Guest Blog from Susan Robertson

Job Shadowing

As part of my participation in the IPS Leadership Academy, I, and all members of the academy, was expected to job shadow a fellow IPS employee from a different agency. In my position, I’m fortunate enough to get to work with all agencies and know a little bit about what they do, but shadowing gave me the opportunity to see first-hand how our employees help the people of Tennessee every day.

I chose to shadow UT Municipal Technical Advisory Service’s (MTAS) Municipal Management Consultant Margaret Norris, who covers a 40-city territory in East Tennessee. We set out on this particular day to meet with five of the cities she serves – Bean Station, Blaine, Rutledge, Luttrell and Plainview. Honestly, I never knew a city of Plainview existed in Tennessee! During these visits, Margaret had a questionnaire, which was a part of MTAS’s Building Better Cities program. She asked the city recorders, in most cases, about the city’s audit, whether the city employs an attorney, what the ISO rating is and 25 other questions related to the city’s operations. 

I was surprised at how small these cities are; many of them only have a volunteer fire department and a very, very small police force. Because we have some rural areas in Tennessee, it is so important that cities and counties have MTAS and CTAS at their disposal. However, it was no surprise to see how much they like Margaret and have a tremendous amount of respect for her and her knowledge of municipal government. The cities we visited treated Margaret like family and were just as welcoming to me!

Throughout IPS, I often hear that employees of one agency don’t know what some of the other agencies do. If you really want to know, I would suggest that you choose an employee from another agency and job shadow for the day. This is a great opportunity to learn about our agencies and to see first-hand the impact that our employees have on Tennessee.