Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

Think Big, Guv'nr

Is it imaginable that Charlie Crist could be a great governor?

He was at a lectern one day last fall at the Capitol to join former governors in praising '50s Gov. LeRoy Collins. Collins, whom Gov. Jeb Bush called his favorite governor, is so highly regarded because he did the right thing during the civil rights era.

Collins' legacy extends as well to the community college system, state parks and fairer financing of education. Intelligent, detail-oriented, urbane, he personified honor and good government.

More than 50 years later, one wonders: How will "Chain Gang" Charlie measure up? He is not a policy wonk. He has championed no great causes, ventured no new ideas. Doubters tend to expect that Crist will be a smooth, risk-free politician, with one eye on the polls and the other eye on the camera. Fans point out that many have underestimated Crist's abilities as he's risen through the political ranks.

Could Charlie Crist inspire some bipartisan remembrance 50 years from now? Maybe. Even politicians as accomplished as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln have encountered low expectations. Sometimes a critical leadership role brings out the best in people.

What could make Charlie Crist a great governor? Let us count the ways, Guv'nr.

1. Give the people the government they deserve.

Treat them like customers of the government -- not just recipients of social services and other obvious service-seekers, but like citizens as citizens, who deep down are less interested in how cheap their government is but instead how great a value their government is.

Look at taxes and spending from the perspective of return on investment, not minimizing investment. Florida has just about the cheapest government per capita in the nation, yet Jeb Bush spent eight years talking about cutting taxes. You can never cut enough to satisfy people who think they have a lousy government.
The head of the state's biggest agency was recently threatened with jail -- she later resigned -- for not obeying a court order to get mentally ill people out of the jails. We started a pre-kindergarten program so mediocre it is probably doing more harm than good by taking people away from their mothers and putting them with underqualified caretakers. What kind of government is that?

2. Make state employees your partners, not your enemy.

Bureaucracies create risk aversion. For every performance-based bonus program, there are mid-level and low-level supervisors who use it to reward their allies and warn their adversaries. Why not instead build teamwork by rewarding entire units that achieve a goal? Even if circumstances seem to demand pay freezes or layoffs or outsourcing, take every opportunity to raise their sights across Death Valley to the next mountaintop you will reach together. Lead them -- don't ignore them. Give them the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently and well.
When Florida Trend writers interviewed Jeb Bush a year ago for a cover story on his legacy, he was asked if he had changed his mind about anything during his governorship. State employees, he replied; he holds them in higher regard than he used to. If only he had ever bothered to tell them that.
Walk around. Show up unannounced in some obscure office where people have done something well and tell them you appreciate them and let them tell you how they succeeded.

3. Teach the people and make them better than they were.

"I think the best thing about Gov. Collins was his ability to bring out the best in you," former Attorney General Jim Smith says in Martin Dyckman's recent biography of Collins. The leaders each of us remembers as most compelling are those who got us to focus on something bigger and more meaningful than our own immediate interests.
Peter Drucker said the job of leadership is "the generation and direction of human energies." It's easy to lead people where they want to go. It's harder to help people decide where they should be going.

4. To be the "people's governor," create the "people's government."

Your creation of the Office of Open Government was a great first step toward restoring "government in the sunshine" as a characteristic of Florida that has helped make our government better, less prone to corruption, more efficient and effective and more credible to its citizens.
Go further. Use technology and transform the collection, storage, retrieval and public presentation of government data and documents so that they are available virtually as soon as they are received and organized so that citizens can retrieve them easily. Then let people follow the performance of agencies on a multitude of performance standards, with a presentation of the information in clear and unvarnished ways.

5. Take a risk on something important that you believe in.

Nothing in his life before he became governor indicated that LeRoy Collins would become one of the great political leaders on civil rights. But he staked his political career on doing something meaningful and important at a time when the country and his political party were being torn apart by the issue.
The same year that segregationist George Wallace was winning the presidential primary in Florida, Gov. Reubin Askew stumped the state urging voters not to oppose busing as a remedy for segregation. He could've kept quiet, but he didn't.

6. Something will go wrong. When it does, your whole government should learn from it.

The traditional political cycle of screw-up or scandal consists of denial, detachment and then, if the headlines don't stop, fault-finding through the sacrifice of some rook or bishop and hoping everyone forgets quickly.
Every failure and every scandal is an opportunity, not for a superficial patch or a celebrity firing, but for creatively rethinking the causes and solutions.
And, by the way, if nothing is going wrong, you're playing it too safe.

7. Pursue a complex challenge as if it were a crisis.

Early in his administration, Bush was admiring the rapid, effective decision making and execution at the emergency operations center. Why, he is said to have asked, can't we run the whole state government this way?
Emergency management works because key people from all over state government -- and local governments and affected private organizations too -- drop everything when the hurricane is on its way. What if we took some complex state problem and treated it as a crisis? What if relevant agency heads could be told to drop everything for a few days and come to the ops center to attack this problem? What if each time an effort fell short, you learned to do it better. What if it worked?

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As you look in the mirror on Inauguration Day and every morning thereafter, Guv'nr, imagine the unimaginable.