Ana Garcia, our second ever Manager, is leaving us. Does that sound harsh? Do I sound angry? Or just bereft? After almost four remarkable, accomplished, instructive years, Ana is moving "up." She got a job as Manager of North Miami Beach, and the offer is too good not to take. Ana herself would tell you, so I'll tell you: she's only 50. And we were her first job as head municipal manager. She'd had departmental positions before she came to us, and her resume made clear that she was a very hot property, with lots of style, accomplishment, and potential. We took a chance on her, over other choices that were more established, and she took a chance on us, a municipality that didn't know what it was doing, what it wanted, and how to work with a manager. I don't think anyone is sorry.
I'm not in a position to say that Ana is perfect-- she herself says she's not, and I don't know anyone who is-- and I can't even say I've agreed with every decision she's made. What I can say is that she's dedicated, personable, very hard-working, always available, responsive, smart, energetic, and creative. The prior Commission or two admitted it was not up to the full responsibilities of managing a municipality, and there's no reason to accuse it of having failed. The Commission that decided to trade amateur management for professional management was courageous and commendable. It saw what was good for the Village, and at the Commission's own expense, it agreed to recommend that it turn over heavy lifting, and decision-making, to a pro.
We didn't know how to proceed, so we accepted advice and a recommendation from Merrett Stierheim, one of the oldest pros in the business down here. He encouraged us to place ourselves in the hands of another well-seasoned manager, Frank Spence. Not to belabor the matter, but Frank didn't do us much good. His heart wasn't really in it. He was trying to figure out how to get a paycheck without doing much work. His schedule said work, and his mindset said retirement. It wasn't clear what having a manager was supposed to do for us, other than cost us money and provide an occasional lightning rod, and we soon enough realized something was wrong. So we let it be known that we were back in the market. We found several interested applicants, including Ana Garcia. I never saw the resumes, but every person who did said the same thing: they're all similar, except one, which leaps out at you. That was Ana.
Ana has spent almost four years with us, working hard to clean up messes left here by others, accomplishing things the Village never fully got around to accomplishing, and streamlining operations, to make them efficient and much less expensive than they were before.
We're not all there, and we probably never will be. There will always be things to be done, for the sake of proper maintenance of a municipality. Under present conditions, we have more than our share of what Ana calls "challenges." It's up to us to figure out how we want to respond to them, but we have now been provided with a sterling model of the kind of help we can get from a manager. And we're not finished learning how to work with one. Sometimes we have to cede decisions we might like to make ourselves, and other times we have to learn to assert our wishes about what we want.
I said Ana is not perfect, and she isn't. As best I can tell, she has one imperfection. She does not delegate every time she could, and should. She's such a go-getter, and so intent on fixing things, and getting jobs done, that she doesn't realize she doesn't have to do all the work. One of my friends said only this morning that one theory of interpersonal dynamics says that if you want to get someone to trust you and feel special, then ask them to do something for you. And let them do it. This is Ana's imperfection. She doesn't slow down enough to ask us to help her, and help ourselves, and we sometimes feel disrespected, and overlooked.
I really think we've learned a great deal from Ana. I hope she's learned just a little bit from us. Or maybe NMB is so big that no one wants to do much for themselves. They might be happy to have Ana to do it all for them. But we're a different kind of neighborhood, and we have to be taken into account more. That's what we'll learn to negotiate with Ana's successor.
In the meantime, I'm very fond of Ana, and I'm sorry to see her go, no matter how inevitable it was.
No comments:
Post a Comment