Leadership Development in WDM

The better our leadership here in the City, the better services we are able to provide you as citizens. We are very proud of our employees and always concerned about their continued development. That is why we've decided to launch a Leadership Development Program for promising employees who want to move up within the City organization and make a significant contribution to our overall operations. As an organization, it is very important to provide this sort of program in order to educate and identify those employees who are interested in pursuing future leadership opportunities and growing as the City of West Des Moines and our city organization grows.

Tier 1 will be a 10-week time commitment beginning in April. The focus will be to introduce the leadership challenges faced by our organization. We will focus the session around the Balanced Scorecard, a measurement tool we utilize in the City to identify our primary objectives, goals, and service areas and monitor whether or not we are meeting or exceeding expectations and targets. Our Balanced Scorecard themes in the City are Planning and Community Development, Collaboration, Sustainability, Resource Management, Community Enrichment, and Community Safety. We are currently working to create an interactive version of our Scorecard that will eventually be available for your perusal on our website. That will enable you to see directly what initiatives and daily operations the City undertakes and how we are meeting our goals as part of our commitment to you.

As a pilot program, the successes and challenges facing the first tier of employee leaders to go through the process will provide important insights into future iterations of the program. We are really excited to be providing this opportunity within our organization and think that it will pay off in more efficient and innovative service to our residents as well. I will let you know how the program goes later in April or June.