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Bending the Bureaucracy Toward Excellence; Transformational Leadership, the 'Right Blueprint' and New 'North Star'
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BY PAUL COMFORT
Chief Executive Officer
Maryland Transit Administration
 As a leader in your public transit agency, you may have noticed the same thing I did when I arrived as administrator and CEO of Maryland DOT’s Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) 18 months ago: overlapping layers of bureaucracy choking line managers’ ability to implement changes and improvements.
| It didn’t take long to see that this 3,300-employee transit agency was in serious need of an overhaul. It was listless and unmoored with no clear direction and its systems in disarray.
So under the direction of Gov. Larry Hogan and state DOT Secretary Pete Rahn, I set about to fix what was broken at the MTA.
The job of just running a major city transit system—including bus service, metro subway, light rail, commuter bus, commuter trains and paratransit in addition to statewide responsibilities for funding and oversight of locally operated transit systems in 24 jurisdictions—is difficult enough without a roadmap for our team on how to make exponential improvements.
There is no finish line to the job of bringing excellence to a large transit system. But with the right blueprint that is focused on setting goals, measuring successes (and challenges), building your own team, breaking up the power of “back office” administrative functions, directly arbitrating significant conflicts, championing a new all-encompassing project and communicating relentlessly, you can bend the bureaucracy toward excellence and move toward success.
Navigating the Steps
I believe the first and most essential step on the road to excellence is to know where you are going. So institute a new “North Star” goal for your agency.
Like the sailors of old who looked to a fixed object in the sky for direction, you need everyone in the boat to row in the same direction. At the MTA, our North Stars are to provide safe, efficient, reliable transit across Maryland with world-class customer service. These now are our guiding principles.
Then we needed to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which measure our progress toward achieving these goals. We instituted new KPIs with benchmark goals that were communicated to all employees and celebrated when achieved. Our whole DOT has done this as well, implementing a new KPI program called the “Excelerator.”
The next step was to build our own team. Finding current management and bringing in new team members who are competent, dedicated and loyal are keys to achieving success. Find leaders who buy into your vision and will work relentlessly to achieve it, who you can delegate to and empower.
Too often, large government bureaucracies become process driven because they are not profit driven. The defenders of process are the administrative support departments. I believe that to achieve exponential progress in any organization, you have to break up the power of “back office” functions.
Administrative support functions, such as human resources, finance, information technology, procurement, legal and communications, in large agencies too often accrue unjustified power and dictate decisions to line management through overwrought risk management and hardened “policies and procedures.” They decide the playing field and move boundaries inward, thus eliminating options for line management.
Instead, they need to have their power minimized and redirected toward helping line management achieve operational objectives. This can be accomplished by actually breaking up the large departments of administrative support functions and re-placing them strategically throughout the agency. Leaders of these functions should understand that their prime objective is to help line management achieve operational success.
Arbitrating Conflict
Now with all this change you are bringing, it is inevitable that you are going to have conflict. As the leader you should personally arbitrate significant conflicts between new and existing staff to eliminate ambiguity and between new and old ways of doing business. Always push toward action over inaction and focus on the KPIs.
Then champion a new all-encompassing project to focus energies and attention and excite your employees. In Baltimore we are rebooting and rebranding our entire transit system in a project called BaltimoreLink.
We are realigning the old bus routes that were laid out 50 years ago to a new hub-and-spoke system and linking them in with our light rail and subway system, creating a new high-frequency bus route core system with 10-minute headways. We are also re-wrapping all our buses, replacing all 6,000 bus stop signs, building 50 transit hubs in the city, installing transit signal priority and bus-only lanes and making other improvements needed in a transit system built for the 21st century. Concurrently, we are building the nation’s largest P3 transit (light rail) project in the Washington, DC, suburbs, called the Purple Line.
Finally you must communicate effectively to external and internal stakeholders. Leaders communicate personally.
If you follow these principles, you can bend the bureaucracy toward excellence and produce lasting improvements at your transit agency.
Comfort has more than 20 years of experience in the transportation industry. This “Commentary” is based on his remarks during a panel discussion on transformational leadership at the APTA 2016 Annual Meeting. He is a member of the APTA Board of Directors.
"Commentary" features points of view from various sources to enhance readers' broad awareness of themes that affect public transportation.
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