This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by podcaster and transit expert Paul Comfort and former California State Transportation Agency Secretary David Kim to talk about their book The New Future of Public Transportation.
It's not all about transit, though! We also discuss writing cookbooks, road user charges and the importance of leadership.
Click the button on the audio player to listen, but if you prefer to simply read the convo, scroll down for an edited portion of our conversation — or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the full chat (fair warning: there are typos there!)
Jeff Wood: Paul, I want to talk about your chapter about leadership. I'm wondering, why is that such an important topic in today's transportation climate?
Paul Comfort: I like to start this conversation with a little story. Most people have shopped at Walmart or Kmart over the years, but what they may not know is that both those stores started basically the same year in the same state, Arkansas, 50 years ago, and they both sold the same thing.
One went on to become the largest company in the world and still is the largest employer in the United States. And the other one went bankrupt. What's the difference between the two? Leadership. It was the leadership of those organizations I would argue. You had one, Walmart, that was based on Sam Walton's philosophy of sell low and sell more — the lowest price and we'll sell more of that and that's how we make the money, etc.
So it's not directly analogous, but it makes the point that leadership can make the difference in success or failure. And so having been in leadership my entire career from right out of college at age 22 until today in my 50s, I have seen the impact on transit agencies and big bureaucracies of government, whether it's county government or transit agencies, I've been the leader of small ones with 15 vehicles, mid-sized ones with 200 vehicles and large ones with a billion-dollar budget and 5,000 employees and contractors.
I've seen the difference that strong leadership can make in implementing our goals successfully. That's why I feel that, especially in a post-pandemic world, we need to hit the reset button. We've all had bosses that we felt were jerks and we were not motivated by them. There's a study and an old adage that says that 70 percent of job satisfaction has to do with your relationship with your boss.
And I believe that. If we all think back on our jobs, the ones we hated were the ones where we had a boss who wasn't good. And being a good boss, being a good leader, is critical, not only in setting the vision and implementing the vision and being a manager to manage all the metrics and all that stuff, but also to motivate your employees to actually come into work and to give their best. No one person can do it all.
You need everyone rowing in the same direction. I know I'm mixing my analogies here, but if we're all rowing in the same direction, we'll get there a lot faster. If you've got four or five people saying no, pushing backwards, you're just going to spin in circles. Literally, that's what happens if you're in a boat.
Jeff Wood: I must say, I personally identified with the delivery driver friend of yours who didn't want the mess of being a manager. I'm wondering when this leadership involved making a choice not to lead.
Paul Comfort: Yeah, it's very good self-knowledge, right? Davey and I know having been in leadership positions and it's funny.
The CEO of the Detroit transit agency was telling me your life becomes an open book when you go into leadership, especially in a public agency. And some people don't want their life to be an open book. I have relatives that don't even want to be on Facebook because they just don't want anybody knowing what's going on with them.
And so this friend of mine that you mentioned, he's a delivery guy for FedEx and he's a great driver. This is a perfect analogy. Like almost anybody that's really good at what they do — it could be a great driver or it could be a great mechanic — and then you get offered the job to be the boss of people in the same line work. Some people don't want that. And believe me, the skillset required to be a driver or a line mechanic is much different than the skill set to be a supervisor or a manager.
It's completely different. Now you're not only responsible for your own work. Your real job is to get other people to do their job. And so it's very different than having a set of headphones on, working on the engine of the bus versus getting 16 mechanics to get their butts into work on time to focus on the job and do all the stuff you have to.
You don't set that down when you go home. When you're a line worker, you're a driver, you can basically say, "I'm off the clock. I'm not working." And you shouldn't work when you're off the clock. You're done. But management and leadership, man, no matter what they say, Davey, would you agree? It's a 24/7 operation, man.
David Kim: For sure. And since you're a lover of food, and I think most of us are same analogy in a restaurant, you've got a bunch of line cooks and someone eventually will play the role of executive chef. They probably were a line cook before and same thing. Some of them may not want to take on the responsibility of being the executive chef to oversee the work of 20 line cooks in a restaurant.
They just want to cook. They don't want to manage people. And that's perfectly understandable. So it really depends on individual preferences and their demeanor and aspirations.
