Opinion: The Yankees have coaches. Why not City Hall?

As the mayor’s race enters its final stretch, and plans for city government grow bolder, my thoughts turn to the people who will have to carry them out.

According to the latest report by the New York City comptroller, the city has lost nearly 18,000 municipal employees as of August 31, 2025. That is roughly 6% of the workforce, five times the pre-pandemic vacancy rate. Nationwide, a 2023 Eagle Hill Consulting survey found that 65% of government workers report burnout, and nearly half are considering leaving their jobs.

That is not just an HR problem; it is a crisis for basic services. Government at its best feels invisible. When operations falter, the results are on constant display.

The people keeping the city afloat often operate without the training or support this environment demands. I should know. I was one of them.

For seven years, I was an assistant commissioner at the Department of Homeless Services, helping shift from warehouse-style shelters to smaller, community-based ones. It was the right policy, rooted in equity, but there was no playbook and the NIMBY backlash was relentless.

In Manhattan, I was chased into an elevator by a TV crew, camera lights blinding me as they looked to turn me into the nameless bureaucrat behind a gotcha story. In the Bronx, community boards passed resolutions demanding I be fired. In Queens, after a meeting later covered under the headline “Queens Community Board Tells City to Burn Its Homeless Shelter Plan to the Ground,” I needed a police escort and a pre-planned exit. No matter how deeply you believe in the work, it takes a toll to show up daily and be screamed at.

This is the consistent reality for public servants who may not face an audience of hundreds, but who still find themselves in hostile rooms and on the front lines – conducting welfare checks, responding to complaints, enforcing regulations – dealing with the public every single day. And it is why we need to rethink how we support them. I knew there had to be a better way.

After leaving government, I became trained as an executive coach and certified by the International Coaching Federation. I have since worked with leaders across multiple agencies, from correction staff on Rikers Island, to frontline managers at the Administration for Children’s Services, to the executive teams at the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services and the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The challenges vary, but the pattern is the same: people in jobs where the demands outstrip the resources, expected to deliver under fire. It's an experience I can relate to. My work is to help them connect to their authentic voice, because New Yorkers can spot a fraud a mile away, and to build the calm confidence that carries them through any situation.

One warden once told me she had been putting out fewer fires since we began working together. I assumed she meant figurative ones.

“No,” she said. “Actual fires.”

In another case, a supervisor explained that for the first time she felt able to make hard calls quickly and stick to them. That clarity spread to her team, and suddenly meetings that had once stretched for hours were cut in half. She was able to delegate more effectively, and the system worked better.

Both stories point to the same truth: coaching is not just about resilience, but about cutting through noise, prioritizing what matters and making faster and better decisions under pressure.

Efficiency in a crisis is not luck. It is a skill. Every New York sports team – the Knicks, Giants, Jets, Yankees, Mets, Rangers and the Liberty – relies on coaches to help talent perform. City government should be no different. Belief in a mission is not the same as knowing how to execute under pressure.

We cannot keep treating burnout as an individual weakness. It is built into how we manage, promote and demand output. Leadership development has to be treated as infrastructure, an agency-wide investment in equipping people to survive and succeed inside complex systems.

Some agencies are already trying. At the Administration for Children’s Services, in partnership with CUNY, the Workforce Institute now provides professional development across the agency. I have been fortunate to join a cohort of coaches in this program and have seen staff reconnect to their values, steady themselves in crisis and become more decisive. These investments ease burnout and, just as importantly, improve the quality of decisions made on the ground, where success and failure find their footing.

Bold policy promises make for good headlines. But no policy can succeed if the team charged with carrying it out is collapsing. The future of government depends on whether we invest in leadership as seriously as we invest in policy.