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The final thing that I would add, is that we want to make sure we have clear performance
expectations. It's not expected that everyone is your friend, but that you work together and
accomplish your goals and objectives together. Make sure that everyone understands that.

5. 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?

I'm going to go the department level. When I came to San Jose, there were problems everywhere
that I worked. The wastewater plant needed to be rebuilt, and there was no plan or money to do
that. There was major morale problems, they felt that no one paid attention to them. There was a
lot of bickering, and there were some serious issues. The executives wanted to sell water to a
water company and privatize. The solid waste situation was the NorCal crisis - there was a huge
political crisis due to the garbage contract. In water shed protection they had a leader that was
just terrible. So I came into that, everywhere I looked serious problems. I spent some time
understanding the problems, tried to understand what was causing these problems. I had to make
some changes in personnel. In other cases, I had to deal with long festering problems that no one
had addressed. There were people who were not performing well, that were managing in a style
that was not acceptable, such as intimidation, that were getting away with it. There were people
who were doing other things during work hours and getting away with it. The first thing I did was
determine why we had morale problems. The fact that I then was willing to address these
problems, caused a huge change in the organization, people were relieved that we were dealing
with these problems. The other thing that I did was start going out to the plant and spend time
with them, listen to them, and start making changes. At least they knew that I listened to them
and I implemeted some of their changes, and that had a huge influence on morale at the plant.
Make it clear that not getting along is not acceptable.

In terms of the garbage contract, it was going through the process of what it took and coming
forward with a recommendation.

We did initiate employee development plans and encouraged people to go to training and
conferences. Really encouraged professional development and not be quite so tight. I want people
to stay up to date on the current trends in the business. A lot has happened in the past decade in
our field. We also looked at, I wanted to make sure that people were prepared for the next
position. Anyone who is interested, how can we prepare them for promotion, put systems in
place, to ready them for the next level. And then the other thing is, I built a good staff. There were
some staff members who were managing in an unacceptable way, so we made some changes and
got in really good staff members. I remember one situation, the position became available, and
typically you would hire the next person in line. I did the interviews and I chose someone else who
was further down in the organization. That raised a lot of eyebrows. The fact that we were willing
to fill the positions based on qualifications rather than just seniority had an impact. A lot of it is
listening, trying to understand what was going on and being willing to take action.