Thank you Randy for giving me this interview. A lot of these questions you’ll recognize immediately as they tie into the Framework for Excellence. First issue deals with Leadership. How important is it in your role as CAO to be the champion, spokesperson for the City’s vision, mission and principles?

I think it’s absolutely critical, I don’t think you can be successful to any great extent in anything unless you’ve got leadership coming from the top. Historically, we’ve had it come from the middle to the bottom ranks and that only works to a point and then it starts to fall off the rails. In the public sector, at the local government level, you not only have to have it come from the CAO, it’s got to come from the Mayor in council. And for us we have that on board. That’s taken several years, at least, of work with councils and successive Mayors to get that established. We now have it established and there’s ownership on both administrative and political wings of the operation. And then of course you roll that into the union leadership and it’s got to come from there too. It has to be a perfect storm between all three of them.

So it’s the elected leadership but also the administration as well as the union. I know from reading your mission that you’ve got excellent relations with the union.

My first year as CAO, we did a 4-year contract which is unprecedented in British Columbia. We did it in a non-traditional way; I sat down with the union leader and said, “Let’s work this out or we can go the traditional bargain route”. We elected as a group to sit down and work it out. It was probably 8 hours of work. The second contract was a 5-year contract, which was just signed this year, and again we did the very same way with both unions and it was done in hours basically. I think it reflected a lot of hard work from both parties and to get to a point where we could trust each other. We knew that there would be problems and issues in the future, so we had mechanisms to strain that out and they knew that I had an open door and I knew that I had an open door with them. So when we ran into conflicts, we were in it together to try and get them solved and we would do so in a respectful way. Not everything has to be carved in stone in an agreement.

Running a City is a little different than running a corporation because you’ve got several levels of leadership. Clearly the Mayor is the spokesperson for the City to the public, while you are the spokesperson in the City staff.

I think you also have to be a champion in the community. The administration interacts with all the community groups, all the interests, taxpayers; I think we’re all part of that. That photograph we gave you showing the City celebrating receiving the award from the National Quality Institute, is filled with community groups as well as staff. It’s the largest gathering we’ve ever had and there’s a whole bunch of people in behind that you can’t see. And we called the community groups, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Association, the groups that we fund such as Western Canada Theatre, all of the Art Galleries, and said, “Look, you’re part of this. We can’t be a Top 100 Organization and reflect excellence without your help and vice versa. And we want you to come and celebrate with us, along with our staff, to celebrate this achievement”. It was remarkable, they showed up as partners and they were highly congratulatory and appreciative of being invited. It’s not just about Council or just about administration, it’s about the whole community coming together and that’s really been our goal to try and draw all those groups together. At the local government level, that’s extremely difficult. They’re not customers. We’re not selling them a product; we’re selling them a service and often we have to say: “No, we’re not going to deliver that to you, we’re not going to give you that amount of money and/or we’re going to regulate you”. So, it’s a much more complex relationship than you would find in a typical company. That’s my personal view but I’m not a private sector guy.

One of your slogans is to be recognized as a world leader; would you think that that is well known throughout the whole team?

Yes. Tournament Capital concept developed in the early 90’s as a tool to diversify our economy. We thought that by attracting tournaments to come to this community, this resource based community, we could diversify our economy. We were very successful in doing it. And over time, we morphed ourselves into the tournament capital of Canada by building and by winning a referendum with our public to build 37.6 million dollars worth of facilities. And when you add the grants on top of that from senior levels of government it is close to 50 million dollars worth of capital facilities that are state of the art.

The whole purpose started with diversifying the economy, it’s now much more than that; it’s about partnership with the University, it’s about quality of life, it’s about pride and being a public servant delivering services in the City of Kamloops as an employee. It really is a holistic thing today. We are not only well known within ourselves … we’re well known across Canada for Tournament Capital Canada status. In fact, there have been several other communities since then that have approached the “nationally ranked” slogan for a number of different purposes but not tournaments. Certainly, we were the first one and sort of fell into it over time because it was so successful. But well understood, well protected by staff, they’re proud of it and very much so throughout the entire community. We did the logo, which was different than the traditional coat of arms logo. This one says, “Tournament Capital of Canada” on it. An artist did it as opposed to typical logo people and now today, you see that everywhere. People are extremely proud of that logo as community members.

The City’s Mission Statement says, “To provide the best possible services to our citizens that reflect the wealth of council and provide a balance of benefits to community”. That’s very interesting wording… A "balance of benefits” because I suppose you can’t please everybody all the time. Can you share what the thought process was to a “balance of benefits”?

I think that there’s always demand on the public sector to give people what they want. And you can’t do it… it’s all about “guns and butter” when it comes to budgets and when it comes to services. So, you have to look at how we’re going to deliver good roads and at the same time deliver good cultural service programs, good recreation programs, and good parks. So you’re balancing all those issues continually. Further to that, this community, (probably others have it to one degree or another), is a very diversified community. It’s made up of seven towns that were forced into amalgamation. And all of them were told they had to be part of Kamloops now and each one of those had varying standards. Some of them were quite deficient in terms of infrastructure and some of them quite sophisticated because of more recent development. And our goal is to try and uplift all of them into a certain standard providing a “balance of benefits” to everybody. So you can’t just put your parks in one area, you’ve got to balance that out with all of the other areas at the same time. When someone comes and makes a demand, “I want a park in my area”; we look at it from a holistic perspective… where is the greatest need in this community not just because you think it’s best in your neighbourhood. Our job is to balance that out. And that’s no different than most municipalities. That’s what makes public service so difficult.

When were the 7 towns amalgamated?

In 1972 – 73.

I noticed that there’s some friendly competition and rivalry with Kelowna. I know you did an exchange of one of the senior executives with Kelowna. Do you collaborate with Kelowna?

Yes, it hasn’t always been collaborative. The community, not the City, had a real competitive perspective of Kelowna because Kelowna, Prince George and Kamloops were competing with one another in the 70s for top spot in the country. Then a recession struck in the 70s and 80s and Kelowna won out. Basically they took off in the other two centers because they were more resourced-based. Kamloops and Prince George fell behind. Business people here, taxpayers here suffered quite a bit in that period of time. And they kept looking at Kelowna, “What is Kelowna doing? How come they’ve got this and we don’t?” There was a lot of envy. Today it’s different. We look at Kelowna and we don’t want to be Kelowna, we’re quite happy at being Kamloops. And that’s because we shifted from being just strictly a mill town to being a garden community. And that’s what Communities in Bloom all about, that’s what Tournament Capital is all about. There’s a very significant level of pride in being a Kamloops citizen today. It was not around in the 70s in 80s. So now we joke about it and we talk about that envy. At the staff level, we cooperate very heavily with them. The public sector has that opportunity that private sector don’t.

What created that culture shift… people becoming proud…?

I think the pivotal moment in Kamloops’ history was in the early 90s… we went after the Canada games. And that was just about the time that Tournament Capital BC was starting to be well recognized in community. And we got the Canada games in 1993-94 and national attention was placed on council. For the first time in our lives, we were on television, national level, showing the vistas in the summertime here, which are quite spectacular. And the entire community came together to volunteer. We had an incredible number of volunteers. That galvanized a spirit in community and a spirit with staff to be proud of their community. It morphed from there into seeking out awards to celebrate excellence and success. To communities in bloom was a big part of it. Going after planning awards that we were successful in achieving and joining the National Quality Institute. All those things are about becoming the very best we can possibly be, raising the bar and going after it. We also did a lot of talking in the community and with our staff about being proud of being a Kamloops citizen and being proud of being a public servant. So we talk about that a lot and we talk about why we should be proud of that and slowly, over time, it has built into this incredible sense of pride of being a Kamloops person.

It doesn’t happen over night, it’s an evolution. You can’t go from being a mill town to a garden community over night with a diversified economy. It takes time and effort.

The principles of trust, health and innovation, pride… this is something that people actually live and breathe… this is actually engrained into the culture.

I think it is. We practice a lot of those through performance reviews, through touching base with one another when we feel that somebody is out of step with those value systems. We talk about that. We have them in every workstation; we try to continually bring them forward to our projects that we are putting forward to council to say… “This is a reflection of the mission statement; this is a reflection of this value”. Constantly making them come alive is part of our culture.


Every boardroom will have a Mission and Values Statement; every staff board will have one. It’s still not out there 100%... we’re continually dealing with that issue. I go around and I talk about the strategic plan and the mission and values statements to every staff member who wants to hear.

I see that all your key people have actually signed the Mission and Values Statement, which is taking ownership of it. In terms of continuous improvement and adapting best practices and becoming a learning organization, and sharing ideas with other municipalities, in running a city, how do you maintain continuous improvement and try to be at the leading edge of best practices?

First of all, a framework of excellence is quite critical. We started our program to become an excellent organization in 2001. It started off as, “Ok, every manager wants to be efficient and effective but what does that mean?” Those are really hollow words. You’ve got to be able to benchmark it and measure it and make sure that everybody is working towards those goals and then you have to evaluate and measure yourself against something, somebody else, some other level.

We wanted to become a Top 100 organization in Canada. And that’s where it sprung from because Richmond had won it and I remember talking to some of the staff and the CEO there and what it did for Richmond is it made the staff feel real proud of that community. Then 2 years later they won Communities in Bloom. That gave me some ideas about creating those visions and those benchmarks to go after. So when we created the Top 100, that’s where we wanted to be and it resulted in a lot of internal debate. “What’s Top 100? What does that mean?” And my response to it: “It means that you are a very, very good organization and proud of it”. “Well, what does it mean beyond that?” I said, “That’s something we’re going to dialogue on and figure out together as a team because I can’t do that as a CAO. I’m not that smart, but with a lot of smart people collectively we can put our heads together and figure out.” So we did.

We studied the National Quality Institute, we studied ISO 9000, and we studied all kinds of different companies that evaluate organizations. We selected NQI and it was very fortuitous that we did. Back in 80’s, I attended a meeting in 1989 in Vancouver and BC Telus was spear heading this meeting. Three of us went down to that meeting and they were talking about NQI at the time. We listened to the presentation; there were a number of companies there and we all looked at each other and said, “Our organization is not ready for this; there is no way we can pull this off. We don’t have the culture, we don’t have the strength, we don’t have the leadership, and we’re not there”. So we backed away from it.

When we went back into it to take another look at it, we felt that this is something, based on the criteria and the measurements, based on the fact that it’s a national organization, it’s non-profit and it looks at both private and public sector, which was important to us, we felt that this was the kind of institute that would help us get to being an excellent organization and to finding the force. You’ve got to do that, you can’t just talk about efficiencies and effectiveness; you’ve got to actually create the vision, and create that framework from outside the organization that comes in and says, “If you want to be that, this is what you’ve got to achieve. And then once you do that, you can start getting there, but it’s a long journey to go through that process”.

It’s not a quick fix.

No, and I’m a very impatient guy. I remember saying to Merv Stanley at NQI, “I want this like next year, I want it done”. Merv laughed and said, “It’s good to have that kind of a goal”.

Can you talk about corporate social responsibilities as a City… to be a good corporate citizen socially responsible and concern for the environment, which clearly is a very important part of what you do? Can you share how that is incorporated in the culture?

I’m not sure I can answer that one easily because I think that is one of government’s roles to be responsible for social and environmental issues that reflect things that perhaps private sector can’t or won’t do for whatever reasons. Our job really is to provide services that the private sector wouldn’t normally do because there’s no money in it. So everything that we do is geared towards those kinds of social equity and environment equity questions. The problem is that it takes money. And the other problem is that there are other levels of government that have a high level of responsibility for those areas. What we do corporately, we’re very concerned about making sure that we’re walking the talk in terms of environmental issues.

We’ve recently embarked on a whole purchase program for alternative fuel vehicles and we believe that by doing that, we’re actually helping the creation of an economy of scale with those vehicles, the price point in the retail market will come down for the general taxpayer. And we’re leading the way by saying to the taxpayer, “This is the kind of thing you should be doing too”.

We participate through City staff in all kinds of non-profit walkathons and we raise the flag. United Way, for example, we’re big contributors to them. So we try and do it in small ways, we have some corporate policies where we meet national standards for environmental issues. Most of what we do is more on a small scale and non-targeted way, wherever we can.

I was reading in a recent edition of Canadian Business Magazine, that Kamloops is rated as the 35th best city to live in Canada. One of the things that jumped out at me was the crime statistics, which I think was 2nd highest in Canada. That crime statistic is that an aberration or is that a real issue?

I think it’s an aberration because the crime stats are linked to the police doing their job in the community to arrest people and charge them. So, you can have a very significant spike in your crime stats simply because of hard police work in breaking a drug ring, for example, or more recently, a car theft ring here which had national roots. You’ve got to be careful when you look at those crime statistics that it is not a spike. And crime tends to spike and then it drops off. I can show you stats going back that actually show a decline and that we’re not in bad shape at all. In fact, we just talked about it today at Council that our citizens generally feel very safe in this community because we survey them, every 2 years. One of the councillors who lives in the downtown core was saying that she walked home from a function on Friday night and she ran into seven other older women in the downtown core walking out for a walk at night on Friday night. You don’t find that in many places but you do find that here. Do we have our issues? Absolutely.

In terms of planning, do you use Balanced Score Card?

We don’t use balanced score cards but basically our hierarchy of planning starts with the Council’s strategic plan. They do their plan once every three years for their mandate. They set the broad goals and parameters. The corporate plan then falls under that and it’s reviewed annually with Council and with our administrative people. From that, every department has their own departmental strategic plans and it flows down. But it also flows upwards through the departmental strategic plans; those guys generate a lot of new ideas of things that need to be done, but they are also heavily involved in the community in doing things like neighbourhood plans. And so the neighbourhood plans will work its way up and feedback to Council through their own plan, which is not carved in stone, and through the annual budget process. It’s an evolving, continually changing product. What it has forced us to do and forced Council to do is try to stay strategic, don’t be pulled off in a thousand directions, get things done, put them out of the way and move on with new stuff. And we’ve been very successful in doing that.


Is there opportunity for citizens to get involved besides in the surveys? Is there opportunity for employees to share in the planning process?

Employees have an opportunity through their departmental strategic plans to understand what corporately we’re doing but also departmentally they have an opportunity to provide some feedback through those plans and the two pass each other and catch on fire depending on what’s going on. Departments also do surveys of their staff. The staff is very involved in doing community work. So that’s what draws the community side in. For example, a neighbourhood plan that is very broad in nature, where you would get a lot of feedback from neighbourhood groups as to what needs to take place, it gets approved by Council and that then feeds its way back into the strategic actions that need to take place.

One of the beauties of local government is that its highly accessible government. Every week, people go through that door to present their views to Council. We have public hearings, once a week… we had one last week, people didn’t like the results but they had a chance to have a say in that particular community issue. We’re really pretty close to people here.

On big issues, like the water treatment, did you hold a referendum?

No, it was an alternative approval process where people didn’t oppose it. We were ordered by the Public Health Authority to put the water treatment plant in. It wasn’t where you ask for permission, you just do it and if there’s more than 5%, dissent then you have a problem on your hands. The Tournament Capital facilities was a referendum because we thought, “This is a fairly major borrowing, it’s 37.6 million dollars, we better find out what the community wants”. So we held a referendum to find out what they wanted and they said yes… everybody bought into it.

Are you constantly in planning mode?

I was at one time because I was attempting to create the process and the plans. But not any longer. Quite interestingly, people have now bought into the process so much that the Council plan today is completely driven by them. They create it, we’re just there to facilitate the process and they don’t even like to have us voice too much of an opinion of what they think the goals and objectives of Council strategic plan is. At one time, it was primarily directed and spearheaded by administration to get Council to focus. Now over the last 4 – 6 years, Council has taken total ownership. At the other end, the departments are creating their own unique strategic plans… I don’t even have to think about it.

You’re the conductor now.

I’m basically receiving and reading them and making sure there’s a fit. I’m not driving that process because it’s part of a culture.

What was your background prior to coming here?

I’m a social worker and a community urban planner. In this organization I went from the Director of Developmental Services to the Chief Administrative Officer. In urban planning you have to have a fairly holistic view of the organization and your community so to me it was almost effortless to step into that next level.

When new Councils come in… what challenges does that present when you’ve got elected officials?

In this town, it’s been no different than any other level of government or City where that’s been an issue for administration. In the last several years, we’ve been very fortunate to have very solid stable elected officials coming through that do buy into the visions of the community for Tournament Capital and for Communities in Bloom. They see the good things that have been done. That wasn’t always the case in this City. I think one of the reasons why we worked so hard on creating those programs is if you want your politicians to support what you’re trying to achieve and get done; you better explain to them what it is. You better create the vision that they can buy into and if you’re not doing that, then they are going to define it for you. We understood what they were after; we just created the framework to help them and us get there. And now the job of administration is to continue to drive that vision and continue to drive that framework and make Council the winners out of that at the same time. Now, a change at the helm could have dire consequences… the program could die as a result of that. We could get serious negative politics and that’s the challenge of local government… that’s the world we live in. What we’ve attempted to do is get the community to buy into the vision. If you’ve got that, you’re not likely to get a political backlash.

In terms of measurement, can you share the systems that are undertaken here by the City to measure that in fact, you are achieving your desired outcome?

I think that the satisfaction survey is a good one… it measures all kinds of levels of satisfaction with our services. It tends to be generic in nature but it does give us over a period of time a measurement tool as to how people view our delivery of services. What we have found is that it has consistently gotten better… we’re at 98% satisfaction level and that’s up from about 85% when we first started doing it. So you know that there has been an improvement. In terms of core delivery of services, each department will do their own satisfaction survey with their customers and their employees because they are customers as well. And we measure that as well. Beyond that, and this is a constant battle for most municipalities, is how long it takes to process a building permit, a rezoning application, a sub-division application and a business license. We measure these things quarterly, annually… we set the benchmarks… we want to produce a rezoning application… 85% of the time within 12 weeks and we measure that and we publish it. So each one of those categories has a target that the staff are geared up for and that’s what they try to aim for and we publish it in the area where the people come to get their permits…they know what they can expect and we publish it with Council and at times, right now we’re in a boom period, we just haven’t been able to staff up to deal with the added pressure of application and so we’ve been able to go to Council and say, “We’re getting added revenues from development applications, we’re falling down in terms of meeting the standards, so we have a choice of either changing the standards or increase the staff and they allowed to increase the staff”.

12 weeks… how does that compare to other cities because I hear stories of 6 months to a year?

Sure… in some cases for complex ones it can take that long too. Kamloops has always prided itself in how fast it does their development applications. We get a lot of outside developers coming in and saying, “Wow you guys do good work here”. But in fairness to other jurisdictions, when you get into larger communities like Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, you’ve got so many more interest groups to manage, so many more complexities. Your city government is run like a large government not a small one. You just don’t have the same opportunity to crank out an application that quickly.

Is there a concern from the citizens that they don’t want the City to grow too fast… do you get pressure saying, “Let’s slow down growth.”

That’s never been a problem for Kamloops… we’ve struggled with the opposite, we’ve struggled with making sure that we move into a more diversified economy. We’ve been extremely fortunate that the infrastructure that we’ve put into place has been able to manage to grow. We’ve gone from negative growth to positive growth to rigorous growth and that gives people a sense of comfort. People want to see growth but they don’t want to see it happen so rapidly that their social habits would change, they don’t know who their neighbours are, they can’t walk in their downtown area. They want to meet their neighbours and friends and be connected. This town still reflects that. When you get 100,000 plus, it doesn’t matter how hard you work it’s very hard to maintain that sense of village. We think we’re probably at 84,000… we’re waiting for the next census to give us the number.

Do you have any targets as to where you want to be as a City or where you don’t want to be?

I think that most people here would like the current level of growth, which is 2½ % per year, and I think most people in this community would probably like to be in close to 100,000. When you get to 100,000 it creates a whole new economy for you. It tends to feed on itself and you get more service levels that you don’t otherwise have. But beyond that, certainly a lot of business people want to see major growth take place but a lot of citizens here that just want to be gainfully employed and want to have employment for their kids; they want to have the University which is here; they want good amenities which we have; they want to be able to retire here comfortably, safely and they want to continue to know who their neighbours are. I think those are their major goals… they are very pronounced here.

Switching to the customer, who do you see as your customer?

Citizens, Council and administration and then current and future citizens and various cultural groups.

You made a comment earlier that being a City and providing services, sometimes you have to say “No” to your customer and “balance the benefits”. You can’t please everybody all the time so sometimes you’re not going to please your customer.

I think what customers expect are truthful answers, timely and reasonably stated and good respectful service attached to it. Most reasonable people don’t expect you to say, “yes” to everything that’s going on. In the public sector, where the problem comes in is when the squeaky wheels get the oil. And in smaller villages, the people know how to work around the politics of situations. I think our strategic plan, working effectively with Council to establish processes and procedures that are fair and equitable, have resulted in being very clear with our citizens groups and neighbourhoods that “these are the processes we’re working through, this is what we expect that you are going to give us and this is what we will give you” and that’s been really tough work. We’ve established service agreements with our major cultural groups. Prior to that there was no expectation for them to perform. They would just get these grants and the community would just hand it out. They would also get provincial and federal grants that had all kinds of expectations attached to it. It was interesting that the moment that we did that, they didn’t like that. We’ve now done service agreements with every one of those people. For example, another measurement tool, we said to the Western Canada Theatre company, excellent professional private theatre company funded to a large extent by the City, that if you want another $10,000, that’s a bonus. How do you get your bonus? You fill your seats to 75% on the average. So now they are striving towards that. It’s a measurement tool. So how do you get to 75%... well you do programs that orient this village not somewhere back in Toronto. We’re a bit different here. Do your own stuff but if you want that bonus, that’s the value that we have for you to achieve.

You seem to use a lot of business principles to run the City.

There are more and more that are doing that. We banded about the whole slogan, “City needs to run like a business”, well it can’t. Because if it’s run like a business that means that we’re going to make a profit and that means that there’s no daycare, no sporting programs, no recreation programs but what you can do, is you can borrow the measurement tools in the management techniques that a lot of businesses use. Those are performance measurements. Those are evaluating the customers’ needs. Continually reviewing what your policies are instead of carving them in stone and say, “We’ve done it that way so that’s the way we are going to do it forever”. You’ve got to evolve in change; you’ve got to be continually moving with the community. This community is changing, we’ve got new people in this community… it’s not the 1960s guys that are still here. So you evaluate what they need, you make sure you’ve got the right management structure in place and you continually drive that process to make sure that you are doing the best that you can in being efficient and effective in the way you are delivering services. That’s the business side of the equation but we can never run like a for-profit.

You’re also helping new businesses to get established.

We have huge partnerships with the business community here. We’ve really worked hard at that and we are members of the Chamber of Commerce. We give each other heads up on policy issues. We invite them to ask us to come and explain our policies to their members. We listen when they say that they’ve got some issues with some of our policies that negatively affect their membership. We don’t always act on them but we give them a response; we don’t ignore it. We have a huge positive relationship with our homebuilders association. They sometimes don’t like the way we regulate them. We continually interact with them monthly & quarterly. We were just up at their awards at a local ski hill for their annual excellence awards and we were part of that process. We attempt to continually talk to those groups and make sure that we’re listening to what they have to say because after all, it’s those groups that are building the City. What we’re doing is guiding the building of the City. So you’ve got to work together… you can’t just assume that we’ve got all the answers… we don’t. There’s a role to play for them and for us.

It seems to me that there’s a theme that seems to be running through the union, the City, the builders groups, the citizens of … and it goes back to your principles, your values… of communication, trust and openness, your working & communicating with them, listening to them, working in partnerships… its not adversarial… you’re trying to build bridges and bonds. It seems pervasive in terms of the way you do business here.

Pretty much and I think that’s got to be done at all levels. I think a lot of organizations get stuck in relationships. And so you’ve got to be able to build in processes to extract from a personal level and put it on another level and let those people solve the problem.

How much of this is because of Randy Diehl’s style, your personality, your strength? You seem to have this ability to deal with union leaders, deal with the Chamber of Commerce, the University. What lessons can other CAOs, leaders take from this?

I guess I would never assume that I could repeat this anywhere else. I’m here and it’s a perfect storm for me to be able to achieve those things. If you were to catapult me into another community and get me to repeat this performance, it would never happen. I think that what I try to practice is that I’m a very strong believer in mediating disputes and understanding other peoples interests not just my own. I want to hear what you have to say, help me to understand your value system, what’s really important to you, let’s try to be fair in how we are approaching this and sometimes the tide has to go to the other guy. Just let it go, it’s not important for the betterment of the bigger relationship, take out the adversarial stuff, it doesn’t work. Adversarial negotiations, adversarial relationships result in a winner and a loser. And then someone starts to take home all the marbles and then you don’t want to play anymore. I try not to practice that… I try to avoid that. That’s for litigation and for arbitration. If I can avoid those two things, I will practice that as much as possible, which forces me to catapult into conflicts that the staff are involved with and sometimes that’s uncomfortable.

Just take the union negotiations, I went to the President of both unions and I said, “Look, we’ve got two choices here. We can go through the traditional adversarial model that everybody has been practicing for the last 100 years and quite frankly I think it’s a failure. Or we can sit down as two people and work this out. What do you want?” The immediate answer was, “No, we’re going to go through the traditional model because we believe in that model”. “Ok… but if you change your mind, my door is open”. They got into the traditional model, we hired a gunslinger, they went into the meeting, we had our management and they met about 4 or 5 times. Then the president of union came in to see me and he says, “I think I want to try it your way… this isn’t working for us… we would like to work out something different with you… are you still ok with that?” “Absolutely.” My team went nuts… they saw it as an end-run and I said, “Sorry, that’s my job. That’s what I’m going to do and the only thing that I have to do with you guys is to consult with you. At the end of the day, I’m going to make a decision with this person and then I’m going to ask Council to approve that contract and you’re going to have to suck it up.” I paid for that for a couple of years until they started to realize that that 4-year deal that we did was hugely beneficial.

Have you taken courses in negotiation, conflict resolution, and the like?

Yes… I come at it initially from a social work perspective, lots of communications, training and a lot of listening skills. The mediation-training program to The Justice Institute in Vancouver. I’ve used those techniques for mediating community disputes and zoning issues.

A lot of leaders in organizations would maybe be reluctant to go around their lawyers and behind their management teams for fear of undermining them and causing internal problems.

You call your lawyers into the room because you haven’t got other solutions to the problem and so it’s adversarial at that point and it’s who’s going to win. You want to solve a conflict, you take the personalities and the legalities out of the room and you sit down and talk to the other person like they’re a human being and you develop some fundamentals in that relationship of trust, caring and understanding. And when you approach them from that end, your potential for success is much greater. You approach it from the other end, your potential for one person’s success is quite good but the other person is not. I think that creates strikes, creates internal hardships, instability, creates the attitude: “I’m not going to trust you to do a 5 year deal”. I’ve had 9 years of labour peace here. We went from a labour environment here that was the very worst in British Columbia. I had my peers tell me when I was appointed CAO, as well as my sister City say, “Boy, you’ve got your work cut out for you. You do realize that Council has the worst reputation in the province for its relationship to its unions.” Now we have the very best and people look at us and say, “We can’t believe what you guys have achieved with your union people”. And other unions look at our union guys and say, “You mean you actually sit down with the management guys and CAO and work issues out?” “Yeah, we do… that’s how we do things”. It’s been a major paradigm shift as a result of that labour peace, as a result of trust building, there’s a respect there that was never there before. I remember sitting in this room when I first started working for the City in ’89, I was a supervisor and it was filled with far more people than it should have been in that grievance … just about every union person in the world was in there, every manager was in there, the two committees were yelling at each other, standing and thumping their fists, every four-letter word in the book was coming out, and I was new to the organization going, “This is really immature.. This is not a healthy organization”. And I vowed that if I ever had an opportunity to change it, that I would change it because it doesn’t belong. I don’t want to go home with that kind of stress in my gut. I want to go home and feel like I’m proud of the work I’ve achieved and I want my staff to feel the same way. You don’t get that if you’re practicing adversarial policies, adversarial structures.

What about empowerment of employees? How do you empower your employees in all different levels to do the right thing for the job, to make the decisions… Can you share how you trust people to make the right decisions for the City?

First of all, you have to have a good training program going on. I remember when I first came to this organization, only the managers had a training budget, only the managers went to conferences. There was the union and there were the managers and then there were departments that followed each other. We’ve struck a corporate training plan, goals and objectives and performance measures that come out of that, and we made it very clear that we expect that you’re going to train your people, there’s orientation, there’s on-going training and through that comes a level of trust that those people are capable of doing the job. Now beyond that I think you have to give people opportunities to do special projects. You look at Communities in Bloom projects here, now internationally recognized, we’ve got people at the staff level that are extremely proud of that project because they were asked. They were asked and they were empowered to do the gardening for that without having to get approval. They just did it. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve been trying to build into each one: the experts in public service, the guys who know the most about what the customer needs is the guy that picks up your garbage daily, the guy that gardens in the park, the guy that cuts the lawn and sees the problems out there, the electrician that has to repair the work that was done by a contractor. Those are the guys that we need to listen to.

Every department has annual meetings, every manager is required to meet with his particular crew weekly and their job is to hear what some of the issues are. When I go around to the staff annually, it’s not a walk around. I don’t even believe in “management by walking around”. I made that very clear amongst my guys, if I had that much time to manage by walking around, I shouldn’t be employed here. But I’ll tell you what I do make time for- I’ll make time to go to a formal meeting with you and I’ll tell you what’s going on corporately and you tell me what’s going on in your world and we’ll listen to each other in terms of the issues. So when I go to meetings, I get told, “Do you realize in the last 6 months that we’ve had 5 positions here that haven’t been filled because your manager upstairs has got it sitting in his in-basket amongst everything else and he’s just holding them up? And that’s causing problems for us in delivering services.” “No I didn’t realize that but I will have a conversation with him about that”. Next day, the jobs are out. So it’s listening, empowering them to have a say, and showing that we do listen and we will act on those reasonable things and getting across to them that we will not do just everything in accordance with the way you want it but we will listen because this corporation is much bigger than the individual.

I went back to one meeting with the trades’ guys… 5 times. They were asking for changes in their jobs, some changes in the way that they were structured, I went 5 times, listened, 5 times reviewed and went back. They finally ended it. They were most unhappy. And what was interesting in that process is they said, “If you want to be a top 100 organization, you’ll give us flex time”. And my reaction was, “Top 100 isn’t about you getting whatever you want, or you getting flex- time when the other staff groups are not getting it, and we’re not doing flex time because we can’t afford it. Top 100 is about fairness and equity across the board and you guys all working together to deliver a service. And that’s got nothing to do with flex- time. Other organizations may have it and that’s good for them but we don’t have it and that’s the way it’s going to be guys”. That’s part of leadership; you’ve got to say “No”. For me it’s not a popularity contest. If they don’t like my answers, they have other avenues. They can grieve things and they can do through other processes.

I tell my staff that my door is open to any staff person, it doesn’t matter who you are. Some of them just want to bitch and I send them out… this is not the complaint station. You can come in here and say something to empower me at the front end to do something about it, to listen to your concern and disclose it so that we can get it rationalized. It’s very interesting over the years, the people that have come through here and made statements and resulted in me having a better knowledge in the organization and making positive changes. So I think that all of the staff know that I respect them, they see the management team respect them and they know the Council respects them. 15 years ago there was no respect in this community for those people. We had councillors running around the community with stop- watches watching every worker and taking pictures of what they were up to. It was awful… I had never seen anything like this before. There was no trust.

We wanted to build trust back into the staff, acknowledge that they do good work. We appreciate what you give us, we trust you but we also want you to earn our trust too. We want you to work hard. We owe you a respectful place to work and a paycheque that’s reflective of the agreement and adherence to that agreement. Beyond that, we don’t owe you anything and you don’t owe us anything.

What are some of the areas for which you do recognize people who go above and beyond?

We started off last year and a half and created the senior management awards of excellence. When we first came up with the idea, many of the senior managers and the 2ICs (second in command) rejected it and said, “No you can’t do that… if you recognize Joe then Peter is going to want to be recognized, were all in this together”. I said, “This isn’t a communist state! It’s OK to recognize excellence in one part of the organization and not the next”. “Well, we don’t think you should do it”….. “Well, we’re going to do it”. So we did it… and the result was that today people are so proud to get that award… and we don’t just do it for managers, we do it for staff and we even gave our previous Mayor an award because he had done so many good things in the community and we wanted to recognize his efforts… so we gave him an award.

It seems to me that as a leader you’ve had several times when you took a really firm stand even though some of your 2 IC senior management were not crazy about certain things, you pushed ahead in spite of their objections.

And in some cases… I would call it “push it down their throats”. I remember one pivotal meeting that I had with the management group, I had called a meeting and probably a third of the management team showed up, I was madder than hell so I cancelled the meeting, called them again and got all the managers and said, “This is mandatory and I want you to be there but the next time I call a meeting for you guys to be there, I expect you guys to be there. You better have a good reason for not being there. This is not optional… we are leading the City as managers and I expect you to participate as a manager along with me as a partner and when you don’t show up, you don’t show any respect for the senior management group or the CAO’s office and when that’s happening, then someone’s got to go. And I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to be me”.

We also set out some very clear strategies. We recognized that we had 70 managers that had evolved over time, many were hired for questionable reasons, didn’t necessarily have the qualifications, maybe they stood in line like a union guy and suddenly evolved into that job, many were not properly performance-managed. We probably had a third of that team that were fitting into a category that I would just get rid of them. So there are a couple of choices… you can fire them on the spot and send ripples throughout the whole organization and I elected not to do that. I went to the guys and said, “Some of you guys are close to retirement and I’m willing to respect that. Those who decide to stay behind after this brief period of time, you will adhere to the corporate policy, you will have an opportunity to create the corporate policies, but once that’s done, it’s over with and you will perform in accordance with the corporate policies and value systems or you will be gone. And it will not be pleasant. So make a choice now… those of you who can live with that kind of leadership, please stay, I want to work with you. And I build in a lot of tolerance to that… I’ve got a guy working next door and got him reporting directly to me who I’ve taken under my wing and I coach him everyday and he’s close to retirement but he elected to stay so I respected that. I know it’s going to take extra effort for me to keep him level… the other guys have all left and it was a breath of fresh air because that brought in the younger guys into the group and the younger guys came in because they liked the Top 100 strategy and they liked the idea of being in an excellent organization which was one of the reasons they had joined the organization. That new blood created a whole new corporation. And that’s how the transition happened.

On the one hand, you’re very collaborative, a great listener, you like to negotiate and on the other hand, sometimes” it’s my way or the highway”. Would you say that you run the City with an iron fist in a velvet glove?

Yeah… I think most of my managers would say that. Sometimes they would say that I’m a little too tough. They would say that I’m collaborative but they would also say that I’m tough but fair. I’m tough on the issues that need to get resolved, I’m fair on people and I’m collaborative in trying to develop new strategies. I don’t think that it does any leader any good to just sit back and let the staff do whatever they want and not set out hard expectations of performance. And when they don’t meet those performances, try to understand why and what role you played as a leader and what role did the corporation play in not helping them achieve that. “Once that’s over with, this is it we’re finished. You either meet these expectations or let’s respectfully part ways. I don’t want to fire you and you don’t want to be fired. So let’s work it out… maybe there’s another place in the organization that you should be. Maybe there’s another organization where you should be, but right now it’s not working and we got to work it out.” And I’m very strong on that. I don’t throw punches on people, I don’t mess with it. You’re paid to do a job and I expect you to do it. I don’t expect to be sabotaged and I don’t expect you to create your own rules. We had seven different companies with their own set of value systems and we had to pull those together to create one value system and one approach. And I would say we’re pretty much there… it took awhile.

That’s an amazing success story of leadership and getting people to buy in and to collaborate. What do you regard as “success” for the City of Kamloops?

Well I think achieving those awards which is a reflection of benchmarking and measurement tools and receiving external validation. I think that’s key to success. Having stable labour relations is key to measuring success; you measure that against a whole range of areas: grievances, collective grievances, longevity, relationships with the unions. I think having a Council that’s highly supportive and visibly supportive of the corporate efforts, Council that is not hanging administration out to dry. And finally, pride amongst the staff. This is a good organization, they are proud to be an employee here and public service work is noble work. It’s not a bad word. And they’re willing to step up to the plate and continue that journey in making that service good. Beyond that, just making sure that your processes are good, good budget processes, good public processes, good customer relations and you’re working at all those levels to create that. It’s very difficult to pin point any one particular area to measure success. I think it’s measured in many different ways.

And how about personally in your role as CAO, how would you define success for you?
How would you like to be remembered as CAO?

The Top 100 strategies... I would be very disappointed if we didn’t achieve that during the time that I’m here. When I first started off as CAO, it was like me pulling a wagon to get them going. Meeting everything, involved with everything. Today I have to ask to be involved with stuff. “Can I participate in the customer satisfaction plan that you guys are developing right now?” In other words, what I’m finding today is I’m not leading and that’s a reflection of a team that is empowered, on fire and making things happen. The photograph of the city celebrating receiving the NQI Award, that’s the first time that so many staff had gathered, that to me is a reflection of success. You look at those faces and they’re smiling. To me those are true success stories. Frankly, other than getting the certification at the top, I think we’re there. I reflected that to the staff. It’s totally different for me today. I’m not as stressed, I’m not as worried as I used to be.

What would keep you up at night from a work perspective?

Nothing anymore! When I go home, I’m a husband and father. I compartmentalize quite effectively because those are survival techniques I learned when I was very young. I practice that all the time. I don’t allow things to percolate in my private or personal life. Tackle the problems, get them solved, don’t ignore them, don’t let them evolve as monsters; get at the root of the problem right away. And I think because of that I don’t think that there are many things that really bother me. I don’t put things off. And I think that’s a disaster for some people. You start to create demons and ghosts in the closet and all you know is that you’ve got this unresolved stress in your life.

You seem to enjoy taking on challenges.

Yes, I very much enjoy it. If things aren’t happening in that regard, I’m not a happy camper.

As CAO, if you had to say one thing that you’re most proud of, what would that be?

I think getting the Canada Award for Excellence and getting the Top 100 strategies. My staff like to remind me that it’s the “NQI Quest for Quality”. I tell them “no it’s not… its Top 100 because it sounds better”. And I think having that reflected amongst the staff and the Council is the one thing I’m extremely proud of because I think that everything flows from that. To be honest, I was really struggling in 2001… how am I going to take this organization and mend it and make it a better organization, how do I do that? I’ve got to create a brand new framework. How do I do that? And that’s how the whole thing got started and I think that the National Quality Institute’s framework for excellence really did guide us to move into that direction.