Ogunquit News
Town leaders take part in vision enhancement workshop
By C. Ayn Douglass
Board of Selectman Chairman John Miller, Planning Board Vice Chair Muriel Freedman and Planning Board Chairman Steve Wilkos visit with Rick Doherty of The Doherty Group, Inc., following his program at the Dunaway Center on Monday.
Photo by C. Ayn Douglass
OGUNQUIT - "There's no such thing as a second first impression."
We've all heard it, but the power of that statement was reiterated several times by Ogunquit resident Rick Doherty, president of The Doherty Group, Inc., during a program at the Dunaway Center on Monday afternoon, July 24, designed to stimulate thought and discussion among department heads, Ogunquit business people and committee and board members.
Founder of The Doherty Group, Inc., a consulting collaborative he founded in 1995, Doherty brings his previous experience as a corporate sales executive with a fortune 300 company to corporations, organizations and business associations throughout the United States and Canada.
"People impact programs," he stated.
Doherty urged attendees to examine the nature of their own strengths and weaknesses as leaders of their departments, businesses and boards to invigorate themselves and their employees.
"Create an environment where people want to be successful," he said. "Make it easy for people to do business with you, make it easy to work with you. Be a community advocate one hundred percent of the time. Talk the talk and walk the walk; be a community ambassador."
A striking example of an ambassador for Ogunquit is Graham Simonds, the transfer station manager, Doherty said.
"I look forward to going to the transfer station. Every time I go there it's a positive experience," he said. "I look forward to seeing Graham Simonds smiling from the shack. What makes this a good town is not just that it's the 'Beautiful Place by the Sea.' The community is the sum of the parts - the people, the departments."
Doherty recommended the audience members replace their mission statements with a vision statement.
"Perception is reality," he said. "The big difference is not what we intend - we all have the best intentions. It takes years to build a (good) reputation and seconds to destroy it."
Mission statements, he said, tend to be written, hung up on a wall somewhere and forgotten. A vision statement is a living document up for review, editing, and revision as the business, department or board changes.
As an example, he recalled an emergency transport service in Massachusetts that was highly successful for many years, but as insurance re-imbursements changed, expenses went up, and profits went down, the owner was frustrated.
"He was used to the day-to-day operation and had little opportunity to determine where he was going," Doherty said. "I told him to sit back, close your eyes and vision three years, five years out. What would you want to look like?"
Like that business, Doherty said Ogunquit has changed with new people, new budgets and new priorities.
"Where are we going to be in five years? Look at the community and your position in the community," he said. "If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter what road you take. Look at goals, methods, strategies, decisions efforts and actions."
Doherty's message to those in management was to lead by example and to recognize that the word 'customer' does not always refer to the person from outside walking in the door. It often is the colleague or employee that the manager works with every day.
"People learn every day by watching leadership," he said. "Help other people be successful and you will be successful. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
A small thing like saying 'please' and 'thank you' can work wonders for team morale and creating a consistent fostering environment and setting an example leads to top-down change, he said.
Doherty said department heads should be looking for three things in their employees: technical skills, people skills, and big-picture skills.
"The most important of these is the big picture skills. That's why department heads are the department heads. You understand what you do fits into the big picture - how (your) decisions affect everyone else," he told them. "People skills are how well you interact and how you communicate what you know to someone else. The least important is technical skills. It's the education we have and we can teach those."
Leaders, he said, "go beyond a focus, they create a personal theme and live by it and they listen and implement. Effective people motivate and create a 'kitchen of the mind' and help people learn. Learning keeps you young; creativity keeps you in business. Remember how it felt on your first day. Act like that and you'll always have a new job. Keep that alive."
The Ogunquit Planning Board, which recently rewrote their vision statement with an eye to the future, sponsored the workshop.
Chairman Steve Wilkos and Vice Chair Muriel Freedman agreed it was a worthwhile event.
"I think Rick did an exceptional job in helping departments heads understand the need for community-based vision," Wilkos said,
Freedman said, "We wanted to know how to make the planning board work better with the community and it was good to see all the department heads here today."
For more information on Rick Doherty and the Doherty Group, Inc., visit his website at www.Rick-Doherty.com.
