Dear Mary,
Our City Manager is retiring. He has been a great leader (from my perspective). He’s also been a champion for several initiatives that are still underway that are important to our community and won us a lot of credibility. I worry that these initiatives will suffer or lose focus once the City Manager is not in the picture.
In a transition, how can a city maintain a commitment to initiatives that a City Manager was clearly committed to?
Sincerely,
City Continuity
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Dear City Continuity,
This is a very timely question. I’m aware of at least four City Manager vacancies within a stone’s throw of the San Francisco Bay. So what you’ve identified is a real problem that’s happening right now.
A lot of cities right now are struggling with profound national issues. Just for example: How do cities maintain social services initiated during COVID, paid for with ARPA money, when that money is discontinuing? There are all these real high intensity challenges that our cities are facing right now.
In my view, this reiterates the absolute importance of council priority setting. This is an exercise that is independent of the budget process and lives outside of leadership changes. Sometimes cities call it strategic planning, sometimes they call it priority setting. We at MRG have facilitated priority setting with many cities, counties and special districts. Cities who undergo this process will build a work plan, and then the work plan should live on independent of who is the city manager.
In this process we work with the council and the senior staff throughout a day or a series of days to identify the Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 projects that are facing the city over the next time horizon, typically three to five years. Those projects get put into a master timeline and are prioritized and anchored around city values like public safety or fiscal health.
At the end of the day this plan can establish continuity if there is a change in leadership, and it gets the city back on track when the city’s been forced to focus on an emergency or a wildfire or something that’s taken them off the work plan. This plan helps an outgoing city manager establish continuity with the council and it helps the incoming manager understand the council’s vision, often preventing drift during the transition.
It’s also important who the City Council goes to for interim leadership. A common approach is to bring in a City Manager from the outside. But there’s always an opportunity cost of this approach. An outsider leader can bring unintended consequences or work slowdown, since the leader must try to get caught up and learn the relationships and the internal work dynamics. I think when at all possible, having a leader move up from within the organization can be a stabilizing force.
I think that this speaks to the importance of having some succession planning. If the council is comfortable with it, the Assistant City Manager, Deputy City Managers, and department heads could have more interface with the council while the outgoing City Manager is there, perhaps during vacations and time off. This helps council members understand the city better and can help leaders build their skills.
Finally, there should be some documentation and handover period built into any process of recruitment and transition. Professional, thoughtful managers following the ICMA code of ethics will do everything they can to make sure the new person is set up for success.
They typically don’t want to meddle in the process because that’s not appropriate, but they will support from the sidelines. The average tenure of a city manager is not long – by most accounts under five years – these transitions happen regularly.
I think with a solid succession plan and strategic vision for the city, you can be happy for your City Manager as they enter retirement, and can rest easy that their legacy will persist—so long as the transition is done right.
Best of luck,
Mary