CEO Corner: How values lead the way

By Gregory Rose

We are in an exciting time for the City of Maricopa as we continue to see growth and the development of our young community. To best serve you and achieve the vision you have laid out for our City, I want to ensure that we are keeping the right employees and that we are hiring the right employees.

As Jim Collins said in his book “Good to Great,” “Leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with where but with who. They start by getting the right people on the bus.”

In 2016, to guide the way city employees will work, who we will recruit and hire, and how we will evaluate performance, we established organizational values.

Organizational values establish a clear set of principles that are important not just for Council or for the city manager or for the department directors, but for each individual that works within the organization and our community.

To define the City of Maricopa organizational values, extensive input from city employees was gathered. A committee of six employees put together the plan to collect input; six brainstorming sessions were held with 148 employees attending, and an online survey was completed with 120 responses. The Executive Team and City Council reviewed the selected values and the values were officially adopted by City Council.

The five values we arrived at are:

Integrity:  We are honest, transparent and demonstrate ethical leadership.

Service: We approach our jobs with a focus on quality and a positive attitude and are responsive, efficient, and flexible.

Teamwork:  We are loyal, hard-working, effective communicators who maintain a positive work environment.

Accountability:  We are committed, knowledgeable, and innovative.

Respect:  We appreciate diversity, are open-minded and compassionate.

The values create the acronym iSTAR. We developed a logo based on iSTAR to help market the organizational values to our employees.  We worked with all departments to define what these values look like in our daily functions and how we can ensure this is the way we are all conducting ourselves. We have developed internal processes, such as quarterly iSTAR Hero awards, to support our values and to guarantee that we are demonstrating them every day so this is not just a poster on a wall.

I think all too often, especially in the hiring process or the evaluation process, we focus mostly on people’s technical skills versus things that indicate character. These values have given us clear guidelines for the type of character we expect in our current and future employees, which I believe ultimately ensures we can provide excellent service.

Gregory Rose is the Maricopa city manager.

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This column appears in the April issue of InMaricopa.