Metro Chief Ready for Next Move

He tackled problems deep in the bureaucracy to make buses and trains more reliable and the agency more accountable to the public. Key managers now answer directly to him. Bus purchases are regularly scheduled so Metro can maintain its aging fleet.

He started linking managers' performance to train and bus performance. In a typical move, Tangherlini and his manager for rail, Steve Feil, worked to find a new way to measure train delays, one that would reflect what riders' experience, rather than what the computers record. In June, after thousands of rush-hour commuters were delayed because heavy flooding shut down two stations, Metro reported that nearly 98 percent of riders "experienced no delay." The real number was closer to 70 percent, Feil told Tangherlini.

"You're going to be measured by overall customer satisfaction," Tangherlini told him during a 90-minute session at Metro headquarters downtown. "That's your ultimate measure."

Even when top managers' jobs were not directly connected to train or bus performance, Tangherlini made them accountable. Engineers who used to focus only on designing and delivering rail cars on time are now judged by how often those cars break down.

The purpose, Tangherlini said, is to give people clear goals and motivate them to work as a team. When organizations are struggling, the problem is rarely the people, he said. It's almost always the leadership and structure.

"If people can have a sense of where they are on the map and how far away from the goal, then people get into it," he said.

When he reshuffled personnel in June, he told the staff that Metro's traditional reporting hierarchy didn't lend itself to a team approach. If anyone was enamored of rank and titles, he said, "the military is hiring."

At the same time, he focused on Metro's looming personnel crisis. In the next three years, about 30 percent of employees will be eligible to retire. If they do, Metro will be hard-pressed to fill those jobs, so Tangherlini doubled the size of the summer intern program. "Computer and IT people are replaceable, but fixing a rail car is a very specific skill," he said. "We need to have a way to start a farm team."

Tangherlini didn't win over everyone at Metro. Virginia's representatives on the board opposed naming him the agency's permanent head because they thought he would be too focused on the city and would not pay enough attention to Northern Virginia.

He also was criticized for going outside Metro's normal process to hire several people and for giving them large salaries. The moves annoyed some mid-level managers who thought they were being passed over without a chance to apply for the jobs.

Tangherlini said he heard the criticism and directed that subsequent hires follow agency procedures. But he defended the hires as necessary to turn the agency around.

In some ways, Tangherlini raised employee expectations so high that some complained that change wasn't happening fast enough. Bus driver Don Folden was overjoyed when Tangherlini rode his route one day this spring but unhappy that Tangherlini did not move faster to get rid of incompetent supervisors.