Robert Francis
rfrancis@bizpress.net
Paul K. Harral
pharral@bizpress.net
The way City Manager David Cooke figures it, Fort Worth city employees ought to be in demand by other cities.
That’s one of the reasons he recently changed some of the responsibilities of his assistant city managers. At the meeting where Cooke announced the changes, he told the assistants that they should all develop the skills necessary to be city managers on their own someday.
Cooke confirmed that in a recent interview and expanded the concept.
“I’m going to broader than that because I believe it to this level: I believe we ought to have an entire workforce that could get a job somewhere else because they kept their skills current and valuable. And then it is our job as an organization to figure out how to keep them,” Cooke said.
Cooke manages an approximately $1.6 billion city government enterprise with about 6,600 employees. He will celebrate four years as Fort Worth’s city manager in June.
Cooke holds both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to the Fort Worth job, he spent more than 13 years as county manager and four years as deputy county manager in Wake County, North Carolina, and 12 years with the city of Charlotte.
WORKING HORIZONTALLY
Cooke says he believes city staff members should work horizontally across departments rather than vertically within in them wherever possible.
Given Fort Worth’s explosive growth, efficiency in managing city services is very important.
“About every four or five years, we add a city of 100,000 people,” Cooke said in an earlier Fort Worth Business Press interview, “so think of just the infrastructure that’s required for a city of 100,000 people.”
Cooke says his core focus is in four areas: giving exceptional customer service; maintaining a long-term perspective; stressing partnerships to provide services and solve complex public policy problems; and planning and implementing the infrastructure needs of a growing city.
“When you think of many of the things we need to do in a city, we just organize in departments to facilitate a flow of work,” he said. “But when you think about issues to the public, they don’t really equate that to how we organize.”
Residents don’t care how the work flows.
“If you have a traffic problem or a crime problem, they just want you to solve crime and traffic,” he said. “Well, crime is not just the responsibility of the police department, although that’s what we primarily think. But it also could be a product of how we’ve done planning and zoning. It could be related to economic development. It could be neighborhood services need to be involved. So it’s bigger than any single department.”
City departments report to an assistant city manager, who in turn reports to Cooke.
In addition to giving assistant city managers (ACMs) experience in a new or different area, the realignment is also designed to tighten the bonds that make horizontal management work, Cooke said.
THE ASSISTANTS
Fort Worth has four assistant city managers, Valerie Washington, Susan Alanis, Fernando Costa and Jay Chapa. Washington was hired after then-assistant city manager Charles Daniels retired, and Chapa was promoted to the position from department head.
That led to a first realignment of duties for the assistant city manager staff.
“I mentioned to each of the assistant city managers that we were going to mix some stuff up at that time,” Cooke said, telling them, “‘Don’t get attached to your departments ‘cause at some point in time we’re going to change them again.’”
Cooke said that when he arrived in Fort Worth city departments were acting autonomously to a large extent without a corporate theme or approach.
An example:
Leasing and purchasing of land and property was being handled at the individual department level, and one of Cooke’s first steps was to create a property management department to deal with that task from a corporate rather than a decentralized standpoint.
Expanding the number of assistant city managers from three and reassigning departments happened a year or so into his tenure.
“It struck me that this is a good time to mix it up again and change around some of the relationships and arrangements,” he said.
The idea a couple of years ago and still today is to create breadth of experience in the assistant city manager team and to give the individuals experience in areas where they might not have had a background.
It’s also a chance to get fresh eyes on city issues with the help of experienced managers.
“Part of the benefit is some of the assistant managers become the teachers,” sharing knowledge and concerns from their experience, Cooke said. “It builds also, I think, a little more teamwork among the assistant city managers as they have to work on some of these handoffs.”
Cooke said the reassignments also cause departments to work in different scenarios with other employees, creating different relationships among peers and managers.
Cooke said that Costa has been either the planning director or over the planning department his entire time with the city.
“Now, planning and development is under Jay Chapa,” Cooke said. “Jay will still lean on Fernando for his experience.”
Cooke left some departments under the city manager who had been responsible for them and reassigned other departments. And he left in place some horizontal assignments that cut across departments.
“Jay’s been economic development director and he took it when he became an assistant city manager. Now economic development is under Susan Alanis. She’ll still lean on Jay and Jay’s expertise, but it gives her an opportunity to learn a little bit more about economic development,” Cooke said.
Police switched from Washington to Chapa, but she continues to be the liaison for the Fire Department and for the Police Department’s 3E Action Plan, designed in response to concerns raised by a group of black ministers about the department’s interaction with the city.
“I knew that Valerie had spent a lot of time developing those relationships with the ministers and the chief. There was no reason to change that immediately,” Cooke said.
Costa continues as liaison with the Race and Culture Task Force and the education initiative that cross department lines. Alanis continues on transit issues, fire health, the Fort Worth Zoo, the new Dickies Arena and the Botanic Garden Strategic Plan. Chapa will continue to deal with the Stockyards, 2018 bond program that goes to the voters May 5 and legislative initiatives.
Costa said the reassignments are a way to broaden the scope of each assistant’s experience.
“According to our theory of horizontal management, we expect department heads to make decisions about issues that are essentially internal to their own departments, but they should defer to the city manager’s office – i.e. to the city manager and the four ACMs acting together – about issues that affect multiple departments or the organization as a whole,” Costa said.
“Under this theory, the ACMs are largely interchangeable and the reassignment of departments among the ACMs should not significantly affect how the departments perform their work,” he said.
Alanis said she’s excited about the opportunities with her new portfolio.
“Shaking things up allows the city manager’s team to be more knowledgeable, ask better questions and work more effectively together,” Alanis said. “I am especially looking forward to implementation of the Economic Development Strategic Plan and the conversations regarding transit in our community.”
Washington said that none of the changes were a surprise. Cooke had warned her before she even started that she should not get too attached to specific departments because they would change.
“It’s to our advantage to develop additional experience if we want to become a city manager on our own at some point in time,” she said.
Washington said she was pleased to retain the ties with the E-3 program and with the faith-based community as it relates to the Police Department.
Chapa has been an ACM for almost three years.
“I am looking forward to the changes and the opportunity to get into new areas of city management that will allow me to broaden my experience,” Chapa said. “I am the type of person who enjoys a challenge and working with new departments will allow me to both learn and provide a new perspective to the various initiatives these departments are working on.”
PROS AND CONS
Employees typically value opportunities for professional development, said Hettie Richardson, professor and chair of the Management, Entrepreneurship and Leadership Department at Texas Christian University.
“At the same time, employees don’t like cross-training simply for the sake of cross-training. They need to understand why they are expected to cross-train and how it can contribute to their own careers,” Richardson said.
“Because there are both pros and cons to a competitive workforce, there are organizations that embrace the idea, as well as those that shun it,” she said.
The risk is that other organizations will, in fact, like to poach employees because of their knowledge, skills and abilities.
“If not approached from a holistic perspective, there is certainly the possibility that you’ll foot the bill to train and develop employees who end up putting their newly gained human capital to work in another company,” Richardson said.
“The key is to develop highly employable employees while at the same time creating an overall work environment where they believe they can thrive and where they will want to stay. This means addressing parallel issue like job design, career paths and succession planning, pay and benefits, opportunities for voice and participation, and fairness,” she said.
David G. Allen, associate dean for graduate programs at the TCU Neeley School of Business, says such cross-training is an increasingly important part of the exchange relationship between individuals and organizations.
“The organization will help the individual gain valuable skills and experiences that the individual can use to build a career, whether with the current employer or with another. This builds the organization’s bench strength (talent who could move into larger roles) and also builds employee engagement and goodwill,” Allen said.
A result, he said, is that even when employees leave, they will be good alumni ambassadors and perhaps even great “boomerang” employees who return at some point in the future.
STAY FOR THE RIGHT REASONS
Cooke understands the risks but thinks the payoff in developing competency and expertise staff-wide outweigh them.
It’s not that he wants people to leave. He wants people to be long-term employees of the city, but for the right reason.
“If you’re not helping people get skilled and keeping their skills marketable, then you’re trapping people in an organization for all the wrong reasons,” Cooke said in the interview. “So I’d rather have the other way. I’d rather us make sure that the people are skilled and marketable, and our job is figuring out how to keep them.”
Cooke says he telegraphed the changes to department heads a month or two early to give them time to push back if they wished. He also shared the plans with the City Council and with Mayor Betsy Price.
Cooke said he was comfortable with his decisions on the changes, and the staff was agreeable to them.
“That doesn’t mean that everybody thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. But I think people were agreeable to what was going to play out. So I didn’t sneak up on anybody,” he said. “I didn’t get any major pushback to say ‘Oh, don’t do that.’”
The role of supervisors, he says, is to make the people who work with them successful.
Cooke says he’s “not a big chain-of-command guy” and vertical systems are just a way to organize work.
“Department heads are allowed to make decisions on contracts up to a certain level and then above that it’s got to go to the manager or the council. That’s just a facilitation of work,” Cooke said. “I’m not sure there’s any value added in that, but it’s just how you organize work.
“And same with personnel decisions. Department heads can hire people up to a midpoint, but if you need to hire somebody beyond midpoint, that requires the manager’s office approval. That’s just a facilitation of work,” he said, what some people would call a chain of command.
Any decision-making is better when more people are involved in it, especially if they approach things differently and think differently about issues, Cooke said.
And that’s part of the intent.
“I think public policy will improve,” he said.
CITY MANAGER EXPECTATIONS FOR THE MANAGEMENT TEAM
(Distributed about four months into David Cooke’s tenure as city manager of Fort Worth)
• We have a shared responsibility for managing the city/corporation. We establish organization-wide principles, priorities, and values. Department heads run departments as long as they don’t violate the previous statements.
• We represent the customer; we represent and protect the taxpayer; we represent our employees. In all our decisions, we must balance these groups.
• There’s always a plan. Nothing just shows up. Surprises are the exception.
• For a plan to be successful, process and inclusion are important. Having the right process and including the right people will save time (in the end). Include others that do not think like you.
• We can question and challenge each other; we support each other.
• We are accountable to each other for our commitments.
• Our responsibility is to provide the best service at the lowest cost … regardless of who provides it. Cost equals total costs.
• Our responsibility is to recommend the best “business decision for the city.” These recommendations are supported by thorough evaluation of options using data and objective criteria.
WHAT DO WE WANT CITIZENS, CUSTOMERS, VISITORS, TAXPAYERS TO SAY ABOUT THE CITY OF FORT WORTH?
• Great customer service: responsive, respectful, attentive, friendly
• Business-like, professionally managed
• Creative problem solvers; solutions-oriented
• Tight; fiscally conservative
• Open and transparent: nothing to hide and everything to share
• Optimistic and future-oriented
Assistant City Manager Department Assignments
Valerie Washington
Current New
Police and CCPD Fire
Fire Municipal Courts
Municipal Courts Code Compliance
City Manager’s Office
Continued Leadership: 3E/Ministers; Fire Collective Bargaining
Susan Alanis
Current New
Parks and Recreation Transportation and Public Works
Public Events/CVB Public Events/CVB
Human Resources Human Resources
Performance and Budget Economic Development
Information Services Information Services
Communications and Public Engagement Finance
Continued Leadership: Transit, Fire Health, Zoo, Arena, Botanic Garden Strategic Plan
Fernando Costa
Current New
Planning and Development Parks and Recreation
Neighborhood Services Neighborhood Services
Code Compliance Aviation
Libraries Communications and Public Engagement
Aviation Performance and Budget
Continued Leadership: Race and Culture Task Force; Education Initiative; Human Relations; Smart Cities Initiative
Jay Chapa
Current New
Transportation and Public Works Police and CCPD
Water Water
Property Management Property Management
Economic Development Planning and Development
Libraries
Continued Leadership: Stockyards; 2018 Bond Program; Legislative