Public Safety Insights Newsletter: February 12, 2014

How to Align Others’ Interests with Your Own
Public Safety Insight:	To align others’ interests with your own, appeal to their enlightened self-interest.

Fire Chief Kingman Schuldt is a leader on a mission, charged with merging two southwest Florida fire districts, East Naples and Golden Gate. Since April 2013, when the districts’ Fire Commissioners signed an interlocal agreement to engage in an administrative consolidation of management and operational services pending agreement on a joint merger plan, his focus has been on implementing that agreement. Next steps include approval of a full merger by the Florida legislature, the governor, and ultimately the voters in November 2014. Although he does not take final approval for granted, Chief Schuldt is optimistic: (1) despite a few individual holdouts, key stakeholder groups overwhelmingly support the proposed merger, and (2) documented efficiencies to date indicate the consolidation effort is on track to deliver its promised first-year savings of over $500,000.

What’s the secret to managing a major change process effectively? Chief Schuldt credits collaborative efforts by multiple stakeholder groups, including the fire commissioners of the two districts, his command staff and administrative assistant, the firefighters’ union leadership, and members of both communities. He also points to the time and effort spent on aligning stakeholders’ interests with the intended merger.

To overcome the inertia of resistance to major change, Chief Schuldt knew he had to appeal to diverse stakeholders’ enlightened self-interest. Specifically he had to answer the question "What’s in it for me?" from their perspectives. He and his team did this by educating people about the benefits they would realize as a result of the administrative consolidation, then the full merger. For example, here’s how he framed the issue for two stakeholder groups:

Greater efficiencies will allow fire district employees to be more successful than they    would be otherwise, resulting in greater pride in the service they provide.

More efficient spending of tax dollars will make members of the East Naples and Golden Gate communities safer as a result of faster response times, and the new structure will allow them to retain their sense of identity with their fire department.

The key to appealing successfully to people’s enlightened self-interest is to focus on the word ME in answering "What’s in it for me?" from their perspectives. The answer cannot be about their community, their agency, their crew, or even their family; it must be about them personally. In the case of fire district employees, the message appealed to the innate sense of pride in being able to do the work they love even better than before. Because the biggest push-back to the consolidation/merger from both affected communities was emotional – i.e., people feared the community would lose its identity if its fire department merged with another district – Chief Schuldt went to great lengths to address that issue by ensuring that the combined organization will retain identifiable elements for each community (e.g., there will be an East Naples division and a Golden Gate division of the merged fire district, and all apparatus will have their division names on them).

To learn more about how Chief Schuldt used enlightened self-interest to align stakeholders’ interests with the consolidation/merger effort, as well as other key elements of the East Naples/Golden Gate merger process, take a look at our article How to Succeed at Consolidation: The East Naples/Golden Gate Fire Districts Experience.

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©2014 Pat Lynch | Public Safety Insights