Former HR Director for the City of Sioux Falls responds on FB to Mayor’s proposal for Cultural Officer
l3wis One of the chief concerns of the mayor is that several hundred employees will be retiring within the next 4-5 years. As Holsen points out below, I look at this as an amazing opportunity for the city to bring in fresh talent while saving taxpayers money. Maybe some of these people don’t need to be replaced at all? Holsen also points out that city jobs are coveted, something I have know for a long time;
I will have been retired from The City of Sioux Falls for 11 years. Prior to my retirement, I was the Director of Human Resources for 23 years, working for 5 different Mayors, under 3 different forms of government.
Mayors are elected officials who come to city government mainly naive in their understanding of governmental accounting, finance and governance issues. That does not diminish any managerial or leadership qualities, it just recognizes their lack of bureaucratic, leadership, management and cultural issues and personnel in city government itself.
Mayor TenHaken’s latest proposal to add a chief culture officer that would work out of his office to address employee turnover in city government by fostering better employee engagement and administering programs that cultivate the next generation of leaders at City Hall makes no sense.
The city has a Director of Human Resources and an extremely competent HR Department whose responsibility is to address and plan for those very issues.
The Mayor is responsible for the overall administration of government operations. That’s why he oversees his appointive officials who are directly responsible for managing their departments and functions.
Employee retention and recruitment is the direct responsibility of the Human Resources Department. Leadership development, culture development, people development and succession planning is the responsibility of the Director of Human Resources and department managers. That’s what they are paid to do.
How do I know that? Because I speak from experience. My department, under my leadership, monitored employee recruitment and retention. With forecasted retirement and turnover data, the directors were constantly informed of retention issues and were tasked, along with our direction and leadership, with putting together comprehensive training and leadership development action plans to deal with the so-called “silver tsunami†which, by the way, is not some new phenomenon just discovered by Mayor TenHaken. We identified it well over a decade ago.
Myself and other selected directors attended a national succession planning conference and came back to Sioux Falls ready to put plans in place to deal with this issue.
As directors, we worked together to identify people within our organization who had either been identified as having the potential and skills necessary to move into leadership and managerial positions, irrespective of their home department. We totally revamped the recruitment, testing and hiring practices for police and fire where the “silver Tsunami “ was a clear and present danger.
The city of Sioux Falls is a coveted employer by people looking for a job. It offers an excellent wage and benefit package including a pension system the private sector no longer offers its employees. The turnover rate has always been historically low, ranging anywhere from a low of 2% to a high of 5%. That is what, we in the field, call a healthy turnover rate. Why? Because change is good and with change comes new talent. The fact is, the city of Sioux Falls didn’t have a recruitment and retention problem that other employers were faced with back then and they don’t have one now. That did not mean we ignored the “silver tsunami†or that we ignored targeted areas where we knew we needed to identify specific recruitment actions for certain technical or highly skilled positions that were outside our normal recruitment area.
The point I’m trying to make here, its totally inappropriate and and actually rather arrogant of the Mayor to propose a Chief Cultural Officer in his office. If the position is actually needed in the organization, it belongs under the direct supervision and oversight of the Director of Human Resources. That department has all the tools and information to administer programs that cultivate the next generation of leaders at City Hall.
Mayor TenHaken needs to go back and read the City Charter so he has a better understanding of his role as Mayor. If this position is actually needed, based on the feedback and direction of the Director of Human Resources, then the City Council should fund it and put it where it belongs. It does not belong in the Mayor’s office.
