By Danielle Mahoney, Assistant City Manager, City of Novi, Michigan | Alliance for Innovation Vice Chair, Board of Directors

On October 12, about 170 City of Novi employees stepped away from their permit queues, work orders, and inboxes and spent the day together. Mile Marker '26 was our first all-staff development day, and it will become an annual tradition. It was also the most visible step yet in work that has been building across our organization: becoming a high-performing organization.

OUR HPO JOURNEY: NOVI DRIVE‍

Like many AFI members, we started from a simple conviction: great service to residents doesn't come from any single program or department. It comes from how an organization works together, every day. In Novi, we call the effort to strengthen that Novi Drive.

Novi Drive isn't owned by the City Manager's Office or Human Resources. It's advanced by an interdepartmental team of employees drawn from across the organization and from every level, from front-line staff to division managers.

Over the past year, that team produced the Novi Drive Roadmap, a description of how we work at the City of Novi, anchored in our four values: Team, Commitment, Innovation, and Trust.

A roadmap only matters if people use it. Mile Marker '26 was our first chance to put that work in front of the entire workforce at once, and to have employees practice it instead of sitting through a presentation about it.

‍INSIDE THE DAY

The morning was built around our four values. Every employee completed a leadership style assessment and talked through the results with their tablemates. Four department directors then spoke candidly about their own leadership styles and how those styles show up in their work. Finally, staff worked in small groups to pitch ideas for improving City operations and services.

Those pitches didn't end when the session did. Twelve ideas are now with the Novi Drive team, which will evaluate them and bring recommendations to City leadership.

We closed the morning with an all-staff photo and video celebrating Novi Day on November 1. In the afternoon, the group moved to the high school auditorium for a keynote from Jason Schechterle, whose story of resilience and the power of a positive mindset left a lasting impression on Team Novi.

THE DESIGN CHOICES THAT MATTERED

A few decisions shaped the day more than any single agenda item, and they're the ones we'd pass on to peers planning something similar.

• Mix the room on purpose. Staff were seated across departments, tenure, and roles all day. A building inspector sat next to an accounting clerk; a director sat next to someone three weeks into the job. Very little of what a city does well is the work of one department alone. Service moves across desks and between divisions, and it depends on colleagues who can call one another and get a straight answer.
• Practice, don’t present. Assessments, table conversations, and idea pitches put the values into action. Employees left having used the Roadmap, not just heard about it.
• Give ideas somewhere to go. Routing the twelve pitches to the Novi Drive team, with a clear path to leadership, signals that employee input leads somewhere.
• Let leaders go first. Directors talking openly about their own leadership styles set the tone for the rest of the room to be candid too.

WHY IT MATTERS TO RESIDENTS

To us, a high-performing organization is one where connections between people are strong. Employees know each other's work, trust each other's judgment, and are willing to carry something a step further because they know who's on the other end. That gets built one relationship at a time, and a day spent together does more for it than any procedure we could write.

Residents feel it in ordinary ways: a question answered on the first call, a permit that moves without stalling, a hand-off that lands cleanly.

‍WHAT'S NEXT

Mile Marker will return each year as a regular checkpoint on our Novi Drive journey. We'd love to compare notes with other AFI members working on their own culture and high-performance efforts, whether that's how you structure a cross-level team, what an all-staff day looks like for you, or what's worked to keep momentum going.

To connect, reach Danielle Mahoney at dmahoney@cityofnovi.org

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