Hiring Guidance for Local Economic Recovery: Special Considerations for Communities & Small Economic Units

Your consultant should be at ground level with you.

In our recent articles, we have discussed the value of good, qualified consulting for economic recovery and resilience, in order to respond to the period we are now entering.  And we’ve been looking at attributes to seek in a consultant to support you in this task, including for smaller-scale economies.  At the level of states on down –– counties, metro areas, cities, townships, boroughs, and neighborhoods –– the considerations that are particular to a smaller economic unit come into play and should be part of what your advisor brings to the effort.  These factors differ from the principles of top-level national efforts, can take on a more personal nature, and typically involve issues of tradition, identity, trust, and local politics.  Small-business recovery will be central to the effort.

To finesse these dynamics, your community should partner with consulting that embraces these areas:

People

Crises impact everyone.  And individuals or institutions may deal with the sequelae of trauma and disruption, in different ways.  Events that are broad-based setbacks to society affect health, education, happiness, and much more.  Economic resilience and mental health parallel one another.  Helping players to overcome and move past a focus on the negative is a critical first step.

Guiding economic response and strengthening systems at the community level also means dealing with relationships of leaders and officials –– as well as the people that these figures answer to and deal with above and below them.  Human egos become apparent, especially in times of setback.  Civil servants or others with mid-level responsibilities may be burned out.  The consultant hired to help evaluate, plan, and execute recovery must contribute work and not add it.  Your source must have the skills to assist people in moving past cynicism about what’s possible and tease apart personal dynamics that help or hinder all along the way.

Working approach

A working style that eases everyone firmly forward is the objective.  And, yes, this may mean interceding with economic-stability bodies that already exist, such as economic development districts and various commissions or councils of government.  My role, for example, in advising the U.S. Virgin Islands after that territory’s most recent natural disaster has provided me with an invaluable recovery case study, in part because this geographic area is somewhat isolated and self-contained –– and so has features of small economic units.

In any such engagement, recovery/resilience managers, consultants, and stakeholders must:

• Watch out for blockers.  People or processes that compromise swift action and progress are inherent to some extent in any organizational structure –– sometimes to a stunning degree.  Resolve them!
• Catalyze communication and coordination.  Get people talking to one another, some who may have not done so before.  (When this fails to happen, for example, I’ve seen representatives of the same locality hire different recovery/resilience advisors at the same time with no awareness of this duplicated effort.)
• Deal with multiple plans.  Plans for economic rebound, strength, and hardening can come from different directions, cover different maps, and spill like overlapping circles across discrete economic communities.  Recognize and take advantage of these synergies, and don’t let plans sit in silos.  Make the best features work in tandem.  And, be willing to create or plug into an existing Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) if one is needed or already in place –– knowing that the team you are helping to lead can adjust, build out, and amplify such strategies, as needed for the new circumstances that have arrived.
• Keep politics minimized.  Easier said than done.  But try to point out or find workarounds for such power and control variables.  Keep your diplomat’s hat firmly in place.

Insight

An experienced economic recovery consultant knows how to trust his or her gut and use the power of instinct and intuition.  One of the things you discover is that the hard work of recovering and building bounce-back qualities for the future can become an avoidance task for those with existing responsibility and those who may be used to always doing things the same way, operating independently, or setting their sights on short-term returns.  Reopening is just the initial response; real lasting recovery and sustained resilience gets structured and layered on, and woven in and around these more immediate steps.  But these tasks are not everyone’s favorite and may sometimes seem insurmountable.  It’s within that need that experienced consulting thrives and moves recovery forward.

Your advisor must get to thoroughly know the economic entity that you are trying to restore.  For instance, regions with more experienced workers and higher levels of self-employment may already be more protected from the shock of economic downturn.  Furthermore, regions that have higher levels of both business and talent diversity and complexity may suffer less in future slowdowns.  In addition, any steps that provide some special emphasis on women-owned business or minority businesses, or on students and new graduates, strengthens and builds for the future.  These considerations fit into an effort that really needs to be one of socio-economic resilience –– a test our willingness for social innovation and improvement.

Macroeconomic resilience has two components: instantaneous resilience, which is the ability to limit the magnitude of immediate production losses for a given amount of asset losses, and dynamic resilience, which is the ability to reconstruct and recover with added strength and resistance to future loss. openknowledge.worldbank.org

The impact of major natural or man-made disasters are determined by:

• a community’s economic vulnerability
• the duration of the shock
• and level of disturbance from the shock.

I have outlined in greater detail the five top mistakes that economic units make in coming back from major set-backs, and these mis-steps fall under these categories:

• coordination
• recovery alone is not response
• governance & oversight
• capacity
• and community vision.

In picking themselves up and dusting themselves off, communities must set priorities, because they can’t do it all; and so, they must have an image and some clarity about where they want to go.  It’s the consultant’s job to get them on the way and coach everyone on to the finish line.