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At a glance, Jennifer Maguire’s career bio shares a lot in common with her fellow successful Leavey School of Business graduates. She has proven her value and worked her way up through an org chart over the course of three-plus decades, going from overseeing budget planning to overseeing an entire operation in a chief executive role.

The difference? Maguire isn’t CEO of a company. She’s CEO of a city.

Maguire first took a role as budget analyst for the City of San José in 1991. Thirty-three years later, as city manager, she oversees the 13th largest city in the U.S., complete with a workforce of 7,000 employees and a $6.1 billion annual budget. 

“The public is counting on us to do right by our community, and that is what motivates me,” Maguire says. 

She first learned about the possibility of public service as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University. She already had a background in volunteerism, and the university’s Jesuit values had reinforced in her the concept of “service to others.” So when she encountered a career booth for the City of San José, her interest was piqued.

The timing wasn’t quite right yet, though. “Because in those days city recruitments were done infrequently, with extensive civil service testing and lists, and I needed a job right out of college, I started my career in the banking industry,” Maguire says. In five years at First Interstate Bank, she rose to the level of assistant vice president. Still, public service stuck in her mind.

“Although I liked my job, it really was not my calling and I felt I needed a more challenging position that could positively and directly impact the community,” she says. 

That position came in 1991 in the form of a role as analyst for the city’s budget office, where she would work on budgets for the police, human resources and IT departments. “I can distinctly remember how proud I was to become a public servant, and I still am,” Maguire says.

Silicon Valley Solutions

Including that first role as an analyst, Maguire has served in nine different positions for San José. Early in the public service portion of her career, she decided to pursue additional skills at her alma mater. She earned an MBA from the Leavey School of Business in 1994.

“I specifically decided to obtain an MBA so that I could apply real-world, advanced business knowledge to the public sector,” Maguire says. “The City of San José is one of the largest  organizations and employers in Silicon Valley, and I strongly believe that the city should  be managed similarly to a private sector company in that our community should have confidence that we are using their tax dollars and the fees we collect from them as efficiently and effectively as possible in how we execute our day-to-day services. This requires a strong leadership and management skillset, which I gained from the myriad of classes I took in my program, especially in the disciplines of finance, management, economics, operations and communications.”

The city runs on a council-manager form of government. City Manager Maguire works with an elected city council and mayor. She still oversees a budget — just a much larger one than when she started. She’s responsible for managing the day-to-day delivery of services to the community, as well as executing policies and programs as directed by the mayor and city council. She also helps guide fiscal and change management and develops “long-term, data-driven strategies” for the city’s future.

Ultimately, this means handling the basic challenges of delivering everything a city needs: transportation, sanitation, police and fire departments, libraries, and countless other community services. But increasingly, constituents expect more from city management, Maguire says.

“With basic services generally addressed, residents are now asking us to turn our attention to much more difficult problems — really wicked challenges, like homelessness. Traditional approaches, frameworks and measurements are not usually sufficient for the big challenges, especially ones that affect lives and livelihoods.”

To meet such challenges, the city has created four areas of focus, all under Maguire’s purview:

• Community Safety
• Reducing Unsheltered Homelessness
• Cleaning Up Our Neighborhoods
• Attracting Investment in Jobs and Housing

Maguire and her executive team work to balance investments and resources to execute solutions to those four challenges, all while never losing sight of the 98 “core services” the city provides or the well-being and needs of the city’s robust workforce.

Appropriately, she borrows frameworks and methods from the industry thriving in and around the city. “We use the “Objectives and Key Results”  agile framework popular within the Silicon Valley technology industry to set expected milestones or accomplishments each quarter, which we then measure against and share with the mayor and city council,” she says. “This is a way to build collaboration and accountability into our governance processes. We turned these measures into quarterly dashboards for managing each focus area and for ensuring that data was central to decision-making and regular reporting.”

Maguire takes pride in the work. When asked about high points in her career, they involve developing and expanding a talented workforce, finding creative ways to fill massive budget shortfalls — with minimum damage to that workforce and the services they provide — and navigating an alternative pension reform settlement with employee unions, among many other accomplishments in the past three-plus decades.
She also knows her work is not finished, and that the city faces massive challenges. “I have lived my professional career in continuous improvement mode,” Maguire says. “I always look for innovative ways to solve challenges, which was a strong ethos in my curriculum at the school. This requires being open to and valuing other people’s ideas and perspectives as we all come to the table with the shared goal of serving others in the best way possible.”