What would you look for in a new CEO?

 Many of you have been asking, what is the Water District doing to repair, rebuild and move forward after the resignation of the CEO. I’d like to talk about three of those things:

1.        CEO Recruitment

2.        BAO Annual Review

3.        Investigation Audit

CEO Recruitment

One of the most important jobs of a board is to hire and fire the CEO. To do that, the board has established an Ad Hoc Committee to develop and oversee this process. Before starting, the Board discussed the key elements they would like to see in a process, including things like employee and community involvement.

That starts this Thursday at a public listening session where you will have the opportunity to tell the Board what kind of CEO we should be looking for. Details on how to participate are here. The public portion of the meeting begins at 5:30pm and you can zoom in or you can come down to headquarters in person. The address is 5700 Almaden Expressway, San Jose.

Earlier in the day we’ll be holding a listening session with employees. This is in addition to a survey that has been sent to all employees seeking input.

Information from these sessions will be used to refine a CEO profile that will then be used for a nationwide search through the search firm Columbia ltd. This is the same firm Valley Water used for the last two executive staff searches. Our hope is to complete the CEO search process by September.

Investigation of the Investigative Process 

One of the problems that surfaced through the investigation of the CEO was that we found we did not have a process for a complaint filed against a board appointed officer, (BAO). We have a complaint process for board members and we have one for employees but BAOs are somewhere in between. That complicated things.

It’s important to note that we’ve learned a lot over the last year and are very appreciative of our District Council for navigating a process that demanded the utmost confidentiality, impartiality, and integrity. And now, with the investigation behind us, we have an opportunity to reflect, identify what worked well, and what can be improved upon.

Toward that end, the Board, through the Board Audit Committee commissioned an audit to improve our investigative process. Information on the scope of that audit is linked here and the Board Policy and Monitoring Committee (BPMC) has had in depth conversations around the types of questions that an audit should help answer. Questions like:

-              Who does the complaint intake process?

-              Who and how is it determined whether to proceed with an investigation?

-              How do we ensure those who file complaints are protected during the process?

-              How do we ensure confidential information is not leaked?

If you’d really like to do a deep dive, the BPMC conversation is linked here and here. For the video, this item starts at the 1:13 time stamp.

My hope is that by looking back at the process we just went through, our existing processes for employees and board members, as well as best practices at other agencies, Valley Water can put together a solid investigation process for our BAOs. Ultimately, some of the things I'm most interested in include making sure that our investigation process is fair and consistent across investigations, that it is time bound without sacrificing integrity, that we protect those involved, and that we have clear guidance on how to handle information once findings are made.

CEO Review Process

Ideally, management issues would be surfaced in the context of an annual review. That did not happen in this case. This gives rise to the question: Why was this missed and how can our annual review process catch management issues before they become a problem? As a result, we are now examining the BAO annual review process. My hope is that we can review other agency processes to retool ours with the intent to create a more robust CEO review process that can surface management issues before they create organizational problems. Our hope is to have a new process in time to inform prospective CEO candidates of how we do annual reviews.