Commentary: The Roles of Local Government Managers: A View from the Trenches

• Author: Scott Lazenby
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12315

Commentary

Scott Lazenby is city manager

for the City of Lake Oswego, Oregon,

and adjunct professor in the Hatf‌i eld

School of Government at Portland State

University. He completed his dissertation,

“City Management Theory and Practice:

A Foundation for Educating the Next

Generation of Local Government

Administrators,” in 2009.

E-mail: slazenby@ci.oswego.or.us

62 Public Administration Review • January | February 2015

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 1, pp. 62. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12315.

Scott Lazenby

City of Lake Oswego, Oregon

Portland State University

Even if our profession sometimes downplays it,

and academia may not appreciate it, I suspect

that my colleagues in local government would

readily agree with Kimberly L. Nelson and James

H. Svara’s point: city and county managers play an

important and fairly active role in policy setting, and

probably always have.

 is observation is of little help to us. It is like telling

the parched plane crash survivor crawling over a sand

dune, “Look what I’ve discovered: you’re in a desert

and you need water!”

But this is precisely why their message is so critical.

 ey are correct in their assertion, and they back it up

with plenty of evidence. I can imagine the response

from local government managers to our scholarly col-

leagues would be, “Listen to them, stop debating this,

and bring us solid, research-based tools we can use to

succeed in this reality.”

Here are just a couple of examples. First, I have

observed that governing bodies are actually more willing

to follow the policy advice of the chief executive of‌f‌i cer

(CEO) when they know the CEO will fully empower

them with the f‌i nal decision and carry out whatever

decision they make without hesitation. To actually cre-

ate this situation, though, seems to take a wide variety

of skills on the part of the manager, even including

body language during a city council meeting. I know

there is much that a multidisciplinary f‌i eld such as

public administration can teach us on ef‌f ective interper-

sonal skills to use in interacting with a governing body.

Second, few policy decisions in the public realm

are made with the kind of rationality that good

scholars would use in approaching a complex com-

munity problem. In this nonrational environment,

how exactly does a manager recognize and advocate

a “good” solution to a problem? And how does the

manager create a little more space for evidence-based

solutions to problems without of‌f ending the torch-

and-pitchfork mob?

 is kind of work is important to the f‌i eld because,

while the politicians that f‌i ll the CEO position in the

state and national governments receive more attention,

the professional CEOs appointed by governing bodies

account for, by numbers, the vast majority of govern-

mental chief executives, at least in the United States.

 is includes city and county managers, certainly,

but also the CEOs of special districts. School super-

intendents, by my own observation as well as studies

I have come across, have an even more active role in

the policy domain, and they are less willing than city

managers to trust their elected of‌f‌i cials with it.

 ere seems to be an explosion of research by psy-

chologists and sociologists on how we can be more

ef‌f ective in working with other people and groups of

people. Much of this work leads to surprising, if not

counterintuitive, conclusions; common sense and past

practices have failed us.  ose in my profession appear

to get access to it through business publications or

books aimed at private sector managers rather than

the public administration literature. But the public

administration f‌i eld could at least help apply this

research to the challenges we face in working in the

policy domain and helping our communities come

together to tackle dif‌f‌i cult problems.

Finally, as critical as this role is, even in larger cities,

the manager spends a great amount of time leading

and managing the organization, dealing with dif‌f‌i -

cult personnel problems, and providing ef‌f‌i cient and

ef‌f ective services.  is is conf‌i rmed by a number of

the scholars whom Nelson and Svara cite and, more

recently, by Richard Clay Wilson in Rethinking Public

Administration:  e Case for Management. So my plea

to our colleagues in the academy is to help us be ef‌f ec-

tive in the role that Nelson and Svara have identif‌i ed.

We know that we are in the desert, and we do not

need to know whether the temperature is 100 or 110

degrees; what we really need is water. But we also need

your help, now more than ever, in tapping into the

research that will make us more ef‌f ective in managing

increasingly complex organizations.

 e Roles of Local Government Managers:

A View from the Trenches