By Pepper Parr
August 13th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
OPINION
There are a lot of very good people working for the City of Burlington.
There are some exceptional people working for the city.
The problem is that there are not enough of either group on the payroll.
Where did being a friend get former City Manager Tim Commisso?
This situation has existed for more than a decade – part of the reason is that City Council does not hold staff accountable. And former City managers have not done the job that had to be done to change the culture at city hall.
It is not the role of council to involve itself in how well staff members do. That is a given – but council members can set the tone when they discuss what comes from staff.
Literally every member of council, some more so than others, goes out of their way to thank staff for the”awesome” or “wonderful” or “great work” that was presented – and that just isn’t the case. It is something every council member does before they even get to the question they want to ask
By doing what they are doing they are enabling those who aren’t doing a fine job to continue to be mediocre.
The Gazette is not going to make any friends with this comment. We are not supposed to be your friends. We would like to be in a position to respect what you do. We would like to be able to work with media people that understand the difference between public relations and journalism.
Burlington Chief Administrative Officer Hassaan Basit.
The current Chief Executive Officer (CAO) Hassaan Bait will do his best – he did a great job at Conservation Halton. He is not a pushy kind of guy – his approach is to appoint people to positions and then work with them and support them while they learn and grow into their new responsibilities – we are talking about senior level people here.
Hassaan hasn’t been in the CAO chair for six months yet. People are still getting used to him and he is learning what he actually has in the way of talent.
If you listen carefully to what he has to say and how he says it – you should have come to the conclusion that he is there to make things better.
He can’t do that alone.
Council doesn’t hold staff accountable because they don’t know how. You actually have to have had related work experience managing a team, setting performance objectives, monitoring performance, conducting performance appraisals, identifying development areas, and implementing performance improvement plans, in order to fully comprehend the concept of accountability. Managing people is tough, and it is often more art than science, and it doesn’t always win accolades and positive endorsements.
Look at who represents us on Council, where they have worked in their careers, as well as the type of experience they have, and it generally falls into two broad categories: 1) individual contributors or specialists with no staff responsibility; and 2) small business entrepreneurs who manage by fiat. The only one on Council who has any real managerial or corporate level experience is Paul Sharman.
Burlington has an operating budget of over $350 million, and something like 1,500 employees. Burlington isn’t a “mom and pop” operation, and it sure isn’t Dog River, Saskatchewan from “Corner Gas”. We need Councillors with the skills and experience who understand managerial basics. A big part of that is setting clear goals and objectives, and holding staff responsible for delivering same. As for the public servants, if they don’t get clear direction they’ll just keep doing what they’ve always done.
“The current Chief Executive Officer (CAO) Hassaan Basit will do his best – he did a great job at Conservation Halton. He is not a pushy kind of guy – his approach is to appoint people to positions and then work with them and support them while they learn and grow into their new responsibilities – we are talking about senior level people here.”
A number of decades ago I was tapped to implement a performance program for senior levels of Management, called Management By Results or “MBR.” The purpose of the approach was to move from a management by objectives approach to one that would transform how projects and programs were conceptualized, implemented, and in the end assessed.
On an annual basis, individuals on the MBR program would establish three to five meaningful goals of which they had control over. The program was designed to achieve specific, measurable, and impactful RESULTS. Requiring a shift from activities to meaningful results.
As an example, a meaningful result could involve increasing sales.
The Basic, Met and Exceeded levels of goal achievement would then be negotiated with a superior and might as and example be as follows.
Basic: Increase sales to $2.0 million
Met: Increase sales to 2.5 million
Exceeded: Achieve an increase in sales to $ 2.79 million.
I have no idea as to how Mr. Basit performed or how his performance was measured in his former role. He is now in Burlington where “accountability and transparency,” are good things to go by, but I hope we measure him for getting things done on-time.
A former Director assured me that COB has an approach that may approximate the one from my experience. Given that information my comments are to be considered as a concern versus a criticism as I have no idea how the COB program is deployed.
I had this coment queued up yesterday for the part one report on the flooding, glad you went first.
There goes the argument that higher compensations will attract the talent that Burlington needs, how many university-educated people does it take to study why the toilet, when flushed overflowed, while ignoring that one of the two principal design features of a toilet is flushing.
My impression is that few of these politicians have a strong background in leadership positions.The public servants are usually long term and know that “this too shall pass”as far as pols go.
Weak pols need to ingratiate themselves to key staff if they want to get stuff done that pleases constituents.EG A park or bike path.So they flatter key staff who really have control.