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She had never been in the water/wastewater business, she ended up being promoted and
eventually became a president. I really like developing people, as far as my leadership style, I
always took input from people involved. I'm dealing with finance, I'm dealing with rates. I always
want feedback. It was my decision that was going to be final, but I wanted to hear all sides of it. A
lot of times it was a modification of what I would have done if I didn't get that input. I was heavily
involved with the regulatory agencies in Indiana and Tennessee. I was heavily involved in all of the
regulatory aspects. I did a lot on the legislative side. We as American Water, we would do billing. I
had to negotiate with different agencies, I even had to testify with the house in Nashville. We had
a new governor come in, we were heavily involved in doing a rate case. Once we got done with
the legislative issues, we decreased cost significantly in rate case costs.

5. This position requires staff to work between multiple divisions of the Department and multiple
City departments. How would you enable your organization to deliver an increasingly cohesive
customer experience internally, including clarity, timeliness, and responsiveness?

The same as what I would do with American Water. I would make sure the department heads to
make sure our responsiveness is timely, and make sure my people were doing what they needed
to do at the time they needed it done. When the customers are unhappy, it just makes more
work. The worst thing you can really do is allow stuff like that to happen. You have to look at these
other areas in the City as customers.

6. Please describe a situation in which you had influence on increasing the effectiveness of
a team of people or a department. What measures did you take to contribute to
employee motivation and staff development?

In Tennesse, before I went down there the president had let things go. We had racial
issues down there and we had to make changes. It got really bad and they ended up
terminating 12 people in management and a number of union employees. My boss sat me
down and told me this is going on and you have to go down and clean this up.

Utilities are dangerous, whenever issues are on the rise most likely you have morale
issues. I had to go down there and change that. When I got down there, the arbitration
with the union had just ended and we came out ontop and we won the case. I had to go
down there to the unions and get past this. I started just really working with my direct
reports and what we formed was a new employee committee, we formed a customer
advocacy committee, I also had monthly meetings with the union stewards. It would be
planning employee picnics, etc… All notes were taken, everybody could see what was
going on. There was total transparency and that really made a big difference. We stopped
having so many grievances. They're like a big chainsaw, we had too many instances where
employees got hurt. We got rid of them and went to these hydrollic safe chains, at first no
one wanted to do it. I worked with employees and pretty soon they loved them. I was
trying to get everyone more involved in our wellness program, and I just couldn't get
distribution to get on board. At the same time there were some staff having heart
problems. We decided we were going to get every person certified in CPR. We did it, we
got everyone compliant in a few months. We even had a year after that where we had