Council works on town manager evaluation
The Fort Myers Beach Town Council discussed different ways to set performance evaluation criteria for Town Manager Terry Stewart during a work session at town hall on Wednesday, March 3.
The meeting was delayed for 1 1/2 hours to dispel emotional tensions and differences over remarks made by Councilman Tom Babcock mainly regarding the trolley workshop at the previous regular council meeting. The respectful exchanges between council members was summarized by Stewart.
“What I see today is people with very strong passions on what they want to do and things that can be done in the community,” said Stewart. “Even though you may be frustrated, I have watched every council meeting and seen this group continuously come back to the issues. That’s always the main focus.”
The main focus of the session’s agenda centered on the appraisal period and performance ratings during Stewart’s seven-month interim status as manager. The objective is to access his job and his staff’s job commitments while in that agreed time frame and receive feedback from him to help in the process.
While Mayor Larry Kiker called the town’s work a ‘service business,’ Stewart discussed customer surveys to receive the proper feedback in his staff’s work.
“It’s a constant focus on making sure you stay where you need to be and get a little bit better,” the town manager said. “It’s wonderful to watch that evolve.”
Babcock, who provided a document with his own rating and skills definitions,
called Stewart’s position a ‘town manager on an interim agreement’ which needs to develop performance baseline and a certain benchmark.
“We need to recognize the risk in that,” he said. “The risk is the hope that we can keep this guy so that in the interim, he needs to be telling us what he thinks he’s doing and we need to be able to feed back how we think he’s doing it. We don’t want to wait until September to do that.”
The council members intentions are to lock up Stewart in a permanent position with a paid performance scale set now.
“During the next round when we get past this transitional period, we need to sit down and say this is the way we want to operate,” said Babcock. “Essentially, are we going to be able to put some money on the line with the opportunity to link it to a possible pay increase. We committing to this up front, not at the end.”
Stewart, who was receptive to the evaluation criteria talk, believes management and leadership are two different things. He makes mentoring a high priority in the everyday work place.
“I don’t believe you manage people,” he said. “You manage the processes in the operations of an organization in a way that allows you to be an effective leader. You need to have feedback with people on a routine basis.
“My biggest issue is that I have to watch real close not to push people around me too hard or too fast about wanting to change things or move them in a different direction. I really have to modify myself here because the resources are so much different. But, we will continue to be change agents. What I pledge to you, as we move forward with the things we need to work on, is I will provide you with a realistic assessment of our opportunities for success based upon the frame of reference which means the people who we have to work on it, the dollar resources that we have to work on it and the internal infrastructure issues that were dealing with at the time. I ask you to always challenge me to make sure you have that information.”