Private Manners,Public Roles

Introduction

In this essay, two areas are explored where private manners collide with the role demands of public board members. The first is how interpersonal conflict is handled. The second concerns how people in power deal with gadflies and activists.

These two areas are used to argue for the necessity for local public board members to recognize that some of our private manners simply are inappropriate for public service. These areas are illustrative of a larger point: trying to maintain consistency between private and public conduct, while seemingly a mark of integrity and authenticity, actually may be destructive of the public good and the public’s trust.

Public Business and Private Interactions

The Florida League of Cities conducts “FLC University” for the purpose of training elected and appointed municipal officials. At the inaugural event in the Fall of 2011 a newly elected council member told this story of a neighbor, an executive with a national firm with many public contracts, including one with his city. They were merely acquaintances and certainly not close. The day after he was elected to office, the councilman and his wife were taking an evening stroll. The neighbor drove up, rolled down her window, and congratulated him on his victory. She then reached into her purse and pulled out two tickets to a charitable fundraising event in the community, inviting him to attend as her guest. Although his first reaction was to be pleased, he asked himself why a woman who never even invited him to a backyard barbecue suddenly gave him $50 worth of tickets and he knew the answer: because now he was a councilman. That realization made him uncomfortable.

In the private sector, gifts to clients, customers, and vendors are routine. No one is troubled by someone picking up the tab. It is the way friends and associates do business. However, the public’s business is different. The deals that are struck are not between owners or representatives of a firm. The agents of the government are agents of the general public. Receiving side benefits for doing the public’s business can look like a betrayal of the public’s interests. Worse yet, it may be one. Nevertheless, it may be little more than carrying routine private manners unthinkingly into the public arena.

This is a problem often encountered by local public officials, elected or appointed. They want to bring private attitudes and practices with them to office because they are part of the way things get done. Yet, these private manners frequently are in conflict with public perceptions and, indeed, best public practices. Somehow, they must become comfortable with the idea that holding public office means adopting manners associated with their public role, manners that frequently are at odds with their private manners.

Conflict among Board Members

Every state in the union has adopted some form of ethics legislation affecting the conduct of the public’s business.¹ In Florida, the state laws on these matters are collectively referred to as sunshine requirements (Government-in-the-sunshine manual 2009). For local government entities, the Florida “sunshine” is very, very bright.

For example, it is prohibited under Florida’s public meetings law for any two members of a local governing board to speak privately about business that might reasonably be expected to come before their board (Government-in-the-sunshine manual 2009, 14). While board members are free to discuss personal matters privately, most local government attorneys in Florida advise against any private conversations out of concern about appearances, and about the risk that, inadvertently, some matter relevant to public business might come up even in casual conversation. Best practice, in other words, is not to talk to your colleagues outside of public meetings.

This approach to dealing with colleagues is radically at odds with private manners. A natural reaction to a public argument with a colleague is to follow up with an invitation to coffee, or a beer. The private and informal setting is used to repair the damage of the public confrontation. The next time the parties are in public, they start on that more neutral ground rather than building on the previous session’s emotion.

These private conversations allow participants to give a little without losing much. They also may liberate them to be more aggressive in the public meeting space. People become accustomed to fighting, making up, and fighting again.

In the public sector, where legal restrictions and concerns about appearances may deter local officials from meeting privately with their colleagues, the loss of that opportunity may lead to increased conflict. There is no private “reset” button; frustration from the last meeting carries over to the next. What is more, the publicity generated by fights between public officeholders, and the practices of reporters and bloggers that can tend to fuel the fire, often add to the actual tension between the original antagonists. With heightened public attention on the very public conflict, it becomes increasingly difficult for the parties to repair their relationship without losing face.

The research on the effects of perceptions of high levels of conflict on public opinion suggests that trust in public leaders and in the institution in which they serve tends to decline when the perceived levels of conflict are high (Forgette and Morris 2006; Mutz and Reeves 2005). There is something about conflict between leaders that makes people uncomfortable and distrustful.

Ironically, there may be a problem with excessive public collegiality, just as there is with excessive conflict. The evidence here is more anecdotal, but it would seem that conflict which simply vanishes, without explanation, might raise suspicions as well. One begins to imagine some backroom deal was done. Of course, history is replete with such deals, giving credence to the imagination.

Private citizens may feel more free to fight in public, knowing they can repair the damage in private. These are the manners public officials bring with them from their private lives. However, the problems of restrictions (legal and political) on interpersonal communication between board members, and the heightened publicity that public board conflicts attract, reduce the opportunity for such private repairs. Public board members may need to adopt a more moderate fighting style in order not to undermine the work of the institution they serve, as well as their own reputations.

Public Opposition: Gadflies and Activists

Most private sector executives have gatekeepers. Their role is to protect the executive from people who present distractions from the work of the day.

Public sector officials often have gatekeepers, too, for the same reasons. Nevertheless, local public officials are less able to insulate themselves from unwanted interactions by virtue of the fact that they are both local and public. Serving where they live, local officials frequently are accosted in grocery stores and restaurants, at public events, and even when out for an evening stroll. Even more certain is the fact that public meetings will attract public comment, including comments from folks whose methods are far from civil.

One such gadfly appeared regularly during the author’s years on Tampa’s city council. “My name is Floyd Er . . . my name is The Ordained of God Reverend Floyd Erwin,” he would begin, and then he would launch into an attack on the mayor, the council, or other public figures. His comments rarely were relevant to anything on the agenda, and even when they were, they rarely contributed to our understanding either of the issue or of public sentiment about it. Still, he was entitled to his three minutes, and he was religious in using his full allotment of time.

After weeks of these encounters, it was difficult not to sigh audibly, or to roll one’s eyes, or simply to try to get up and leave before one’s departure would cause the council to lose a quorum, whenever he approached the microphone. However, at one council meeting, a young mom and her two young children were in attendance. It did not look like they were there to speak on anything on the agenda (and it turned out that they were not). Rather, it appeared that this was a field trip, a mom-and-child visit to democracy in action.

For a moment, one could see Mr. Erwin through the eyes of this young woman and her children: here was a disheveled little old man who obviously was deeply troubled by something the city was doing, though exactly what might not have been clear. In a flash it became clear how the rush for the exits, the eye rolls, and the sighs might look to her: disrespectful, uncaring, and mean.

Here is another place where private manners and the dictates of a public role collide. Confronted on the sidewalk by Mr. Erwin, a private citizen with a soft heart might choose to give him the time to speak. Conversely, that private citizen also might feel comfortable walking away. Probably, most observers would not be troubled by either action.

Yet a public board member who walks away from a citizen in the grocery store, or who shows disrespect to a citizen during a public meeting, will be judged unresponsive and uncaring. It is a label that can stick, and one that can do considerable harm, not only to the official but to the public’s confidence in its leaders.

The sensitivity to public perceptions of our handling of troublemakers and “crazies” (as we understand them) does not come naturally. In our private lives, we have developed ways of deflecting or dealing with unpleasant encounters that are perfectly acceptable in the private sphere. Those same private practices, performed on the public stage, can undermine public trust.

Even here, dealing with the respect we show every member of the public, there is a balance to be struck. This same “Ordained of God Reverend Floyd Erwin” occasionally lapsed into anti-Semitic attacks on our mayor and one of the council members. Having adopted the approach that one simply had to tolerate these gadflies with a measure of respect, I was unprepared for the private criticism I received from the mayor after a particularly offensive comment by Mr. Erwin. The mayor’s point was a good one: while we must recognize that everyone has the right to be heard, we are under no obligation to remain silent when those opinions are not merely inconsistent with ours, but offensive to members of our community. In fact, there may be an affirmative obligation for public board members to speak out against abusive comments, even as they give those who utter them the space and time to do so.

This balancing of permitting comment, however unpleasant, and resisting abuse, might be noble in our private lives, but is not necessarily cultivated there. For the local public board member, this pairing of manners is essential to fulfilling their role.

Public Manners for Public Roles

People seek the opportunity to serve on public boards for a variety of reasons. By far, the most common reason expressed in responses to surveys is to make the community a better place, to serve the community in which they live (Deckman 2007; Svara 2003). Of course, this answer is the socially desirable response to such a survey question, and others (specific issues, political ambition) undoubtedly influence many as well. Still, the idea of service resonates with most local public officials and often is the touchstone to which they repeatedly turn.

What public service requires, in terms of individual conduct, is necessarily different from what is required of private citizens. Yet this claim often receives push back from local officials. Some feel they should not change just because they got elected. Others think they are frauds if they are not the same person all the time. These responses seem to come out of a concern local officials have to not become or be perceived as “politicians:” people who willingly say whatever their audience wants to hear to secure or retain public office. Yet, this almost certainly reflects a misperception of how people act in their private lives. One does not respond to one’s own children on the playground in exactly the same way as one does to other people’s children. One makes requests differently to those over whom one has power than to those who hold authority over one. One hopes one treats one’s spouse differently than other members of the same gender. In short, even in our private lives, the role in which we find ourselves determines the manners we employ.

Public service is simply a role, albeit a very important and very visible one. Like any role, the demands of the public role are different from the demands placed on us in other roles. It may seem little different from our leadership roles in other contexts, but service on a public board is fundamentally different from other leadership roles in at least one respect: the business we do is, ultimately, everybody’s business. Every person has a right to be heard, every decision to be made is to be held up against the standard of the public interest, and every action of the members of the board is seen as a statement about the attitude of government toward citizens. We would do well to consider the implications of those differences for how we conduct ourselves in public office, adjusting our manners to the public role we have accepted.