technical, management, and leadership skills in all members.

Adapt your organizational structures. Enable your jurisdiction to accomplish great things by restructuring to allow people to be more creative and entrepreneurial.

Support experimentation and renewal. Understand and commit yourself to the concept of creating a learning environment that enables change and adaptability to occur. Foster out-of-the-box thinking, instill trust, and recognize the importance of failure in building a self-renewing, continuously improving organization.

Embrace Change
Changing the ways we always have done things, along with making the corresponding cultural changes, must occur to foster high performance. The transformation from a hierarchy into an organic, adaptive environment is likely to be long and painful. The metaphor of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly comes to mind.

To add to the difficulties of instituting change, citizens and staff members fall into patterns of dependency that place impossible burdens on those at the top to pull the next rabbit out of the hat. And if the magic fails, we collectively do away with the leaders. Rarely do we blame ourselves for our unsuitable expectations. This is nowhere truer than in the context of government. The democratic process often reflects the fact that the collective leaders have failed to see their roles in the process, have developed unsuitable expectations through a variety of factors—some of their own doing and some of our doing—and have proceeded, albeit not too speedily at times, to expel the offenders and replace them with “better” leaders.

When thinking about cultural change that requires participation, we need to appreciate the differences between technical and adaptive situations. Technical situations can be addressed because the necessary knowledge about them already has been absorbed and reduced to a set of accepted organizational procedures that guide what should be done and who should do it.

Conversely, for many problems, particularly during times of rapid change, no adequate response has yet been developed. Adaptation must take place; habits, attitudes, and values must change; and organizational roles, norms, and procedures have to be relearned. If you think about the traditional command-and-control leaders and their personality attributes, you will see that they are not trained or inclined to invent new norms or role structures but to direct, defend, and maintain order within the established routines.

Achieve Alignment
Three separate environments run concurrently within the local government setting: the democratic process (citizens), the political arena (governing bodies), and operations and service delivery (organizations). For high performance to exist, there must be a shared vision among these three.

If we envision the three to be represented by circles, then high performance can only exist in the area(s) where all three circles overlap. If there is no shared vision and thus no overlap, then high performance is impossible. Maximum performance is possible when all three circles exactly overlap and have the appearance of being one. A coordinated dynamic needs to be maintained so that there is continual alignment among efforts and any chaos that is caused does not become uncontrolled. If one element is changed, then the others need to change as well so the overlap can continue to exist and the process can keep its effectiveness.

An unsuccessful example of an effort toward this outcome can be seen in the commonwealth of Virginia’s recent move to phase out the personal property tax on automobiles, with the resulting budget woes. Disequilibrium was generated during this process that put the program at risk and, in many political analysts’ minds, resulted in the removal of the incumbent political party from the governor’s office.

In this case, there was no shared vision among the democratic process, the political process, and the organization (the various local governments and state agencies). From a democratic-process perspective, the constituency at first supported the political approach; however, the lack of full disclosure, as well as a failure to consider honest input from the “organization,” resulted in a low-performance political strategy. In short, the proposal failed to disclose the true cost of the tax reduction in terms of service delivery, and it ultimately—and unnecessarily—triggered uncontrolled conflict.

Another option would have been to explore openly the needs of the three groups, identify possible options, and be open, honest, and direct regarding the strengths and weaknesses of each proposal and each alternative. This approach would have allowed for a shared vision and for successful, high-performance adaptation to occur.

Develop People Assets
Energize your organization by developing needed skills in all of your members. First, the organizational environment, individuals, and groups must have the traits and attributes necessary to effect the incorporation of high performance into the organizational culture.

Second, flexibility must exist on both the personal and the organizational levels to adapt to the needs of the situation. Gaining the ability to recognize and anticipate the needs of the situation and to provide organizational members with the skills to adapt is necessary to achieve effectiveness in the 21st century.

Individual skill flexibility will play an important role in organizational effectiveness. Everyone within the organization must possess a skill set that includes leadership, management, technical, and personal skills (within the context of the individual’s responsibilities). This model shifts responsibility from an external- to internal-control perspective.

Basic to this notion is the assumption that every organizational member has the attributes that can help identify the needs of the situation and help make the changes necessary to adapt to the emerging circumstances. This is in contrast to situational-contingency and fixed-attribute theories and expands the personal set of skills for effective organizational members to include the ability to self-assess, organizationally assess, and adapt to environments that can change in relatively short order. Tomorrow’s high-performing organizations will be those that can help employees develop and exercise these personal attributes.

Individual customer service providers, for example, will have to recognize the need to provide leadership among their peers by taking the initiative to make changes that bring about better ways to provide customer service. They can no longer wait for other organizational groups to figure out that what they are doing is not in the best interests of citizens, the organization, or themselves. The adapting takes place on the front lines, and the organization must be willing and able to provide support.

Another example would be organizational members who are needed to shift assignments. High performance requires that they possess the ability to reassess their situations and to apply the appropriate techniques where the needs are clearly different, as they are in administrative operations as opposed to emergency response. This ability to reassess the case and to apply different skills is no less critical for the high-performing manager as for the front-line emergency responder.

Many organizations overlook a fundamental priority in order to become more adaptive, and that priority is personal balance within organizational members. In a metamorphosis as tough as from the caterpillar to butterfly, humans need to be helped to accomplish personal change and to find balance from within. Individual health and balance are the foundations for any effective cultural change process and the prerequisites for acquiring effective technical, management, and leadership skills.

Author and novelist Rumor Godden’s model suggests that we all have “four rooms” within us that reflect our emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental (or intellectual) selves. Simply speaking, individual balance occurs when we visit all four rooms and “exercise” within them so that their sizes develop equally. When this occurs, we attain a personal balance and can achieve a purposeful centeredness.

The model further suggests that we all have preferences to “exercise” in one room more than others and, therefore, fall out of balance. How many of us know someone who has exercised their mental capabilities, and the size of this room overpowers their others? Or someone who is exercised emotionally, spiritually, or physically but sacrifices their intellectual time and becomes unbalanced?

Unfortunately, in our society, we tend to take these capacities for granted and don’t think to develop them systematically in the service of self-understanding and wisdom, particularly in our workplaces. We act as if, magically, our work is somehow dissociated from our intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical selves.

Adapt Organizational Structures
Enable your local government to accomplish great things by restructuring it and allowing staff members to be more creative and entrepreneurial. As individuals within the environment acquire new skill sets, structural adaptations should occur to remove roadblocks and allow functioning at the next level.

As organizations become more oriented toward service flexibility and cost-effectiveness, use of networks will increase, staff are likely to decrease in numbers or remain stable, and mid-level managers will become less critical to fulfilling objectives. Employees and the organization must be positioned to deal with the inherent flexibility needed to achieve this outcome.

It should be apparent, then, that as a result of placing more decision making at the appropriate points, in conjunction with structural changes, our organizational values, vision, and goals need to be clearly articulated and reinforced consistently. These should include the need for decision making based on an identified, principled foundation. Several structures to work toward after moving away from the traditional top-down, hierarchical, and cross-functional models include the matrix, integrated network, adaptive network, and dynamic anticipative models.

Matrix systems seek to eliminate the “distance” and formal communications structures that are more typical in cross-functional models. Integrated networks have a core organization at the center and operating nodes interconnected through a series of designated channels. Just-in-time resources emerge as the communications and self-coordination elements increase exponentially.

The elements of adaptive networks have no apparent visual attachment to one another but instead influence other elements by using core values and operating principles. A defining attribute is that equilibrium is maintained until a component is added, removed, or modified. Dynamic anticipative systems take on a life of their own and actually “predict” change, in effect.

These systems are characterized by components that move about without an obvious sense of purpose, finding balance and adapting instinctively, depending upon the present and future needs of the system. These systems resemble the ecosystems and biological balances and interactions that exist in nature, but with greater anticipative reasoning capacity, and are the most enduring structures.

Support Experimentation and Renewal
An organization must understand and commit itself to the concept of fostering a learning environment that enables change and adaptability to occur. It must continuously look at what is being done, why it is being done, and how it is being done, while seeking ways to pool resources at every opportunity—whether they are internal or external resources or public/public or public/private partnerships.

Look for new ways to provide services despite imaginary boundaries and parochial interests, and then implement these approaches when they represent better ways to carry out your purpose. Clearly define what the “right” things are that should be done. “Doing more with less” should mean focusing resources on doing the right things right.

To start off any successful effort to develop a “learning organization” and to initiate continuous renewal, it is absolutely imperative that high levels of trust exist within the organization. Trust is a lubricant for human relations. Without it, the mechanisms of interaction are damaged and will grind to a stop. Because of this, our reliance on the commitments of coworkers, management, and others must be an organizational value and instilled in the culture.

Developing trust through open, honest, and direct communications is a seriously underrated value in many organizations yet is crucial to achieving high performance. To develop effective relationships, managers must change their perspectives on how they manage implicit and explicit contracts in interpersonal relationships. People often look at contracts as means of ensuring compliance instead of ensuring that everyone knows what is going on and what is expected of them.

When a contract is broken, we have traditionally begun punitive action for compliance. But we need to shift our frame of reference to a positive posture, instill trust, and use our contracts as agreements, expecting that involvement will be based on achieving the intent of the objectives instead of on meeting the letter of the contract. One approach calls for restrictive behavior and holds people back, while the other opens positive opportunities to move forward.

If we allow the individuals who are directly involved in the provision of a service to be directly responsible for the expected organizational performance, we will find trust, responsibility, accountability, and ultimately the highest levels of empowerment. These assets will in turn result in highly effective service delivery and high performance.

A Case in Point: Campbell County, Virginia
Five years ago, Campbell County embarked on a comprehensive strategic improvement process focused on developing a high-performance learning organization that could respond more effectively to the changing needs of the community. One core element in the county’s efforts was to change the way people both within and outside the organization thought about their responsibilities to anticipate change and the effect of these thoughts on service delivery.

The amount of time and resources required to implement such a deep-seated improvement process should not be underestimated. This point must be fully realized up-front and supported by all of the key players. Campbell County expected to take five years in getting the initial transformation process to function appropriately in the desired environment. Longer-term organizational goals would take from five to 20 years.

Shortly after beginning the process, the staff involved a variety of stakeholders, including the public, elected officials, and organizational members, in a strategic visioning exercise that produced the 7-Step Performance Improvement Planning Process. The process involved clearly articulating the purpose (1), the values and operating principles (2), our leadership commitment (3), a strategy for succeeding (4), our current reality (5), issues to address (6), and, ultimately, the future (7) that we wanted to create. Goals and objectives are updated annually, after obtaining citizen input and incorporating it into the comprehensive plan. Strategic plans are then updated and used to develop operating budgets and update long-term capital plans.

We knew that we needed to become more adaptive to meet county goals, and it was imperative that the county’s service strategy be reformulated from the traditional top-down management style. Basic to this premise was the implementation of a learning strategy that supported individual improvement.

We needed to eliminate fear-based practices and to implement strategies that allowed people to take risks in order to respond to the external environment and produce innovation that provided results. These results had to be based on a set of clear values and operating principles, a need that would involve sharing power (information and decision making) and building the kind of trust that was not pervasive in the past.

It also meant practicing what we preached. Two examples of how we did this included our instituting electronic board books and publishing a county-wide newsletter. If the governing body is not using the structure and current technology that you are working on within the organization and community, like using electronic board books, it becomes more difficult for local officials to make decisions on such related issues as economic development and education.

Campbell County also developed and publishes a county-wide newsletter that is mailed to each county home twice a year. The newsletter tells about current events, organizational changes under way, and the reasons for making the changes. It is a means of disseminating information and soliciting input from the community, keeping them involved.

One important element in the county’s efforts was the simultaneous implementation and use of an in-house Web site that houses such information as organizational structure, rosters, adopted goals and objectives, and related documents that we are compiling, along with the newsletter. This information is available to all employees and citizens.

Once we had identified where we were and where we wanted to be, we assigned key “front” leaders and began an educational program geared to providing our employees with the skills necessary to survive in the new environment. We implemented the strategy with an understanding that we didn’t want any casualties and were making accommodation for that risk. Fortunately, there have been few, and these occurred when the articulated values and operating principles of the organization conflicted significantly with personal ones.

The key fronts we identified as needing attention were technology, infrastructure development, quality of life, organizational development, education, and regional cooperation. These fronts did not align with the traditional divisional concept or processes and were a fundamental change in the way staff looked at improvement. It removed barriers between traditionally competitive operations within the organization. Part of our renewal process will be to reevaluate these fronts regularly to see if they are still effective or if they need to be reformulated.

We started work by establishing teams that separated management work, which attends to day-to-day production activities, from leadership work, which focuses on people and future states. Listed in the box below are the six team types, along with the structures they currently operate within.
 
 

Performance improvement teams (PITs), with five to seven core members, were developed for each front. All PIT members make up the county’s innovation team (some 50 members), which functions as the organizational leadership team.

PITs meet monthly and come together quarterly as the innovation team. During their monthly meetings, PITs discuss and review performance-improvement objectives statements: documents that outline how we are going to accomplish projects and change programs. Functional departments generate the objectives in conjunction with PITs.

PIT membership is based on what value the individual brings to the team within a particular front. We have a core membership in each team with the provision that ad hoc membership is appropriate for specific projects. The technology team, for example, has five core members. Membership cuts across horizontal and vertical lines within the organization to get a broad perspective. The team facilitator comes from the information systems staff. Membership is selected by the leadership team, and based on the representation, diversity, and value-added aspects that an individual brings to the table.

Monitoring and constantly reinforcing our values, our vision, and our operating principles have been significant challenges. Once all of these started to sink in, however, it became much easier to manage the process. I think this is an important point with any kind of change in today’s environment. Make a change incrementally, and make sure that one thing sticks before you move on to the next. I struggle with this because it is not the “model” that I would normally use in a major restructuring. My temptation is to make a clean cut and build it over. I realize, however, that this temptation is not totally realistic in this environment.  A local government is not a building site!

Our current educational program focuses both on personal and on professional development programs. The personal development program has been accomplished through the implementation of what we call the Campbell County Lunch Bunch. Two lunch sessions are provided monthly that last about one hour each. They are voluntary for most people, unless the department leader feels that a particular skill set is lacking for an individual.

This program has been a tremendous success and has attracted employees in large part because the content’s focus is on personal mastery issues and not directly on work-related skills. Individuals are exposed to six personal development programs during the course of the year.

The professional development portion focuses on three areas: leadership skills, management skills, and core technical competencies, which are required to function within specified job positions. These are mandatory training requirements matched to the needs of individuals and based on a gap analysis that is done regularly. The training providers vary depending upon the type of activity needed and the resources available. All of the training is being done within the context of team-based skills development, to help transfer and reinforce operating knowledge to the entire organization.

As Campbell County slowly enhances its learning organization, the staff will continue to see major improvements in innovative thinking, resource maximization, high-quality service delivery, unparalleled cooperation, and teamwork, in an area that previously has produced parochial and ordinary results. By using the five principles, the county is seeing the formation of a learning environment and an evolution of high performance that will ultimately provide the best possible services, more effectively, for citizens and businesses. 

R. David Laurrell is county administrator, Campbell County, Virginia.