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Google Docs And Breathing Exercises: A Look At The ‘Eric Adams System’ Of Management
By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Jan 13, 2022
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By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Jan 13, 2022
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Professional courtesy and tradition demands that NYPD officers stationed inside City Hall stop what they’re doing and stand when the mayor walks into a room.
However, Mayor Eric Adams, a retired NYPD captain, recently put an end to that practice.
“I tell people I have one rule,” Adams told Gothamist/WNYC in a phone interview Tuesday. “You don't stand for me. I stand for you.”
He later added: “If they see me as this deified person, I'm not going to get the best out of them. But if they see me as just another person in the building who's trying to make our city better, they're going to feel comfortable. And comfort brings confidence.”
The new mayor used the anecdote to explain his management approach, one that builds on his campaign image as a man of the people, emphasizes emotional intelligence and empowers top advisers to make decisions.
Adams's first days in office were marked with high-profile appearances and compounding crises, including managing the response to the omicron surge, the reopening of city schools and the city's deadliest fire in decades.
Hear WNYC's Elizabeth Kim report on what New Yorkers can expect from Mayor Eric Adams's style of managing:
But two weeks in, the new mayor is still just getting his sea legs at the helm of a vast bureaucracy. As Brooklyn borough president, Adams oversaw a staff of roughly 60 people. As mayor, he is executive-in-chief in charge of around 400,000 municipal employees. And while many of his administration picks have been hailed by political observers, some have fallen under a cloud of controversy.
Adams says he’s not deterred.
He said he spent nearly a year before becoming the city’s second Black mayor reading about different types of leaders, from politics to the armed services to professional sports coaches. Likening his role to a pilot monitoring a dashboard, he has suggested he would take a more hands-off approach to managing his senior staff.
“Once I recruited people who were emotionally intelligent, who were sound, who knew how to handle conflict,” he said, “I can just give them the mission and they are carrying it out.”
Still, the job has bedeviled many of his predecessors. Adams comes into it amid an unprecedented crisis in the pandemic, where policies on testing and vaccination need to be rolled out swiftly and effectively to nearly 9 million New Yorkers.
He is also facing ethical concerns. In his first week, his decision to reportedly hire his younger brother Bernard Adams as deputy police commissioner and appoint Philip Banks III as deputy mayor drew accusations of nepotism and cronyism. Banks, a longtime friend of Adams, is a former police chief who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal corruption investigation.
The controversy has prompted the mayor to pull back on at least one decision. On Wednesday, a City Hall official confirmed Bernard Adams would be appointed as executive director of mayoral security at a salary of $210,000 – not deputy police commissioner as initially reported by multiple outlets. He will manage approximately 40 people. The downgrade was first reported by the New York Times.
“You really need a managerial system,” said John Mollenkopf, a political scientist at CUNY, but added that no matter the model, a mayor must also focus on fostering a good dynamic among cabinet members, each of whom will bring their own set of expertise and viewpoints.
“The team has to be cohesive,” Mollenkopf said. “It has to be able to make decisions.”
The ‘Eric Adams’ System
Although not every New Yorker may have agreed with his policies, Michael Bloomberg, who served from 2002 to 2013, is often invoked as the mayor who showed that City Hall could be managed. The billionaire founder of a financial information company introduced an unprecedented governing style that evoked Wall Street trading floors and placed him at the center of an open maze of around 50 cubicles.
Those who worked for Bloomberg say the decision to sit in a bullpen made him both more visible and accessible. Not only did he himself hold his meetings inside the bullpen, his deputy mayors were expected to do the same. The arrangement was also credited for imposing a high level of accountability.
Stu Loeser, who worked as Bloomberg’s press secretary, recalled that Shaun Donovan, then the city’s housing commissioner under Bloomberg, never entered City Hall without committing to memory the most updated tally of how many affordable housing units the city had built or preserved.
“Because he knew that there's a good chance he's gonna run into Mike,” he said. “And Mike's going to say, ‘What's the number? How are we doing? Are we doing fast? Are we doing slower? What are the complications?’”
Bloomberg, a notorious workaholic, was typically at City Hall by 7:15 a.m., Loeser said. There was a standing 9 a.m. staff meeting at either Gracie Mansion or City Hall.
A City Hall spokesman said that the time Adams reports to the office is variable, depending on whether he has a morning event scheduled. He says the mayor is usually in bed by 1 a.m. and rises by 5 or 6 a.m.
Adams said he believes in accessibility but he does not demand frequent one-on-one updates from his staff.
“I'm a big Google Docs person,” he said.
He added that as borough president, he used Google Docs to track meetings, staff changes as well as budget and other data.
“I can see where I need to interfere because we're not trending in the right direction or something is not being fulfilled,” he said. “So I don't have to have the physical face-to-face because those documents tell me when I need to call someone.”
His predecessor, Bill de Blasio, by contrast, was known for micromanaging and preferring late-night meetings and phone calls. He often carried a ringed binder to his press conferences along with a series of index cards.
Adams, who said he meditates every morning, is also big on mindfulness. He said he recently began a Zoom meeting involving a “stressful situation” by making everyone do breathing exercises.
“In City Hall, everyone is learning the Eric Adams system,” Adams said.
Slow Appointment Process
But the job of New York City mayor is the antithesis of zen, a constant churn of crises. And by most estimates, Adams is behind on filling out his administration. Nearly two weeks into office, he has appointed just over two dozen people to key roles of advisers, deputies and commissioners. He has yet to announce picks for more than 80 positions, including the critical roles of sanitation and fire commissioners, which are currently being occupied by holdovers from the previous administration.
The pace has been similar to de Blasio, who was often criticized for slow and deliberate decision making. Bloomberg, along with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, took the speediest approach to hirings, appointing roughly 30 members of their administrations by their first inaugurations, according to the New York Times.
Adams’s choices for top members of his cabinet have received both praise and scrutiny. Some have been trailblazing: Keechant Sewell, New York City’s first woman police commissioner, Louis Molina, the city’s first Latino corrections commissioner, and five women deputy mayors. Many of his top advisers are viewed as experienced and steady hands, such as First Deputy Mayor Lorraine Grillo, who worked in high-profile roles under the de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations.
Alicia Glen, who served as a deputy mayor under de Blasio, called the hiring of so many women in top roles “incredibly exciting.”
”Looking at it from a gender lens, he certainly delivered, maybe even surpassed expectations,” she said of Adams.
Sid Davidoff, a lobbyist who worked as an assistant for Mayor John Lindsay beginning the late 1960s, said that although many of Adams’s appointees were City Hall veterans, they should not be seen as bureaucrats. He offered up Grillo as an example, pointing out her work leading the School Construction Authority to build over 80,000 K-12 seats and over 9,000 pre-K seats.
“They have been at the forefront of changing things to make government work better,” he said.
‘Trumpian’ Choices?
The picks of Bernard Adams and Philip Banks III have raised serious ethical concerns among experts.
Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University, described the pair of appointments as “Trumpian,” referring to former President Donald Trump who employed members of his family, including his daughter and son-in-law, to key positions in the White House.
“You're literally hiring your brother, and what amounts to one of your dearest friends,” she said.
Greer argued that aside from Banks’s involvement in a corruption scandal, his selection is also troubling because it threatens to undermine Sewell, a former Nassau County chief of detectives who grew up in Queens but has never worked in the NYPD. As deputy mayor for public safety, Banks would oversee and coordinate public safety policies by all city agencies.
“On the one hand, you’re championing this African-American woman that you've appointed for police commissioner,” she said, referencing Sewell who is Black. “But are you handicapping her in her ability to do her job by putting in all these other NYPD personnel who have deeper connections and knowledge of how the department is run?”
The mayor, who has promised to prioritize public safety, has defended the two appointments. Speaking to reporters on Sunday, he described his brother, who he said would be in charge of security for the mayor and other elected officials, as someone he trusts to protect him amid a period of increasing hate crimes and white supremacy.
Policing and good government experts have questioned Bernard Adams’s qualifications. Although he is a retired NYPD sergeant, Bernard Adams most recently worked in the parking and transportation division at Virginia Commonwealth University.
On Wednesday, a City Hall official said Adams’s brother would in fact be hired as an executive director of mayoral security, which was first reported by the New York Times. Initial news reports said Bernard Adams was tapped as a deputy police commissioner. Adams’s brother will work out of 1 Police Plaza, the NYPD’s headquarters, and manage approximately 40 people, the city hall official said. The job’s salary is $210,000.
The appointment is currently undergoing a review by the Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB), according to the mayor. It is unclear what the administration would do should the request for approval be denied.
Adams has argued Banks has never been charged with a crime, and that as chief of department, he brought down crime and reined in the abuse of stop-and-frisk tactics.
Recent mayors have appointed family members to key jobs. De Blasio put his wife Chirlane McCray in charge of fundraising and mental health initiatives. Bloomberg appointed his daughter, Emma, and sister Marjorie Tiven to roles in his administration. In all of those cases, though, the jobs were unpaid.
J. Phillip Thompson, a former deputy mayor under de Blasio who also worked for Mayor David Dinkins, said that he believed Banks, who was on track to becoming first deputy commissioner prior to resigning in 2014, was indeed qualified.
In the end, he argued, all mayors need to surround themselves with people they have known and trusted. And as someone who pressed for change within the NYPD, Adams knows the culture of policing needs to be changed, he said.
“I think he's thought about this for a long time,” Thompson said. “And he's probably thought about it with Phil Banks for a long time.”
The potential conflicts of interests, however, go beyond Banks. His brother David Banks is the city’s schools chancellor. Sheena Wright, a deputy mayor for strategic initiatives, is the chancellor’s partner.
Two other members of Adams’s inner circle have also been given jobs in the administration. He appointed Frank Carone, a close friend and prominent Brooklyn lawyer with some controversial clients, as his chief of staff. On Tuesday, he named Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his deputy borough president whose husband was Adams’s partner in the NYPD, as his chief adviser.
Political And Managerial Risks
From a management standpoint, Mollenkopf said appointing people with “emotional, historical and familial” connections to important positions in government is risky.
“Because you'll have to listen to them,” he said. “They have special access, and every other commissioner and so forth will know that they have special access. And it threatens to create a sense of favoritism and a narrowing of the band of information that the mayor will get.”
New York City mayors have historically had to contend with silos and turf battles within their staff, he added. That can lead to frustrated commissioners trying to recruit support from those outside the administration or the public by leaking stories to the press.
Asked about such concerns, Adams said he is acutely aware of the tendency for infighting and jealousies within a new team.
“I did not try to ignore the fact that I was bringing in longtime advisers into an environment with new people where there's going to be some natural tension,” he said. “We work through it and we communicate.”
Tagged
new york city
nypd
City hall
Politics
eric adams
Elizabeth Kim
Elizabeth Kim is a reporter on the People and Power desk who covers mayoral power. She previously covered the pandemic, housing, redevelopment and public spaces. A native of Queens, she speaks fluent Mandarin. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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