Thread by @stateofthecity

#SundaySidebar ... yesterday, @ns_ahmed asked me a question about one issue that pops up in my news feed a fair bit, namely the "Chief _______ Officer" craze in various city governments. /1

/2 His question, paraphrased: isn't hiring a Chief Equity Officer (to take the example that popped up yesterday) merely a diversion of resources or a distraction from fully funding city operations or services to achieve better equity?

/3 The question comes up in a hundred places, in a hundred ways, now that cities have hired everything from Chief Resilience Officers to Chief Engagement Officers* to Chief Bicycle Officers**.

/4 Asterisk #1: Chicago's new Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, did this just days ago, on June 3rd... chicago.gov/city/en/depts/…

/5 Asterisk #2: The Chief Bike Officer was a move (by Atlanta's then-Mayor Kasim Reed) that prompted @Governing's @AlanGreenblatt to write this skeptical, but balanced take in 2016: governing.com/topics/mgmt/go…

/6 I'm mostly in the business of dispassionately (if selectively) tweeting urban news that might be of interest to urban policy geeks from this account; my current job limits my ability to express opinions on everything as boisterously as I did in the past. However...

/7 That's not the case on maybe 1/2 the issues I cover, give or take, and @ns_ahmed asked for my take as someone who's been in govt & campaigns and bickered about these issues with decisions makers. I definitely have a take on this issue, and...

/8 ...and my strongly-held belief is, it depends. ;) For middle cities or metros, the cost of a new Chief Bla Officer is relatively small compared to the expense of funding a program decisively enough to change outcomes - which is one reason a new Chief is an easy announcement.

/9 In a typical 🇨🇦city public service, appointing a Chief _______ Officer with support staff & other incremental costs is a $0.5-$1.5m call. For a Chief Bike Officer, that's several bike lanes a year; for a Chief Equity Officer, it's foregoing a dent in equity issuesat best.

/10 But *politically*, I take @ns_ahmed's point on one issue: it's important for public & public service confidence to watch the ratio between $X at the management level versus $Y actually spent on the thing being managed.

/11 The larger concern I have with the Chief ______ Officer craze isn't that ratio; it's the one that @AlanGreenblatt confronts in the article; is the point of the Chief Bla Officer hiring symbolic, or not?

/12 There are two sensible reasons to appoint a Chief ______ Officer in a complex, politically-loaded bureaucracy like a major city govt: to signal that something is a priority, and to have a specialized manager work across silos where doing so is necessary to get results.

/13 Where I still call myself "an urbanist conservative" on city management issues, whatever that means, is partly b/c I've seen better management or policy solve as many problems as more funding has solved; it depends, and $ isn't always the answer, or even the sole answer.

/14 And so that's what I ask whenever I see the Chief ______ Officer title pop up as a thing a mayor or council or city manager is doing. Is it both a signal of priority, AND an appointment of an official w/ room to work across boundaries, *effectvively*? Or it is JUST a signal?

/15 Too often, you see solid names rise to one of these jobs, but then they're forced to improvise for yrs by necessity, w/out backing or enough authority for one structural reason or another to cut through whatever silos impair progress on issues that cross dept'l silos.

/16 So if you're watching one of these jobs appear, or you're applying for one, or hired for one, or considering hiring for one, where that Chief _____ Box is on the org chart matters a great deal, for *similar* reasons to ones I think @ns_ahmed was arguing.

/17 If there's a problem that can really be solved by a cross-dept'l view (CFO's being a great example) or senior specialist (see my article with Jay Brown on infra buying experience - nationalpost.com/opinion/kelcey…) then, great, hire away IF THE AUTHORITY IS THERE TO MAKE IT WORK.

/18 Otherwise, I keep turning back to the insight of the General/Field Marshal my grandfather served under for the Burma-India half of his Second World War, Bill Slim, Post-war, Slim mocked the resources spent, w/out his support, to create special forces to support his advance.

/19 His attitude, simply, was that the resources invested in creating special forces could've been invested in making 000s of ordinary soldiers to be closer to special forces themselves, with far greater, more direct & broader impact on the outcome.

/20 Spending $1.0m on public service X might not change the fortunes of public service X, but absent real authority for a Chief _____ Officer to execute, spending the same $ on training frontline staff & managers to solve the same problem but distributed across those silos...

/21 ...*could* be more effective than a symbolic posting. And so, again, I think the value of Chief _____ Officers depends, not on their price tag, but on whether their post has been launched in a way that actually gives them a shot at meeting high expectations.

/22 (and, of course, none of this is in any way a comment on my colleagues doing Chief _____ Officer jobs at my own workplace, who weren't hired for complex, politically-loaded jobs in the complex world of city governments!)

For more examples of the phenomenon, good, bad and middling, see:

Buffalo, NY and its Chief Service Officer:
citiesofservice.org/case-studies/c…

Kansas City's Chief Environmental Officer, appointed in 2006 and in office for more than a decade: bizjournals.com/kansascity/sto…

Minneapolis' recent loss of a Chief Resilience Officer... m.startribune.com/minneapolis-ch…

And, in Vancouver, the ride and fall of a Chief Housing Officer: Vancouver's chief housing officer fired cbc.ca/news/canada/br…