A Performance Management Conference Yields Gems & Duds

Last week, I attended a Performance Management conference designed specifically for state, county, and local governments.  There were a few gems and a few duds, both of which contributed to my take-aways. Today, I'll recap what I felt was the biggest gem.

The Gem of the event came from the City of Miami Beach. 

The folks in the budget office of Miami Beach have been at it for some time.  So from a strategy execution methodology, they have the model down quite well.  This isn’t really news. 

What really struck me was their story from this past year.  As some may know, the state of Florida recently went through a politically-driven change to its property tax system –- resulting in significantly reduced tax revenues for county and city governments.  Miami Beach was no exception to the revenue drop, and for its size, it took a major hit.

So, Miami Beach had the unique opportunity to utilize its wonderfully developed strategy execution system to manage a strategy of downsizing.  How can downsizing be done in a strategic way to minimize the negative impact on citizen outcomes and services?  This was their challenge.

The revenue reduction equated into nearly 100 positions in the City.  For an organization of about 1800 employees, this was a significant cut that in most other organizations would have been crushing –- crushing to morale, productivity, and quality of service. 

Yet, Miami Beach found a way to eliminate the positions without any impact to strategic outcomes and services. Plus they did it in such a way that only a handful of people actually had to be fired.  In fact, they helped the bulk of the 100 downsized employees find new jobs (albeit often at lesser pay) within the city. 

The result of the tax cuts was that Miami Beach had to reduce its budget by $7 million over the previous FY. And since they had been forecasting a larger budget based on community growth, the true net impact was more than twice that number.

So the city drastically trimmed expenditures, while maintaining good morale, team work, high productivity, and commitment to quality citizen services across the city government.  For those who have lived through a downsizing, you know this isn’t the norm.

What did Miami Beach do so well that enabled it to weather this storm and come out relatively unscathed compared to other organizations?   

1. It had in place a clear strategic plan, departmental business plans, cascaded objectives, aligned measures, and prioritized initiatives.
2. The city council (its strategic planning group) was involved early and often with an active role in the process.
3. The administrative staff (i.e. city manager, executive staff, and department directors) was united in that it would make budget reduction decisions purely based on the cascaded objectives and measures living in their Balanced Scorecards.
4. A rational process of eliminating positions, processes, projects, and services that were not highly aligned to the strategic objectives and measures was followed.
5. The leadership communicated very openly and often to the employees as the processes unfolded.
6. Political, emotional, and non fact-based decision making were not allowed.

The City of Miami Beach is indeed a gem in the world of performance management. In my next post, I'll talk about the dud...