Beleaguered MTA on Track With Management Training Program

Given the crisis aura surrounding Los Angeles County’s transit agency these days, the acronym MTA might as well stand for Metropolitan Turmoil Authority.

Indeed, what with the recent resignation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief amid political infighting, harsh criticism of its subway project and charges of ethics violations, the organization appears to be careering off course, much like that volatile bus in the movie “Speed.”

Just last month, an independent audit of the 4-year-old MTA described an agency in need of fundamental improvement in its basic management, leadership and team-building skills.

“Levels of trust and empowerment are low and indicative of a controlling management style which must change,” said the report by Coopers & Lybrand Consulting.

The consulting company found little to rave about in its assessment, but there was one notable bright spot amid the gloom: MTA’s Transportation Leadership and Management Program, known as TLAMP.

Designed with UCLA’s Anderson School, the program aims at bringing together upper-level managers to improve the organization’s notoriously flimsy interdepartmental communications, to help build a sense of teamwork and to eliminate the angry finger pointing that has often characterized the agency.

“Two really good things are coming out of it,” said Martin E. Gilmore, San Francisco-based managing associate at Coopers & Lybrand.

First, Gilmore said, the very idea of management development is good. Private industry routinely puts managers through training, whereas public agencies often do not. The other plus is getting managers in different departments to meet and talk to one another. This is helping with one of the MTA’s key weaknesses: a tendency to isolate managers and leave them operating in a vacuum, often at cross purposes.

Conceived two years ago and launched in April 1996, the program uses funds from the MTA and a federal training grant. Managers--97 to date, with 60 others scheduled--attend 10 days of classes in two-day chunks.

Instructors from UCLA and the Center for Organization Effectiveness in San Diego emphasize the latest management theories on teams and networking. They lecture about risk taking and innovation, strategic planning and conflict mediation.

Participants are also assigned to teams that apply their newfound skills on real-life MTA projects or problems. Among other assignments, they are tackling the logistics involved in using technology to create a “virtual MTA” that would enable more employees to work from home or remote sites. Other students are devising ways to measure how a better MTA benefits the public.

One goal of TLAMP, said Patricia V. McLaughlin, MTA’s managing director of organizational effectiveness, is to encourage managers to think more creatively. Another has been to hash out some of the residual mistrust and cultural differences resulting from the 1993 merger of the Rapid Transit District and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission into a single agency, the MTA.

“It’s about getting MTA management all on the same page, with the same set of tools,” McLaughlin said. “People have to want to work with each other.”

Richard Hunt, deputy executive officer of MTA’s transit operations, has found the program to be “the most rewarding experience of my professional life.” Senior managers, he said, could share concerns off-site in a rigorous academic environment, away from the pressures of the office.

“It allowed us to let our hair down,” Hunt said.

Since going through TLAMP, Hunt has started to delegate more decision making to subordinates. He also has no qualms, as previously, about networking with counterparts in construction, finance and other departments. TLAMP graduates, he said, decided on their own to continue monthly meetings, helping to keep the lines of communication open and share what works and what doesn’t.

This sort of training is all the rage, said Paul Curcio, director of the public-sector group at UCLA’s Anderson School. In management circles, current thinking is that organizations must focus on developing teams rather than select individuals.

“That is essential,” Curcio said, “in addressing an era of increasing public expectations and decreasing resources.”

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