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The podcast episode of the LeaderGov podcast features Andrea Scott, Director of Talent Acquisition for Harris County, Texas. In this episode, Scott discusses effective strategies for setting clear and actionable goals within local government teams. She emphasizes the importance of aligning goals with the organization's mission and vision, ensuring they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Scott also highlights the value of collaboration and communication in the goal-setting process, encouraging team leaders to engage their members in defining and pursuing objectives that contribute to the community's well-being. The episode offers practical insights and examples to help local government leaders enhance their goal-setting practices and drive meaningful outcomes. Learn more at https://www.leadergov.com/blog 

Transcript

0:10
Thank very much for taking time out of your busy schedules to be with us today. You might be here at the workshop. We're going to record this, and it's going to become a podcast for some of you all to see a little bit later, but again, thank you so much for spending some time with us today and thinking about your leadership and thinking about your teams and how we can all be more effective this topic today, we love at LeaderGov on goal setting. We think it's an amazing tool that we can all sharpen to get better at in terms of how we engage our team and set goals to really get the most important things done. So I'm Tim Fenbert. I'm sitting in for Bill Stark, who's on vacation. He's in Hawaii, actually, which I'm very jealous of the fact that bill's in Hawaii, but he gets, you know, couple days every year to go somewhere. So what the heck? And with me today is Lindsey Snyder from California, with LeaderGov. Say hi Lindsey. Hi everyone. Good to see you. Great. Yeah. And again. Great to see some familiar faces. We're going to introduce Andrea a little bit later when, when I start my interview. We're glad to have her as our special guest today. But let's get let's get rolling here and get started. We've got folks from kind of all over the country, and I think that's one of the real advantages of this. We're going to, again, talk about this topic. I've got a couple questions to ask Andrea, get her her expert insights on how she's done goal setting with her team, and then we give you a chance to to be in a small breakout with four or five other folks and really share some best practices around goal setting, engaging your team in goal setting. So our hope is that you're going to meet some folks from different places and walk away with some ideas again at LeaderGov, we love serving local governments. It's all we do, and we're really blessed to get to do this on a regular basis. Cities and counties all over the country. We do four things. This is our little commercial. We do retreats, strategic planning, succession planning and professional development. Obviously, this is what we really love to do, is professional development, leadership and team development. So that's who we are. So today is about goal setting. In fact, every month we have a different topic, the month of May for leader gov is on goal setting. So our teamwork summit program kind of aligns with that. We do a lot of social media posts about goal setting, and we know that there's, as you see, this list of five different things, as you start to think about goal setting for your team, there's some best practices that you're going to hear about today, obviously focusing on priorities, what, what's most important, fixing the things that are broken through goal setting. And I think this middle one is really the thing we want to talk a lot about today, is this opportunity for us to engage our team and goal setting. It's goal setting is a team sport, not it not just a leader sport. So we want to think about how we are actually engaging our team and setting goals for our either just our team or our departments. Ultimately, it's about taking action, right? Leadership is about the future. It's about setting vision. And again, goal setting is just a great way to to hold our team accountable for the progress that we're making, or sometimes that we're not making, because we get busy and we get distracted, and sometimes our goals slip a little bit. So that's that's but that's okay. We want to stay focused. So that's, in essence, where we are going today. Again, as I mentioned, teamwork Summit is a monthly program, and again, today's topic is on goal setting, which is our monthly teamwork summit topic. So as we get into thinking about goal setting, you know, we want to think about how you can leverage this as a tool. You might be a city or county manager. You might be a department head, you might be a frontline manager or contributor, but we think goal setting is for everybody. It's not just for our elected officials, setting priorities. It's for everyone. Setting goals is, is really a way to execute well. Lindsay, we when we when everyone registered for this workshop. We asked a question, maybe a couple questions, but kind of highlight what, what this chart says for us here.

4:04
Yeah, so this is one of the questions you guys answered. So, you know, the question was, What's your biggest challenge with goal setting? And it looks about like 25% you know, said that goals are vague and lack clear steps or milestones. And then it looks like another 25% said we lack a clear system or tool to track and visualize our goals. Yellow we really follow up on our goals after we set them. And then another 25% says we confuse operational tasks with bigger picture goals. And then we have orange there that says goals are assigned to everyone, so no one really owns them. And

4:46
there's a little sliver there with about 2%

4:50
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We mostly focus on short term or reactive goals as situations arise. So yeah, it's pretty interesting.

4:57
Yeah, interesting. That was. Read so evenly amongst the folks that the 100 or so folks that responded, again, a very unscientific survey. But I think what this says is we all have some level of struggle with goal setting. We probably have different struggles based on our organizations and our team, and kind of maybe the time of year that we're that we're executing on our goals, but we all have some things, some obstacles that get in our way from being maybe as effective as we would like to be. And we probably need to work on all five of these top five things here to really be better at goal setting. There's, there's some work that that needs to be done in this area of of goal setting, for sure. Yeah, thank you, Lindsay. We just want to share that back. And I want to share a quick little story. You know, in our work with local governments, we find local governments teams and leaders, really, in one of two buckets. Either you have clear priorities from your boss or maybe from your elected officials, right? It's very clear what are the most important things that we need to work on. Maybe you have a strategic plan that was written and that gives us, as staff, clear direction on what we need to focus on. But probably a lot of you on this phone call, on that, on this workshop, on this podcast, don't get that direction right. You have to kind of figure it out yourself. And you know, the question is, how do you set goals without priorities? And I would say if you're not getting priorities from your leadership from your elected officials, perhaps, then, really, it's the work of of you and your team to figure out what's the most important thing, because you can't do everything. You know, we we think sometimes local government set too many goals, right? You've got 25 goals, and it's very, very hard to to get focused on what's most important. And really an important aspect of goal setting is to what's the most important thing. So if, if our elected officials have said, maybe transparency, local government, transparency, is going to be one of our high priorities, then it's pretty straightforward. How, as a team, maybe I'm a director of an HR department, how am I going to be more transparent? I'm a finance department head, how am I going to engage my team to set goals around transparency with our citizens? But if I'm not getting that direction from my boss or again, from my elected officials, I need to kind of determine what are the most important priorities and really set that as a way to have my goals feed into those priorities. And what I would encourage you all to do is, as you start setting goals with your team, make sure you're communicating up to your leadership, up to your management, what you're setting goals on, because they may have some priorities. They just have not communicated very well with you. And we always want to make sure there's good alignment with what you're executing at the department level, perhaps, and with what your leadership wants from you as a as a team member. So just want to share a quick little story about the chicken or the egg, which comes first priorities or goals. We think you need priorities first, and then your goals kind of follow underneath your priorities. Just a quick story. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our special guest today, Andrea Kimball Scott. She is with Harris County, Texas. It's actually the third largest county in the United States. This is a Houston Texas, a very, very large organization. And she is the Director of Talent Acquisition, a busy, busy lady. So we're really fortunate to have her with us today. She joined Harris County in 2005 she's had a number of roles in HR and a couple other departments, and really has grown with that organization, taken on more and more responsibility to get to the place where she's really in charge of hiring. She's a good lady to know if you're looking for a job and you want to move to Houston, She is the lady in charge, but she runs a great team, obviously responsible for sourcing, screening, securing talent across the entire all of their diverse departments. She's part of Sherm, of course, is a certified professional, and she holds her senior professional in human resources from SP HR, she's certified. She also has a master's degree in business administration. So Andrea, are you unmute? Are you able to say hello and introduce and say hello to everyone on the call?

9:07
I am unmuted. Good afternoon, and thanks for spending some time with us this afternoon on a Friday at that yeah,

9:14
great to have you with us. Well, I'm going to ask you a couple questions, and if anyone in the audience has a question, please put it out in the chat. Lindsay will kind of keep an eye on that, and when we kind of wrap up, we'll go back and ask and ask Andrea some questions, maybe from from our audience. So first, I wanted to ask Andrea any stories come to mind that you could share with the team about how you've seen teams leverage goal setting successfully, just in your in your diverse experience, where have you seen teams really thrive in the area of goal setting? Any ideas come to mind?

9:49
A couple of come to mind in your slide on the chicken and the egg, you list priorities and goals, and I would like to add a third item in the plan. And so. So I think one of the most recent stories that that comes to mind is a few years ago, received our, at the time, new chief talent officer, and we were setting goals. We had priorities on what we were doing, and at that time we we were faced with standing up several new departments within Harris County at the same time that we were expected to still execute against some of the priorities and goals that we had, and so when I think back on that experience, a we were successful at meeting both objectives, it provided us an opportunity to raise the profile of our department within a very large and complex organization, one of the things that having goals allowed us to do in moments where we had to pivot, we had something to anchor us back to what was the main thing. And I think so often in the public sector, we have being public servants. We have to have a level of being reactive. And sometimes in doing that, you you you respond to whatever the thing may be, and then you get over that, and you're like, what was I working on? And what I have found in my career is goals have allowed me to be able to come back and be able to very quickly, go back to the things that are priorities, and the things that I should be focusing both me and my team's time and effort on. Oh,

11:26
I love, I love. What a great example, because I think you're exactly right. We get distracted a lot, and when we get pulled away, the question is, what do we come back to? And so I like this plan, this idea of plan. Have a plan. Know where you're going. It's, it's really leadership, 101, right? It's about the future. It's about having vision. And I love how that folds in. So, yeah, let me ask you a question. The premise of our conversation today is that the goal setting is a team sport. It's not just a leader's responsibility, but we know. I mean, we can make our team do it right? We can tell them, hey, you've got to participate in this goal setting session, you've got to do a SWAT with me, you know, whatever. But how do you get folks to initiate? How do you get them engaged? What? What can we do as leaders to really involve our team members? So as you think back on maybe that example you just gave, how do you how did you get your team engaged? I think it's a it's a question we all need to answer.

12:23
I think a couple of things. I think, you know, answering the What about me question is always helpful when looking for buy in engaging your teams. But also, I think how we present it to our teams, I think, as the leader, if we, you know, we gather around the conference room, and it says we have to come up with our goals, and it is viewed as performative in nature. I think our team members will have that same type of reaction. But I think if we set it up and it presented presents it to them as an opportunity for you to have a voice and for you to have a stake in the goals and the priorities that we're going to be working on for that whatever that time horizon may be, maybe your fiscal year, it may be for a specific or targeted project, I think that allows them to feel as if they are part of it, and they're not being told what this is, what is the main thing. Also, think another thing, as a leader, when we have our team members actively involved and engaged in goal setting, they provide us with insight and feedback on the feasibility, on the conditions within our organizations, that sometimes we may have blind spots to as well. So so there's also an added benefit that you get additional insight, you get additional data points that you can plug into those SWOT analysis that you can go and provide to your leadership, to provide some additional context or perspective that you may not have if your team is not actively engaged in the price tag.

14:00
Yeah, I love that, you know, I I always fight the temptation to, like, tell everybody what my goals are, right? Sit down with my team. I go, here's my goals. Now, what do you all think? And what what happens is they just shut down, right? And so I think the challenge as a leader is to kind of shut up right and ask our team first if you are you kind of good at that? Kind of not telling them what you think, because I don't know about you, but it kind of, I think, manipulates the result and shuts some people down

14:28
absolutely. I think it's a thin line. I think it's a thin line around around, setting, you know, the expectation and providing the context and the perspective. But also, I think to your point, going in with all the answers, right? And I think here's one of those things where as leaders, we have to put some time and some some some work on the front end, around how we go about engaging our teams, and how we go about doing the work to get them active and the goals. Adding process? Yeah, no, really good. I do. I do think for a lot of us, we do have a moment of we say, this is the way we're going, or what we think that a lot of times, our teams will defer to that, and that may not be the best option, yeah,

15:15
kind of have it in your back pocket, right? You know, because, because you may be privy to where you're, where leadership wants to go, and maybe your team isn't. And so we've got to kind of guide our team. I think that's maybe the the art of leadership is, how do I engage my team, make them feel like they're contributing? Because they've got to buy into these goals. But yet, I've still got to steer the ship right. I've got to kind of know that we're not going down some rabbit hole that's going to not doesn't have good alignment with what you know, our leadership wants to get done. So, yeah, we kind of keep those things maybe in our back pocket a little bit and guide instead of manipulate, which is kind of what I find myself doing sometimes. Yeah, good. Hey. Lindsay showed a slide earlier about some challenges in goal setting. And just want to ask you, in your experience, there were some things like, you know, we don't have a good system to track our progress. We we don't sometimes assign it to someone. So just like everyone, like no one, takes ownership on it. You know, those kinds of things kind of came out of this little survey. What? What do you think are the challenges in your experience, again, that you and your team has have faced with goal setting.

16:21
I think when they were popping up on the screen, I was sitting here, yep, been there, struggling through that now, yep, that rings true. I think they're all that. I think some of them, you know, may be organizational, and some of them may be may sit at your department or at your team level. When I think about the accountability piece and also the visualization piece, I think those go hand in hand. I think that if you have not provided a way for people to visualize and track their progress, it is much easier for there to be a lack of accountability. And so one of the things that I have started to do, even when I may not have a project management system or some type of tool to do visualizations, we can do a 15 minute stand up to talk through what where we are from, a status process, right? We can leverage a whiteboard where we're coming in and checking on so that there is visibility across the team, and so that we can also have accountability around who's doing what and where we are in the process. The other thing that I think, that also came on in that survey, and I think we spoke about it earlier, is the reality of being in local government is that we don't get to determine I'm here in Houston. We don't get to schedule when a hurricane is going to come through here, right? We don't get to schedule some of the things that we are charged with, respond responding to. And so I think having that, that that visibility, and having those stand ups, and having that check in once again, it allows you to come back and be able to make pivots and be able to pick up where you left off.

18:08
Yeah. Really good. Yeah. You know, I think the thing that frustrates us as consultants sometimes is we see organizations go through a goal setting process. Maybe it's around a budget, right? They get really focused, they set these goals, and then guess what? They close the book, and it sits on a shelf, and it sounds like you take on the added responsibility as the leader of making sure I'm creating visibility around these goals. I've gotta figure out some way to do it like, like you said, Maybe we have a clear point strategy, clear point strategy system that creates this visibility. Maybe it's just a Google Doc. Maybe it's a whiteboard. I love that idea. We've had teams. Do you know leaders? You know they go, I'm the first thing I'm doing is calling maintenance, and I'm installing a big whiteboard in my office, and we're going to put those goals up there, maybe even in the break room, whatever, so everyone can see them. Because it sounds like you think you take that responsibility of saying, I've gotta keep talking about this stuff, because we're going to get distracted. We're going to move on to the next shiny penny, and all of a sudden, we haven't talked about our goals in six months.

19:10
And I think it's important that you're staying on top of it, because what I have found, not only as a leader, but as an employee, because I'm also an employee, is that you have changed fatigue, right? And we talk about change agility, but I think one of the ways that you combat that is for your team members to see that at the work that I am doing, the effort that I am putting in to bring change about around this goal, that the action is taking place, right? That if it, if it's one of those things where for for two months or three months, or however long it's taken, that we're putting all this effort, and it goes nowhere, even if it still sits at our team level, if there is an output that we can use, that we can leverage, that we can incorporate into our day to day. Team. It allows us to be able to go back to that team and say, Hey, we have to do it again. Another thing I know for us, we're very limited from a budget perspective on how we're able to reward and how we're able to do certain things for our team. One of the things I think also is important with team goal setting. It also provides you an opportunity to be able to acknowledge and to be able to reward your team very with small allocations. I'm talking about something as small as gold stickers that you make it somewhat of a team building competitive process. You will be amazed to see how your team buys into it because they are motivated to be able to be the one they receive the star of the week or the gold pin, whatever it may be. So that's some other things that we have done in the past, to be able to not only motivate our teams, not only to engage our teams and recognize our team members, but to also make sure that we're staying on track with goals that we have set. Yeah,

21:03
no, I love that idea of, you know, just thinking outside the box. I mean, everyone on this call has a different team, different makeup. Some of us have frontline employees. Some of us have more of an executive team, and we've got to figure out how to keep them engaged, because that really is the key. And I think that love this idea of being creative when we get into our breakouts. We'd love for you all to share just a creative way that you've engaged your team, to keep them kind of connected to it. And I do want you to speak a little bit more you talked about, I think I don't know if you use the word burnout, but you might have, I don't know you kind of relating that to this fact that there's so much change going on in our organization, and we certainly feel that we we feel just this level of burnout. How do we, you know, now you're going to do goal setting Andrea, and we're just, you know, we got so much going on, we have no capacity for more. But yet, you're pushing me as a team member to engage you in this goal, to have this conversation about what more we could do. How do you how do you balance that? Our teams are burned out. They're tired.

22:04
They are nothing burnout and change. Change, change. People being burned out from change is a real thing. I think this is one of those areas when we talk about burnout, where goal setting can become a useful tool for a leader to determine we're doing these things. And some of it may be statutorily driven, some of them may be from a compliance perspective related to our specific organization, but some of it could be we're doing it just because we have always done it. And I think when we are looking at goals, we're looking at priorities. It provides us an opportunity to start to have conversations around, why are we doing it? Why are we doing it this way? Should we still be doing it? Are we the appropriate team to be doing it right? And so it's not a, not a, you know, necessarily a cop out around saying we shouldn't be doing things, but I think it gives a leader visibility into understanding that, and being able to have some conversations around capacity for their teams, around distribution of work, around their availability to take on more. You know, we keep hearing doing more with less, but to be able to say, if you know leadership, if you want to put this on our plate, here are the things we're going to need to have some dialog around that may have to be adjusted in terms of priorities. And I think goal setting provides leaders with that. I think that also times, though, as leaders that when we are in these, what I call voluntold situations, and we're working with our team, this is where, you know, we talk about Visionary Leadership and Motivation, where we have to really stand in that as leaders and be the one that comes in and is able to pull our teams together to get them to execute against whatever that goal or that priority is,

24:01
yeah, I love that. You know, we have to stand in there. And I think it also, engaging in this goal setting process allows us to advocate for our teams, right? Part of our role as leaders is to fight those battles go, you know, because we can't, we can't win it all. We don't have unlimited resources. We have limited resources. But, you know, engaging the team in a conversation about what's, what's the big battle I need to go fight for us is really kind of arms you and kind of aligns you with your team. They start to see you in a little different light as you're someone who's really out there fighting battles for them to get some things done, get some resources for for the department that they don't currently have. Yeah, absolutely. You know, having someone here from talent acquisition is is unique. I mean, you're, you're, you're in the trenches. Your team is in the trenches every day, hiring and firing. What just a little side note here. I'm gonna take you off course a little bit. But what is your what's going on right now? What would you say is the. State of the Union in hiring. Are you seeing more, a better pool of candidates, or are we still struggling, kind of, coming out of the COVID years? Kind of, where are we in, in attracting really good people to our local governments?

25:15
And so I know you mentioned, I'm in Houston. So in Houston, large city. So talent and sourcing talent for Harris County, it is always a challenge, I think, like so many other local government, it is, it is really important to be able to tell the story, the story of why I love that, my bio that you pulled out, that I had been with Harris County since 2005 and one of the reasons when I am working with candidates and having conversations around the Y I say I stay because I've been provided with the opportunity, and I think for so many leaders in public sector, that is our story, like we may have joined the organization thinking that we were Safe for a few years and in transition, and then we found a that we loved what we do. We love being a service to the communities that we live in, but also that we were able to grow our careers. But I do, I think it is still challenging. We're somewhat unique here in Houston, large city. We compete directly with a number of other local government, local counties. Our sister county up the road, I think, has consistently been named one of the fastest growing counties in the country. And so we have a lot of dynamic we have the energy corridor here in Houston. So we compete with them, the world renowned Houston Medical Center, where we have to do some competition as well, along with a number of large ISDS, the seventh largest one in the country. So we have a lot of just public sector, quasi public sector employers that we're competing with. And one of the things that we're working on, we talk about goals on in our team is service delivery from a talent acquisition perspective, like, what is the services that we're delivering to make sure that Harris County has the talent that it needs, not only for today, but future proofing, we're looking and five and a five and 10 year horizon. We know that the workforce dynamic is changing, and so how do we structure the work that we're doing to be able to respond to that changing dynamic in the workforce? Because the reality is, is that fewer people are coming in and wants to do a 1520, 25, year career with any organization. So as that shift the story that we tell and how we position ourselves as an employer has to change.

27:46
Yeah, I like that. Do you think there's a way, or have you seen it be successful if we are a goal setting organization, a goal setting team, let's just talk about let's not talk about the whole organization. Let's talk about the team. And I'm hiring new members to this team, is there something that we can convey in our interviews? Maybe it's in our onboarding about the fact that you're you're going to get engaged in our in our goal, saying you're going to be a part of that. Do you think, and does it even help us, like choose candidates who might be better fits for our culture, if, in fact, we do have a culture of setting goals? I think

28:20
that's important, and I think this is and I'm excited that you mentioned that, because one of the things that I see consistently at all levels of the organization is that candidates want to know how an organization is going to grow them. And one of the things that we do know that planning, organizing and being able to execute against agreed upon deliverables is absolutely key to growing your career. And so I think that hiring managers that are able to use a goal setting not only as a transaction that that individual is going or a task that individuals is going to have to complete, but also frame it from the perspective of development. And professional development may be the thing that stands out for candidates as they're trying to make a determination of which organization that they join, I think, especially if you have a gaps in terms of the ability of your team members to do, say, written communication. This is an opportunity for them to start to exercise that skill set. This might be an exercise we talked about visibility. This might be an exercise where you tell someone for not only we're doing this as goal setting, but as part of your development plan. We want you to create the spreadsheet that we're going to be using, and I want you to leverage formulas and whatnot, things that they may not be able to use in their day to day job. So I do think that there is a way to incorporate goal setting into the discussion that you're having with candidates. And I think if it is something that you at the team level or even at the organizational level, know that it. Going to be key. You absolutely should be having those conversations with candidates around your expectations for them to engage in the process.

30:08
Yeah, and we're not going to pick on the Gen Zers today, but we know intuitively that the young people that we're hiring into our workforce today want to know the why. And so if, if you know, the question is, how can we leverage goal setting as a way to share the why and engage them, because they they want to know. And I think that's, you know, an organization that is good at goal setting really kind of, I think, aligns itself, maybe, with this newer generation workforce. And this isn't a workshop on, you know, next gen, but any comment you would say about this younger workforce, and again, specifically, maybe tying it to the opportunity to do goal setting, goal setting,

30:46
I think they want to know the why. But I think for all employees across generations, they want to know the why, and they want to be part of the solution, right? They want to be able to have a voice and be able to have input into not only the why, but how we get there. And so I think that with goal setting and engaging your team, being able to provide them with an opportunity to be able to to sit there and and help you craft what the deliverables are, what your timeline is, resource allocation, right? The resources that are being brought to bear. One of the things though, too, I think, when we talk about resourcing, is that sometimes in those conversations with my team, when we're talking about our goals and we're developing the plan, some of my team members have raised their hand and say, Miss Andrew, why are we doing that? We could use this that has a, you know, a nominal cost that will cut down on the days we it would take us to do something to where we were allocating three or four days, you know, leveraging this service would maybe only take us a day to do it. Oh, and by the way, we could probably do it within the trial period, right? And so that's the other thing. I think when you are able to go in and engage your team and they have voice in it, they're more likely to a provide you with really good feedback, but more importantly, actively help you in a deliver against those goals.

32:20
Yeah, no, really, really good. Hey, last question that I have, and by the way, if anyone wants to type a question out in the chat, now be a good time to do that for Andrea. I know you might want to pick on her in the talent acquisition side. The focus is on goal setting, but anything goes this is going to be your chance to ask her any questions that you have. But you know, what advice would you give us? You know, most of us are kind of middle managers. We're in the trenches. We're struggling day to day. You know, our budgets are tight. Our budgets are kind of getting cut right now, what's some advice you would give us around leveraging goal setting specifically as a leadership tool to be more effective in the way we we run our teams, I

33:03
would say a spending some time to understand from a goal setting, what is set in stone, what are the things that have been handed down to me that are non negotiable for my leadership, that kind of are here. Here is what you will do, the items where I have some discretion and can engage my team. And then also, even within that, what is the current capacity of my team to engage in the goal setting process, and then who is best to be able to partner with me on my team around that goal that we're working towards and we're planning towards right? Sometimes it may be a member of the administrative team that can work with me on that. Sometimes it may be more of my system administrator who I can work with and partner on and work with that. But I think taking some time on the front end, to be very clear, you mentioned earlier, the why sometimes unfortunately fortunate as leaders and managers. The why is because we were told to right, like we have the time to also sit in that, but understanding that, understanding the items that I do have some control and some discretion on, and then doing an evaluation for my team. We talked earlier about leveraging goal setting for developmental purposes. We talked about leveraging goal setting for recruiting purposes. Are there opportunities to do that, and then being clear when we're engaging with the team, what the ask is of them?

34:36
Yeah, good. You brought to mind something I think we forget is, you know, inviting maybe some other people outside of our team even into our goal setting session our customers, right? If I'm, if I serve internal like an HR department, you know, am I inviting maybe other department heads to come in and give some feedback as to how we're setting goals and what's most important? So I, yeah, really, really, great reminders. Well, thank. You so much. That's kind of what I had, Lindsay, anything kind of rise to the top in the chat that you want to, you want to share with, with Andrea, yeah,

35:09
sure, we have a Thank you, Andrea. That was really amazing. Like, I've learned a lot. So thank you so much for that. That was really powerful. So Sean has a question, and he said, as a talent manager, how have you motivated those who don't care to engage in personal or professional development, to assist in the goals set forth? Great

35:31
question, awesome question. And I think that that really is an engagement issue around how do you just engage an employee that may be at the point that they're not motivated, right? Because I think what I have found is that even for some of my employees, or my team that may be still over Stat, over capacity or whatnot, usually when we are working on large initiatives, that usually kind of brings up, brings a little bit of life back into into them. But one of the things, I think that for an employee that truly has stopped having some desire around their own professional or personal development, I think that speaks to a larger issue, and I think it has to be a discussion with them. I think one of the things, if I had that on my team, and I was recognizing it, and I was looking to understand the root cause. I would maybe use a project goal setting to start to kind of re engage them, to understand where they are at right? Could be something that is just a phase that they're going through, right, and sometimes we all check out a little bit, or it could be indicative of that person really has started to disengage, and maybe using goal setting is an effective tool to kind of reintegrate them back into into the team, and to reintegrate them, you know, kind of to shake them back in for that. I hope that answered your question,

36:59
yeah, well done. Or maybe find another role for them, maybe at the end of the day they're not in the right role. Yeah? Really, really good. Yeah. I think it's all things that we need to consider with around goal setting, this idea of some of our teams, but some of them might just be their personalities. I think, you know, there's this added opportunity. We know we have our go to people, right? And if we keep going back to our go to people. We know we've got people who want to contribute, and they may seem to be unmotivated just because they don't want to engage, but sometimes it's on us as leaders. We're not asking them as much as maybe some of our Higher Performers. And so really, this is almost like a culture question, right? I mean, it's, it's, how do we adjust the culture that everyone's going to participate. I'm going to get every you are going to be asked your opinion, and so don't come, you know, just know you're going to come to this meeting and be in a position to voice your your opinion. A lot of people are very uncomfortable in that, particularly in a group setting, right? If you do your your goal setting with the entire team, there are folks who just do not want to engage. Yeah, well, done. Anything else Lindsay, or any follow ups from Sean?

38:06
No, I think she pretty much answered a lot of people's questions, because we didn't really get a lot in the chat. So that's amazing.

38:13
Well, good. Well, again, thank you Andrea, very much for your time. We wish you the best at Harris County, and really, thank you for investing in other municipalities. I hope, I hope no one was here from your competing county that might get one up on you and acquiring talent in your in your region. But we know we want to give to each other, and that's how we all get better and serve better. So thank you. Any closing comments from you?

38:37
I see that someone did just put another question in the chat, and so definitely want to make sure I answer everyone's question. But I think, in closing is, I think one of the things that as a leader for me, even with goal setting, because I fall short, you know, I, over the past two weeks, have moved a check in session around just because my availability and capacity was limited, I think the best parting advice that I have is also giving yourself grace, right? Like that. I think your teams for leaders, and what I have found is my team sees the work that we're doing collectively. They see what the asks are, and so are there moments from an accountability perspective, where I'm not hitting all my milestones, or we're not hitting all of our milestones? Absolutely, you know, we don't use that as a cop out. We hold ourselves accountable. But I think also understanding that the work that we do serving our communities, sometimes your project is going to slip a day, or you're not going to be on on target, on that whiteboard or on that spreadsheet, and that too is okay, as long as that you're prepared to do the work to get you and your team back on track.

39:56
Yeah, I love this. You'll come back to it. We get busy with those seasons. But it's on our list. We're going to come back to it. Well, great. Thank you again for being such a good friend to LeaderGov and you sharing such great information.

40:10
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