Category: Issue 15

As I started my journey of Graduate School in the summer of 2020, Covid-19 was just beginning to wreak havoc on our country. As a firefighter, an EMS educator, and a long time healthcare worker in the Emergency Medical Services field, I admittedly was skeptical about the seriousness of this disease and the impact that it would have on my community and this nation. We have seen over the years many diseases come around with much the same warnings in advance that did little to no damage to the nation and its people. As I got on the rig every day, I along with my colleagues treated it like any other disease and went along treating patients and doing what we do every day. Were we ever wrong in our arrogance?

As numbers continued to climb, our workers continued to be exhausted, working long hours while we worked overtime, exhausted all of our personal protective equipment and one by one, we too got sick from this very dangerous virus. One of my own contracted the virus, became so sick he fought for his life in the hospital for three months, forty-five days of which he was on a ventilator.

As workers began to become ill and forced to quarantine, this made for a managerial nightmare. Firefighters, forced to pull forty-eight hour shifts in order to keep the stations staffed, experienced many sleepless nights as our call volume went up by thirty percent. My firefighters worked tirelessly through all of this and service to our community never faltered. Masks, quarantines, and online schooling for their children have inconvenienced many people during the past year. Some have had to change the way that they do business and adapt to the current state of existence to which we live. I have seen all too frequently in the past year, the mental anguish that being on the front line of this has on the workers. Mental issues are rampant in doctors, nurses, and frontline EMS workers, and people whom I have, throughout my career, seen smiling, joking, and laughing do not do that quite as often anymore.

On January 4th, the reality really became clear. I was diagnosed myself with Covid-19 and pulled out of work to quarantine. Little did I know that after receiving that horrible news, that it would be a blessing in disguise. Two days later my father tested positive, we do not know where he contracted the virus, because he quarantined with my mother who had a surgical procedure done the week prior and had not had contact with anyone. With my mother still recovering from surgery, I was able to spend time with my dad, and take care of him as the rest of my family, due to his illness were forced to stay away. In the early morning of January 10th my father lost his life to the effects of Covid-19. When this hits your immediate family, close friend, or co-worker it becomes too real, the consequences are unforgiving.

I am not writing this for pity, for condolences, or for myself. I decided to write this for strength for others. You are only limited in this life by yourself and what you can push through in the face of adversity. I am a firefighter, an EMT, a father, and a full time student here at Clemson, and through all of this I come out of this determined, focused on the future. In this world filled with sickness and hate, choose to love, choose to be kind to each other, and make sure that the people that you care about are safe and that they know that you love them.

Innovation within the public sector, specifically governmental organizations, will slowly emerge as workplace culture shifts to a less authoritarian leadership-driven environment. In the public sector, older leadership regime protects the status quo, content with incremental changes, to preserve their status, trying to avoid major career-ending mistakes, and clinging to old skills in a rapidly shifting environment of new technologies and paradigms. Leadership will need to adapt to meet the needs of the workforce, as well as the needs of the organization as a whole. Leadership style changes are important, but more important is the cultivation of an inclusive, safe, collaborative team-based structure within the department.

While we have made great strides to create a diverse organization, inclusion is not yet a guarantee. Equality and inclusion are often granted as a matter of policy but few embrace it as a matter of culture and behavior. People want, need, and deserve validation. High psychological safety drives performance and innovation. Leaders must first ensure unconditional inclusion safety, which is the foundation of psychological safety, followed by granting learner safety.
Low employee engagement is a common problem in the public sector – according to Gallup, 71% of US government employees are disengaged, costing taxpayers $500 billion annually in lost productivity. The second stage is learner safety, and employees crave developmental opportunities and want to grow within an organization, in turn, they are much more likely to be engaged with their job and bring their best each day.

As employees grow beyond the apprenticeship nature of the learner safety stage they cross over to a contributor safety stage of self-directed performance where the organization trusts them to perform competently and respects their ability to create value, therefore becoming an earned privilege. In the final stage of psychological safety, challenger safety is based on earning the right to innovate based on a track record of performance, where the organization grants permission to challenge the status quo in good faith. Proactive, offensive innovation is a response to an opportunity and is attainable at the pinnacle of psychological safety. Without challenger safety, there is a high cost to curiosity and creativity, usually resulting in embarrassment and emotional pain. The process of challenging the status quo usually involves a degree of conflict, confrontation, and stress. Innovation is not comfortable or frictionless, and it is hard enough because there is no safety from failure. Innovation ultimately emerges from the process of inquiry through collaboration.

The key issue for innovation in government is cultivating an organizational structure capable of elevating cross-sector collaboration through encouraging less hierarchy and more organizational flattening, even if not structurally flat. Leaders must embrace the uncomfortable nature of disruptive questions, cultivate a climate necessary to encourage constructive dissent through challenger safety and endorse open, transparent organizational development. The barriers to innovation will not be the fears associated with risk-taking and how it will impact the budget but rather if we have an engaged workforce that feels valued and safe enough to share their creativity in hopes of innovating a better government.

I have been thinking a great deal recently about organizational values. They are not just words… or they should not be. How do they guide what we are? Perhaps more importantly, who do we, as an organization, wish to be?

I just surpassed my first eight months as Chief Operating Officer for a large nonprofit, Global Connections to Employment (GCE). We are a bit different from many nonprofits. We not only provide training for our team members with significant disabilities, we then provide meaningful work, often in the form of large Department of Defense contracts. My company has many different lines of business. We compete with all types of companies. So how do we differentiate ourselves when competing with other for-profit and nonprofit companies? What provides our company a competitive advantage in the market place?

A competitive advantage can be differences in cost or other differentiators in service delivery and strategy. Because of our Mission of “Helping People Throughout Life’s Journey,” it is difficult to be the absolute least expensive alternative in a contract bid. We are competitive on price, but that is not what makes us special. We focus on accommodations for our differently-abled team members and ensuring living wages. So what separates us and makes us great… the choice for our customers? I would argue that our competitive advantage is adherence to Values.

We talk about this all the time. Our organization’s values are our V.O.I.C.E.S (Values = Ownership, Integrity, Compassion, Excellence, and Service). I see our values at work all the time and at every level of the company. From our daily lineups via Zoom, to the incredible work being accomplished both remotely as well as at multiple customer sites, now in 26 States. This team embodies and lives our values!

As some of you know, I spent over 24 years in the US Army. I was both proud and humbled to serve my Country. The Army, as an institution, is at its core a values-based organization. Many times, we dealt in operations surrounded by ambiguity and with imperfect information. What drove us to be the best military force in the world? Our shared values. That is what made us strong and pulled people from all walks of life, together.

GCE is also a values-based organization. We continue to strive to be the best version of ourselves… to live our values. Our values drive us to strengthen who we are and strive to be. Our values, our V.O.I.C.E.S. are our competitive advantage.

Be well and stay safe!