CLI comes at just the right time for Ark. county assessor

Arkansas county assessor saw immediate impact from lessons learned at County Leadership Institute 

For Kasey Summerville, the County Leadership Institute was a dream, but that’s all it seemed to be.

Though it caught her interest when she got the email advertising the three and a half day intensive program in Washington, D.C., the cost just seemed too high for Clark County, Ark., the 20,000-person community where Summerville serves as assessor.

So she applied for Next Generation NACo’s first-ever fellowship to pay costs of the program, but didn’t expect to get it, so her reaction was unbridled when she got the good news.

“I was jumping up and down,” she said about getting the news. “I was excited because I had this opportunity I otherwise wouldn’t have had.”

As a member of the NACo’s Finance and Pension Steering Committee, she has attended several conferences, but all primarily in service to the organization or her county directly. Now, she had a chance to focus on her skills as a leader to do her job better.

And she got that.

“It was like dying and being reborn,” she said. “It changed my life. What we did in those three-and-a-half days was more than anything I was expecting, but I came out of it a new leader.”

She hasn’t made it nearly 14 years without strong leadership. While working in the Clerk of Courts’ office, she saw the assessor’s office and had plans for it. She wanted to take its operations into the 21st century, and even waiting another two years after an unsuccessful campaign for the position, didn’t dampen her enthusiasm.

“The office was still doing most things by hand,” she said. “I wanted to digitize everything, get all of our records online so people could access them whenever they wanted.”

Though it has been a long process, she’s two years from finishing the job, which she sees as getting her part of the county government to an ideal point. And that means more than just saving money on postage because they can email assessments.

“It will be complete transparency,” she said. “Not only will you be able to see your own records, you’ll be able to see any property in the county, so you can see we treat everyone fairly and equitably. That transparency is important to me as a leader.”

But those goals and that process were in place long before County Leadership Institute met in June.  How did it change her?

“I called my staff in when I got back and said, ‘You may see me handle some things different based on the training I’ve gone through,’” she said. “I didn’t want them to be alarmed, or ask if something was wrong, but I just felt like everything I did was going to be a little different after that.”

First off, she almost immediately addressed a personnel issue that had been festering for a while.

“We need to have courageous conversations,” she said. “We took a look at our weaknesses as leaders and I knew mine was procrastination, especially if I had to deal with an uncomfortable situation. I am also too nice, when I need to be more professional.”

The attendees, 22 in all, did role playing exercises to work on dealing with those tendencies, and for Summerville, it worked.

“I needed CLI at that very moment,” she said. “It was at just the right time. I’ve always had a pretty stable staff, but we lost two of our five, and we were going through a little transition. This was the best time to take a step back and look at what I’m doing as a leader.”

It felt like every second, though, she was running forward. From the webinar to prepare for CLI, to the homework assignments before and overnight during her stay in D.C., it felt like there wasn’t a second wasted.

“My husband wanted to come along, but I told him this wasn’t going to be that kind of trip,” she said. “He was going to have to be doing sightseeing on his own.”

For Summerville, the overall CLI theme of “seeing from balcony” was as prescient as the approach suggests. Too often, she said, leaders can get too bogged down to remember the big picture, look at all perspectives and angles before they make their final decisions, something she admits she can be guilty of.

“Right now, everybody in the office is using their downtime to scan 75,000 property records,” she said. “There’s always something we have to do, but the question will be what comes next.

“When we finish these records in two years, we’ll have the entire assessor’s office digitized. Then what?”

As the only assessor in attendance (and the second overall since CLI began in 2004) and the only attendee from the middle South, Summerville relished the diversity that she values in her office, but got to see it in a different way

“I got to work with so many different individuals from so many parts of the United States,” she said. “To have that opportunity in a time where we are all focusing on being better leaders was important.”

She left D.C. knowing the boot camp was well worth it.

“There are a lot of leadership programs out there, but one that was focused the way this one was made it valuable,” she said. “It’s important for county governments to keep up, and it felt we all found ways we could improve and be better leaders and empower the people we work with.”