Solving Problems / Improving Leadership City Hall
Along with its effectiveness, the City of Richmond also has problems that are not beneficial to its overall progressiveness. As I stated earlier in a previous post, there are many properties within City Hall that make work seem overbearing. One thing that I mentioned in the past is the over exaggeration of duties reported that discourages workers. Along with overreporting, technology within City Hall, is in need of a massive reboot. There are only a few employees that have all of their technology up to date. I am assuming that the overhaul on technology hasn’t progressed enough because of the average age of the employees, licensing for new products, and comfortability have all been factors. There is also, for the manager and supervisors, no set time that they come in. They come and go as they please. That isn’t necessarily terrible because as managers and supervisors they have earned the right to work the hours that they see fit, but some consistency with their hours would benefit the organization as a whole because it would add to the image of the company and improve the company culture from within. As a supervisor or manager, you set the standard for your office, and arriving to work at different times encourages that same behavior for your subordinates.
There is also a deep seated traditional approach to all programs that limits creativity within City Hall, which again isn’t necessarily a bad thing because of the type of organization it is. It just prevents more creative means to promote group cohesion among workers. The biggest problem area that could be improved is how long it takes to get things accomplished. The structure of City Hall has an unbelievable amount of checks and balances that have to occur just to get one thing accomplished.
So you’ve identified a lot of challenges you’ve observed. Seems in some instances (e.g. technology) you’ve made some assumptions (e.g. use and/or updating of technology a result of age of employees) that may not be based on data/evidence; in other instances it seems you may have overlooked other repercussions (e.g. supervisors/managers not having a set schedule makes it difficult for people to reach them to get approval, etc.). Would be interested to hear more abut the traditional approach and how it limits creativity (examples would be helpful). So as a leadership studies major, what might you suggest to your colleagues to address some of these issues? What concepts/theories have you learned that support recommendations you would make, explain why the things you’ve identified are (potentially) problematic, etc.
For my assumption about Technology, I verified it by shadowing 2 managers in the IT department. Being a leadership major my supervisor insisted that I follow different types of leaders within the organization to really understand all the processes that take place. Essentially, I honestly believed that all DIT did was set up computer software, for new employees. When I had the opportunity to shadow two DIT managers, they showed me the many processes that DIT is involved in. I was able to go to five different meetings and each of them gave me a broad scope of what DIT’s is in-charge of. When there is a formal complaint about a certain type of technology DIT is in charge of collaborating with auditors to assure that the technology is efficient enough for continued use. When new departments are created, DIT is in-charge of the electronic portals that store different types of information that departments use for new employment registration, payroll, and different software applications.
The biggest misconception that I had with DIT was that there was no distinctive reason for having all this out dated Technology. I didn’t realize that some offices working with the City of Richmond, have completely different forms of software, and that form of software might be the best kind of software for a specific department. For instance, the Finance department uses a budgeting software called opengov and that software is not compatible with the most updated versions of computers. This process causes for other software installed on computers to also be outdated. Microsoft Office is still at 2013 because to update Microsoft office to 2016 (latest version) it would require a whole new system update, which would render the software (opengov) that the government has already payed for, useless.