April 21, 2005

San Jose promotes diversity with employee leadership development program

By Sheila Sanchez
Staff Writer

In an effort to promote diversity and grow its own leadership potential, San Jose officials have created a professional development program to bring more qualified minorities and women to its senior and executive staff.

Last August, the city, under the direction of its Department of Employee Services, began teaching its bottom-level employees a graduate-level class, “The Art and Practice of Leadership,” tagged by city officials as the next step in building the bench for city managers and leaders.

The goal is to train and develop a diverse and talented employee group ready to take on the highest levels of responsibility and leadership within the city organization, said Mark Danaj, director of the city’s Department of Employee Services.

While the city’s 6,700 public employees reflect the ethnic makeup of the city’s population, the majority which is non-white, the city’s top-ranking officials are mostly white males. Only two of the city’s 25 department directors and appointed officials are minorities—Retirement Services Director Ed Overton and Employee Relations Director Alex Gurza; and only seven are women.

Danaj said program outcomes include aligning management and leadership practices to the city’s vision, mission and values; establishing a high quality succession plan for continuity of leadership, building an organized effort to retain and optimize internal talent, creating a pool of internal candidates for the highest leadership levels, enabling diversity within the senior and executive staff and making the city the best public sector employer.

Danaj explained under the program that 25 employees from 16 departments will receive 70 classroom hours of training from leadership experts, including San Jose City Manager Del Borgsdorf.

Training staff will communicate regularly with an advisory team of senior and executive staff, the enrollees’ supervisors and enrollees to determine the program’s success and areas of improvement.

Central to the program’s success, Danaj said, is creating an inclusive work culture, providing employees with a holistic view of diversity.

“We want to make sure that we hire the best talent that’s available. We want to make sure that we recruit aggressively for people of all descriptions and we want to make sure there are no artificial barriers to be considered for these senior staff jobs,” said the mayor’s spokesman, David Vossbrink, about the lack of ethnic diversity in the city’s senior and executive ranks.

“The new program is one of the steps we have taken to increase training opportunities to prepare our current workforce to take on opportunities for leadership and promotion,” Vossbrink added, indicating that obstacles to the city’s minority recruitment effort is the area’s high cost of living and lack of affordable housing.

Vossbrink also said the city’s top executive staff has been more ethnically representative of the city’s population in the past, having several people of color and women in the senior jobs, including the city manager’s office, the fire chief and the police chief as well as many department directors.

“Taking a look at the city’s current senior staff can give a skewed sense of diversity. We’ve had more minority representation in these positions at various times,” he said. “The dynamics of the organization are always changing. It’s important to look at the broader picture.”

Danaj said while other cities around the country are conducting similar leadership development programs to help their workforce land the top-level city jobs, San Jose is a leader in the area.

“We want to better prepare our existing employees to assume these high level leadership positions,” Danaj said.

“The point is we’ll naturally have diversity if we grow our own.”