a wide range of services to its constituents. Unlike most cities, the vast majority of Sandy Springs’ work is outsourced to private contractors. The entire town has only seven government employees, and the whole Sandy Springs operation “is housed in a generic, one-story industrial park…the people you meet here work for private companies through a variety of contracts.”2
If you apply for a business license in Sandy Springs, want to make a structural change to your home, or need assistance with trash collection, you will work with contractors in Boston, San Francisco, and across the “pond” in Coventry, England. Think this is a one-off experiment that won’t extend to your organization? Consider that the city has no long-term debt and no fleet of vehicles to maintain. While cities like Detroit and Chicago grapple with significant challenges, the first city manager of Sandy Springs, Oliver Porter, met with government leaders in Japan, Iceland, Britain, and the country of Georgia to share the Sandy Springs story. Meanwhile, the current city manager, John McDonough, is producing annual reports with the look and feel of private industry, showing an eight-year winning record and articulating a vision for the future.
Whether you work for local, state, or federal government, volunteer at or run a nonprofit, serve on the board of a charitable hospital, or work in any part of the public sector, competition is present, growing, and intensifying. Yours is a world of competition.
We’re not saying, “Act like a business.” As Jim Collins wrote, “We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sector is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good.”3 Moreover, your organization’s purpose and the measures of success may be very different from those of most businesses. In your world, it is likely that mission is more important than market share, and service trumps profits. Additionally the inherent challenges of enforcing laws, implementing policies, and ensuring public safety or national security rarely correlate with stellar customer-service numbers—after all, the very nature of your work may cause you and your people to say no. For the most part, customers don’t like that word. Throw into the mix the public sector’s unique constraints associated with hiring, positioning, developing, rewarding, promoting, and—at times—terminating employees, and the concept of acting like a business becomes not just difficult but downright naïve to suggest.
We are saying that to be a truly great public-sector organization, you must recognize the pressures that surround you and proactively rise to the challenge. You must see the world as the executive director in our example saw it and put a system in place to ensure success both today and tomorrow as the pressures in the competitive cauldron become more and more intense. This book is a road map for such an operating system.
The Paradigm: Leadership Is a Choice, Not Just a Position
A New Paradigm: Everyone on Your Team Should Be a Leader—And It Is Your Job to Get Them There
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“Leadership is a team sport, and teams require collective leadership.”
–Dave Ulrich
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It Starts With Culture
Think of a top-notch organization you know—one you wholeheartedly tell others to work for, or whose story you share with friends at dinner. Why do you recommend it? What makes it so unique? Or, to put it more forcefully, why is that organization so remarkable, and rare, that you tell stories about it? What causes you to feel so strongly about the organization?
After thirty-plus years of partnering with some of the greatest public- and private-sector organizations and leaders worldwide, we know that top organizations share the most powerful, hard-to-replicate, and sustainable competitive advantage: a winning culture.
We define culture as the collective behavior of your people—what the majority of your people do the majority of the time; the nature of the language and relationships; and the spoken and unspoken values, norms, and systems at work. Winning cultures are filled with superb people who deliver as promised time after time. In the public sector, a wining culture means that customers go to you not just because they must, but because they know you can effectively provide services or support. They give them someone and something to trust. Winning cultures are unique, deliberately designed and maintained, and rare.
Definition:
culture: the collective behavior of your people—what the majority of your people do the majority of the time; the nature of the language and relationships within the culture; and the spoken and unspoken values, norms, and systems at work.
“Winning cultures are filled with superb people who deliver as promised time after time.”
Culture That Stays on Track
In the 1830s, Charles Pearson proposed a rather ingenious, and arguably mad, idea for public transportation. Some fourteen years later, a tunnel began to weave its way under the streets of London. Nine years after that, the first segment of what would become London’s Underground opened for business. Although the system’s original visionary, Charles Pearson, was no longer alive to make the journey, some 30,000 Londoners climbed aboard the Metropolitan Line during its first day of operation.
“Winning cultures are unique, deliberately designed and maintained, and rare.”
Since its opening day in 1863, the Underground has grown to 11 lines, 249 miles of track, and some 270 stations. Transportation for London (TfL) operates the “Tube,” as it has come to be called, and in 2014, it carried a record 1.26 billion travelers, marking an increase of over 33 percent in the last decade.
Keeping pace with the rapid growth of both the city population and passenger numbers is a significant challenge for TfL. Imagine trying to renovate stations, replace aging trains, build new control centers, and upgrade network signals while transporting four million people. One leader said that modernizing the Tube is similar to “doing open-heart surgery whilst the patient is playing tennis.” Those of you in the Washington, D.C., metro area during the update in 2017 can likely relate.
So how does an organization accomplish such a mammoth task without disrupting commuters and frustrating thousands of employees? TfL decided that the answer resided in its ability to build leadership capacity and establish core values. In other words, they needed to deliberately develop a culture that would meet the demands of their ever-expanding mission.
In 2006, TfL began training managers on the organization’s core behaviors of accountability, fairness, consistency, collaboration, and directness. After two years, the general manager of TfL’s Bakerloo Line, Lance Ramsay, believed that to truly achieve the culture he envisioned, he needed to empower his organization’s team members as well.
Ramsay, a TfL employee since 1983, knew how things operated in the Underground. The Tube’s history was heavily influenced by the military and its command-and-control culture. Ramsay determined that his 800 Bakerloo Line team members would benefit from FranklinCovey’s proven process of behavior change. FranklinCovey began by training Ramsay’s leadership team in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® and certifying internal Bakerloo Line facilitators and champions at all levels of Ramsay’s organization.
Just as an individual’s character is tested in crisis, an organization’s culture is exposed under intense pressure. The Bakerloo Line was tested from 2008 to 2013 as it
