Diversifying
YOUR LEADERSHIP TEAM
BY JOSE M. LEON JR.
Seven thoughts to consider for recruiting, retaining, and promoting the best minority talent As I have grown in my career as a public servant, I have watched communities fill their vacant positions. Many organizations are filled with high-quality professionals who are extremely experienced and educated. I have presented to full audiences of city/county managers and administrators, assistant/deputy city managers, and department heads. But every time I look around the room, there is one question I have started to ask myself a lot lately: where are the minorities?
14 | PUBLIC MANAGEMENT | FEBRUARY 2022
In my first seven years of public service, I was a nonsupervisory, nonexempt engineering technician. I met several minorities from all walks of life in that position. Most of whom were in similar non-exempt, non-professional categories. The next seven years of my career I would work at a department-head level, and it became very apparent to me the limited number of minorities who I could call my peer. I have discussed this with a handful of people in city manager or assistant city manager positions, as these are the people who hire department heads. Lately, I have felt my time for merely talking about this issue has ended, and I firmly believe it is time to do something about it. So, any chance I get, I am going to ask these individuals who manage and lead these wonderful organizations about their hiring, mentoring, and planning for minorities in department-head and executive-level positions. And I think we need to take a hard look at the make-up of professional organization boards as well. A while back, in a class for my MPA program, we had a guest speaker from one of the top high-performing local government organizations in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This was a very respected individual who had a great career, and I was very honored to hear them speak. They spoke about the organizational restructuring they had ventured into over the last two to three years, including the new pillars of their organizational chart and how they planned for their organization’s future. They started by explaining their organization’s 2020 plan and how it helped make them the high-performing organization they are. Then they spoke about their new plan for 2040. It was a great presentation with
