When Roi Dahan, Senior Director for Human Capital Development and Planning in the Local Government at the Ministry of Interior, experienced learning at Harvard Business School through the MAOZ Fellows’ program, he realized: local government managers and employees need this kind of training, at a Harvard level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Approximately 140,000 employees and 15,000 managers work in local government, at the forefront of providing services and impacting residents\u2019 lives. Recently, the Ministry of Interior focused on working with existing talent while bringing new blood into the system through a training program. Training the critical mass of tens of thousands of managers and employees was not on the agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was before Roi returned from Harvard. Realizing that the key to developing employee capacity was a highlevel training program, he arrived at MAOZ’s Meitzim Accelerators. For the past 30 years, employees had received training in instruction centers called Mafamim, whose effectiveness had not been measured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During field meetings, municipal CEOs and mayors proposed keeping the existing structure, fearing disappointment from an unsuccessful reform. Meanwhile Roi discovered that the Center for Local Government had
recently established a college in Tel Aviv offering highlevel training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Ministry of Interior\u2019s first instinct was to label the Center for Local Government\u2019s college as competition and start their own entity. But before deciding, they analyzed and examined models from around the world. When Roi showed officials from the Ministry of Interior examples of cooperation between European local government and oversight Ministries as monitors, their eyes widened. \u201cHow can you compare Denmark
and England to Israel? Government structure, political culture, everything is different.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But over the three months of MAOZ’s 100 Day Accelerator, the Ministry of Interior realized that they had a unique opportunity: to partner with a new, high-quality institution already in operation and create a successful
cross-sector collaboration. So the Director General of the Ministry of Interior, Mordechai Cohen, made a bold decision: to establish a School for Excellence \u2013 together with the Center for Local Government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A joint team was established, with ongoing consultation from MAOZ’s Meitzim Accelerator, to build trust and formulate an outline for cooperation. The team includes some surprising crucial partners:
members of the Mafamim network, enlisted to contribute their expertise in a process that may, ironically, result in closing their workplaces but also in upgrading the professionalism of local government. Their inclusion
ensures that the process will create a more balanced solution that takes into account the current system and the dozens of workers employed there.
The process has been quick, and the School, now jointly operated, opened this year. Training will be innovative: no longer will finance departments study only with finance departments or CEOs with CEOs \u2013 there will
be collaborative learning across positions. The program thus hopes to change the \u201csilo mentality\u201d which hampers efficiency in local government.
Partnerships with leading universities in Israel and the world are planned, as well as an overseas practicum for outstanding employees where managers from Israel will learn from the best cities in the world how to
manage local government to better serve residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New mayors, elected in October 2018 are already in training at Hebrew University and will continue to study at Tel Aviv University with veteran mayors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Roi Dahan, from the Ministry of Interior, returned from Harvard with the realization that the Ministry must invest in high quality training for local government employees. With a similar initiative already in motion, instead of competing with it, Roi convinced the Ministry to partner with them to establish a college for excellence together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n