Lean Six Sigma doesn’t belong in City Hall

Cleveland Heights Mayor Kahlil Seren has reportedly adopted a Lean Six Sigma–style management approach. On the surface, that may sound smart—who doesn’t want more efficiency? But Lean Six Sigma was developed for manufacturing, not municipal government. It’s a system that focuses on eliminating defects in production.

City services, programming, facilities, communication, and resident support aren’t assembly lines. They require nuance, flexibility, and a focus on people—not just process.

Using Lean Six Sigma as a framework for city management is not just a mismatch—it risks damaging morale, stifling creativity, and weakening the quality of services residents rely on. Government doesn’t exist to maximize profits or outputs; it exists to serve. Attempts to rigidly quantify and streamline that mission can lead to serious blind spots, particularly in a diverse, dynamic community like ours.

Just as troubling, the mayor's role in Cleveland Heights is not supposed to be operational management. We have—or are supposed to have—a professional city administrator to handle the day-to-day implementation of city services.

The mayor's job is to set a vision, lead strategic planning, and be the city’s face and connector—in the community, with local organizations, with city council, with the school board, with neighboring cities' leaders, and with area organizations such as the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD).

Overreach into nuts-and-bolts management undermines the city administrator’s role and confuses accountability.

In just three years, three city administrators have come and gone. Danny Williams, who resigned at the end of 2024, explicitly cited a difference in management philosophies—pointing to the mayor’s Lean Six Sigma model—as a reason for his departure. That’s not just a philosophical conflict; it’s a leadership failure.

When hiring a city administrator, alignment matters. If a city administrator candidate doesn’t embrace Lean Six Sigma—and the mayor insists on it as non-negotiable—then either the mayor must reconsider his rigidity, or more discernment must be taken when hiring for such a pivotal role. Otherwise, it’s a revolving door of misalignment and dysfunction, which is exactly what we’ve seen.

Cleveland Heights deserves clear leadership, a collaborative spirit, and a functioning administration. We need a mayor who inspires, connects, and plans—not one who’s busy trying to run a municipal version of a factory floor.