Chapter 3: Gordon’s first 100 days

As the California DMV's new director, Gordon arrived with a clear set of initial hypotheses for the department's major strategic objectives. He wanted to stabilize an organization that was already struggling to effectively meet customers' everyday needs, and prepare it for the imminent additional influx of millions of California residents seeking a Real I.D.—a new driver's license and identification card the federal government would require for all U.S. airline passengers starting in late 2020. “As many as 28 million Californians could apply for the new ID in the next year,” Gordon explained.

Gordon also wanted to demonstrate speedy progress. “From my experience overseeing complex integrations in the private sector, I learned that when you arrive in a new place you should give yourself around 100 days just to learn what's going on. You don't want to mess with things that are working well,” Gordon laid out. “But in this situation, we didn't have that luxury. The department was already in a crisis and I felt the pressure to make progress fast.”

At the same time, Gordon's mission was under added scrutiny from a number of external stakeholders from day one. Gordon felt the eyes of California's media and residents on the struggling department ever since Governor Newsom had placed the DMV turnaround at the heart of his public manifesto. Moreover, the state auditor was conducting an in-depth performance review and the state had authorized a one-time budget injection of $242 million to support Gordon in his turnaround efforts. “As a result of this urgency and attention, I had to go to work on each one of the divisions quickly. I had to meet each one of the leaders to figure out how their business was being run, and understand how it affected our ability to serve the customer,” Gordon explained.

“Quickly, I suspected that the biggest challenge we'd face would be a cultural one. From what I'd heard and started to observe, the prevailing culture at the time did not encourage employees to question the status quo or the wisdom of systems and processes that were negatively impacting the consumer experience,” Gordon recalled. “At the same time the department's technology was creaking and more than 60 years old—we would have to radically upgrade that while also keeping services online to meet daily needs.”

Vignette 1: The 180 field office tour

As the freshly minted DMV director, Gordon decided his first step would be to jump in his car and visit all 180 of the state's field offices in person. While his trips were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, Gordon covered over 50,000 miles as he criss-crossed the state from office to office. “The CEOs I respect go out and meet with customers and staff. They cover the globe if they need to, and they come back with stories,” Gordon explained.

Gordon's decision to visit every Californian DMV field office was driven by three objectives: to build trust with staff, gain firsthand insight into the department's issues, and motivate the workforce to support upcoming changes that would require their buy-in. 

Gordon wanted to meet as many of the nearly 10,000 DMV employees as possible. “I wanted to go out and meet with them because I knew that with the amount of changes we're about to bring, I needed to build relationships built on trust. I wanted them to know: Here's the new guy in charge, he actually took the time to come all the way out here to Coalinga,” Gordon explained.

Gordon hoped his visits would help him understand the reality facing customers and staff. To drive change in such a complex organization, he felt he needed to establish a personal point of view and build a bank of anecdotes and stories. “Witnessing and owning these stories myself is so much more powerful than just reading about it in a report or seeing statistics. This way, I can return with my own observations and make things happen,” Gordon said.

For Gordon, building face-to-face relationships was the most important part of these visits. “It's all about relationships and showing that I was willing to talk with employees and customers and take ownership of issues,” he explained.

As the latest director, Gordon was concerned the workforce might simply drag their feet and resist his proposed changes until he left. “I needed to have my team and front-line staff bought in on the changes I planned to bring. Anybody who's ever run a large organization knows that if staff don't buy into you, they can just wait until you're replaced.”

Gordon's field office tour caught the attention of his executive team. “My visits made quite the impression on my team. Some people at headquarters had never been out to the field offices themselves. They'd never been to Coalinga; some don't even know where Coalinga is,” Gordon shared. 

Gordon encouraged members of his team to follow his example. “Sometimes leadership can become 'headquarter-focused', and they've never seen a field site before. So I've been kicking people out of the nest encouraging them to check out our operations firsthand. In Sacramento where our headquarters are, we have probably about 20 field offices that folks could reach in a day,” Gordon explained.

Vignette 2: Speaking Up

Soon enough, Gordon's field visits started to pay dividends in his attempts to improve customer experience. Frontline employees shared valuable insights and observations with him about broken or inefficient systems that he might never have discovered if they had been filtered through multiple levels of management. “The advantage of being out in the field is that you get people in a situation where they're willing to tell you what's really happening, right there and then. It's not coming up through the hierarchy, it's coming directly to me,” Gordon explained.

One interaction in particular led to a major improvement in the design of the DMV's license renewal application, and provided fuel to Gordon's efforts to improve the organization's culture around speaking up about opportunities for improvement.

During his tour of the state's field offices, which began in 2019, Gordon visited a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recovery site in Monterey County that had been set up to support residents after flooding had devastated the region. During the visit he challenged two frontline employees to share with him the single most frustrating or confusing customer issue, and to propose a solution to the problem.

“They immediately told me a story about a set of confusing questions on our touch-screen driver's license application. The questions asked customers to opt 'in' or 'out' of organ donation. But the questions were worded and designed in a manner that left many customers fearing that someone from the DMV would try to remove an organ right there on the spot,” Gordon exclaimed. “I actually watched an older gentleman encounter that process myself; he just froze.”

Not only did the questions confuse customers, but in most cases they required a DMV staff member to interrupt their work to resolve the situation. Gordon took the simple solutions that the two staff had sketched out on Post-it notes back to headquarters in Sacramento, and the questions and formatting were promptly redesigned. “If it hadn't been for them saying something, we would probably not have fixed those questions. Sometimes, when you're at headquarters making policy decisions, you're not able to see the actual implementation of your policy,” Gordon explained. “But because these two women took the time to explain the issue and sketch out a solution, we had the opportunity to fix it.”

Gordon saw an opportunity to capture this interaction and use it as a symbol of the type of cultural shift he wanted to see across the thousands of his customer-facing staff. “We celebrated those two women. To continue improving, we need the ideas from those on the front lines to help us understand where the impediments are for our customers. We're using this story to try to encourage more staff to give us feedback,” Gordon explained.

In another example, a major bug was reported by a frontline employee leading to a fix that impacted thousands of drivers. “An employee recently reported that her husband didn't get a drivers license renewal notice. We looked into it, and found a bug that affected about 100,000 other drivers. We fixed it because this employee spoke up, sooner than we would have if we waited for customers to complain,” Gordon explained.

The following video is an internal communication to DMV employees describing and celebrating this event.

Vignette 3: “Going to battle, picking your army”

In addition to his field office visits, Gordon spent his first few months on the job assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the executive team he had inherited. These leaders would be critical not just to setting standards across the entire DMV workforce, but ultimately to his ability to achieve the considerable improvements he'd been brought in to deliver. 

“As soon as I got into the organization I took stock of my leadership team. I had to figure out who's leading, who's capable, who's willing, who's leaning in, and who's leaning back,” Gordon explained. “I'd been appointed by the governor to lead the department. So I needed to know who I could rely on, who I could trust, and who could actually get the changes we needed to get done, done.”

One of Gordon's earliest observations was that DMV's leadership was organized, in part, in fiefdoms with differing objectives. “When I first started it was clear that we had fiefdoms operating in our senior staff. Everyone had their thing that they wanted to own, manage, and do their own way,” Gordon explained. While the discovery of self-serving divisive groups was not necessarily a surprise to Gordon, he was keen to dissolve them as soon as possible. “It's about breaking down the organization and getting it focused on our core mission, ensuring that we prioritized resources and leadership talent on the central mission, and not allowing their mission to bleed resources on pet projects or projects not aligned to our overall focus,” Gordon explained. “But it's hard to see all of this if each fiefdom is busy building walls to protect themselves.”

But it was a mere two weeks after joining that Gordon made his first major people-related decision.

With Gordon's decision to terminate one of his direct reports after less than two weeks, he aimed to achieve two goals. First, he hoped that removing a weak leader would raise the standard for staff across the entire DMV. “If we're accepting mediocrity at the very top of our departments, then you can only imagine what's going on further down,” he explained. “As the leadership team, we are role models for our departments, and we set the standards for the 10,000 staff who follow us.”

Second, Gordon wanted to signal to the rest of the team that they would no longer wait to act or change things that clearly needed fixing. Changes would be swift and decisive under Gordon's leadership. “We're going to model the type of culture that doesn't just sit around accepting that the status quo is sufficient by default. We recognize what needs to be done, we do it, and we do it now.” Gordon said. 

Otherwise, Gordon was thrilled with the caliber of his leadership team. Notable members included Anita Gore, deputy director of communications, Ajay Gupta, chief digital transformation officer and Edward Swenson, chief deputy director, who joined the DMV in 2021.

“I've been lucky to work with some incredible talent over my time at the DMV. On the technology front, I was very fortunate that we had a chief digital transformation officer that had joined just a few weeks before I started,” Gordon said. “Ajay is a wicked bright guy. Not only does he know the legacy systems really well, but he was able to bring new technology to the department. And by leveraging his contacts with various vendors we were able to test new technology rapidly. This has been critical to the improvements we've made, and especially important during the COVID pandemic.”