Paving the way: key to snow removal success is effective leadership.

Learning about snow control and snow fighting equipment is just one aspect of winter management operations. Learning to be a successful leader with your management staff during winter carnivals, snowstorms or daily snow removal can be tougher to manage. But there are four leadership principles that have helped the Ohio Department of Transportation successfully lead its staff toward a common vision for satisfaction among its many customers.

Figure 1 (below) illustrates the four principles on the road to leadership success. Imagine your employees driving down this road. As a leader, you would not necessarily drive for them, but instead, you want to give them the means to drive down the road on their own providing them empowerment. A leader also provides a clear vision or a billboard out in front for employees to see what is ahead. A leader keeps his employees on the road with a guardrail called teamwork, and another boundary or guardrail called customer focus. Our leaders help get drivers to the vision. No manuals, policies, or steps in a process will get them there, so leaders must guide them and give them tools to keep them on the road.

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For our department, this road runs through three counties in northeast Ohio, and encompasses the communities of greater Cleveland. Figure 2 (pg. 30) shows Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties for which we are responsible. Our district receives an average of 100 plus inches of snow each year, and the 171 snow plow drivers on this road each winter maintain 1,688 lane miles of highways and 526 ramps. They log more than 1 million miles fighting storms with 85 trucks. They do all this using the following leadership principles.

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Our Vision

Leaders help give clear direction and point people toward a vision. Our vision is to be second to none in snow and ice control. When we talk about vision, we need to provide a positive expectation and talk about what we want, not what we don't want people to do. Our leaders do not say to plow drivers, "Don't make the customers angry with snow all over the road and a virtual ice-skating rink around Cleveland." This is negative and not the way to communicate. Instead, all of our teams understand that the vision and billboard that we drive toward is to be the best at snow and ice removal.

Visions also need to be simple and clear. If they are not, tear them down and start over. For example, we met a couple where the husband was a carpenter from Florida. He contracted for Disney and built theme backgrounds for its rides and hotels. Construction was all about providing the feel and vision of what the theme should be. The vision at Disney had to be crystal clear. The architectural drawings could look fantastic on paper, and the carpenter would build the set exactly as delineated. In the end, if the set did not look right, the carpenter was instructed to tear it down and rebuild it to make it give the perfect feel. Sometimes he rebuilt the same project twice, even three times; As leaders we must provide a clear vision that is positive and that looks right to our people.

Empowerment is Our Foundation

Traveling down the road to leadership proves impossible without the next step--empowerment. It is the foundation on which our people travel to reach the vision. My bricklaying instructor, Frank Rossi, always told us, "Get the foundation right, with the first course of bricks being the most important, and the rest of your work will reflect your initial efforts." His wisdom proves true in all aspects of business whether bricks are involved or not: Empowerment is the first course of bricks and the foundation of a good leader.

For example, empowerment is used in the employees' annual work plan. Each year workers come together and develop a plan they will work toward. This annual work plan is based on the total number of hours the employees have to work in a year. The employees take these hours and subtract out the jobs they do best. These include how much time they estimate to plow roads for snow and ice control or other maintenance functions such as street sweeping or ditch cleaning. Our staff then balances these hours with hours they estimate to correct maintenance deficiencies. When all the work is identified, the hours of work for customer satisfaction exceeds the number of hours per year. So the employees decide what work will be contracted out. The workers are the people closest to the customer and closest to the work, and they are the ones that have the answers. Managers then provide their employees with the material and equipment needed to complete the employees' annual work plan.

Another example of empowerment is the way we hire managers. District 12 managers empower the workforce with the responsibility of having a say in who will manage them. Managers are selected by interview panels of equal numbers of bargaining unit employees and managers. The interview panel takes this assignment seriously.

"These are the people who work with you in the trenches and now you get to see if they have the qualities needed to serve the customer," says Cortez Browner, a Geauga County account clerk who is on an interview panel. "Being a front-line worker sitting on the other side of the interview table with the potential manager, you get to see what is important to the candidate."

Our interview panels narrow the choices down to two or three candidates. These short-listed candidates would be acceptable as managers to the bargaining unit-comprised team. Top candidates are the best of the group, and the employee-comprised interview panels identify strengths of each potential manager. The final selection of the manager is made using the short list by the district's executive leadership. These empowered interview panels work together to make the right decisions. Since starting the process in 1996, we have had 157 interview panels.

Team Work Keeps Them On the Road

The great thing about teams is that you don't have to be the expert on everything. Do you have to know how to drive a snowplow truck to be effective on a team? I hope not, in my case, because I am not a driver. I'm just an engineer. I tell the drivers on our teams, "The only thing I know how to do is drive a desk."

We use total quality management and cross-functional teams to focus on meeting and exceeding the customers' expectations. Teams are given the authority to make changes and the placement of that authority where the work is being done has improved the organization. When a quality team looks at a problem and makes recommendations, it does so in front of our quality-steering committee comprised of managers and bargaining unit members. When this quality-steering committee approves the team's changes in the operation, these new rules become operating practices.

One of the most effective means used by teams to start the problem-solving process is storyboarding. Storyboarding is a brainstorming technique used to frame a team's ideas, with a visual display that will lead to implementing change. It organizes complex problems and lists possible solutions.

Storyboarding is used by the team to quickly see problems and potential solutions. Solutions are agreed by consensus. "Storyboarding lets you express your ideas and thoughts with no pressure on you regarding what you say," says Luis Cardona, a Cleveland garage highway worker. "The process allows you to see where you are going and build from others' ideas so that the team is all in the same ball park."

Our employees also work on teams to manage the tax dollars provided to them. At the beginning of each budget biennium, 30 managers from Highway Management come together and build a zero-based budget. No money is automatically allocated to the departments at the beginning of the biennium. All requests for expenditures and overtime must be justified in front of this budget team. Each department questions other departments and comes to consensus on all budget requests. All requests must be linked to the department's vision, goals and customer service.

When we first used zero-based budgeting and added all the requests tied to our vision, we had saved $292,000. By linking all requests to the department's vision and goals, we assure our external customers that funds are not being spent on someone's special interest. This team builds its budgets from the bottom up, and shares a part of a $40 million budget from the beginning to the final expenditure.

Guardrail for Guidance

Leaders guide our people down a road to an organization's vision. To keep them on that road we must stress customer focus. At the Ohio Department of Transportation's district 12, every one uses customer focus to set direction for our business decisions. Our department even uses a customer-focused approach in determining how much snow needs to be removed.

The district responds to its customers in the winter by using snow spotters. In the three counties around greater metropolitan Cleveland, our customers are contacted weekly to rate our winter performance. Ohio's snow spotter survey is used asking professional drivers one critical question, "how did we do overall?" Managers in charge of the plow routes telephone snow spotters and use this customer feedback in their winter decision-making process. The results from this question in each county are tabulated to get results on a scale from 1 to 10.

Each week we have the opportunity to interact with seven to 10 of our snow spotter customers per county. Our snow spotters range from police officers to truck drivers or delivery workers out on the highways in all types of weather. Snow spotters are dedicated volunteers, contacted each week, and provide us with valuable feedback--if they see problem areas, they report these to our manager. This gives us an opportunity to improve and the manager an opportunity to correct the operation.

One of our report cards for knowing what the customer wants is snow spotter scores. In 1999, our average scores were only around a 4. When we engaged the managers directly in charge and started making changes for our customers in 2000, snow spotters rated us between 8 and 9 on average. Since 2001, we have consistently averaged between a 9 and 10 for our winter plowing, brining and salting services. We have steadily improved because we listen to our customers and the snow spotters, and make improvements.

The Missing Link on the Road to Leadership

There is one big part of our road to leadership that is missing. The missing piece is the people that travel down the road with a leader's guidance. People are deliberately not shown on the model because any type of representation narrowly defines this broad category. The people are the part of the road to leadership that will get you there. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell summed this up when he says, "Plans don't accomplish work. Goal charts on walls don't accomplish work. Even talking papers don't accomplish work. It is people who get things done."

It is the snowplow driver on this road to leadership who decides every storm, what to plow and how much to salt that makes the organization successful. The people on this road are the most important part. On my refrigerator at home along with other family members is a picture taken at our winter dry run preparation of people who snowplow (see Figure 3 above). Many times visitors to our home ask, "Who are these people?" My standard answer is these are the men and women that keep my family safe every winter.

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We have sophisticated measurements, state-of-the-art snow plow trucks, road and weather information systems and none of the snow gets plowed without the people who work in the organization. Leading people down this road toward a vision is our responsibility. Vision, empowerment, teamwork and customer focus are key components in a leader's role. Guiding people along this road is the essence of leadership.