When a crippling ice storm hit Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) last December, stranding 95 light rail vehicles, Marvin Hurt, manager of rail fleet engineering, knew that DART could benefit from the expertise of public transit agencies to the north.

“I immediately got on the phone with my colleague in Denver, because they have snow and ice on a daily basis,” said Hurt, who quickly learned all about ice cutters that could be mounted on the vehicle’s pantograph to slice through ice and free stuck cars. “Less than 24 hours later he sent me pictures, points of contact, where we can move forward with the pantograph.”

Hurt had the benefit of a close relationship with counterparts in Denver who had participated in the Multi-Agency Exchange (MAX) program, a cross-agency leadership development and learning exchange offered jointly by DART, the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD), and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Los Angeles Metro).

Not only did Hurt’s Denver colleague help troubleshoot the immediate challenge posed by the ice storm and put him in touch with counterparts in ­Chicago, Hurt received advice on the optimal mix of heated and non-heated ice cutters, which helped him put together a procurement for ice cutters that will be mounted on eight vehicles.

“We will definitely be prepared” for the next storm, Hurt said, adding that his participation in MAX not only gave him an expanded network for trouble shooting, but also a broader understanding of DART’s overall goals and an exposure to top-level executives. “It’s all upside in terms of all the wonderful things that are good about the program.”

How it Works
MAX began in 2011 when the heads of the three agencies were chatting about the challenges of workforce development, retention, and running a public transit agency. “We are all obviously competitive but at the same time we’re all after the same thing: to grow people and to provide a service to our community,” said Gary Thomas, DART’s president and executive director.

The three general managers appointed internal coordinators to create a program that brings together eight or nine middle managers from all areas of each agency to share best practices and develop a network for future partnerships and knowledge sharing.

“This is a collaborative program focused on sharing the knowledge of today’s experienced workforce through that collaboration and candid interaction,” RTD General Manager Phillip Washington said. He reiterated the program’s three overarching goals:

* Provide a better understanding of transit best practices,
* Create future public transit leaders by giving employees more exposure to their own agencies and peer agencies, and
* Leverage best practices to minimize the learning curve and speed implementation.

Every year, each agency head selects a new group of participants to spend four days in each city learning about that agency and getting to know each other. The program is a mix of information sessions, networking, and hands-on opportunities or “field trips.”

The first year of the program concentrated on light rail and bus operations, safety, security, facilities, human resources, and capital programs. The second year, MAX expanded to include labor relations, negotiations, special events, marketing, and asset management, Washington said.

Participants receive training materials—including slide presentations, manuals, and reports—via flash drives and Google Drive, which are subsequently shared with all employees at the three agencies. The MAX organizers schedule the meetings around special events when possible, such as Denver’s event to sign a $1 billion Full Funding Grant Agreement attended by a number of dignitaries.

It takes time to build the trust needed to share the details of past failures, which is what true innovation is built on. “A lot of times you’ll get in a room at a reception or a conference and you’ll talk about the successes, what’s going right. Oftentimes you don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of what didn’t work and why it didn’t work,” Thomas said. “That’s what this group has the opportunity to do.”

Offering Opportunities; Closing Gaps
Los Angeles Metro Chief Executive Officer Art Leahy puts a special emphasis on making sure that about half the group is from operations. “You can go to colleges and recruit accountants and finance and marketing people,” Leahy said. “We always send people from operations, and they come back with a much larger ­perspective about what transit is and where they fit in.”
Looking ahead, about 30 percent of the management of Los Angeles Metro’s operations division (transportation and maintenance, bus, and rail) is approaching retirement in the next five years. Another 10 percent is between 55 and 60 years old with more than 25 years of service.

“The whole industry is approaching a crisis because in the next several years, the baby boomers are going to retire, so there’s going to be a great opportunity for younger people to move up into leadership positions,” Leahy said. “We have a great task in front of us to prepare younger people for those opportunities that may arise.”

All organizations need to develop internal talent as well as looking to recruit and attract future leaders from outside, said George Bradt, author of First-Time Leader and a leadership and workforce development consultant to many Fortune 500 companies.

“You’ve got to take individual people and train, develop them,” Bradt said. “One of the pools of possible successors is certainly the pool of current employees. If you can do it, you have the luxury of having some generalists you can move around: utility players that can slot in.”

At RTD, the MAX program fits in with a broader succession planning program that includes descriptions of career paths in various divisions and a new, 12-month leadership academy—now a prerequisite for participating in MAX.

“In this day and age when we’re not doing pay increases because our budgets are very challenging, the people in our agencies know we are investing in them. That has paid off in all kinds of areas,” Washington said. “You have higher morale, you have this mindset and thought [from staff] that ‘our leadership really takes this seriously and wants us to step into these leadership positions’.”

RTD requires that participants return from MAX with a commitment to share their knowledge not only through presentations to senior management, but also through lunch-and-learn gatherings with other employees. Of the 54 individuals from all three agencies who participated in the program’s first two years, 17 have already been promoted, proof of the positive effect on employees’ career paths.

Thomas was surprised to learn, through MAX, that up-and-coming leaders had limited knowledge about DART’s broader goals and needs, outside their silos. “They had a good understanding of their department but not the overall agency,” he said. “This program helped highlight that for me and allowed us to talk a little bit more about what our expectations were, goals, challenges.”

Share and Share Alike
Dallas participants learned from their Los Angeles counterparts about buying and maintaining compressed natural gas buses. “It revised our specifications, and ultimately we redesigned some of the engine criteria,” Thomas said. “It allowed us to get ahead of that curve and not make a costly mistake.”

DART officials also used suggestions from Denver when implementing a police texting tool, including ways to record police contacts with passengers and responses more directly, essentially adjusting their program prior to rollout based on Denver’s experience. And DART adapted Los Angeles Metro’s program that uses retired Metro professionals as safety ambassadors. At DART, employees who are restricted to light duty may become customer service ambassadors on platforms while also monitoring hot spots.

It’s been a wonderful program for us,” said Gus Espinoza, DART’s manager of passenger amenities, noting that the light duty program enables the agency to manage staff more efficiently, and it lifts the morale of people who are injured. “I’ve had some discussions with some of the light duty personnel,” he said. “They felt like they were really contributing in a meaningful way. We didn’t just put them in a back corner with some papers to be filed.”

The light duty program, which began in May 2013, gives participants the additional benefit of being exposed to the maintenance department and having another possible career path open in the future.

Los Angeles Metro adopted a practice from DART by hiring two recent college graduates to tweet service alerts. The practice has enabled the agency to gain 3,000-plus followers on Twitter, and mainstream media now follow the agency’s service alerts to spread the word farther and more quickly.

Leahy, Washington, and Thomas reject the notion that sending their best managers to competing agencies for the MAX program puts them in danger of being poached. “You can be afraid of the market, but the fact is that you have to play in it,” Leahy said. “We’ve all three found the participants have really had a great experience. They get to know people; they get to network with peers; they get to learn about best practices at the different transit systems.”

Washington agreed. “I don’t mind being the farm team for the industry. It makes for a very vibrant organization, and it makes for an organization [where staff members say] ‘I have a chance to get promoted.’ I’m okay with that.”

Thomas notes that if other agencies don’t want to recruit his future leaders, he’s not doing a good enough job developing them. “The people we put in this program ought to be the best. Everybody in the industry ought to want to hire them,” he said.

Ingredients for Success
The program’s initial success depended on the initiative and prowess of the three coordinators: DART’s Teana Bush, project manager for customer care and service delivery; RTD’s George Kuzirian, manager of education, training, and development; and LA Metro’s Patricia Soto, director of government relations.

“You’ve got to find that person in your organization that takes this opportunity and seizes that moment and turns it into something that really does work,” said Thomas, who’s been impressed at the participants’ experiences. “It broadens each of their perspectives and the windows they’re looking through because they hear what everyone is dealing with, not just their world. It really causes you to have a much better and broader perspective, which at the end of the day makes a great leader.”

The program has been so successful that the partners expanded it in January to include the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). Adding MARTA to the program makes sense because the participating systems are comparable. “All of us have a fairly large base system of day-to-day operations along with a fairly large expansion program, or capital program,” Washington said.

“The MAX program allows MARTA to send our future leaders to engage with and learn from other transit agencies and to share knowledge that we’ve amassed over the years,” said Keith Parker, MARTA general manager and chief executive officer.

“Our intellectual and human capital represents one of MARTA’s most valuable assets,” he added. “MARTA’s participation in the MAX program serves the dual purpose of investing in our employees to reap lasting rewards for our customers for the next 35 years, and beyond.”

The program will kick off in Dallas on March 16, move to Denver in May, Atlanta in July, and reach a finale in Los Angeles in September.

“It’s going to be a great opportunity for MARTA to shine and show that we are a leader in the transit industry,” said Linda James, acting director of training for the agency and MARTA program coordinator. She and her counterparts in the other agencies are planning days of speakers, seminars, and tours of a bus garage, rail facilities, and the integrated operations center.

The average age of a MARTA bus operator is 47, and the agency sees a steady stream of retirement and attrition, said LaShanda Dawkins, interim assistant general manager for human resources. “It is extremely important that we develop future leaders. Succession planning and leadership training and development are at the forefront of our goals and objectives,” Dawkins said. “It speaks to our initiatives to be an employer of choice. We want to attract and retain outstanding individuals.”

Looking ahead, it’s possible the partners might add a private-sector aspect to MAX, Washington said, perhaps to help the agencies better understand procurement and the bidding process from the other side of the table. While the program is too big now to add another public transit agency, he hopes other agencies will launch similar models in different parts of the industry.

“I would like to see MAX programs all over this country, in various regional areas of the country, understanding best practices,” he said. “Look at the number of transit agencies just in the ­Northeast. . . . I know the general managers talk at the Transit CEOs Seminar, but do the middle managers spend a week like we’re doing with this ­program?”

Washington’s question gets to the heart of the challenge MAX was designed to address. By investing in employee development, public transportation organizations can realize significant benefits, especially as a growing number of baby boomers reach retirement age, a number that approaches 10,000 a day—a trend that will continue for the next 15 or 16 years, says the Pew Research Center, a Washington, DC-based nonpartisan center.

Public transit agencies that beef up their thinning ranks today by identifying and nurturing aspiring leaders will help ensure that their workforces are innovative, prepared, and robust in the years to come.

10 Start-Up Tips
So you want to start a program like MAX? Here are 10 tips to get started:

1.  Choose a go-getter to coordinate the program internally, someone who will make it happen and ensure success.

2.  Select participants from all areas of the agency, with an emphasis on areas and job functions where retention is a challenge or where a potential labor shortage looms.

3.  Pick partners that are about the same size, with similar challenges and ­operations.

4.  At the same time, find partners that are sufficiently different that they can share unique experiences, practices, and knowledge.

5.  Plan agendas that include substantive networking opportunities and hands-on visits, not just days filled with workshops and presentations in a conference-room setting.

6.  Match participants with their counterparts in the other agencies—those who hold the same job or perform similar functions.

7.  Make sure participants share their new knowledge broadly across your agency by ­making presentations to senior management and through informal information conversations with peers and other employees.

8.  Keep a database of best practices and knowledge sharing that anyone in the ­partner agencies can access.

9.  Develop leadership and management development programs specific to your agency. It should be one tool in your toolbox of employee and leadership ­development.

10.  Participate in other employee development programs, including Leadership APTA, the new Early Career Program, and the Mid-Level Managers sessions at the annual bus and rail conferences and the Annual Meeting & EXPO.


Build Your Workforce with APTA
APTA offers several programs to help public transit agencies and businesses build, develop, and strengthen their workforces—from the front lines to the “C suite”—to help ensure the sustainability and success of the public transportation industry.

Leadership APTA is the association’s premier professional development program to develop and support experienced managers and others aspiring to hold senior and executive leadership positions in their organizations, the public transportation industry, and APTA.
As such, each class reflects a diverse, broad-based group of highly motivated and dedicated industry professionals from among APTA’s membership.

The Leadership APTA Committee annually selects 25 individuals to participate in the year-long program, which includes skill-building workshops, conferences, executive roundtables, class leadership projects, teleconferences, online meetings, and other web-based events. The program is in its 17th year.

The Early Career Program (ECP) is a professional development program for individuals who have three to five years of work experience in the public transportation industry, including one to two years of management experience.

A task force composed of public transportation leaders selects up to 25 individuals for the year-long program, which focuses on skill-building workshops, roundtable sessions, online collaboration, and a virtual mentorship component that pairs program participants with the industry’s senior leaders. The program is entering its second year.

The Mid-Level Managers Magnification Program (MMM) meets in conjunction with APTA’s major conferences: the Bus & Paratransit Conference, the Rail Conference, and the Annual Meeting & EXPO.

hTe program is specifically designed for mid-level managers who are new to APTA conferences or those who are new in their managerial role. Sessions include workshops, small group discussions, senior-level briefings, and networking opportunities. More than 400 mid-level managers have participated in the program since its launch in 2012.

APTA has recently expanded its focus with the addition of several programs for the front-line workforce, specifically designed to respond to the industry’s ­unprecedented need to hire and train skilled operators and technicians. The ­programs are based on APTA industry-wide approved training standards required to create sustainable and skills-based training programs.

Under the leadership of APTA’s Human Resources Committee, many front-line workforce programs will be highlighted at the association’s upcoming conferences and in a webinar series that features successful practices and initiatives.

For details about front-line programs, contact Pamela Boswell. For details about Leadership APTA and the MMM, contact Joe Niegoski. For information about ECP, contact Rachelle Jezbera.

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