Photo By Shannon Bauer | District leaders from engineering and construction discuss the future of the St. Paul...... read more read more
RED WING, Minn. - Thirty-five district and emerging leaders participated in a Strategic Governance Meeting in Red Wing, Minnesota, Jan. 7-9.
The purpose of the three-day meeting included determining the long-term strategic direction of the district and identifying key first steps to posture the district for success. The group drafted a vision statement and guiding principles, as well as scoped out four lines of effort leadership will take in an attempt to position the district for future success. The
days included a number of presentations, small breakout sessions and team building activities. There were many discussions on the service the district provides, why it provides these services and how the district should go about providing these services.
“Holding an off-site is important to do from time-to-time, because senior leadership doesn’t take time during regular business hours to do a lot of strategic thinking about where the district needs to be in 10 years. One way to do this is to go off-site and not be distracted by all the fires you
are typically putting out on a day-to- day basis,” said Terry Birkenstock, chief of regional planning north. “It allowed us to focus on strategy, where we think the Corps of Engineers is headed, where we think Congress wants us to focus, how we can go about continually improving.”
Megan McGuire, biologist, and Sierra Keenan, planner, served as facilitators at the off-site. McGuire said it was interesting to get to facilitate, as it involved trying to provide structure during a very fluid discussion.
“I wish all of the district employees could be there to witness the discussion,” she said. “It was awesome to see our senior leaders interacting in a way that shows how much they care about the people and the mission here.”
The vision statement the group came up with incorporated the vision of the Corps of Engineers Headquarters and the Mississippi Valley Division:
“Driven to be a world-class District that delivers for our workforce, partners, region, enterprise and Nation by BUILDING STRONG and Taking Care of People!
Mission
Value
People.”
The guiding principles developed focus on the Mission (we are committed to delivering our program), Value (we are passionate about using our expertise to serve others), and People (we develop an inspired professional workforce of trusted and reliable teammates).
“Guiding principles are behaviors we permit, practice and promote,”
explained Col. Karl Jansen, district commander. “In essence, they describe our culture or the way we do things. They are behaviors we try and teach our new teammates, when we bring them on board. “
As for the future, the participants came up with four lines of effort to focus on to ensure the district continues to add value. The first includes looking at ways for ‘resilient navigation.’ This will involve not only finding ways to maintain navigation infrastructure but also ways to better use dredged material and the possibility of allowing lockages when the river is wide open.
The second line of effort includes working on making the district’s technical capabilities ‘agile and innovative.’ Kevin Wilson, deputy district engineer, said this includes leveraging some of our strengths in hydraulics and hydrology, private-public-partnerships or P3 and geotechnical engineering and expanding our partnerships and getting our technical
expertise recognized.
The third line of effort will include becoming a watershed planning center of expertise, as well as leveraging Planning Assistance to States, the Tribal Partnership Program and the Continuing Authorities Program.
“We have a lot of customers interested in our technical capabilities, and we need to be able to reach the customers that are interested.” said Wilson.
The final line of effort includes developing and maintaining a worldclass
workforce. This will involve looking at hiring authorities, the work environment, professional development and more.
| Date Taken: | 01.07.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 03.20.2020 09:01 |
| Story ID: | 365565 |
| Location: | RED WING, MINNESOTA, US |
| Web Views: | 33 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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