Our team headed out to Newport Beach, California, to participate in the City Managers Department Meeting for the League of California Cities this past month. We loved meeting city managers and deputy city managers. In most cities we work with, they are our main users and we love working with them. Here are three reasons why:
We love working with city managers because of their professionalism. City managers are serious and committed to execution. City managers are long-term public servants who have been honing their skills for many years. They have a clear and defined track with a long tenure – from acquiring their MPA, to being department heads, to becoming deputy city managers before taking on the city manager role. Additionally, they are committed to their professional growth. City managers are part of a peer network where they constantly learn from one another, as we at Zencity have had the opportunity to witness at many conferences we’ve attended, including the California City Managers Department Meeting.
City managers live and breathe the city but also have the ability to look at things from the bird’s eye view. They are interested in looking at strategic trends, and not just in putting out fires. For example, they will want to know how residents’ feelings about complex issues like homelessness evolve over time, not only about real-time reactions to a specific incident. When working with city managers, they ask us to help answer these kinds of bigger picture questions with our technology. City managers ultimately will also know how to put us in touch with the right person within the city who is working on a certain issue so that they can use the insights Zencity provides to actually resolve the issue and affect positive change.
At Zencity, we’re interested in improving how cities work by enabling cities to genuinely incorporate citizen feedback as an integral part of their decision-making process. This cultural change of being committed to performance management is really done best when it is top down. From our experience, city managers are the best positioned to create this kind of change. They are both committed to bettering how city employees and leaders do their job and they have the power to implement processes and new technologies, like Zencity.
As a Customer Success Manager at Zencity, I have the privilege of working closely with city managers and continue to learn from them every day. As we continue to grow, I look forward to the new opportunities and relationships to come.