Strategic Management for Government Leaders: Planning for the Future

Municipal leaders are experiencing significant challenges to the communities they lead. Those who are successful manage change through systematic strategic thinking, planning and measurement.

Understanding the different frameworks and tools for conducting effective stakeholder outreach, making sense of changes in their operating environments, and engaging in strategic planning can enhance a local government leader’s ability to position the municipality in achieving desired goals and outcomes.

Using strategic planning as a foundation, successful governmental leaders link strategy to performance systems. Local governments are increasingly competing with and against one another in their efforts to attract economic development, innovative industries and more affluent residents while balancing goals of growth against those associated with a high quality of life.

These goals are not unique to a few communities. Rather they are often considered in line with other challenges that local governments across the country face. Increasingly these challenges include responsibility for federal and state mandates that are passed on, aging infrastructure, demands for low crime, high performing schools, high-density low-impact communities, and preservation of their community’s natural environment while managing the tensions associated with growth, sprawl, and rising costs and expectations about government services.

To manage these challenges and achieve the desired goals of those in and affected by the community, local government leaders need to engage in systematic strategic thinking and planning. However, such thinking and planning is not without costs and often occurs as a result of having to react to a crisis or from a failure to plan.

It is vitally important to be able to communicate to key stakeholders how well the goals are being achieved and to differentiate which programs are leading to positive outcomes and which program strategies are not meeting desired targets. To communicate these types of results, it is important that local governments think about developing performance measurement and management systems.

The foundation for communicating the progress of a municipality is its ability to link goals to strategies, strategies to a key set of measures, and linking those measures to budgets and individuals. Developing a culture of performance and accountability does not stop with strategic planning, but rather is dependent on that foundation and builds from it.

To fully communicate with important internal and external stakeholders about strategies and programs that are considered of public value, leaders need to be able to show with specificity what is working and why and what is not working and how change and progress can be addressed. In addition, stakeholders will demand to know at what cost these changes are taking place. These types of systems not only promote accountability, but can improve communication, public participation, and customer satisfaction.

A municipality’s ability to plan strategically and implement and measure its goals and strategies is used as a foundation for furthering a community’s investment in strategic management through linking planning with performance measurement and management systems. The outcome is a community that thinks and acts strategically to achieve its long term desired goals.

Details: For more information on this seminar, contact the Leadership Training Institute at (202) 626-3170 or visit the NLC website at www.nlc.org.

David Van Slyke is a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Syracuse, N.Y., and will lead two half-day seminars during the program in Rapid City.