Within the current climate of local government—where we are being asked to do so much more with so many less resources—encouraging, cultivating, and creating well-rounded managers is an essential mission of local government agencies to ensure their continued success.

How do we as local government agencies ensure that our managers are multi-faceted and promoting cross-functional leadership to be able to do more with less? The key to this question is cross-training and collaboration within your agency, and the best way to achieve this is not by bringing it in from the outside, but through organic implementation and promotion to have it become part of your organizational culture from the inside. You may be asking yourself, “Great idea, but where do I start?” Let’s break down cross-training and collaboration to see how you can best implement organic and unforced change within your organization, not only by securing buy-in through change management, but also by creating a blueprint for the future success of your organization.

Cross-Training

Most local government managers understand the importance of cross-training at the staff level. If there is a critical absence within any area of the local government operation, we need to be able to plug in an alternate staff member to ensure continued program delivery or service to constituents. However, cross-training is even more critically important at the management level within an agency because managers understand the larger organizational goals and how each department or component of the agency fits together to accomplish the mission of the organization. Having well-rounded local government managers makes an organization more effective and efficient, with the ability to think big picture and identify issues upstream and intercept them before they can potentially impact and disrupt organizational operations.

Managers who are cross-trained and exposed to various operations within the local government agency become assets and champions for organizational success. One of the critical benefits of cross-training is the elimination of organizational silos. Silos can be detrimental to operations and impact service delivery to the constituents of any community. Silos represent an organizational struggle over resources, power, and politics that distract managers from the larger organizational mission and goals. When we intentionally eliminate silos within our organization, we are agreeing to the concept of multiplying our subject matter experts (SMEs). When we have SMEs that have knowledge, skills, and abilities in several different functional and operational areas of an organization, they can analyze and interpret issues on a much larger scale, diagnosing operational impacts well before they occur and maximizing efficiencies within operational areas.

Managers who have been effectively cross-trained can advise their executives on how to fluidly maneuver resources between programs and services to avoid operational interruptions and emphasize effective and efficient service delivery. This also allows for managers to look at operational and functional areas through different lenses of expertise, enabling them to identify opportunities for process improvements that can potentially save the local government agency time, energy, and resources. Cross-trained managers also set the example for the organization. Staff members that see well-rounded leaders within their organization will be eager and hungry to learn new functions outside of their area of expertise, creating a well-rounded organization from bottom to top—an organization that can be agile and pivot to meet the dynamic needs of their community.

Collaboration

Cross-training your local government management team leads to many more opportunities for collaboration on larger-scale projects and cross-functional operations that impact several departments or areas of your agency. Through the understanding gained by cross-training, managers are more equipped to lead their teams in these collaborative environments, which opens the lines of communication and can assist when compromise is needed to ensure programmatic or service delivery success. Cross-trained managers also set the example for their teams on how to be nimble, flexible, and quickly adapt to change in the ever-fluid local government landscape.

Collaborative approaches to leadership within your local government organization can also promote healthy environments for different perspectives and hard questions to be brought to the table. For example, when forming a team to work on a request for proposals (RFP) for a local government contract award, SMEs are critical to the success of creating an all-encompassing RFP. But the use of non-SMEs can bring alternative perspectives to the project, ask the hard questions that SMEs may steer clear of, or be the bridge to compromise when SMEs disagree on the path forward for the project. In addition, managers operating in this collaborative environment typically do not have a stake in the project at hand, so they are much more unbiased toward the outcome of the project. This can help them assist the team in identifying and addressing unanticipated outcomes early in the project plan, versus later in the project timeline where changes may be more costly and time-consuming to deploy.

Collaboration also reinforces the cross-training of managers among various departments of the local government agency. This allows each member of your management team to represent your department in any setting, equipping them with the ability to answer questions at a very high level and then identify the SME to answer the technical details if necessary. Think about community outreach events, where you may not have one of your critical SMEs available to attend. An effectively cross-trained and collaborative teammate—another manager within your organization—can step in, represent your department to the constituents, answer questions, and present your organization in a positive light. You will never need a plan “b” because you will always have a pool of competent and capable professionals in your organization to answer the call.

How Los Angeles County Employs This Strategy

Los Angeles County is the largest municipal government organization in the United States, covering a land size of 4,753 square miles and serving a population of more than 10 million residents. The county has more than 38 departments and commissions responsible for all the programs and services provided to the constituents within its jurisdiction. Several departments have adopted the model of cross-training and collaboration into their operations and have been successful in connecting with their constituents to educate, problem-solve, and enhance local government service delivery. Here are a few specific examples of how Los Angeles County makes this work.

Property Taxes

The county’s secured property tax roll contains more 2.4 million properties and certifies at over $20 billion annually. Within the county, there are four distinct property tax departments involved in the process. These county departments are the Office of the Assessor, the County Auditor-Controller, the Treasurer and Tax Collector, and the Executive Office of the Board of Supervisors, Assessment Appeals Board.

When a constituent contacts the county for assistance on a property tax matter, many times they are unaware of where in the process their question or issue lies, which often leads them to contacting a department that needs to refer the inquiry to another department. This is where cross-training and collaboration is key—not only at the staff level, but also at the management level.

Recognizing the need for this strategy, the four county departments initiated the Inter-Departmental Steering Committee (ISC) consisting of senior and executive-level manager representation from each department responsible for the collaboration among the four departments throughout the property taxation process. The ISC oversees the Property Tax Coordinating Committee—consisting of supervisors and line operation managers—who work together to troubleshoot issues, determine the latest customer service trends, and oversee the education committee who is responsible for the quarterly interdepartmental public service training. This cross-training is critical because it focuses on areas of the property tax process that are confusing or complex for constituents and how to handle and route those inquires for response and resolution. Often, because of the level of cross-training provided across the four property tax departments, the issues can be resolved even before they get to the department who would be “responsible” for the inquiry under their jurisdiction.

Property Tax Billing, Collection, and Payment Processing

Within the Treasurer and Tax Collector (TTC), there are two branches specifically engaged in the billing, collection, and payment processing aspects of the property tax process: tax collections and banking operations. Historically, there has been loose collaboration and cross-training between these two branches. The perception was that one is a “public-facing” operation and one is a “back-office” operation. This line of thinking reinforced the silos that existed between the two operations, and the collaboration and open lines of communication were less than satisfactory. Tax collections was the face of the organization and what happened behind the scenes in banking operations was viewed akin to the Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

In recent years, changes in personnel, organizational theory, and a collaborative approach have bred an environment where customer experience is now at the forefront of what happens in banking operations. Cross-training and collaboration at all levels—especially at the management level—have contributed to a more fluid functional environment, encouraging problem-solving, troubleshooting, and process improvements. As a result of this collaboration, the TTC is actively researching ways to make property tax payments as effective and efficient as possible without compromising security standards, both with physical payment processing and online commerce transactions. The approach for researching operational efficiencies is much more customer-centric now that cross-training and collaboration have entered the operational arena. In addition, the teams have brought in contributions from other operational and administrative areas of the department—information technology, internal auditors, and administrative services—providing valuable input and perspectives to the project success.

Lastly, the TTC has implemented a process for management rotations, encouraging managers from the seven internal TTC branches to cross-train and collaborate with other branches to create a much more diverse and deep level of experience and insight from all areas of the department. The proof of concept is evident in recent transfers of managers from tax collections to the banking operations branch, demonstrating the ability of the department to adapt to change and create a much more diverse succession plan, contributing to the future success of the department.

Conclusion

Cross-training your management team leads to enhanced opportunities for collaboration, and collaboration leads to effective and efficient strategies to develop better programs and enhance service delivery throughout your local government agency. This is the way of future success for local government agencies—developing a bench of management professionals with breadth and depth of knowledge to improve the future operations of your agency. These cross-trained and collaborative leaders are the new mold of public administrators that can meet the needs of our diverse communities and enhance the ways in which we meet our constituents where they need us most.

BENJAMIN M. EFFINGER, MPA, is operations chief of the cash management division of the Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector. He serves on the communications team of the ICMA Veteran’s Advisory Committee, and is currently pursuing his doctorate in public administration from the University of La Verne.