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Transcript 

0:00
Welcome to the LeaderGov podcast, America's premier source for local government leadership and teamwork training. And now your host, Bill Stark,

0:10
we're really glad to have everybody here today and welcome. My name is Bill Stark, and with me is Lindsay Snyder, and we're both with LeaderGov. We have a special guest today, which we'll introduce in just a few minutes. We do this every month. We have a leadership and a really a team oriented workshop each month, and this one is on the topic of being an engaged team, and we know that's like a super important topic to probably everyone on the Zoom today. It's like, how can I get my team engaged? I know that. I know that when they are engaged, things are better. We get we get incremental effort when people are engaged. And so Lindsay and I are really excited to be with you. She's She and I are going to walk through this together, and when we have our conversation with Stan Wilson in just a few minutes, we've got a few questions. We're going to ask him around engaging his team. He's at Fulton County, Georgia, at leader gov. We do four things. Most of you know a little bit about what we do, but we are involved in local government retreats, staff and council retreats, commission retreats, strategic planning, succession planning and professional development. And so those are the different areas that we get involved in. We've got customers from really coast to coast, Texas, Georgia, Florida, California. We were out in the state of Washington recently rich Richland, Washington. And so it's really a pleasure serving local governments all across the country. You know, when you registered for this workshop, we asked you a question, and we wanted to know how engaged is your team. That was the original idea, and here's what we found. Y'all ready for the big answer? 53% said, Yeah, we're pretty average. We have our good days. We have our bad days, middle of the road. 25 26% of you said we've got a lot of personnel issues and personal issues, lack of team skills that really keep us divided, keep us at odds, and not what we would call a cohesive team. So that's an area of concern, obviously, those 26 almost 27% about 15% of you, said you know what we are. We're hitting on all cylinders. We got it going on. We're fully engaged, we're consistently functioning at a high level, and that's awesome to have a team of that type. Is wonderful. We all want to get there, but we have our good days and bad days, right? And then we have about 4% that said we just are not doing it. Our teams are not engaged. A lot of people are checked out, and it's a real struggle for us to have an engaged team. So what we would like to do, and maybe, you know, our goal today is a big goal, which is like, how do we move from the blue area, which is average, over to that red area? How do we move from the gold over to the red area? Because we want really highly engaged teams. When teams are engaged, they give incremental effort. There's a positive vibe, there's a culture that's created. There is a connectedness, a cohesiveness, that's really valuable for productivity. And so that's where we're going today. We hope that our goal is that you walk away today just with one or two ideas on things you can do to enhance the level of team engagement, to help your team achieve their strategic goals, elected official goals. Strategic goals, our guest today. We're really excited to have Stan Wilson with us, and I want to welcome Stan. I'll just share a brief introduction here. But on this topic of, how do we have engaged teams and local government, we have worked with Fulton County, Georgia in the past. Leader gov has and I was always struck by Stan's leadership style and his thoughtfulness around leadership. So really excited today to have Stan Wilson with us. Stan is the Director of Human Health and Human Services and Community Development for Fulton County, Georgia. And previous to that, he was the Neighborhood Development Director in Greensboro, North Carolina. And prior to that, Greenville County, South Carolina, Executive Director of Greenville County Redevelopment Authority. And before that, the housing director at Charlotte, North Carolina, really glad to have you. Stan. I don't know if you can unmute and say hello, but we're very. Happy to have you with us today.

5:02
Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Everyone. Great to be here. Yeah, same

5:05
here in our Lindsay and I at leadergov, one of the things that we do around teamwork is this program called teamwork Summit. And I think about this topic, Stan of engagement, our February course and work course in the month of February, but our February course talk is about engagement, and we talk about building team trust, we talk about getting on the same page, and we talk about innovation and tearing down roadblocks and hurdles, and we talk about learning together. Those are the four components when we talk about engagement in our teamwork summit course this month, those are some of the things that we talk about in our course. But today Stan, we wanted to really just hear from you. I've admired your leadership and what you do from afar, and I wanted you to have a platform to share some things that have worked for you in your career in local governments. I've got some questions here that I wanted to ask you. And again, as I mentioned, for guests that are a part of this, we welcome your chat questions as well, but we'll just get kicked off before we get into the questions Stan. I would like just to say, could you share a little bit more with us about what you do there at Fulton County, and kind of the people you serve, and a little bit about your team, the different departments or agencies that you are affiliated

6:29
with. Oh, sure, absolutely, we're a community development department, and so that means affordable housing. We address homelessness, some of the typical housing programs, like housing rehabilitation, also down payment assistance. We have a community services program. We fund about 150 non profit groups in different areas, such as economic stability, youth homelessness, senior services, providing services to people dealing with disabilities. So it's a broad array of programs. We also do youth programs, mentoring and Youth Commission that's active, and we work with and for the homelessness. We're the lead agency for the county around homelessness and addressing homelessness. And so our divisions obviously have a financial division, Youth and Community Services. We've got a homeless division as well, and the federal programs, and that's what we do most of our housing activities, administer our HUD money, those type of things. My team is about 2727 folks, very diverse group and team building. The challenge with Team building for us is we're virtual. So all the things that I've done in the past has always been being in office, so now it's taking those things and really now trying to do additional things to pull us together, because of the fact that we're working virtually. So that's a different dynamic, different challenge, if you will.

7:56
Yeah, maybe we could get into that a little bit, because having an engaged team and not being physically together does cause a little whole nother layer of issues. I've

8:06
been there three and a half years, so I'm really learning the team. So

8:11
Tim Fenbert, our my business partner, we kid all the time about about COVID. During COVID, he was quite happy to work from home and heads down, get knocking stuff out. And I kept saying, Hey, man, we need to get together and see each other. I hadn't seen you in three weeks, and it was driving me crazy, because I'm a people person. He was like, Nah, I like being here by myself. Engagement for him was fine, but for me, it wasn't good. Yeah, well, Stan, we just had a couple questions we want to ask you get get some of your thoughts about about this whole idea of of engagement, and so I'll just jump right in there and feel free to share other things that come up as well. Stan, but how do you engage your teams and what's what's working for you now, or maybe what's worked in the past? Can you just share a couple of examples from your own leadership, where you've had really good engagement and what, what? How did it help you? What tell us about that?

9:07
Sure, absolutely. Thinking about all the different things you mentioned, some of the places I've been, and I was thought about all the creative different things that I've done. So I'm trying to figure out, Am I old or am I just creative? I don't know. I'm going to go on the slide that I'm extremely creative when I think about Fulton County, some of the things we're doing right now. In fact, Tuesday is one of them we're doing. Welcome to the Jungle series. And that's a personality assessment that's really done creatively and in a fun way. And you're going to hear me say fun a lot when I look at engagement, I try to look at it from a perspective of getting away from day to day and doing things that would be interesting and ultimately enjoyable for the team. And so the Welcome to the jungle is really looking at personality traits and then aligning those with different things, such as a lion, Flamingo, turtle, chameleon, they all have. Different character traits. And the initial time I did it, I came out as a lion that said strong, aggressive, protective. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's how that assessment came out. But when things like that are done, people get to know each other differently and really understand each other a lot better. And for example, one of one of the people on my team, very detailed in all his responses. And one of the things I learned is that's his way of communicating. And you know, so once you learn those things, you can really appreciate and understand somebody else's perspective. Another creative thing we do is a monthly lunch and learn. And the beauty of being virtual is that now you can invite anyone from anywhere. On our last Lunch and Learn. We had the assistant director for city of Dallas redevelopment, and he came and talked to us about some of the things that they're doing in the city of Dallas. And part of the reason for the lunch and learn was that when you're working from home, you really got to balance your time. And so we found was a lot of people just working through and skipping lunch. So we said, No, let's do a monthly Lunch and Learn opportunity for people to bring their lunch and kind of relax a little bit and make sure you have that break away from work time everywhere I've been we've done the traditional mission, vision and values. The values piece is the part that I like to really focus on, because that really helps people talk about, what are those things that are important to them? What do they value? And then you have great conversation around those particular things. And one of the key things that came out of that was work life balance. When you're going to the office every day, it means one thing, but when you're working virtually. Now, work life balance becomes two different things, and for me in particular, I'm a recovering workaholic, and so one of the ways that I got away from being a workaholic was to not work at home. Now I'm virtual and working at home, so I've got to change my approach and my way of thinking. And currently, one other thing I want to mention, and this is not a leader gov plug, but it's going to sound like one, the leader gov teamwork Summit. We're going to take that and my management group is going to meet monthly. We're going to pick a topic, somebody's going to introduce that topic, and we're going to go through the questions together, you know, on each topic. And then I'm encouraging my folks to do the same with their divisions as well. Just want to highlight some unique things that that I've done around engagement. And you're going to like I said, you're going to hear me say, fun, because I think it's important. While with the Greenville County Redevelopment Authority. One of the things we did, I don't know if, if y'all have done an escape Breakout Room session, I'll tell you what. That's a lot of fun. And we broke out into two groups, and we did the breakout and you learn a lot about people when you going through a breakout session. Some people are not as patient. You find out who's to take charge. And this is what we're going to do, yeah, and the only way to get out is to end up really being a team. One another thing that that we've done as a team, I had the opportunity to be a director of a of a community action agency. Community Action has broad programs, from education services, all of those things. And we had teachers, we had a health component, we had a food component, so pretty large, and had 300 staff people in six counties. And so each year what we would do, and grateful to Daimler truck trucking company for doing that. They would give us a training facility for a week. And so we would have training sessions that whole week. It was multiple rooms. And one of the most fun things we ever did was a team building session that was called rhythm at work. And so this woman came in, high energy, highest energy person I ever met, bunch of drum symbols and things like that and and what you learned about that was collaboration. What you learned about that was change, and what you learned was aligning and also to developing teamwork. And it was all based on the rhythm of the drum. You start the beat, everybody has to align with the beat. You slow down the beat, and then you see what it's like when she'll tell certain people, okay, they're doing that. Now I want you to change it and take it in another direction. And so now everybody has to shift gears right away and move into that direction. So that was a lot of fun, and the team thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm more of an introvert. She pulled me out there in the middle, in the center, and I played the drums and everything. And it was a fun teamwork, team engagement opportunity. And with city of Charlotte, we did a lot of affordable housing. We funded a lot of projects, redeveloped neighborhoods. And so what we would do is do a bus tour. We get everybody together, get on a bus, go out and view and see some of the things that we were involved in, and also to. Having lunch at one of the facilities and having someone come out and tell us about it, talk about what it does, what the impact of it is, because a lot of us, we don't do direct service. So getting the chance to be out there and engage and learn more about it, it really helps a lot. I could keep going bill, so you have to, you have to stop me or Amy, well,

15:21
yeah, I want, I mean, those are, like, really good example. I was writing them down because I don't want to. I'd like to come back to them and review. But as you did those things, as you put forth that energy and effort as a leader, to get the team involved, obviously they're participating. So we could say they're engaged because they're participating. They're a part of it. But what was the benefit? How did you see the team members relate to each other differently? What's the payoff for individuals and teams? Yeah, the

15:51
payoff is huge. And I don't know if you remember the first session that we had because we were dealing with COVID. I mentioned we're virtual, and when we first got together in a meeting. It was, it was great to see everybody interacting and communicating and exchanging with each other. In fact, we held off the start of the meeting to allow that to continue even longer. And so first of all, you develop the team. Develops a sense of teamwork that you typically don't get. The other thing that you get is everybody drops their guards, so to speak, right? It's not your coworker who's always asking you for that information who always needs this, right? So it's a more relaxed setting. The other thing about it too is we become a very much of a email culture, and you can't convey everything through email, and you can't understand everything that people have to say through email. So now it gives you a chance to really learn what's the best way to communicate with each other as well. And then two you'll find out more and learn more about people and understand why they are the way they are. Quick example on that the city of Charlotte the management team we got together one time, and the task that we were given at the beginning of this session, it was a retreat, was to draw our view of community development, or what we thought of it as. Everybody had the different drawings, some a neighborhood, etc. And one of the gentlemen that was part of the team, he drew people around the table, and they were talking. But in looking at his picture, you could see they were very aggressively talking. And so we're looking at him when he got when he got his turn to explain his drawing. He talked about that was talking around working on a project, and we said, Why does it look so aggressive? He said, that's the way we were raised. In our family, we always talk. If you watched our family, you would think we were arguing, and we all just paused and said, Ah, so you're not really hard to deal with. That's just the way that you've been raised and the way that you communicate. So you get a better understanding of people as well as a team, and it makes it easier than to go back and approach your work.

17:56
Yeah, I love that example. We have these misconceptions of each other. We think that we're we perceive someone a certain way, and in reality, we just don't understand their background or why they communicate that way. And I think some of these things you're talking about allow us to draw out of people, some of their background and some of their history in their better, better perspective. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this word participation. I think when we talked one time, you mentioned and some of your staff meetings you like to have your departmental mission or vision off to the side on the agenda, and you may get people you like to get people, or you have, in the past, had people participate in your staff meetings. It's not just you going through every piece of the agenda. What would you tell us about participation? Because the ability to delegate and let other people contribute to me that just has does great things for engagement and makes people feel like they belong and they're a part of the team. So could you speak to this word, idea of participation?

19:06
Certainly that, and that's the one thing I'll say about engagement, is that you have to look at it as a journey, as a as an evolution, and you always have to look at, what do I need to tweak? What do I need to change? And for me, I never wanted to be about me. I never wanted to keep for me to be the one always talking and always doing those things. And so when we started our lunch and learn, for example, I would put together to have different speakers come. And initially I was new. So I had some people from different departments presenting their department things that were new then. And then I said, now we got to change that up. So what we do now is each division is assigned a month, and so they host the meeting, they find the speaker, they introduce the speaker, they facilitate that meeting. And so we changed that looking at the teamwork Summit, that's an opportunity. Now for different people to be involved, to present the different different topics and really talk about it. We do have an agenda for all our meetings. We have a standard agenda format. It does have the values on the side and at the bottom is the mission and vision. So we keep those things in front of us, but it's really about it's really about trying to turn some of these things over to different team members so you can get the participation and engagement. Now I'm talking about all this bill, but this was an evolution for me, because when I first started earlier in my career, I didn't have time for that. You know, what I could be doing? I got 10 million other things, you know. And so, you know, I keep that in my mind. And, you know, because we have to take away that time to do these kind of things, because they really are important, because they really help make everything else that we do a lot easier. And that's the perspective that I take.

20:54
Yeah, I really love this idea that you want to give away some of this and let other people Shepherd it, let other people speak up, let other people, you know, participate in the meetings, maybe the planning of the meetings, the facilitation of the meetings, because ultimately, we need people to be bought in, right? We need their engagement, their participation, and what we're doing as leaders. So, yeah, that's, that's some really, I'm going to go ahead and just repeat some things I heard you say there so I heard lunch and learn. I love that some people do book clubs. Of course, that's a very popular way to get people engaged. Personality assessments. We do the DISC assessment here at leadergov, which many people are familiar with your mission and your values. And I think as we create our mission and our values that can be a way to engage the team, and then in getting people to speak into our mission and values can improve engagement. I like the escape room idea the rhythm, the drum exercise you all did, the bus tour, the idea of field trips, I think is a really great way to, again, open people's perspective to what else is out there, and get people's

22:07
Yeah, you know, I did a when I was with the city of Charlotte, 2008 2009 I'm sure everybody remembers that time. We were dealing with the recession, and it was pretty bad. I had a meeting at Crisis Assistance Ministry with the director there, and it took me literally about 20 minutes to park and get into the building, because so many people were in line looking for help, and they did emergency rent and utility assistance. So after we got done talking, I said, Carol, I do a meeting, a kickoff meeting every year in July with my team, and I want to have the meeting here, if that's okay with you. She said, Oh, you can have the conference room. Then she said, You can also use the back. Did we have a store in the back? And if you guys want to volunteer, you can help us out in the store. I said, perfect. And so then she said, make sure you tell them to carpool. And I said, No, I'm not going to tell them that part, because, like I mentioned, we don't do direct service. We manage the contracts and so forth. So I wanted my people to come there and understand the impact of what was going on with the people that were helping. And so as everybody came in, they really got to see that we talked about it, and it really helps add value to what we do. Community development work has inherent value that you can automatically see, but also wanted people to see it directly and know that the work they are doing is helping people at a critical time. And then we spent time in the store volunteering, and everybody enjoyed it.

23:34
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. That talk about hands on engagement. Yeah, it's one thing to get out there and do it. We do have a couple of questions on this whole topic. Two questions, one from El Paso County, Texas. So from Tim Stan, what approach have you taken to team members who try to cancel others opinions and aren't supportive of change, or who don't buy into this engagement and participation. Idea, what do we do to keep at it? For those that are struggling, that's

24:07
a whole nother session. You talk about change, I think it's a matter of really trying to find out what that thing is that's going to get that person involved. I admitted I was a skeptic in the beginning, right? And then once you saw the value of it, and you get to the end, you people understand, and they'll embrace it. You got to understand, too that some people are not going to communicate at the same level. But you can't do it and stop you have to keep it moving and continue to be consistent when you're talking about change, the best thing you can do is communicate and over communicate whether people are paying attention or not. I talk about things that I'm going to do months before I do it, and continue to bring it up. You want to find you want to find your people that are going to be the change leaders who are going. Help you to get there. But I've not found, and I'll confess, a group that was just up, jumping up and down and cheering and couldn't wait for change, but you have to, but you have to be very deliberate with it. You have to be consistent with it, and you can't not talk about it. But the other thing too is Don't rush it. I

25:20
think too about just consistency, too. Tim and this idea, we've got a friend of ours who decided to put up positive quotes every day on email, like every day eight o'clock, they would put this positive quote up to all the whole team on email. And there were a couple of negative Nellies, a couple of dramaters, dromminators, we call them, people who just want to throw dirt at everything. And this leader put these kind of silly little positive quotes up on email. The good vibes that came from those emails over a long period of time actually drove the drummonders away. They couldn't they didn't want to be around all this positivity. So I think Tim, for me, it's consistency, you know, Stan, I think about it. If you can create that sort of engaged environment over the long term, people may select out, they may come around. Of course, they may not, but we've got to be consistent in doing what we can do.

26:22
I found, though, that once you're creating that environment and you got more people on, it's very hard for that person to continue to stand out as a Negative Nelly, if you will. Yeah,

26:34
let's see. We got another question from Alaska here, from Collier, can you revisit your message about payoff from these team engagements. Have you seen that the team members go back to the normal day to day? Or have you seen more engagement on a daily basis? So any Is it stuck over time?

26:54
Yeah, it ends up taking time. And it's not like I said, it's more like a journey, but it does get better. I think the thing that is probably more immediate is that you have people freely communicating with each other more so than they were before. Some of those walls, some of those barriers, they go down. And then the other thing too is, I'll give you an example of a difference, a big five assessment when you do those and then you try to group people in their different areas and so forth. Well, one thing that stood out for me was the need for stability. Whenever we do a big five, I got a low need for stability, and I'm way down here by myself, and majority of the people are on the other end. And so I had to temper how I deal with change and talk about change, because little did I know that my assistant, she was way down the other end. And so who was I bouncing off ideas about change? I was bouncing them off of her, and I'm probably stressing her out, because she likes stability and calmness. So if you do those things, and if people do add self awareness to it, it does change how people will engage in and how they work with you and make it better. Yeah,

28:04
yeah. Dominique from Prince William County said variety improved the probability of buy in. People are motivated by different things, so keep going until you find something that resonates with each person at some point, I love that that's that's consistency and it's variability, right? So people are different, so we have to vary our approach to engagement and just really getting to know people. I like the fact that you started with the personality assessment. You were talking about the different animals. I think getting to know people and where they're coming from is so huge in all of this.

28:39
When I was in Charlotte, I was able to keep the same the same consultant to work on these things with me. So whenever we would talk about what we're going to do the next year, she could literally say, Okay, well, you remember this one? You know you got this one, you know how this one's going to feel about that. So ultimately, as you're observing people and the different things and variety is excellent. You understand where you might get the challenges. And so, you know those kind of upfront so you can address them.

29:08
Yeah, yeah. This has been a great conversation on engagement. Thank you stan for Well, you're welcome sharing some of your experiences, some of your history, with us, and I'll just love kind of the practical nature of a lot of what you've been doing. It's not esoteric, it's not philosophical, it's very practical in many ways. And thank you for taking some time today to share with the leaders around the country. Yeah, love hanging out with my colleagues. Well, thank you for being a part of our time together and for your commitment to having healthy teams that are really engaged in what you do, particularly here in Fulton County, Georgia. So thank you. We wanted to wrap up here just in the next couple of minutes and just tell you about something that Lindsey and I are working on called teamwork Summit. Stan mentioned it briefly in the very beginning. This is a teamwork training program that we are inviting you to. You learn more about these are short, simple videos on teamwork topics. So it could be team accountability, Team conflict, team communication. We provide you with the videos all the discussion questions, so that in a team meeting, you can have really a robust conversation around important topics, teamwork topics. We know that if you're like most local government departments, when you have your team meetings, it's basically project updates, right? This is an opportunity to pause and think about the health of your team, right? That's pretty important. And so we want to invite you all to check this out teamwork Summit. We know it, it's going to be helping a lot of folks have stronger teams, more productive teams. In the training program are eight existing courses. You see their emotional intelligence, how to be a team player, stress, self care. And then each month we provide you with a new course. On the beginning of the month, we drop a new course for you to then play that video, that course material, with your team. And as Stan said, you can actually circulate it around and let other people on the team lead the discussion around these important teamwork topics. We've priced this thing so it's like, really affordable. You know, if you've got 250 employees in your city or department your county, it's $4,500 for the entire year, right? That's 400 bucks a month. If you've got 450 500 employees, it's $7,200 for the entire year. If you're a larger agency, maybe 12,000 again for the year. So we tried to price this so it's very affordable. And if you would like more information, go ahead and you can either QR code this and or you can just email Lindsay. [email protected] L, I, N, D, S, A, y, [email protected] or you can email me [email protected] B, I L at leadergov. Dot, well, there we are. There's our info. Lindsey Nancy, yeah, yeah. We just want to pause here at the very end and just say thank you again to Stan Wilson for being with us, taking the time to share some of your know how. And we know that no leader is perfect. We all make mistakes. We're all learning and growing. I think used the word journey. So while we're not perfect, we try right? We put our foot best, foot forward. We're trying things to connect people. Have some levity, have some fun, get to know each other, and I appreciate your commitment to doing that. Stand for the folks there in Fulton County, and hope you have a great day. What a great time. Enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you for participating. It's really great to see everybody, and we'll see you all back again about a month from now, when we're talking about team ethics and team integrity. So if you want to grow in ethics and integrity, I know none of you have any of those challenges, but if you do come join us, I think it's the 15th of March or 14th of March. See you in four weeks. Y'all take care. Thank

33:05
you for listening to the leader gov podcast. Don't forget to like and subscribe and for more information on leader gov's workshops and programs for state and local governments, visit www.leadergov.com you.