Metro Chief Ready for Next Move
Challenge of Managing D.C. Government Looks Tempting to Tangherlini

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 4, 2006

On the night that the District's new, young up-and-comer, Adrian M. Fenty, won the Democratic nomination for mayor, another rising star gave him a call. Dan Tangherlini, the interim boss of Metro and the leading candidate to get the permanent job, couldn't get through and left a message. Fenty called back with no luck.

But within a day, the two were joined in headlines announcing that Fenty wanted Tangherlini to serve as city administrator and, in effect, run the government of the nation's capital. Suddenly, the 39-year-old Capitol Hill resident, a man with no permanent job, was the leading candidate for two of the region's highest-profile positions.

Tangherlini (pronounced tan-gur-LEE-nee) announced Monday that he plans to take the city job, assuming that Fenty, 35, wins in November as expected. The move will mean that in less than a year, Tangherlini will have gone from running a city agency of 600 employees to overseeing a regional transit system of 10,000 workers to likely managing Washington, D.C., with its 38,0000 employees, failing school system, troubled police and emergency medical services and inefficient bureaucracy.

Tangherlini will be called on to do what he calls the "deep-dive" issues of holding agencies and managers accountable, and Fenty will be in charge of politics and policy. By moving from Metro, he will be taking a job with a lot more work, a lot more risk and a lot less money -- perhaps as much as $100,000 less, based on past salaries.

"I like to serve. I like to make a difference," he said. "I like to produce results that can improve people's lives. If it was all about the paycheck, I'd go work for a bank."

Which makes you wonder: Who is this guy? And what is it about him that makes everyone want him?

In No Time, Mr. Metro

Throughout his life, Tangherlini has been a fixer. At Metro, he was brought in to fix an agency that had suffered from service problems, management missteps and the widespread perception that its leaders had lost touch with riders and employees.

Easygoing and approachable, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, Tangherlini seemed to be the tonic Metro desired. Within months, he became the face of Metro, literally -- his picture is on huge posters at subway stations. People recognized the man with the beard and the steel-blue eyes as "the Metro guy."

The interim general manager quickly developed a following among riders and employees. He dropped in at rail yards and bus garages and showed up for track work, parking garage groundbreakings and the bus "roadeo" competition.

He listened when an escalator technician gave him an earful at the Landover station. The work is dirty, the mosquitoes are terrible and riders curse and spit at him, the technician told him. Tangherlini promised to get down in the bowels with a repair crew. He got as excited discussing a cost-benefit analysis of light bulbs with his budget staff as he did talking classic cars with rail mechanics. (One of his prize possessions is a 1967 MG, which he rebuilt himself.)

Tangherlini, a regular bus and subway rider, immediately offered riders tangible relief. More light in the underground stations. Credit card readers in parking facilities. Express lanes at fare gates so SmarTrip card users can speed through.

After he suggested that Metro consider putting shops in the subway -- a once-taboo subject -- one blogger proposed that Metro sell Tangherlini T-shirts. Another called him "Mr. Tangherhottie."

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.

But Tangherlini's imminent departure has left many others saddened. "When I heard it, my first reaction was, I lost hope," said station manager Etta McKnight. She and other employees are circulating a petition. They want Tangherlini to stay.

"He's the best thing that happened to us in years," she said. "He shows concern for the little people. He's real, not like someone coming out to get votes. And he has great ideas."

Childhood Ups and Downs

Even as a kid, he liked to fix things.

"By the time he was 2 1/2 , whatever was broken, he could fix," said his mother, Jane Kjems. The third of four boys, he often worked on cars and other toys taken from his older brothers' toy chests while they were at school. "He had the knack of knowing how things fit together," she said.

Tangherlini grew up in the central Massachusetts town of Auburn, a blue-collar community near Worcester, where his father, Frank, taught physics at the College of the Holy Cross. His parents divorced when he was in fifth grade. Money was tight. During high school summers, Tangherlini filled potholes, picked up trash and cleaned pit toilets.

"It was humility-inducing work," he said.

For his last two years of high school, he won a full scholarship to Milton Academy, a private boarding school outside Boston. At the University of Chicago, he tried economics, sociology and political science before finding his niche in public policy. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's.

He came to Washington in 1991 as a presidential management intern through an elite government recruiting program, and he was hired at the Office of Management and Budget. For several years, he worked as a budget analyst but "was champing at the bit" and "eager to fix things, to solve problems," according to his boss at the time, Michael Deich, an associate director. Tangherlini became Deich's special assistant, functioning as chief of staff. He worked round-the-clock and developed an intense coffee habit.

"He has a keenly analytical mind, and he has this joy, when faced with a new problem, to figure it out," Deich said.

Tangherlini worked briefly in the office of the U.S. transportation secretary, but found the duties unappealing "because you couldn't see any outcome."

He started to find more job satisfaction in 1998 when he started working for the District as chief financial officer for the police department. Anthony A. Williams (D) had just been elected mayor, and Tangherlini pulled double duty, at the police department by day and in the mayor's office by night, working on transition issues. He also began working toward his MBA from the Wharton School, traveling to Philadelphia on weekends. By 2000, Tangherlini took over what later became the city Transportation Department. His wife, Theresa, a nurse practitioner, had just given birth to their second daughter.

"That was probably the most crazy time," he said.

At the Transportation Department, he orchestrated the turnaround of an agency that had trouble filling potholes and repaving streets. He launched the innovative D.C. Circulator bus. He recruited older and more experienced managers.

"He has a personality that people like to work for. He is willing to listen to people on the front line who have the answers, and he's able to make decisions and be held accountable for them," said John A. Koskinen, a former deputy mayor and former city administrator. "He turned out to be terrific, one of the best agency directors we had."

'The Culmination of All My Jobs'

Tangherlini is about to assume the biggest job of his career, what he calls "the culmination of all my jobs strung together."

His biggest challenge will be dealing with the District's wide range of issues, Koskinen said. To name a few: health care, Medicaid, economic development, the new baseball stadium, police and fire services, and, of course, the schools, he said.

To deal with those and other issues, Fenty has said, he wants to institute a comprehensive set of performance measures for agencies. That's just the kind of talk that resonates with Tangherlini.

Fenty and Tangherlini want to "focus on specific outcomes, so people can see tangible results and we can hold agencies accountable," Tangherlini said.

The two under-40 leaders are eager to get started. They are in the BlackBerry generation and have three between them. They communicate constantly. Tangherlini holds meetings in Starbucks, where a fresh coffee is never far from his hand. Fenty orders tea or hot apple cider. But that's about as far apart as they seem to get.

"We're two versions of the same personality," Tangherlini said.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.