In 2002, Florida Governor Jeb Bush directed his Department of Transportation to empower its toll facility agency, Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), to pursue new ideas and best practices. Governor Bush challenged the Turnpike Enterprise to determine how quickly it was possible to transform the mindset of a 4,600-employee public-servant/civil-service organization to that of an entrepreneurial top performer. He asked the agency to serve as a prototype for change. At the center of the agency’s transformation is “Flight School.” The training curriculum provided the one hundred senior managers in each session with the knowledge and tools required to accomplish FTE’s operating basis: “public sector motives, private sector methods.” This article describes the first two years of FTE’s training for senior managers, paying particular attention to the goals and objectives of the learning program, curriculum design, first-year results, curriculum changes, second-year results, and significant lessons learned.
Florida’s state-operated turnpike system, constituted in 1953, originally consisted of a single 110-mile stretch of highway running north from Miami along the state’s east coast to Fort Pierce (Fig. 1). The infrastructure and management of “Florida’s Mainline” has expanded to meet consistently high population growth rates in the Sunshine State over the past fifty years.The turnpike system was operated for two decades as a separate and independent turnpike authority, as part of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). It was first a self-contained office and later one of eight FDOT districts. Today the Mainline, now known as Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), is the United State’s fourth-largest revenue-based transportation system, comprising six hundred miles of roadway, more than 130 interchanges, eight service plazas, and five toll bridges.
In March 2002, the Florida legislature passed HB 261, which mandated that FTE operate as a public agency empowered to pursue best business management practices to provide Florida residents and visitors with the best highway system possible. This legislation was both historic and revolutionary.
Fig. 1. This nighttime photo shows a segment of the Florida Turnpike Mainline, which runs north from the Fort Lauderdale area to north of Orlando (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
Unprecedented expansion
Shortly after the passage of HB 261, we issued a document that explained the transition to “public sector motives, private sector methods.” Reinventing Florida’s Turnpike: The Enterprise Model (FTE 2000) outlined the operating goals of our newly envisioned organization and described in detail a set of sixteen first-year initiatives.
The subsequent “Annual Performance Report” (FTE 2003) introduced a five-year strategic plan based on ten specific strategies. Most importantly, it outlined ambitious performance measures for the goals and objectives.
We have already begun revamping nearly every aspect of our operations to meet our ultimate goal of expanding capacity while consistently increasing revenues and lowering operating costs.
Some of the most dramatic transformations included reengineering our project delivery mechanisms. Various combinations of design-build, multiple contracting, and performance bonus options could now be used to get projects built faster, cheaper, and better. Specific projects are being monitored to evaluate protocol efficiency.
Also undertaken was a thorough reengineering of the entire toll collection system to increase the system’s electronic toll collection (ETC) capacity and use. FTE’s ETC system is called Sun-Pass® (Fig. 2). ETC makes toll collection operations more efficient, and thus, less costly. New mechanisms were put in place to enforce violations and more closely measure the variance between indicated and actual toll collections.
Fig. 2. SunPass®-only lanes enable travelers to pass through tollbooths slowly without stopping to pay cash. Should open-road tolling be implemented, tolls will be collected from vehicles traveling at full highway speeds (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
FTE’s 2003–2008 strategic plan calls for the most aggressive infrastructure expansion program in our history. More than $4 billion in projects will extend and improve FTE roadways. This includes a total of 150 lane-miles of widening and eleven interchange improvements through fiscal year (FY) 2012.
In addition, the strategic plan targets the construction of more than one hundred SunPass-only lanes to help reach a 75 percent ETC-user rate by 2008. The plan also calls for the installation of a fiber optic network to support system-wide operations and communication.
One of the most futuristic initiatives includes the transformation of the Sawgrass Expressway, a twenty-three-mile connector on the northwest outskirts of Fort Lauderdale, into a state-of-the-art user-financed highway. As a first step toward all-electronic toll collection on the Sawgrass Expressway, the FTE will implement Express Mainline Plazas offering SunPass customers the ability to pay tolls at highway speed in a nonstop environment. The entire facility will be widened to six lanes and additional improvements will include noise walls, median and canal protection safety improvements, landscaping, and ITS improvements.
Laboratory for change
Along with the ambitious performance expectations set for the FTE, our 2002 mandate challenged us to serve as a prototype for change within FDOT—and as a laboratory for innovation within Florida state government.
We recognized that operational change always begins with people. Our first step, then, was to reorganize our workforce to meet the many new challenges. Our “old” organizational structure was comprised of separate, “vertical” functions. Groups functioned somewhat autonomously and without the synergy that creates a truly high-functioning organization.
Our “new” organizational structure is a more “horizontal” organization with better communications among departments and with streamlined efficiency and effectiveness throughout.
FTE’s executive director and chief executive officer (CEO), James L. Ely, D.P.A., reports directly to the Florida secretary of transportation. A chief operating officer, chief financial officer, general counsel, and communications and marketing manager report to the executive director—similar to the organizational structure of many private corporations.
At the same time, we faced the basic challenge of integrating new employees. The passage of HB 261 brought several additional highways and bridges (and those who manage and operate them) into the FTE organization. FDOT’s center for toll collections and Troop K of the Florida Highway Patrol also formally joined FTE, increasing the total staff from 1,300 to 4,600.
To ensure that day-to-day activities consistently align with the business objectives, we established four essential themes to our operations and visualized them as gauges on a control panel, or “dashboard.” The dashboard includes:
•
Achieving the highest levels of customer service
•
Maintaining a highly trained and motivated work force
•
Increasing the quality and efficiency of project delivery
•
Fully leveraging FTE as a fiscal asset
•
A safe transportation system
The need for speed. . . and training
We also recognized that the pace of change needed to be swift, and we understood the critical role education and training would play in achieving both short- and long-term success.
Effective leadership is key to bringing about change and guiding an organization through significant transitions. Therefore, we turned our attention to designing an effective curriculum to educate, train, and motivate the top one hundred managers in the organization.
Organizational cohesion and unity was the underlying objective—the need to “speak with one voice.” To FTE, this means that the entire organization is working together with an unwavering commitment toward shared goals and objectives. This is especially critical in an organization deployed in offices throughout the entire state of Florida.
Flight school: The takeoff
“Flight school” was the tool FTE chose to enhance its reorganization and leadership training. However, the twin military and flight metaphors went beyond clever labeling of a single event.
For a highway-based organization dramatically increasing its effectiveness and efficiency, the idea of “taking flight” seemed ready-made. And military training and preparedness provided a natural comparison for a unit of state government adopting more competitive strategies.
The first session of flight school took place in December 2002. Attendees were assigned to one of five teams (designated “squadrons”) of twenty participants. Each squadron included managers from across all disciplines of the organization.
The weeklong curriculum of individual modules began and ended with a motivational session. In-house staff or specialized consultants delivered the series of ten content units. In addition to presentations about the new organization, sessions covered managing change, people mapping, time management, strategic planning, and media relations, among others. Throughout the week, one at a time, each squadron cycled through all ten units.
Former Navy Captain Charlie Plumb, a veteran flight pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, gave the keynote presentation. Afterburner, Inc., a group of former U.S. fighter pilots that offer motivational speaking and leadership training, closed with their “Top Gun” training—real-life simulations designed to put lessons learned into practice (Fig. 3). The December 2002 flight school became known as “Top Gun I.”
Fig. 3. A veteran U.S.-fighter pilot, now a member of Afterburner, Inc., offered simulations and exercises intended to inspire staff to adopt new strategies for real-life issues (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
We concluded that the key goal of Top Gun I—informing top managers about where the new organization was going—was successfully achieved. The military readiness positioning, in fact, helped our managers define the organization’s new set of challenges, and some of the ideas they developed during the training became the basis for FTE’s 2003–2008 strategic plan.
Furthermore, the successes of this session also gave us the framework for a sequel. The motivational messages of the first flight school proved informative and useful, but we realized that future sessions would benefit from content and activities that would specifically speak to FTE-related goals and challenges. We felt that the training would be more effective to our evolving culture if relevant and useful tools were put directly in the hands of each top manager.
Flight plan revised
Our plans for the subsequent flight school, then, incorporated a different kind of training curriculum. We recognized that employees working in bureaucratic work environments naturally learn skills that will help them survive and succeed in bureaucratic environments. Changing the culture of the workplace itself might take a significant period of time and would require a new set of tools.
Therefore, we shifted the methodology of the next flight school from “classroom” to “hands-on.” We focused on real-life objectives. The new motivational vision would specifically depict the path required to get from a traditional government bureaucracy to a market-driven organization.
We created a conceptual map for this road to the market—and summarized these characteristics with the acronym PAVE (passion, action, values, and environment). A “high-involvement, high-performing organization” (or HI-HP) described the desired end result (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. PAVE the way to HI-HP has become FTE’s conceptual road map (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
Very intentionally, PAVE has become the organization’s mantra—“PAVE the way to HI-HP”—because it succinctly communicates personal and broad organizational behaviors. First, it summarizes, in a more specific way, expectations for organizational change. Second, it offers expectations for leadership roles. And third, it outlines the requirements to fulfill those expectations.
Within this framework, too, we found the hands-on tools that top managers could use in day-to-day activities. Our intention was to avoid setting hard-and-fast standards while clearly emphasizing self-reliance, flexibility, and individual empowerment.
“Top Gun II,” then, would deliver the new vision for organizational change, and would also model it. Using the basic structure of Top Gun I, keynote speakers were once again scheduled at the beginning and end of the training. However, the emphasis for Top Gun II was on modes of transportation (keynote presentations were from a former Navy commander and a former Southwest Airlines executive) that more closely compare to managing a statewide highway system.
The underlying theme of both presentations clearly mirrored the organizing principle of the new leadership-training curriculum: dealing with change. The curriculum was once again built from individual training modules, but these were more carefully chosen for thematic relevance and timed in sequential blocks that were delivered to all attendees at once so that other activities could be included in the schedule.
Pre-flight and take-off exercises
Top Gun II was held in November 2004. Some of the new activities were intended as modeling exercises and opportunities—in essence, specific skills and processes that attendees could take back to their own offices and put to use.
Each manager was asked before the training to administer a personality-mapping self-assessment and to complete required reading assignments. In addition, they were asked to participate in a “squadron” identity exercise by choosing a leader, a name, and a logo (Fig. 5). The Wildcats went so far as to choose a musical theme for their team, in this case choosing the song “Eye of the Tiger!”
Fig. 5. At the outset of Flight School II, each “squadron” chose an identity. Here, squadron teammates meet to learn more about each other (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
Once again interdisciplinary teams were organized. But in a new wrinkle, each member was given the assignment of learning from each teammate five pieces of personal information, such as birthplace, previous employment, or career aspiration, for example. This meant each participant had to meet all others in the course and get to know them on a personal basis.
At the end of the week, at unexpected intervals, team members were asked to stand and the group was obliged to provide the crucial pieces of personal information about that person, revealing how well each member of the group had performed the task of getting to know all the others.
Model of change and adaptation
Throughout the curriculum, we provided our participants with real-life experiences—in the form of surprises, unexpected events, and changes in the “rules”—all related to dealing with change. For example, a series of unannounced “pop” quizzes was given at day’s end on content from that day’s training sessions.
We also made a point of adamantly deflecting all questions about how to proceed with the consistent response that “there are no right answers.” This communicated two messages. First, it assured those attuned to bureaucratic environments that a prescribed solution was not being sought. Second, it instilled a sense of self-reliance in teams trying to seek direction from those with “greater” authority.
We also borrowed the format of a popular cable TV interview program, Inside the Actor’s Studio, with short, daily interviews of local business and political leaders as a means of providing “up-close” examples of professionals whose careers very effectively, and successfully, modeled adaptation to change (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6. FTE’s Chief Executive Officer James Ely interviews transportation engineer Maryam Ghyabi in an “Inside the Actor’s Studio”-type program (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
The central activity of the training curriculum, a field trip “photo safari” and process-mapping exercise, sent teams out for an afternoon to pairs of competitors, such as Hertz and Enterprise, Nordstrom’s and Target, McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A, to document comparable organizational functions. To complete the exercise, the squadrons documented their work processes and then presented their findings to the entire group.
The final exercise prompted each squadron to develop one segment of an organization-wide deployment plan for the “PAVE the way to HI-HP” leadership vision. The winning team was then declared the session’s “top gun.”
Exceeding trainers’ expectations
It’s one thing to explain, illustrate, and provide “controlled” experiences for employees to take initiative, work cooperatively, and adapt to change. It’s another thing entirely to expect a single week of training to change behavior on the spot. Sometimes, however, it’s the trainers’ expectations that need tuning.
This was dramatically confirmed for us when several squadron leaders asked us to extend the deadline for the final assignment. Since we fully anticipated that the “real” work on an organization-wide deployment plan would continue after the training, we naturally turned down this request, with the expectation that teams would simply do the best they could in the time allotted.
Instead, all five squadron leaders returned and announced that the five teams had come together and, on their own initiative, changed the rules. Rather than address the final assignment as five separate teams, they were going to work as one large team, a new entity they designated Wing One (Fig. 7). This would allow them to better divide the tasks required to develop a deployment plan and more-efficiently assign team members to a larger set of smaller work groups. (For whom, by the way, they extended the deadline.)
Fig. 7. At the conclusion of Flight School II, all of the squadrons joined together into “Wing One” to most effectively carry out their individual missions (Florida Turnpike Enterprise, with permission)
Conclusion
Looking back, we decided that we may not have only underestimated the ability of our top managers to absorb and apply lessons from a demanding training curriculum, but we may have underestimated our own ability to design a training curriculum that effectively delivered both the content and spirit of organizational expectations.
What had begun as an experiment in curriculum design had become a living example of initiative-taking, cooperative interaction, and creative response to change in a competitive environment.
In more fully assessing the experience gained from creating one version of leadership training to the development of the next, we derived several important lessons.
First, while engineers may feel challenged in the field of human resource development, there is no lack of specialists and consultants available to provide assistance. The key to using these resources effectively lies in tailoring what’s available to the exact nature of the organization.
“Off-the-shelf” components can be adapted and combined with self-generated materials to create a tailored program. In the case of flight school, the curriculum spoke directly to our individual organization, its culture, its vision, and the particular challenges of the present moment. We also found that speakers gladly adapt their material to our themes.
The second significant lesson learned is that a values-driven vision must be conveyed. The effort expended in thoughtfully and clearly constructing a cultural vision is a critical investment. But without the ability to actively believe in and enable an environment based on those values, an organizational vision becomes practically meaningless.
If self-reliance, initiative, and creative solutions are the values most desired in organizational leadership, then an environment, even a training environment, must be created that conveys those values and actively illustrates them in behavior, expectations, and reward setting.
This idea that training should actively and authentically model the expectations of a cultural vision cannot be emphasized too strongly. In moving from Top Gun I to Top Gun II, the leadership and top managers of FTE advanced from talk to action—from discussing an idea to bringing it to vibrant life—an unparalleled experience that will likely bring benefit to the entire organization for decades to come.
Suggested reading
Complete details of the leadership training programs developed by Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, including downloadable training modules and related support materials, can be accessed online, at ⟨http://www.dot.state.fl.us/turnpikepio/FlightSchool/index.htm⟩.
Christopher L. Warren is deputy executive director and chief operating officer of Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, and can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected]. Nancy Clements is director of planning and production for Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, and can be contacted via e-mail at [email protected].
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/43e23ce4-8c1f-49bb-baa0-401ceebb7aa1/assets/images/1.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/27fa4167-9ec7-4043-9699-afcad12e20f8/assets/images/2.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/db1afc2d-a99a-4af7-a58f-40afd0c98d9e/assets/images/3.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/c06a6f05-4f5b-4959-92a0-5eed2d1b8613/assets/images/4.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/8a9195a4-cc86-41b0-9a3c-c1e55643cae8/assets/images/5.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/e45610f3-0e96-4563-a062-31b9b53c81f2/assets/images/6.jpg)
1532-6748(2006)6:3(117)/asset/b978112d-8283-4198-a121-6eac86c8e744/assets/images/7.jpg)
