Adams County Commissioner Erik Hansen, back from a three-week program for government executives at Harvard University, would like to see other county officials have the opportunity.
“I really felt it was super-valuable, and I would love to have a regular program to send Adams County officials there on a yearly basis,” Hansen said after his return from the July program. “I think that’s the kind of thing that can really raise our game in Adams County.”
He’s going to push for that move, he said, after his “great opportunity to learn from people all around the country.”
Hansen received a Gates Foundation Fellowship to attend the Senior Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which is designed to bolster officials’ abilities to lead in rapidly changing political and social environments.
Hansen’s class of about 70 people included 22 elected officials along with leaders in other capacities.
“We had a pretty heavy schedule, usually about 7:30 to 5 for three straight weeks,” plus study time in the evenings, Hansen said. “It was probably close to a semester’s coursework in three weeks.”
Topics included contemporary issues such as the debt-ceiling talks that were occurring in Washington, but also focused on “leadership, transparency and how to manage,” he said.
The best thing he got out of the program, Hansen said, was “the ability to evaluate where we are as a county.” He said the program offered tools for goal-setting, such as how to accomplish reforms and sustain them so the change is permanent.
On another issue, transparency in government, Hansen said the point was made that “it has to be something that everybody’s committed to and everybody does.”
He said Adams County is embarking on an exercise in “targeted transparency” with the Open Adams plan that is to start later this month. “We’re going to put all of our contracts on the Web,” he said. “That’s kind of exciting.”
He compared the initiative to food labeling, where “you tell people what the ingredients are so they can make good choices.”
There also was a focus on how to measure results in government during a time when there’s less money to work with, and on “how much can or should government do.” Making those kinds of decisions, he said, shows how much staff is needed, “which is a little bit different from ‘we’ll have as much staff as we can afford.’”
The program was on the Harvard campus, and participants stayed in apartments at the university’s business school. “We were right there in the thick of it,” Hansen said. “You feel really privileged to be there.”