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Bill Stark interviews Terrell Hughes, Director of Public Works for Henrico County, VA, about managing change in large organizations. Hughes discusses the challenges employees face during transitions, especially moving from paper-based to digital systems, and stresses the importance of communicating the reasons for change, engaging influential team members, celebrating progress, and providing training and resources. He also emphasizes that leaders need to value expert input but ultimately own and drive decisions during periods of change.

Transcript

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

0:10
special guest today is Terrell Hughes. He's the Director of Public Works for Henrico County, Virginia. That's Richmond, and I want get Terrell to share a little bit about the county and so forth. But he served in state roles, Virginia v dot, director and assistant director of administration, appointed in 2020 as director there at the county for public works. And he oversees a big group of services, road, stormwater and more. I want to get him to share a little bit more about that, and he holds a BS in civil engineering. So it is really great to have you with us. Terrell, and thank you for being a guest today on our on our workshop. How's it going up in Virginia, y'all got any snow yet?

1:03
Well, apparently, earlier this week, the beach got snow, but we're inland, so we didn't get the snow. Oh, wow, the opposite. We might get it before the beach, but yeah, no. Thanks for the introduction. I just want to let everybody know that photo you see the difference in gray hair, that was after starting my job. So blame my co workers for it.

1:26
Tell us about Henrico County, like, where is that near Richmond? And tell us a bit about the big four or five buckets of services you all provide in public works there.

1:37
Yeah, so thanks, but yeah, no, if you're familiar with the Richmond, Virginia area, we're actually about two hours south of Washington, DC, down I 95 so we're on the East Coast in Virginia. Henrico County is actually the we wrap the city of Richmond to the north. Virginia is a little different than a lot of states, so we have independent cities and independent counties. So that's a little different than a lot of other states that you know, I understand, you can be both in the city and in the county. We provide everything schools. We actually take care of our roads here in Henrico, which is under our public works department, which has about 300 staff members that I lead. We also oversee design development. So as things get built, you know, we review site plans and oversee construction, and then we have, we're the environmental stewards for the county. We buy and sell land for the county. And, you know, like I said, everything associated with roads, we actually have just, I think, just over $900 million in roadway projects. We've got 100 projects, lot of drainage issues in the county that we're trying to address. So, yeah, little, little, little widespread of what we have going on. Yeah.

3:00
Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that kind of introduction, and it's good to have you with us today. I know in your career, you've been around the block a few times, and you've encountered lots of change. You've probably instigated change, and you've probably been asked to facilitate change. And I just want to have a conversation here. Ask you a few questions about your background as it relates to change. The first one being, what have you found to be like the hardest part for employees when, like, a big change is introduced, and how have you tried to help them through that? So what? What do you see as the as the big bugaboo for your employees when something big is about to change?

3:48
Yeah, thanks. So, yeah. So I actually came to Henrico County in 2020, so I came in the pandemic. So that was a great time to start a new job, when it was really hard people. I think I was here for almost a year before I even knew what people actually looked like with, you know, the masks on. But, you know, I was fortunate to come in to lead a very, I guess, experienced team. We have a lot of people. We've seen a lot of retirements over the years, but we had a, we have a very large concentration of employees that had been here 20 plus years. So a lot of lot of people who had been around the block. So one of the, I guess, this maybe gets to some another, you know, but one of my strategies, I didn't want to immediately make changes. I wanted to understand what I was changing before just making changes. For change sake. Because I know myself. I like change. I will, I will change things. So I have to kind of curtail that understanding that everyone doesn't necessarily want to move at the same pace that I want to move sometimes. So I wanted to take an intentional pause to understand. But I'd say one of the biggest fears, you know, with our team, we just had a lot of folks that. You're used to doing it a certain way. There's a certain security in the way you're doing it, you know, you're good at doing it the way that you've been doing it. So when someone comes in with a new process or a new tool or new technology, there is definitely a fear that you're what you were once great at you might not be great at anymore, because that change is occurring. And, you know, I think that's one of the big things that we have to kind of understand is, is these changes are intended to make things better. They're intended to make your life easier. They're intended to make the process smoother. You know, these so, you know, trying to make sure that we're making change that that takes great the greater or good degree. You know that, and you know, I don't want to just change for change sake. So usually, when we identify there's a change, there's obviously something that needs to be changed. So we're we're identifying, hey, this can be done better. We have to be very careful how we communicate that. Because if you have a team that takes a lot of pride in their work, suggesting a change, may, you know, offend somebody. So I think that fear of change, and you know, you have the you know, there's an opportunity that to, you know, alienate or offend some of your teammates. So those are some of the things we have to balance out. Yeah, so I'll give one quick example. So, I mean, a lot of we were very paperwork heavy. I'm just going to say that in 2020, I came in and I was amazed at how much paperwork we you know, so we're a public works organization. Work assignments were printed and handed out by paper, and it was very hard to understand where everyone was at, where we where are we going, you know? And someone had to kind of code in all the work that we were doing, and really wanted to move to more of a digital system, which is a lot of you on here, probably like, yeah, that makes sense from the change standpoint. But we had a lot of people who had been here a long time, and they were very resistant. And at one point, a previous director tried to make this change, and people threatened to quit and wanted to leave. And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, it was a lot of energy associated and I think one of the big turning points that we needed to kind of get past was people didn't understand why we were trying to make the change. So we had to really walk people through and communicate what is the why, so that people really understood what we were getting at. And I think once people understood the why, the rest kind of made it. And you know, one tip I would give you guys with any presentation would change, or any presentation in general is spend a lot of time on why, and then everything else you can just throw a few slides in, if you, if you sell the why everything else is doesn't really matter. So, yeah, you know. So, like, I mean, like, I mean, I'm not saying to follow this formula. But, I mean, if you have a 1010, slide deck, you know, maybe seven of those slides are building your case.

8:06
Why? Wow, yeah, I was gonna, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna ask you about that. Because, like, I was gonna ask, how detailed did you have to get with your why, like, like, was it statistics on the time it takes to get work done? Was it the cost of paperwork? Like, how? How detailed did you have to get? Seems like, the more detailed. Probably the better. But I'm curious how you how much detail you gave on the why?

8:37
Yeah, and everybody has a different style, you know, so you could be the numbers graphs. Person, that's not me. I'm more of a picture story. Person, so I kind of walk through examples of calamities that could have been prevented by changing our system. Oh, no. You know, no names were shared and, you know, we protected the, you know, people and but, but just really trying to walk people through, Hey, these are some of the things that were happening, and this is why this happened. And, you know, and then kind of got people on board going, Yeah, we, we don't want those, those things to happen anymore, you know, where we were getting backed up. And, you know, like I said, I think that kind of helped, helped, you know, get the buy in. And I think the other big thing is, and you'll see with any team, there's always people who have a little bit more influence than others. You and you kind of have to understand who those who those people are. So when you're working on the why those are the ones, if you can get to them, they have a little bit more influence in getting people to follow. So, you know, I had a lot of, you know, Foreman and just people who've been at the county a long time that you know, when you're saying stuff, people are looking over, you know, they're looking at them seeing, are they shaking their head, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Are they arms, you know? So, so there's a little bit of catering and trying to figure out who the who the influential people on the team are.

10:10
Yeah, yeah. Tell us. Tell us how you did that. I'm curious. Now, you've got a pretty big group, two or 300 folks, but do you sort of naturally know who those leaders are sort of unspoken. You do you go to them in advance and say, Hey, here's what we're doing. I'd love you. What do you prep them? Or how did that? How did that kind of work out for you?

10:32
Yeah, yeah. So like that. I didn't jump straight in the change. I was new, so I had to try to learn people. One of the benefits of coming in during the pandemic. It did allow me to slow trickle meeting people, because we were a little bit more spaced out than normal circumstances. But, but, yeah, you know, a lot of this change was, you know, so I'm in the office. A lot of times I had folks that are in the field. They work out, I need to go there. I need to be I would, you know, I'd drive by sights, and if I saw somebody, I'd pull over and, you know, I'd show up around lunch break. And, you know, we had, we had breakfast. And just just being observant, you can kind of see who, kind of see who, who's who in the zoo a little bit just just by who's interacting with who, and who tends to have more of a gravitational pull and just spending time asking questions, and, you know, doing some things. And, yeah, I for people who I knew were a little bit more influential, I would maybe give them, them a little bit of a sneak peek. Hey, man. Hey, let me let you in on something. You know, you get the exclusive. And, yeah, you know, you know, you know, they might talk about it, but, you know, just trying to get a little bit more buy in, and, you know, building a little bit more of that rapport and credibility,

11:52
yeah, but, yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you a question. I wish I had this graph to show, but there's a, there's a, kind of a famous image of change, of the change process, where things are going along fine, and then you then you put change in, and everything goes down, and everybody's sort of almost like not depressed, but there's a sadness, right? Like I used to like the way we did it three years ago. There's like a reckoning, like there's an almost like an unbelief, I can't believe we're doing this, and there's a resistance to reality. And so obviously that requires time, and that requires some, hey, it's going to be okay. We did something like this a few years ago. You know, in other words, I guess my question is, during that phase where people are kind of, their senses are heightened. They're like, anti change, like, do you just give it more time? Are you constantly explaining where we are and why we're doing it? Or, how do you get them over that hump of just kind of sadness that we're not doing it the old way anymore. How do you what do you do there?

13:08
Um, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, progress isn't always linear. You know, sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, or when, you know, especially if you're trying to, you're dealing with technology and dealing with human beings. And, you know, I, I mean, we're currently dealing with a situation like that now, where we're trying to become an accredited agency, and dealing with accreditation, there's a lot of documentation, and there's a lot of paperwork, and we're streamlining some of our processes so that we meet the accreditation and when we initially went into accreditation, there was a lot of momentum. Everybody was excited. They're like, yeah, we want to be accredited. And then the work takes longer, and it's more than you want it. So you deal with staff turnover, you deal with you know, life happens, and before you know it, your project deadline needs to shift, and there's a little bit of that momentum. But, you know, I think, I think that's one of those things where we, while you're in that, that transitional phase, it's very important to kind of keep the team re energized. So, so, like one of the examples, we knew we weren't really showing what we wanted to show we weren't finished. And, you know, my only plan was to celebrate completion, and because we realized it was a little bit more than we thought. We when we hit 50% we did a we did a thing. We spread it 50% so nice. That wasn't our goal, you know, half done, but, yeah, he needed a little bit of a boost. Yeah, while we were going through the change, and I think that can happen with any change, if, when you hit a when you hit a snag, it's trying to find some opportunities to to invigo, some positivity, you know, with the with the technology, you know, effort, when we put the new. Work order system, and we had some folks that immediately took to it. You know, they're, they're like, Man, this is just like my iPhone, my smartphone. This is, this makes a lot of sense. We had some folks that needed some additional training, and we needed to find ways to make training available to people, because you had people who had pride that didn't want to ask, had people falling behind? And we wanted to make sure that we were availing ourselves, so that everybody had, you know, had the tools needed to succeed with the change to kind of get past that down period. Yeah, and maybe there was a learning gap, or maybe we didn't. Everybody has different learning styles. Maybe someone needed a little bit more shadowing time or one on one, but, you know, just trying to make sure that we, you know, we provided the resources for everyone to come out of the chain successful, because that wasn't the case initially. Yeah, yeah. If we, if everyone was like a few of the people who hit the ground running, we wouldn't have done any training. But, you know, you have different people with different backgrounds. So, you know, we had to, kind of, you know, create a program that made sense for the team. Wow.

16:09
And so how much of your so you're, you were largely paper dependent up until this point. It sounds like four or five, six years ago, and now you're using this new system. Obviously, things are more automated, streamlined. What percentage are you sort of still paper dependent? Or have you kind of totally gone on your on digital?

16:34
Yeah, no, we're pretty we're fully digital with the work orders. So it's nice you pull up on your phone or your tablet, where the work order is, when the work is complete, they're able to log photos, and there's a lot less work on the back end. So you're in the form, boom, take my photos, show that I'm done. Going to the next project. There's no, you know, yeah, don't have to do any coding in the office after the hours. Or, you know, you're not dealing with a pile of paperwork at the end that you're you're going through and then log the work orders are complete. So yeah, you know, folks, once the once the jobs are done, they can go home. They don't have to deal with the paperwork anymore. So you're seeing huge, huge efficiency boosts where, you know, they had to leave maybe an hour or two early to finish up the paperwork in office. They can stay pretty much till the end of the day and finish all their washers up. You know? They can, wow. And I mean, one of the other big inefficiencies with the paper is they weren't really necessarily geographically sorted. So if you're thinking about, like cleaning ditches or mowing or whatever, we had different work orders, and they kind of, if you just kind of go to the next sheet, it might drive you from here to here, and then here to here. By having everything digital, it was, it was showing the geographic location, so you could go to the next nearest site. So there were a lot of efficiencies that we made. So, you know, you're talking, yeah, saving money on fuel, say, you know, being Yeah, staff time, you know? Yeah, they could plan where they were going to go to lunch.

18:04
Yeah? I mean, there was a lot of important stuff.

18:08
Yeah, all the important. I mean, that's huge, I think through my stomach a lot, but, um, but yeah, you know. So there's a lot of good things that came

18:17
about. Yeah, that's good, yeah, Lindsey, we're going to go ahead and go into the groups here in just just a minute or two. So if you could get those ready, maybe groups of four or five or six, whatever you want to do. I did have kind of a final question for you, and hopefully I've been listening a little bit here this morning, this afternoon. Y'all can help me out. I think I heard you say focus on the why. And in your words, if you have 10 slides, make seven of them about the why. So your point is just emphasizing why we've got this change. And I'll My word is pre sell, like you're finding leaders within the organization, and kind of pre laying out the change with them, getting them kind of as your supporters, early supporters, sell up, celebrate along the way, and obviously adjust as things. Sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back. So we have to be constantly be adjusting. But I love this idea of of really focusing on the why and getting people, getting key people bought in early in the process. Would you add anything to that? Or could you just kind of share with us one sort of final thought of yours as it relates to change here, before we before we wrap up.

19:38
Yeah, one quick thing I will say. You know, I kind of mentioned the key leaders. I do value team support. So, like, sometimes when you're making change, there's people who are experts. I think the expert opinions matter, so you want to make sure that you're gathering input from the experts before just making changes to I will say this, though. So if you're leading the effort, you still need to own whatever decisions are made. And I'll give you a quick example. One time, I had a leader that worked for me that would always bring the experts in, and then they would vote on what should be done, and then, you know, they would come forward with their idea, and it was not a very effective strategy all of the time, because do a vote, you're kind of weighing everyone's opinions equally. And sometimes there's people in the group that may have a little bit or should have a little bit more input on the translation, because they have a lot of a lot to give. And as a leader, you have to discern that. So at the end of the day, as the leader, it's your it's your decision on what change and what path you're going to take. So you want to make sure that you're not deflecting to the team and voting when you're actually the leader. So Wow. So that's one other thing I'll just add. Is leaders. Yeah, leaders do value subject matter experts, but at the end of the day, it's your decision.

20:55
Wow. I love that we do a workshop on situational leadership, and one of the situ, one of the leadership styles, is Democratic leadership, where we get to vote on everything all the time, which is kind of a nice thing, right? Everybody gets an equal voice, and it's Kumbaya, and it's awesome. But sometimes the vote isn't really what it should be. And as a leader, you have a vision, and you might your decision might be different than the votes. I really appreciate you saying that, and that it's ownership. I own the decision. Sometimes I have to make a hard call, or maybe rely on one expert over seven experts, and not necessarily, sort of acquiesce to the to the team, although, you know getting the team's input is important. So, yeah, that's another, that's another, another good one here. Thank you expert input and owning the decision once you've made the decision, well, thank you for being with us. Terrell, I really, really appreciate, appreciate your insights and thoughtfulness means a lot to us. Thank you for having me.

22:05
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