GUEST COLUMN.

How can public sector organizations be effective at what they do?  This is a foundational question we have confronted at the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), a state department that regulates over two million individuals and business entities including professional licensing, health systems, construction and fire safety, utilities, cannabis, liquor control, and unarmed combat.

As a government agency we are expected to do more with less and provide a high quality of service.  Toward this end, we’ve worked to align complex regulatory functions around broad strategic goals with the aim of improving public perception and awareness of our effectiveness and impact. 

From Strategic Planning to Strategic Implementation

Our diverse regulatory portfolio can create challenges with maintaining a uniform and consistent approach to our work.  Even as our teams carry out distinctive statutory responsibilities, our collective efforts are centered around four strategic goals:

1.     Reducing barriers to licensure

2.     Improving regulatory compliance through education and consultation

3.     Providing efficient, effective, and timely services

4.     Enhancing the customer experience

To be effective as an organization, we needed to realign our operations with these goals and our mission.  As we brainstormed how to do this, key themes emerged.

Performance – Ensuring consistency and leveraging performance data to achieve positive outcomes.

Education – Seeking to “educate before we regulate” through constructive engagement with licensees and stakeholders.

Workforce – Acquiring the talent and resources needed to fulfill our responsibilities.

In some cases, we were already incorporating these themes into specific program areas; however, our holistic effectiveness required coalescing new and existing initiatives under a single framework – both metaphorically and functionally. 

The Three-Legged Stool

Given the size and scope of our department, the development of a centralized team focused on effectiveness became a clear objective.  To support this direction we conceptualized a three-legged stool as our metaphor for regulatory effectiveness.

The first leg of the stool was performance, which utilized our existing Lean Process Improvement team alongside the creation of LARAStat – a data-driven leadership strategy based on the ‘Stat’ model used by other government agencies around the country.

The second leg of the stool was education, which consolidated our efforts related to employee training, public outreach, and equity and inclusion.  The third leg represented our workforce, which necessitated establishing a recruitment and retention position to enhance LARA’s employee life cycle (hiring, onboarding, growth, and career transition). 

Finally, there was the seat of the stool – the piece that brought everything together.  Our focus on team culture meant that employee engagement would be another key to our effectiveness.  This last component built on a statewide strategy of regular employee engagement surveys but also afforded new opportunities for mentoring, networking, job shadowing, employee recognition, leadership education, and team building.

The three-legged stool is more than just a metaphor.  It clarified the scope of work for what became our Regulatory Effectiveness Office (REO).  It also justified our organizational realignment and helped us advocate for additional resources.  Today, REO is a team of 11 employees dedicated to pursuing and demonstrating regulatory effectiveness throughout LARA.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

There have been positive results from these efforts.  In 2025, LARA published a “Cutting Red Tape” Report with nearly 80 recommendations to streamline regulations and improve licensing processes.  As of this writing, 17 recommendations have been implemented and 61 are in progress – including more than 40 bills under consideration by the state legislature.  Through LARAStat, we’ve improved performance on timeliness standards and reduced backlogs for investigations and administrative hearings.  

Our recruitment efforts have increased awareness of career opportunities and supported our MI Trades Partnership, which is a multi-department effort to recruit skilled and professional trades candidates for state government jobs.  Lastly, our department realized higher rates of employee engagement, scoring 89 out of 100 on the most recent employee survey, representing a 13-point increase from 2022 to 2024.

With our successes, we have learned a few important lessons that may be instructive for other organizational effectiveness initiatives.  One lesson is to beware of mission creep – where your original goals and objectives unintentionally shift over time.  It is easy to place every idea under the banner of effectiveness.  The reason we live by the three-legged stool metaphor is because it defines our scope of work. 

It’s also critical to clarify what is meant by effectiveness.  We encountered legislators and journalists who were celebrating or bemoaning that REO was a spin on the federal Department of Government Efficiency.  It was important to articulate this as something different and specifically aligned with our strategic plan which promotes efficiency, effectiveness, and timeliness. 

Our biggest lesson is to just start wherever you are.  Things will never be perfect, and it may be messy at the outset.  You can always scale and adjust as you learn what works.  Most importantly, you don’t have to create a new team or replicate what we have done in Michigan.  Take time to identify what is already in place to help achieve your strategic goals and promote organizational effectiveness.

Special Note: I’ll be presenting at the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) annual conference about this very topic on Sunday, March 22^nd at 9:15 AM (PDT). I invite any readers who will be there to attend.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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