Sharing Our Goals

You’ve probably heard the expression about getting everyone in the boat to row in the same direction. In a huge organization like ours, doing such a wide variety of stuff, it makes an enormous difference. Taking the idea literally for a moment, picture 17,000 or so of us with oars in the water and the wake we’d make pulling together. 

We’re also an organization driven by goals. Every department has them. And they all in some way support our four big strategic initiatives: healthy families, safe communities, sustainable environments and operational excellence.

Now – what if instead of each department having just its own goals, we came up with a set of goals that combined some of the different things departments do? Keeping with that notion of everyone rowing toward the same point.   

That’s exactly what we’ve started doing with this new fiscal year, and we have a name for it: enterprise-wide goals.

The idea is that these goals go across departments. Sometimes a couple departments, sometimes several. They all have a part in achieving one goal.

It’s not like working together is new ground for us. We’ve had numerous successful partnerships between departments, and we’re always cooperating in countless ways.   

What is new is the whole framework for lining up our many efforts and steering us where we want to go. It now sets the structure for, and ties together, everything in our operational plan.

Let’s look at one example. Under Sustainable Environments, one enterprise-wide goal involves finding ways for residents to be civically engaged and work with us on challenges. Multiple departments are taking on facets of that. Health and Human Services will train people to deliver its Resident Leadership Academy, which teaches people how to create positive change in their communities. Parks will build civic responsibility through a series of volunteer activities. The Registrar will work with community organizations to increase voter registration. The Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board will expand awareness of its role through stakeholder outreach.

You see there are different departments, each doing what they do, but working toward that same goal of civic engagement.

That’s just one example. Under each strategic initiative are several enterprise-wide goals. And each of those goals has those cross-departmental objectives feeding into it. Our op plan lays it out quite neatly, and it’s easy to trace how everything connects.

One really great thing about this is how the whole design came together. The Board of Supervisors sets policy. Our executive leadership team translates that into our County vision and came up with the goals. Our strategic planning support team refined that, then pulled together a cross-section of County employees representing every department. They were put into focus groups to work out the departments’ objectives. It’s a plan for the organization – by the organization.        

You know, the variety of operations you get in a local government like ours beats anything you see in the largest corporations. With so many very different kinds of jobs, sometimes it can be hard to see how each one fits in to help us reach our big vision: creating a region that’s healthy, safe and thriving. These enterprise-wide goals make that connection much more clear.

I know you’re all rowing hard. With this new help steering our efforts, I can’t wait to see how far we’ll go in the year ahead.