Building a Stronger Safety Net

They say people don’t quit jobs, they quit bad managers. When you have a bad manager, you know it. You know it because you can’t get out of bed in the morning. You can’t speak your mind because you don’t trust you’ll be listened to. You can’t get good results because there are roadblocks in your way and no one to help clear them.

A good manager, on the other hand, can see the mechanics of their team like a doctor studying an X-Ray, collapsing inefficiencies, lightening workloads, and nipping bad dynamics in the bud. Tim Cook and Lisa Su are transformational leaders who got there by being world class operators. 

We’ve endorsed Mark Farrell for mayor because he’s a leader who is also a good manager. Our CEO Kanishka Cheng was a legislative aide to Mark when he was a supervisor—she was one of only four aides who ever worked for Mark, because unlike many other politicians, he had so little staff turnover. She remembers quarterly staff off-sites to define and measure goals. She remembers Mark actually reading department heads’ budgets and policy proposals in their entirety before meeting with them—and no, this is not common practice among all of our elected officials. She also remembers the way he valued a spirit of cooperation across the aisle.

All the candidates have big plans to fix San Francisco, but Mark is the only one talking about the factor that makes or breaks what gets done: what kind of manager they would be. Mark has said it’s important to him that his team comes to work in-person five days a week to ensure maximum clarity and cooperation: “I want to work and govern our city the right way, and that means holding every department head accountable.”