Keeping people safe & well

 

Making the Connection

Otawa Citizen, August 5, 2008

Deputy city manager Steve Kanellakos always figured he'd end up in the restaurant business. Instead, he's in charge of nearly half the city's workforce, writes Laura Drake.   Laura Drake The Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, August 05, 2008 CREDIT: Julie Oliver,The Ottawa Citizen Deputy city manager Steve Kanellakos, shown in the main foyer of Ottawa City Hall, very nearly didn't apply for his first job with the city, until a friend happened along and talked him into it. In the past year, all these issues crossed the desk of the same man at Ottawa City Hall: Putting cameras in taxicabs, building a new permanent city archive, finding the money to repair social housing units, dealing with city firefighters' getting groceries in their firetrucks, and finding new winter shelters for the Royal Swans. Steve Kanellakos is the deputy city manager in charge of community and protective services. And if a common thread among his responsibilities doesn't seem immediately clear to you, don't feel bad -- when he started the job, he didn't get it either. "I said, 'I don't see the connection'," Mr. Kanellakos laughs, recalling the day more than four years ago when city manager Kent Kirkpatrick offered him his current job. "I told him I didn't get it. But if I didn't go for it, there wasn't going to be a job for me." Today, he says, he gets it: His job is about making your life better. "A daily, constant interaction with members of the public," he explains of the tie that binds together the 8,100 people -- from bylaw officers to firefighters to paramedics to social workers to long-term care aides -- who fall under the 11 different branches of community and protective services. Sitting in his pink-walled office in City Hall's older wing, where a blue diamond-patterned tie hangs on the back of the door and two coffee cups sit side-by-side on his desk, the swarthy 49-year-old admits this is not where he ever thought he'd be. He points to the success that the No Community Left Behind project, started by the Southeast Ottawa Community Health Centre, had in the Ledbury-Banff neighbourhood. Over three years, police, city and social services officials worked with citizens of the social housing-dominated neighbourhood, targeting problems identified by residents themselves. In that time, the percentage of residents who said they felt safe went from 46 per cent to 80 per cent. Mr. Kirkpatrick says expanding on No Community Left Behind has been one of Mr. Kanellakos's greatest successes. "I think it's a tremendous vision and nothing galvanizes people like a strong vision. He's very, very good at being able to communicate that vision to all kinds of different groups of people," he said. "I always thought I would be in the restaurant business," he says, popping a mint into his mouth. Raised in Ottawa, Mr. Kanellakos lives in the house he grew up in on Athens Avenue -- a fact he readily admits is hilarious, given his Greek heritage. He says he always thought he would take over his father's "greasy-spoon restaurant" in the south of the city, where he spent his childhood washing dishes. Even after getting undergraduate and graduate degrees in public administration from Carleton University, government wasn't on his mind. After he graduated with a master's degree in 1985, he says, there wasn't a lot of work to be had anywhere, so he applied for a job with the Gloucester police as a file clerk. He spent the summer typing up incident reports at night and can still rattle off the boxes he had to fill: suspect, witness, complainants, charge, and so on. "I did that, over that summer, thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?'" he says. "Actually, you know, it was pretty good because I got to play tennis all day and work all night." As he describes it, "one thing led to another," and 10 years later, he was still with the Gloucester police -- though as a manager, not a typist -- when the province announced it was going to amalgamate all the regional police services. Mr. Kanellakos was hired as the director-general of administration for the new Ottawa-Carleton regional police in 1995 and worked there for five "tumultuous" years. It was when the City of Ottawa announced it would amalgamate with surrounding municipalities that he first considered going into municipal administration. The amalgamation transition board was hiring a "six-pack" of managers in the summer of 2000 to be the second tier of municipal management. One of the managers would be in charge of the new city's emergency and protective services -- a job Mr. Kanellakos applied for "at the very last possible minute." Even after convincing himself to do up a résumé for the position, he still wasn't sure he should apply. Half an hour before the deadline on the day the application was due, he says, he remembers sitting on the edge of a fountain trying to decide if he should walk the application over or not. "A friend of mine comes along on his bike and I was sitting on the fountain. He says, 'I'll take it over for you right now,'" Mr. Kanellakos recalls. His friend told him later he got the résumé in on time, but only after banging on some closed doors. "Next thing you know, they're interviewing me and I got the job." In 2004, Mr. Kirkpatrick was made city manager and asked Mr. Kanellakos out to breakfast one Sunday so they could discuss some of the changes Mr. Kirkpatrick was thinking of making. On the breakfast table, Mr. Kirkpatrick laid out an organizational chart he had drawn up that restructured the city staff so there were only three deputy managers. He asked Mr. Kanellakos where he saw himself on the chart. "I point to one area and he goes, 'Nope.' I point to the next area and he goes 'Nope.' And so I go, 'Christ, it's gotta be this one, but I don't know anything about social services'," he says. Mr. Kirkpatrick says he had very specific reasons for choosing Mr. Kanellakos for the job, which put him in charge of nearly half of the things on which the city spends its entire budget, and about half the workforce. "It was quite an experiment, that department, and I needed someone very strong to put in charge of it," Mr. Kirkpatrick said. He put all the disparate departments together, he explained, because they all have one thing in common: service delivery. "That rationale behind the department has succeeded and that's due in a big way to Steve." Mr. Kirkpatrick describes Mr. Kanellakos's management style as results-oriented, with a big focus on implementation and execution. Colleen Hendrick, the city's director of cultural services and community funding, said that from the perspective of her branch, Mr. Kanellakos has been very supportive of her and her staff on their agendas. For example, she says, he helped drive a proposal to fund a new city archive and library through committee and council so construction was ultimately approved. "Steve provided a lot of leadership on that project," she says. Ms. Hendrick says Mr. Kanellakos has constantly pushed her and the other 10 directors under his management to scrutinize the services they offer to ensure they have the biggest possible impact on the citizens they're aiming for. Mr. Kanellakos says he likes to think of his job in business terms. In the corporate world, he says, profit is measured in dollars, but when you're working for a municipal government, profit should be measured in public satisfaction. Which is why, he said, his department's motto is now "How Can We Help" -- though, he insists, not in a corny way. "I'm not a theory guy. I really believe in results. What drives me crazy is when I don't see something tangible from an action that's been directed," he says. "I don't want to sit here and say to you that every program we run is great value. I don't think any organization can say that. But we're trying hard to make sure every program is relevant." And the best way to figure out if programs are relevant, he says, is to scrutinize each neighbourhood to find out what is working, what isn't, and what is needed in that area. "For most people -- I'm convinced of this -- your neighbourhood, where you live, you associate yourself with that. And your conditions in that neighbourhood have a bigger impact on you than anything else that's going on in the city," he says. It's by looking at individual neighbourhoods that he hopes to make the city better as a whole. "Most people never think of their city that way, but 10, 20 years from now, we're going to have some real problems in this city if we let neighbourhoods that are unhealthy now continue to deteriorate," he says. "We want to look at neighbourhoods and working with the community to solve their problem." He points to the success that the No Community Left Behind project, started by the Southeast Ottawa Community Health Centre, had in the Ledbury-Banff neighbourhood. Over three years, police, city and social services officials worked with citizens of the social housing-dominated neighbourhood, targeting problems identified by residents themselves. In that time, the percentage of residents who said they felt safe went from 46 per cent to 80 per cent. Mr. Kirkpatrick says expanding on No Community Left Behind has been one of Mr. Kanellakos's greatest successes. "I think it's a tremendous vision and nothing galvanizes people like a strong vision. He's very, very good at being able to communicate that vision to all kinds of different groups of people," he said. But it's still in the very early going, just beginning to move beyond Ledbury-Banff. Right now, Mr. Kanellakos says his department is poring over the results of the Ottawa Neighbourhoods study, which measured 44 indicators in the city's 86 inhabited neighbourhoods. By the end of August, Mr. Kanellakos says, they hope to have identified three to five neighbourhoods that have consistently low rankings across all the indicators. The city will then go into those communities and work with the health and community centres to identify problems. And once those in the community have identified a solution, Mr. Kanellakos says, he wants to make it as easy as possible for them to be put in place. He's establishing an internal one-stop shop where community leaders will be able to go so they can get answers right away from the city. Making sure that the 11 different branches under him work together as well as possible has been a hallmark of Mr. Kanellakos's leadership, says Ms. Hendrick. "It's a new way of working, how we work in the community, how we work with community partners and how we work with other departments," she says. "I think before there might have been more of a silo approach that involved going in with an approach specific to your branch, but not looking at it from a comprehensive approach." The overall effect, she says, has created a lot of excitement and energy in the targeted neighbourhoods and for the city's employees, and she gives a lot of the credit to Mr. Kanellakos. "I think he's exceptional. I really, fundamentally believe that. I think he's an exceptional leader," she says. Gloucester-Southgate Councillor Diane Deans, who chairs the community and protective services committee, puts it this way: "Everybody loves Steve Kanellakos -- I don't think he has very many enemies, none that I'm aware of," she says. "Steve's a star. He has a star quality. If City Hall had a star, then Steve Kanellakos would be it." © The Ottawa Citizen 2008

 

 

 

 

 

© 2005-15 South - East Ottawa Community Health Centre
Centre de Sante Communautaire du Sud Est D'Ottawa

Contact: Abid Jan Tel./ Tél: (613) 737-5115 Ext. 2403  Fax/Télé: (613) 739-8199

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