Spotted on the FB Feed - OpEd: Recruiting Specialized External Talent, Headwinds for Attracting Talent in the Community, and Retaining Once Engaged. A Structural Dynamic with Examples in History.

On challenges of finding local talent for local government.Hiring externally, and challenges for people with good experience, special skillsets, or a different working culture/approach integrating.

The idea of hiring locally... I was just talking to someone at City Hall about this. There needs to be some balance. A lot of the public entities around here hire and promote from within or they take from the community. I don't believe that we have a single person in leadership at the City (my example) that has outside Municipal experience. It ends up being a very parochial culture because of that, it's tough to get momentum behind new ideas. Getting a cross pollination of a very well qualified outsider can have a much longer impact than just the couple years served.

We've had two folks with outside experience in leadership at city hall in my year and a half, they've both resigned, and I thought they were the two most impactful folks in my interactions with them. Impactful even though their time was short

- Chuck Nelson, City Counsil President, on Facebook in reply to query about city and local government dealing with challenges of hiring and finding talent locallly and finding themselves having to look externally of the region.

In my opinion, the problem for the incoming side of the equation is that it can be a hostile and unappealing environment/reception for those interested in contributing with something to offer, be it skill, experience in other applications, or focused skilled capability. This is true of any small organization with a structure that values/awards years of experience, often even over performance. Often, the smartest thing one can do, with something to bring to the table but knows it’s futile, is to avoid getting involved and save the trouble. If you have good ideas/skillset/look to go outside status quo thinking, other places would gladly have you in their mix where proactive expansion/growth/thought is encouraged. If you know it will go nowhere, why commit the mental investment? I think there are many very smart and talented people throughout this community, but they don’t want to deal with the BS that often comes with these types of institutions.

Good ideas can often be taken as insults. An idea or suggestion can come off as “you should have known this,” even when that hadn’t entered your mental framework and you just wanted to see something good done. Other times, they are dismissed as a burden due to someone not understanding or following your proposals due to technical knowledge gaps between the two parties. Furthermore, big thinking is generally not welcome in smaller organizations with a slow operating procedure and many checks and codes on what can and can’t be done and what process it has to go through to get from point A to B, regardless of how meritless it may seem. In struggling organizations, new ideas, especially ambitious ones, often meet an audience with a defeatist mentality. Even worse, you can be seen as ridiculous (coming from an entirely different type of operating framework and experience, this is very possible), and you get zero velocity to go anywhere. Plus, a deficit starts growing each time an idea is shot down or dismissed, making each future proposal much more likely to be ignored.

I experienced this early type of dynamic early in my working career when I briefly worked in a public job and later, at an investment firm, but found out early that I’m not the type to fit in with a culture that is focused on clocking in, meeting job-mandated minimums, and clocking out, so I went out on my own where I got to bear the risk, but also potential, of adopting ideas that were dismissed previously. But it is much smoother sailing and safe to stick with the status quo and stick, just enough to keep your direct report happy, but not much more than that if you want to wade into these types of water.

I strongly suggest pursuing entrepreneurship for anyone who reads this and fears that scenario. You take control of your destiny, implement things you believe in, and, importantly, work at your desired speed. It’s not for everyone. Based on life experience and statistics about the number of business owners, it’s probably not most people.

Many people are cool to do what they need to do, which is totally fine. Live the life you want! But there is definitely a personality type that can’t sit comfortably with that. I am confident that, more often than not, local government bodies, often out of their very nature, do a lot to repel that type of person. Of course, there is the exception for people with that mindset who also want to hold public office, climb the ladder, and lead a group/community on a large public stage - those people I find truly impressive. This is a structural issue for sure, one that I think someone could probably flesh out and come up with a pretty good thesis on the dynamic and why it is a structural headwind to future potential and examples throughout history.

I can think of a few big major ones with obvious evidence of this structural challenge that comes to mind when thinking about this. Even presently, I look around the country off the top of my head, and more often than not, it’s replicated in struggling/distressed cities/states/countries/companies. You could probably go to any small city with similar financial status or a steady to low-growing business with a fixed model with no real desire from ownership to mess with something that, for them, is working well enough and doesn’t want to take the risk associated with changing their tested and working model.

For examples to use as a way to identify these issues, many once strong nations failed because the smartest, hardest working, most experienced, or otherwise not conforming with status quo thinking members of the public knew just how bad and poorly managed the country’s leadership was, and given someone who did have the skills/knowledge/ability could get a much better compensation package elsewhere without the headache and constant taste of failure to get good things going anywhere.

The best example of this is for sure the Weimar Republic. It’s well-documented, and the downstream events were about as bad as it gets, so it’s at the top of the list. The state was not seen as powerful enough to bring about changes or new thinking. It was largely dysfunctional, with a small circle of overlapping personal relationships running everything and controlling the power of the internal machine and levers of control. Which benefited very heavily from the state bureaucracy. It was widely seen by the top technocrats/thinkers as a joke rather than a place for someone with serious value/credibility to risk their reputation by even just a simple association. Weimar continued to circle deeper and deeper into dysfunction as it did operate poorly but also had many real challenges to grapple with, unique in nature. (Reparations for WW1 being a big one).

With no one in government with any monetary policy experience or understanding, they did everything at the top of the Def. Do Not Do list for governments dealing with spiraling inflation and high fixed structural costs, ultimately leading to full-blown hyperinflation where the economic collapse was incredibly dramatic and psychologically traumatizing. So much so that once formerly decent people had been pushed into the worst state of poverty imaginable and a resulting mental framework that couldn’t grasp how they went from a middle to upper middle-income earner with a job, savings, child education, and comfortable living, to suddenly having to use your cash paper currency to light the stove as it was cheaper than using the worthless paper as fuel than to buy woold - not an exaggeration.

Also, for what its worth, as its an interesting topic, I think, importantly, many of the German people lost their sense of dignity, having been thrown into severe poverty, still reeling from losing a great war effort that cost a significant number of lives - as well as vast resources, now unable to provide for their family or secure respectable work. Almost all working-age males were unemployed at the peak of the crisis period, which lasted for some time, and those employed would see their morning’s wages turn into a fraction of what they were just hours before when they could finally go shopping for their family - and the cash would be almost worthless by the following day.

Those formally reasonable and generous wage-earning, tax-paying members of society eventually reached a crisis-breaking point, culminating in rallying for and enabling one of the vilest political movements in history. Obviously, that is not what I’m suggesting is going to happen in Erie, obviously, but its a maybe the best modern example of the dynamic and danger I’m speaking of. Ironically, in this example, many of the talented technocrats ended up working with the new fascist party because it, unlike the former democratic government, was seen as a vessel of strength for pushing through needed reforms and executing effective government that would get things done and “make the trains run on time.”

The same dynamic can be seen in many countries in South America and Africa, with an added risk beyond bad pay or not a hospitable/productive environment. It can be pretty dangerous with coups and military groups regularly attempting power grabs across parts of both continents —, as well as the small fact that state-backed criminal organizations get payback for getting a policy win or administrative win over their guy, not in city hall at a markup session or meeting…

The academics and experts take safe haven at the universities that are actually loaded with very smart people (I have a pen pal/ at this point dear friend who lives in Venezuela and is in precisely this position. Maybe the smartest person I’ve met, an engineer by education, with incredible intellectual depth, command of multiple languages, sharp memory, and immediate ability to grasp complex ideas). From what I’ve read and learned through conversations. They primarily stay inside the confines of academia. As I understand it, there is essentially an understanding from the State that they will be left alone if they don’t create noise or make any problems/criticism. This is agreeable over joining a terrible government with just awful policy, and if they pledge to stay completely out of political issues, they go unmolested.

The State and Leader “get” credibility by pointing to a large collection of very bright minds and rigorous academics; in their eyes, its proof their deeply flawed system is “It’s clearly working; just look at this intellectual credibility!” - this was the exact same setup/deal n the Soviet Union, which also had a fair share of intellectual clout/smart and talented people in academia. This option is much better for many reasons, like inefficiency and churning wheels of graft/bureaucracy/corruption. Still, it also allows them to eliminate the potential risk of shining too bright and catching the wrong attention or becoming seen as a threat or a potential liability for power.

Anyways, I had many thoughts on this, and I am going to turn this into a blog post, but these comments here kicked off some thoughts about what I see as an operating headwind/liability for organizations looking to grow/improve their position, and I had actually been recently thinking about. I would also be curious to hear more about what this individual did at Millcreek.