Systems thinking is a change of perspective
When I first learned about Hennepin County’s workforce initiative back in 2013, it was apparent that they were thinking differently than everyone else.
In most organizations, especially government, systems change was about big reforms that prescribed how other people should act differently. Further, change initiatives broke issues down into parts and assigned them to varying committees, each one assigned to fixing their part of the problem.
In contrast, Hennepin’s workforce initiative was characterized by two changes in perspective, both hallmarks of systems thinking.
The first was shifting to a holistic view. Rather than seeing each problem as a separate entity requiring its own solution, Hennepin focused on how its problems were interconnected. With that perspective, solutions required a holistic, cross-departmental approach.
The second shift of perspective was from thinking the problem is “out there”, and instead looking at how internal actions could be unwittingly contributing to the problem. As is often recommended but rarely followed, change starts from within.
I recently reached out to Mike Christenson to learn about how Hennepin County’s workforce initiative solved two problems simultaneously, and became a platform for solving the region’s talent shortage.
Mike Christenson has been an executive at Allina, vice president at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, and economic development director for the City of Minneapolis. He is currently working on a variety of projects for the Hennepin County Attorney, which is the country’s 34-most populous county. Hennepin’s county seat is Minneapolis, and more than one in five Minnesotans live within its boundaries.
In the interview, Mike called out two leaders from the County as leading change agents. First, county administrator David Hough, a 38-year veteran of Hennepin County, a former lead prosecutor with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, and – in Christenson’s view – the best public administrator in the state.
The second is now Hough’s assistant county administrator, May Xiong, who served as the workforce lead at Project for Pride in Living until 2019. At that time she accepted Hough’s call to public service and now heads up the disparity reduction effort at Hennepin County.
Insights from Mike Christenson
Bryan: What challenge was Hennepin facing in 2012?
Mike: The county had a looming workforce shortage. The county administrator, David Hough, analyzed the staffing numbers and realized that a third of the county’s workforce would retire within 8 years. That’s a huge number of employees, over 2,000. It was going to be a huge recruitment challenge.
Bryan: How did you get involved?
Mike: David Hough called me – I was vice president of Minneapolis Community and Technical College at the time – and Steve Cramer, then executive director at Project for Pride in Living, to a meeting. He outlined the challenge and asked if we could help fill the workforce gap. But he also wanted to link new workforce efforts to the county’s anti-poverty and job training approaches. Why not intentionally link the county’s job training programs to public service jobs?
Together, we created a partnership between our organizations – an employer (Hennepin), a trainer, and a nonprofit – to build tuition-free training programs that would lead to local government jobs. We specifically targeted low-income residents from across the county, most on public assistance, to participate.
Bryan: What was unique about Hennepin’s approach?
Mike: The chief executive prioritized and drove it. Change in any public organization must be micromanaged at first, in my experience. David Hough is not only the most experienced of Hennepin County’s administrators, he’s the most talented public administrator in the state. Why? Because he knows that change is not just about a speech—but institutional and workplan reforms.
The changes David wanted required his involvement at every level of management. He engaged and got public support from the County Board. He pushed the human resources department to drop unnecessary job qualifications. He encouraged cross-department collaboration, like human resources working with job training and public benefits programs. And he personally led the development of partnerships with the colleges and nonprofits.
Bryan: How did you first start making changes?
Mike: I thought Hennepin should set up many training pathways at once, but David wanted to master one pathway – from training to recruitment to hire – and then replicate it. He was right.
Steve Cramer was the one who recommended that Hennepin set up a seven-month program for human service representatives. Hennepin needed to hire a lot of new reps following a new federal grant. So we did that pathway first. It worked from the beginning for participants and for the county. Hennepin hired over 130 human service workers within three years.
Then Cramer and Hough turned pathway development over to the best workforce mind in the state – May Xiong of PPL. May had been building pathways for years, and was expert at operationalizing partnerships between job training players and employers. The arena is crowded in the Twin Cities, but May has a gift for building enthusiasm among diverse players on a common goal. And she also understands that the most important investment in racial justice involves raising incomes in challenged households. Her jobs programs at PPL proved the most effective way to attack poverty, in my view.
Bryan: We’re seeing a lot of employers follow Hennepin’s lead and drop their unnecessary credential requirements. Did you influence that?
Mike: Not enough. Minnesota was not ready for the labor shortage and has not perfected the tuition-free pathways that make public service reachable for everyone.
Other employers have only recently eased bachelors degree requirements and other minimum qualifications. Workforce data provided by RealTime Talent demonstrates that IT hung on too long to the bachelors requirement. And industries like HVAC competed for talent rather than cooperating to train more installers, only worsening shortages.
Hennepin saw this coming and backed off minimum qualifications for hundreds of positions. Building on the success of the Humans Services Representative pathway, they launched many additional pathways into government service.
And May Xiong was the engineer-in-chief and quietly steered an effort that culminated in about 2,600 people a year graduating from over 20 career pathways across Hennepin County. That scale will begin to close big gaps.
There’s a role for government to play with these market failures – and we did just that when the Hennepin Leadership Council convened employers several years ago. That’s why Hough and Xiong will be bringing it back sometime soon.
Bryan: On the training side, how did you build a career path into government jobs?
Mike: Hennepin created opportunities at every step in the path. Each change built on the others. At the front end, the county created paid internship opportunities to give more people experience. Then, once someone enrolled in training, Hennepin made sure that they were earning college credit. Upon graduation they were offered a good job at a good wage with full benefits.
Unnecessary job requirements were eliminated to make sure the county wasn’t screening out eligible workers. In addition, Hennepin started offering all staff tuition reimbursement. Our pathway hires started accumulating more college credit toward degrees and were able to advance within the organization.
Bryan: I like that example because it shows that the changes Hennepin made weren’t ad-hoc. They were part of a bigger vision. Each reform in each department had to fit into the logic of recruiting over 2,000 new employees.
Mike: Exactly. I like to say that Hennepin County “cracked the code.” In other words, there’s a method to closing workforce gaps, it’s based on a variety of tools, and it’s repeatable. It’s sort of like your online course’s seven-step problem solving method.
We use eight steps based on what’s worked in the past and real-time labor market data. It includes creating partnerships as well as measuring performance to make sure it’s working as planned.
Bryan: You also managed to make the training programs holistic by linking them to support services. How did you do that?
Hennepin required that programs partner with publicly-funded colleges. Why? Efficiency. First, Minnesota colleges offer the biggest job program in the world – it’s called Pell grants. If employers pay for job training without using this source first, it’s a waste.
Second, college students are eligible for federal and state support for child care, mental health, career services, and transportation. Nonprofits choosing not to partner with colleges often complain that they cannot afford to provide such support. Do you see the problem? Nonprofits who refuse to put up with college processes – and most do – ask their trainees and funders to pay for services that are already publicly available. It doesn’t make sense.
Finally, support services mean more student completion, more job placements, and more return on investment for Hennepin County. Research in the county’s human services department has shown that hiring a public benefits recipient has the twin benefit of getting that person out of poverty, but also dramatically reducing county spending on public assistance.
We learned all this from May Xiong’s leadership in pathways design.
Bryan: What final lessons learned should others know about?
Mike: Hennepin didn’t stop with internal changes. As I said, we “cracked the code” and wanted to share that with other employers in Hennepin County. To do that I worked with Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin to create the Hennepin Workforce Leadership Council. It involved hundreds of employers, all the regional community colleges, and many of our local nonprofits. It was our platform for bigger systems change about how our region can tangibly close talent gaps. It’s coming back, and none too soon.
