In my work with emergency services agencies, I continue to find that leaders are often the biggest barrier to creating a culture of change and high employee engagement. Stuck in the ideology that they alone need to have answers, create solutions and dictate direction, leaders de-motivate employees and block change.
One notable exception is the Woodbury Public Safety Department in Minnesota. It has flipped this traditional paradigm of leadership and created a collaborative culture in which frontline employees often drive and execute change.
Located in the eastern suburbs of the Twin Cities, Woodbury (population 63,000) is home to a unique municipal public safety department that blurs the lines between police, fire and EMS with a combination of career and paid-on-call staff. Many of its police officers are cross-trained as paramedics or firefighters and readily switch hats as needed on calls. Firefighters blend roles with EMS, and everyone aims toward a unified mission of saving lives and delivering top-notch community service.
Seven years ago, the organization was meeting expectations … but doing nothing special. “We didn’t have any greater ambition than to be available and do our best,” says Todd Johnson, deputy director of public safety.
The department practiced traditional top-down leadership and did little to connect daily tasks with its mission—or community expectations. Frontline staff frequently retreated to their respective police, fire or EMS silos and had little involvement in the big picture of the department. But a leadership change, some questions from a new city administrator and a desire to do better launched the department and its leaders on an odyssey of change. The story of that journey is much larger than this column, but a few basics are worth considering.
The journey began with the leaders making a powerful admission. “We wanted to change but didn’t know how,” Johnson says. The department found an organizational consultant who, rather than giving them answers and solutions, pushed them to involve everyone in learning about their department, listening and getting focused on their mission. Frontline employees with peer and street credibility were taught to conduct simple interviews and sent out to “find the truth” from both internal and external stakeholders.
Leaders then demonstrated their commitment to change by stopping everything to involve everyone in a process of reflection, visioning and objective setting. Using coverage from neighboring communities, they shut down operations for 2½ days and brought everyone together for what is now known in department lore as the “big meeting.” In this meeting they looked at the department’s critical mission and the stakeholder “truth” that employees had gathered. Together they plotted tasks and activities on a matrix that helped them collaboratively prioritize what mattered, what didn’t matter and what needed to change. From this place they formulated a unified mission and left the meeting with doable objectives and a plan.
Over the next few years they slowly—and sometimes painfully—implemented change. Key was leadership’s leaving their thrones, not dictating direction and cultivating new levels of trust by demonstrably engaging employees. Embracing a belief that those who do the work every day know what is best, they empowered employees with no previous leadership experience to lead and manage change processes.
Employees stepped up. New internal communication systems were developed, dispatch was outsourced, technology improved, and numerous small tasks and reporting processes were streamlined and revamped—all led by frontline employees. The result, through much hard work and learning, has been the creation of a culture that continues to be nimble to change, is highly engaging for employees, and is relentless in planning, acting and reflecting.
The leadership challenge of this kind of cultural overhaul, according to Johnson, is one of letting go, courageously facing the truth, building trust and being open to what you don’t know.
“It is a whole different approach to leadership,” says Woodbury’s EMS commander, J.B. Guiton. “It requires more listening, dropping the ego and leading by example.”
John Becknell is the founding publisher of Best Practices. He is a consultant and partner at SafeTech Solutions.
