City of West Palm Beach
CLIENT: | CITY OF WEST PALM BEACH |  |
INDUSTRY: | LOCAL GOVERNMENT (MUNICIPALITY) | |
COMPETENCIES: | Consolidation |
CHALLENGE
To assist the Mayor of a progressive city leverage the skill sets of the city’s staff and substantially increase productivity.
BACKGROUND
The then new Mayor of the City of West Palm Beach, Florida had limited managerial experience, and very little experience with using a large staff.
She believed her legal background had not prepared her to utilize and manager her own staff (of 150) properly or effectively. Although a professional City Manager was on staff, the Mayor still wanted to take a more hands on approach.
PROCESS
Executive Consulting, Inc. was brought in to investigate potential productivity improvements and assess what could be achieved. Executive Consulting conducted several days of “silent” observation of the Mayor interacting with her staff. Subsequent meetings were held with the City Manager and each of the Department Heads to help identify / clarify key organizational issues. Regular progress meetings were conducted with the Mayor to “work through” each of these issues, develop better communications methodologies, and tackle some key staff performance issues, during which other non-policy issues arose. In particular, the lack of overall strategy became apparent and found to be a major hurdle to improvement. Executive Consulting facilitated an offsite of the city Leadership Team to develop an appropriate strategy, and put an efficient project management system in place for more effective operations of the Office of Special Functions. Executive Consulting was retained over a four year period to provide ongoing leadership counsel to the Mayor and facilitate continuous organizational improvement.
RESULTS
The new staff procedures quickly became the paths for success as opposed to bureaucratic processes previously in place. Employees, the public, and even the City Council commented on the “new era of support from City Hall.” In the case of the Office of Special Functions, savings of over 40% could be readily tracked, far exceeding the cost of implementing the new processes and initiatives.
The HR Manager of the city commented “Executive Consulting was hired to help us develop a strategy statement. They did that and much, much more. Their methodologies involved many exercises that not only helped us achieve our objectives quickly but also slipped in a lot of learning about teamwork and leadership. They were effective and easy to work with. We have actually over-shot our ‘stretch’ goals.”