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Self-Assessment Guide for Legislative Staff Organizations National Conference of State Legislatures

December 2011

Preface The NCSL Self-Assessment Guide for Legislative Staff Organizations is a customized survey tool that provides insights into organizational strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement. It is presented in two parts. This introductory part provides an overview and explanation of the Self-Assessment Guide along with definitions and other resources. The companion, Excel-based self-assessment survey and instructions bring the Self-Assessment Guide to life, offering a valuable new approach for evaluating organizational performance and for beginning a discussion about organizational change and improvement.

Introduction During the past several decades, America’s state legislatures sprinted through a dynamic period of reform, renewal and professionalization. A major feature of this evolution was the expansion and development of a professional corps of career legislative staff. These employees and their staff organizations brought new capacity, energy and independence to the state legislative institution. Today all state legislatures have well-defined staff resources and mature staff organizations. With the period of staff expansion largely past, and in an environment of limited and declining budgetary support, legislative staff managers and legislative leaders are looking within their organizations for opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This Self-Assessment Guide provides a unique and customized tool for assessing organizational effectiveness. It offers legislators and staff managers a way to begin the conversation about organizational performance and identify areas for improvement. The NCSL Self-Assessment Guide for Legislative Staff Organizations is a two-part document that consists of this Introduction and a companion, Excel-based assessment survey and instructions. The Self-Assessment Guide content is based on widely accepted standards of organizational and managerial effectiveness and performance. The assessment survey questions rely heavily on benchmarks and practices presented in the Baldrige performance criteria, the research of Jim Collins (Good to Great), the writings of renowned management theorist Peter Drucker and legislative staff performance indicators derived over 25 years of NCSL consultation with state legislatures. Further reading on these resources is recommended and a bibliography at the end of this document offers a short reading list.

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The companion assessment survey is divided into the following six performance areas: 1. Leadership 2. Organizational Planning and Performance 3. Management 4. Employee and Workplace Development 5. Information Management and Process Improvement 6. Customer Focus/ Results Orientation For the purposes of this document, the term “staff organization” refers to a team, office, agency or other group of legislative staff that has a singular mission or purpose. This term includes non-partisan staff agencies, partisan caucus staff groups, or a member’s personal staff team.

Performance Area Descriptions The following performance area descriptions serve as a reference for completing the companion assessment survey. It is recommended that survey respondents read these descriptions prior to completing the survey.

Leadership

Most experts on organizational development agree that effective leadership is a key predictor of organizational effectiveness. This section of the Self-Assessment Guide focuses on critical aspects of leadership practice and behavior that experts agree are essential to organizational success. The Self-Assessment Guide makes a distinction between leadership and management. Management assessment criteria appear in later sections of the self-assessment. Leadership takes many forms in the state legislative environment. Legislative leaders—the House speaker, Senate president, majority leaders and other chamber officers—constitute the board of directors of the legislative institution. In many states, the legislative leaders of both chambers sit together on a joint management committee or legislative council that is responsible for institutional oversight and decision making on broad institutional matters. Other types of legislative committees also provide oversight of staff functions. For example, many legislatures have a joint audit or program evaluation committee and some have joint technology committees. These bodies provide guidance to staff who serve the committees’ respective missions and, in the case of audit and evaluation committees, these committees typically review the work products of the staff group. In the context of a private business, the House speaker, Senate leader or committee chairs are equivalent in many ways to chairs of a board of directors. The directors of legislative staff agencies and leaders’ chiefs of staff or chamber clerks and secretaries are the chief executive officers of the legislature or of their specific staff organization. They run the daily operations of

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the legislature or staff organization and have varying levels of discretion for decisions about personnel, budgets, planning and general administration. The questions in the Leadership performance area of the self-assessment survey adopt the board of directors/CEO framework and ask you to assess how your legislative staff organization performs on several key leadership benchmarks.

Organizational Planning and Performance

Legislative staff organizations work in a dynamic and rapidly changing political, cultural and fiscal environment. Some level of planning and strategic thinking about the future is necessary in order to maintain peak effectiveness and responsiveness to legislators and other clients.

Management

Management guru Peter Drucker identified the following five roles as the basic work of managers:

managers set objectives managers organize managers motivate and communicate managers analyze, appraise and interpret performance managers develop people, including themselves

NCSL, from its decades of experience as a management consultant to state legislatures, adds these complementary responsibilities to Drucker’s list:

managers embrace their manager roles (and do not retreat to the comfort of the skills and expertise that got them to the management level)

managers engage in and promote rich and robust communication managers monitor, analyze and respond to change managers build trust

For purposes of the Management section of the self-assessment, the term manager includes any personnel who have supervisory responsibilities for one or more employees.

Employee and Workplace Development

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, finds that great organizations focus first on people and then on outcomes. “The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.”

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Most legislative staff organizations have a fairly solid, tradition-based sense of direction, but it is no less true that the quality and talent of employees have a huge impact on organizational performance and adaptability to change. Effective organizations invest in recruitment, hiring, firing, retention and employee engagement and development with practices, policies and processes that enhance the chances of attracting and keeping great talent. Often conducted under the banner of “human resource management,” these activities are more than legal preventatives designed to protect the employer. Rather, effective HR practices and policies contribute to employee satisfaction, professional growth and workplace engagement.

Information Management and Process Improvement

Over the past few decades computers, mobile technology and the internet have become integrated into almost all aspects of state legislative work. The question no longer is does your office use these tools, but rather how effectively does it apply and take advantage of developing computer innovations and applications to serve legislators, the public and other clients. In addition, computer technology provides new opportunities to generate a broad range of management information data and analyze workplace efficiency and productivity.

Customer Focus/Results Orientation

Effective organizations are characterized by their employees’ unwavering, top-to-bottom dedication to the organization’s core values and commitment to accomplishing its mission, or purpose. Core values and mission guide an organization through change and the adaptations required in its culture, practices, goals and strategies that help sustain optimal results. Legislative staff organizations also achieve optimal results through close and routine contact with their legislator clients. In addition to frequent interpersonal communication, client feedback gained through legislator interviews and satisfaction surveys, focus groups, peer reviews and other devices enhance and inform staff assessments of organizational effectiveness. Heightened sensitivity to the quality and effectiveness of results helps ensure the relevance and success of a legislative staff organization.

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Self-Assessment Survey Instructions for Individual and Group Application The companion self-assessment survey for the NCSL Self-Assessment Guide for Legislative Staff Organizations is formatted into an Excel spreadsheet that provides users a straightforward and simple way to compile individual or group assessment results. This format allows the tool to be flexible, portable and applied “in-house.” An online version is under development for use by very large staff groups but it will not feature the portability of the Excel instrument. The self-assessment survey is divided into the six performance areas described earlier in this document: 1. Leadership 2. Organizational Planning and Performance 3. Management 4. Employee and Workplace Development 5. Information Management and Process Improvement 6. Customer Focus/Results Orientation Respondents score the self-assessment criteria within each performance area according to two measures: Rating. The “rating” measure represents the user’s opinion about how well the organization performs on that criterion. The scale provides for a rating value from 0 to 3 which have the following meaning: 3 = very effective 2 = effective 1 = not effective 0 = not being performed Weight. The “weight” measure represents the user’s opinion of the importance of the criterion in the context of the organization and its effectiveness. The scale provides for a rating value from 1 to 5 which have the following meaning: 5 = highest importance 4 = very important 3 = somewhat important 2 = not very important 1 = lowest importance

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[NOTE: It is important that survey takers select a RATING and WEIGHT for every question in the survey] The assessment compiles total scores for each criterion and an aggregate score for all criteria in the performance area (Leadership, Organizational Planning and Performance, etc.). A system of green, yellow and red indicators at the end of each completed area provides guidance to the user about organizational performance. Green indicates acceptable performance, yellow suggests that the organization may have some performance risks in the performance area, and red warns that the organization needs to address key issues addressed in the performance area.

Individual Results In addition to the average scores for each performance area shown in the survey, two additional tabs in this workbook compile the evaluation results for the individual respondent. Summary Chart Tab: The tab labeled Summary Chart presents the averages for each performance area in a bar graph and compares the individual results to threshold performance levels indicated by the red, yellow and green standard on the left of the chart. The threshold performance levels offer a quick reference that helps you identify priorities for further examination. Problems and Priorities Tab: This tab shows the performance criteria that the individual scored as problem areas or as priorities. When you assign a rating of 0 or 1 to a survey item, it appears in the Problem Area column. Survey criteria that you assign a weighting of 4 or 5 appear in the Priority Area column. Look especially for criteria that appear in both columns in this chart. Criteria that appear in both columns are important to you or your organization, but also ones where performance is a potential problem.

Group Results This performance evaluation tool can be distributed to a group of people, and their individual results then compiled into an overall group report. To compile the results, each respondent first copies his or her individual results and emails them to a manager or to a third-party facilitator who then compiles the individual results. This process works as described below. Step 1: Each individual survey respondent:

a) copies his/her summary results from the Share tab*; b) pastes them into an email message; c) sends the email to the person who will compile the group results.

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* To copy the summary results, select all the content in the Share tab by clicking and dragging from the top left cell of the Share tab worksheet to the last entry at the bottom right under the Problem Areas column, being careful to select all items under all three columns. Use the tool bar copy command or Control-C keystroke to copy that content.

Share Tab Example Illustration for Step 1:

Step 2: The person compiling the group results receives each email and pastes the content into the Group Scores tab, Group Priority Areas tab, and the Group Problem Areas tab, as appropriate.

Group Scores Tab: The "My Evaluation" average scores from each respondent are pasted into rows 2 through 7 in separate columns for each respondent (starting at column F for the first respondent’s scores, then G for the next set, then H, etc.) under the heading Group Member Weighted Scores. [see illustration next page]

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Group Scores Tab Illustration: Example of Group Scores Tab after entering data from three respondents.

Group Problem Areas and Group Priority Areas Tabs: The problem areas and priority areas from each individual are copied and pasted into column A of the appropriate tab. Each set of items is pasted below those already copied into the column, so all the items for the entire group appear as one long list in column A of each tab. The results from any individual should be copied into the tab only once.

Step 3: After copying all the individual responses into these three tabs, the workbook automatically presents the group summary results as follows:

Group Summary Tab: The weighted scores from each individual for the six performance areas are averaged for each area and those averages are displayed in a bar chart on the Group Summary tab. The chart shows the group results compared with the Red, Yellow and Green performance level threshold levels. (If a manager in the group is compiling the group results within his/her own Survey, then those summary results also are displayed.)

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Group Problem Areas Tab: The tab where the problem areas identified by each individual respondent are compiled also presents these areas in a cross-tab table (columns C and D) that lists how often each performance area was identified by the group as a problem area. Problem areas identified most frequently by the group are sorted to the top of this list, thereby quickly identifying consensus problem areas. Group Priority Areas Tab: Like the group problem areas tab, this tab presents a cross-tab table that lists all performance areas identified by the group as priorities and sorts them according to frequency to show any consensus priorities.

Step 4: The person compiling the group results can now copy the summary information from these three tabs into another workbook or document as a summary report.

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Acknowledgments The NCSL Self-Assessment Guide for Legislative Staff Organizations was produced at the direction of 2011 NCSL Staff Chair Tim Rice (Illinois) and through the efforts of members of the Strengthening Legislative Staff Work Group of NCSL’s Legislative Staff Coordinating Committee. The work group was assisted by NCSL staff Diane Chaffin, Doug Sacarto and Brian Weberg. NCSL Strengthening Legislative Staff Work Group members: Julie Pelegrin, Colorado, Chair Linda Pittsford, Texas, Vice-Chair Earnest Sumner, Florida, Vice-Chair Jan Yamane, Hawaii, Vice-Chair Thomas Bennett, West Virginia Raul Burciaga, New Mexico Mary Camp, Texas Marti Harkness, Florida David Larson, Kansas Holly Lyons, Iowa Scott Sager, Wisconsin H. Pepper Sturm, Nevada

Additional Reading Many of the assessment criteria used in the Self-Assessment Guide are derived from the following sources. Please consult them for further information on organizational performance.

• Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, 2011-2012 Criteria for Performance Excellence. National Institute of Standards and Technology, United States Department of Commerce. Gaithersburg, Md. (2011).

• Collins, Jim. Good to Great. HarperCollins: New York, N.Y. (2001). • Drucker, Peter. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Harper & Row: New

York, N.Y. (1974) • Latham, J.R., & Vinyard, J. Organizational Diagnosis, Design and Transformation: A

Baldrige User’s Guide. John Wiley and Sons: Hoboken, N.J. (2011). • Weberg, Brian. Things We Know. State Legislatures Magazine. National Conference of

State Legislatures: Denver, Colo. (May, 2002).

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Glossary of Terms Classification and Compensation Plan—a structured system of job titles and pay ranges arranged into a hierarchy based on job content and responsibilities. Jobs with similar content and responsibilities are grouped in the same range and are compensated within the same range. Continuous Improvement—a workplace philosophy and practice that encourages routine examination and improvement of employee skills, workplace processes and management strategies. Culture (Organizational)—the combination of values, norms, styles and expectations shared by members of an organization that guide behavior, interpersonal relationships and attitudes toward clients. Diversity—an organizational condition that exists when employees represent a broad range of backgrounds that reflect society, including differences in race, ethnicity, age, religion or disability challenge. Employee Engagement—a measure of employees’ involvement, commitment and contribution to their organization’s mission, goals and customer satisfaction. Focus Group—a survey technique using a small group of people in a facilitated setting designed to extract opinions, ideas and feelings about a specific issue, product, person or trend. Goals—specific outcome responsibilities assigned to a person, team or organization. Effective goal statements are time-specific and clearly understood by the responsible party. Human Resource Management—the professional practice of employee and workplace development and improvement based on generally accepted and legal standards for personnel policy, compensation management, professional development and other conditions of employment. Job Description—a statement of employee responsibilities and minimum qualifications specific to a job title. Leadership—the practice and profession of identifying and articulating the direction and objectives for organizational development, change and results, and motivating people and the organization toward the achievement of those objectives.

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Legislative Leaders—legislators elected by their colleagues to serve in key positions of institutional and political responsibility. Leadership titles typically include, but are not limited to, speaker of the house, president of the senate, majority leader and minority leader. Management—the practice and profession of organizing people, processes and other resources to achieve specific outcomes or results. Mission—the central purpose of an organization, or its reason for being, often presented as a mission statement. Non-monetary Rewards—forms of employee recognition or reward outside the traditional framework of monetary compensation and benefits. Peer Review—systematic assessment of organizational or individual performance conducted by people from a similar, or peer, organization that is based on generally accepted management and operational standards and practices. Performance Feedback Data—objective information usually in the form of numerical data collected and analyzed to measure organizational or individual productivity, accuracy, quality or customer satisfaction. Personnel Policies—written legal or generally accepted practices that define employee behavior, rights, conditions of employment and other workplace benefits, rules and expectations. Staff Organization—a team, office, agency or other group of legislative staff with a singular mission or purpose. Strategic Challenges/Issues—internal and external trends, changes, expectations or predictions that may affect the productivity and effectiveness of a legislative staff organization. Trust—a condition that exists between two people that allows one of them to invest the other with responsibility for outcomes that affect them both. Values—fundamental beliefs held by a person, group or culture that guide behavior and provide a framework for interpreting and assessing the outside world. Values include concepts such as honesty, integrity, fairness and tolerance. Vision—a perspective on the future that guides long-term planning. Vision statements incorporate an organization’s values, purpose (mission) and environmental conditions into a strategic idea about the organization’s future.