 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. Coming up on court to court. You saw the problems they were having. You could see a solution that would help them, and you had to say, I'm not going to do it. The most common ongoing difficulty is also the best thing about teams. It's communication. I would say probably within the last four years, our case loads have tripled from what we used to see here. This is Court to Court, your connection to what's happening in the federal courts around the country, providing information and ideas that will enhance your job and how the courts function. Now with today's program, Michael Burney. Welcome to Court to Court, the Federal Judicial Center's educational magazine program for all court employees. Today we'll see how one court has overcome some of the inevitable problems when a management structure has changed. We'll get a glimpse of the problems facing the Southwest border courts, and Bob Bacon returns with more words to know. We also acknowledge the profound sadness and grief caused by the events of September 11th. Realizing the challenges that coping with such a tragedy presents to all of us, we encourage you to ask your court managers how to access the many resources available to you. And we want to recognize the special difficulties that our colleagues in New York experienced and are still experiencing. More and more courts are using team-based management. The concept is simple. Team members control and coordinate their own work. Easy to say but harder to do, and it's not for every court. It's only one of several options among management structures. If a court unit does choose team-based management, there are problems and staff must be ready to deal with them. There is no problem-free management system. The District Court Clerk's Office for the Western District of Washington changed to team-based management in 1994, but the road wasn't smooth. The whole idea of lunch, we can do this. It was kind of so much freedom that we didn't quite know what to do or what we could do. We would all do our own little job and not pay any attention to our teammates' work, how they were doing or performing. We were babes in the woods. We didn't know really how to, without the supervision, how to interact with each other and how to do that. So we kind of felt lost. And it would end up being just chaos because we weren't working cohesively as a team. You saw the problems they were having. You could see a solution that would help them, and you had to say, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to allow them to make a mistake. It's okay to make a mistake and make an incorrect decision. We felt like the team failed, that we had a sense of failure. We didn't live up to the expectations of the team concept. And nobody came to our rescue. But if we jump in too soon, then it's not their issue. It's our issue. And then you start getting into a tug of war. And they don't accept ownership of it. Upper management wouldn't intervene. They would just let us keep going that way until we finally kind of fell on our butt, so to speak. We were resentful, I think. I was. If you let them flounder for too long, on the other hand, they get very demoralized. And so one of the hardest things that we've had to learn, I think, is a good sense of timing. When has it gone on long enough? There's no one answer to that question. Bubness says that at the start, teams don't really trust that management will give them the authority. But they don't have the opportunity. I can see them having a problem with, okay, this person gets a raise because their judge isn't doing anything in court this month, but I don't, because I'm working. The actual following through and letting them make a mistake and then not beating them up over it, but helping them learn from it and being there for them, that's what starts building the trust. But there were more problems. And then the old supervisor felt like you're on your own. You guess what? Fall on your face. The experience was much different from some of the supervisor's points of view. It felt like a person who had received glowing recommendations, wonderful evaluations, and oh, by the way, you're fired. That what you have seen as your skills and your abilities within the organization are no longer desired. Lindbergh says the change in responsibility can create problems for the court, as well as the former supervisors. If they do not have a way to continue to move up, or even if anyone coming into the court has no way to move up within the organization, you're going to lose that knowledge and those skills to someone else. Problems within a team usually involve communication and making decisions as a group. Dara Khalil from the Tacoma Division Office came to the court after teams were in place. When I first came there, I was told it was team, but I really had no concept of that. I was used to supervisors reporting to a supervisor. It's really difficult in the beginning, I think, for a new person coming in. It was a little difficult for me at first because coming from a company where your opinion, I mean, you weren't asked for it. And so I had to get used to giving feedback. I was a little intimidated. The hardest part about working in teams is letting other team members know when there's something they're doing that's affecting the team or the mistakes they're making. Because we're all peers and sometimes it's difficult for people to be evaluated by people who are in equal footing with them. Finding time to meet as a team is another obstacle, especially for the magistrate deputy clerk team. Hi Judy, this is Heather, calling with a new arrest. We are responsible for running court dockets and our answer to judges and are really dictated a lot by other people's schedules. It's hard for all of us as a group to get together. Chief Deputy Clerk Janet Bubnas says that if managers raise expectations with team-based management and then abandon the technique when it becomes difficult, there can be serious morale problems. Teams take time. Literally in the sense that these people have to have time to meet, to work out their own internal processes and procedures and time in a larger sense because some of the real benefits of teamwork may take years in terms of people developing the requisite trust, openness. She says they've all been learning the same way. From having stubbed our toes a few times we keep learning from what works, what didn't and why didn't it. The problems we've just seen are only some of the difficulties that can come up when a court chooses a team-based management structure and the solutions we're about to see will vary from court to court and take varying amounts of time. But even though it may involve trial and error, the District Court for the Western District of Washington knows that they'll get over the bumps in the road. For managers there must be a deep commitment to team-based management and to the teams' decisions. When you tell them that you will stand behind a decision, for example, then you have to stand behind it. Now, over a period of time, if you do that, trust is gained. They will make mistakes, and as a manager you have to create an environment where it's safe to do that and allow them to do that. And then all of us have to learn from our own mistakes. That's all I need, and I'll go ahead and pull that for you. Okay, excellent. Thank you. Now, I'll be right there. Rifkin and Bubnas stepped in for a three-month period to manage the intake team. They provided specific training to address each type of difficulty the team was experiencing. Giving and receiving honest feedback was an important issue for the team. Positive feedback is very easy to get. It's the negative feedback that takes work and courage to get. And a lot of work, a lot of teamwork. I was almost one foot out the door when I first started working here because I wasn't quite ready. I was too rough. And this was a very big deal for my team because they had hired me, and I was not doing well. It's key to keeping the team going is being open and honest. You bring out the person's good points and bad points you just communicate effectively with them telling them this isn't anything personal, it's all business, it's work-related. This is right when the first team decision that they had to make as a team that really involves some emotions, some serious soul-searching about, is Mike going to be here for a while? We make the wrong decision on hiring this man, talking to my teammate, and she said, Mike, you know, we really want on a limb to hire you. And that's kind of what the whole team thinks about. I wasn't really thinking, at first I was always thinking about myself, you know, the government, this job, you know, I didn't really, and then when I thought about my teammates, that's what kind of sold me on working harder. That's what turned it all around because the people involved, you become your family, and you really want to work, you know, that's who I was letting down. You know, I didn't want to let them down. When I came to get search request letters, I forwarded them on to the faculty for that after we received the money. Yeah, but if it's someone over the phone, I don't just blindly order that, I'm sorry, you need to see the check first before. These teams have learned to not let problems drag on, and to deal with them as soon as possible. They usually start with a one-on-one approach. It's always good to kind of take that person aside and say, hey, you know, I noticed this, or you know, a couple of people have mentioned this, maybe you should, you know, pay attention to this, or, and at that point, if it goes beyond that, the team is called together. Learning to make decisions as a group can be a slow process. We're all different personalities here. We all have different likes and dislikes. You know, there's the shy people, and there's the quiet people, and then there's the outgoing, aggressive, assertive people. They don't start off being honest with each other. They start off ducking confrontation, and so one strong personality might propose a course of action and others keep their mouths shut. I was a little intimidated because all the other people in my group and the team, they were so well-versed and knowledgeable on the subjects, and Hannah, it was hard to make a decision because everybody sounded right. You have to let that play itself out. You have to let the quieter people get dissatisfied enough. You direct some of the questions to them. Well, what's your input, or what do you think are coming up to them and asking them specifically, will you send out email regarding this? Because the only way it works is if everybody feels safe enough to really throw out their ideas and to challenge poor ideas, that doesn't happen overnight. You can't just order people to do that. We get together once a week in a conference room away from our intake area so that we can discuss issues. I guess we need to talk a little bit about how we're going to handle the transition into Mike's being the support for both the prisoner desk and the appeals desk. The hardest part about that is confronting the issue. Since his work is going to be the prisoner desk, can't he train while Darlene's being trained? That's an idea. That's a good idea. He could just sit in. The positive thing is there's different perspectives that are thrown at you, and you can walk out of a team meeting and completely have changed your mind about what you thought when you went in there just because somebody else gave you their opinion that you never thought of it that way. Because decisions require consensus, the teams need time to talk things over with each other. We use a lot of technology to communicate their calendars that are updated, a lot of email, telephone calls, and if we find the odd moment when we're all here, then it's not unusual for us to have an impromptu meeting. Pat, I got your email about adding more things to tomorrow's agenda. Something that I've been struggling with since I've been here, I think I'm going to add to it, and that's when letters come in. Resolving the roles of former supervisors can be a long and difficult problem. With several years of painful transition behind her, Shirley Lindbergh has advice for court managers about dealing with supervisors before and adoring the transition to teams. Is to help them understand their value within the organization and in fact help them craft possibly a new position within the organization so that the court is able to retain the individual and their skills and knowledge along with that. Lindbergh tried several ways of being an administrative resource for the teams. A key change came when an outside trainer recommended that she negotiate with each team for her services. Don, could you call me about getting together about this Chambers project? I need to talk to you about a schedule where you and I can get together to work on the macros and the merges. She says now she feels that she's helping the teams so that... I get the joy of seeing the wide pieces of the organization being able to put people together to help them resolve problems. Hiring new members is a key responsibility requiring the teams to arrive at consensus and make decisions. And we were wondering what appeals to you about this position and why you're leaving your current job. Well, you have to think about what's good for the team, not what's good for necessarily you. Tell us about a time when this happened to you, how you dealt with it, how you kept your schedule flexible enough to deal with these kind of things, please. Basically, with any kind of position, you're going to have a lot of interruptions. Because I know that there are times when... I may not feel the same as the consensus, but, you know, I'll concede because, again, it's the best for the group. Taking care of the priorities and emergencies first and doing the best you can do with that and if you need to, if you find yourself being a little bit overwhelmed with that, is to go ahead and call on your team members. The teams have learned that no member is wrong and that all of them are right. And one person can be hired. What was the third candidate we had? She had, yeah, darling, had much more experience. The give and take of consensus-building is not easy to master, but the intake team now takes pride in its role as the hiring ground for the courthouse, in the words of one team member. I thought that was pretty sharp. Because most times people answer that question and they answer what they think we want to hear. And, you know, she was honest saying, you know, I didn't bend the rules, this is what I did. I liked the answer she gave on the crisis, the major change with her computer, what she did. Courts that choose a team-based management structure can overcome the serious problems that make the transition difficult, but there will always be challenges. The most common ongoing difficulty is also the best thing about teams, is communication. Because it's not up to one person, it's up to everyone to contribute and to make their opinions and their voice heard on how things are going. In recent programs, we've talked about several Latin phrases prominent in the court's work. Today, words to know switches to the ever-illusive terms from the worldwide web. It's a veritable feast- web browser, web server, and cookie. Our producer says it's amazing what you can do with two cups of sugar. And he's right, but more about that later. When we decided to talk about cookies in relation to the worldwide web, we realized we couldn't do that without first talking about web browsers and web servers. A web browser, or simply browser, is a user-friendly software program in your computer that permits interaction between your computer and the worldwide web, as well as smaller computer networks. Browser software interprets all HTML code, including text, images, hypertext links, Java applets, and so on. Interpreting this code allows you to view web sites and to navigate from one site to another. When you use the web to research a word, look up a definition or fact, indeed, to seek out any type of materials, the web browser is what you've used to read the materials. Have you ever heard someone say, is your browser to such and such a site? You might have thought, wait a minute, I'm moving the cursor to a particular place on the screen and then clicking the mouse, but I'm not pointing to anything. Well, that's another of those expressions that's entered our language, but doesn't quite mean what it says. Sort of like the phrase, step on the gas. The word browser seems to have originated prior to the existence of the web, as a generic term for interfaces that let users navigate through and read text files online. By the time the first web browser with graphical capabilities was invented in 1992, the term browser seemed to apply to content as well as the software interface. But technically, a browser is a software program. By the way, that first browser with graphical interfaces was called Mosaic. Widely used browsers include Netscape Navigator and Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. There are others such as Opera and Links. So if that's a browser, what's a server? In this case, it's certainly not someone who brings your food. A web server stores data and communicates that information to computers that connect to the server. A server is itself a computer and can have many different software packages running on it. When you connect to a website, you connect to a server from which you can access programs, files, data and other information. And of course, it's the browser in your computer that's connecting to the server. There are several kinds of servers, such as web servers, mail servers, LAN, a local area network servers, and WAN, or wide area network servers, such as the DCN. Well, all right, if you insist, cookies are messages sent by a web server to a browser. The message is a record of your actions at that website. The browser in your computer stores the message in a text file and then each time your browser requests information from that particular server, the message in the cookie goes with the request. None of this takes place on the screen. The user is unaware of the cookie or what's in the message. The purpose of the message is to let the server identify the user, that's you, and prepare customized pages from the website. And also, so that the site doesn't have to ask you to log in for each page of the site. The cookie is a lot like a preference file for the program on your computer. Whenever you visit the site after being sent the cookie, the site will load according to the information stored in the cookie. The cookie provides a way for the website to keep track of a user's patterns and preferences and with the cooperation of the web browser to store those patterns on the user's own hard drive. Those are permanent cookies. There are also temporary cookies, which are retained in your browser, but only during the time the browser is active or open. There are vulnerabilities with cookies. Probably the most serious is the potential for transmission of viruses. But there's also what's called data mining, keeping a record of your online activities. You can have your browser disable cookies or warn you if it's about to accept a cookie. Look for the cookie options of your browser in the options or preferences menus and talk with your system staff about how to deal with these web morsels. Remember those two cups of sugar? Computer cookies aren't as sweet as this kind, but they have their uses. But only if you want them to. That's words to know for this time. I'll have more on a future court-to-court. Along the United States' southwest border, five districts are struggling with a huge load of drug and illegal immigration cases. The growing number of cases create problems for all parts of the criminal justice and court systems. To help understand the difficulties and how some courts are coping, the administrative office prepared our next story. Dan Cunningham of the AO reports. Beginning in 1994, Congress created the Southwest Border Initiative, pouring millions worth of enhanced federal law enforcement resources into the states along the U.S.-Mexico border. The initiative was designed to stem the flood of drugs and illegal immigration streaming into the United States. Now, more than six years later, the Army of New Federal Agents has indeed sent arrest rates soaring. However, the court system in which those defendants must be tried and sentenced is in serious jeopardy. To understand the magnitude of the problem, you have to understand that it is a challenge of big numbers and impossible geography. While most of the trafficking in drugs and illegal aliens along the U.S.-Mexico border comes through major ports of entry, such as this one in El Paso, Texas. Most of the border looks like this. Hundreds of miles of sagebrush and dust, perfect terrain to let drug smugglers and illegal aliens slip undetected into the United States. We apprehend at the Las Cruces Station approximately six to eight hundred a month. Every day seems to be a little bit different on the quantity. Some days we have more, some days we have less, but it always seems to be basically the flow of drugs doesn't stop around here, it's always continuous. One sleepy courthouses from Southern California to South Texas, like this one in Las Cruces, New Mexico have been transformed into assembly lines of justice, where criminal defendants are brought in by the busload and packed into crowded courtrooms, while overwhelmed judges and court staff process them through a system that has been stretched to the breaking point. We see criminal aliens and haven't seen them for a while, but criminal aliens that have serious criminal records that we've been prosecuting for the past few years and then we continue to prosecute. And I think every indication is that one of the reasons why there's been such a dramatic drop in the crime in this county and this district has been that a lot of people who were committing those crimes are locked up for a longer, longer period of time. And that's true also with criminal aliens as it is with other precipitous. But I think the greater issue is just the sheer number of cases, period, that are coming through the system that have to be handled. And defendants are entitled to... they have their lawyers, they're entitled to go to trial, they're plea negotiations, there are motions, there are just court appearances. All that depends primarily on the court. We've been operating under these increases since 1994, and what's so frustrating to us is that there doesn't seem to be any long-term solution for our court, where we really, because of our position next to the border, the cases aren't going to go down. The cases are going to be there. If there's a commitment to make the border safe and secure and not to have drug coming into our country, that's a long-term problem. We don't have the solutions to that. But since we are here, since we are on the border, I think we have an obligation to handle the cases that are brought to us. And part of the problem is there's been an increase in law enforcement personnel on the border in the last five years, over a thousand positions, new positions created. There's been no increase in district judgeships, and in fact, a decrease. I would say probably within the last four years, our case loads have tripled from what we used to see here. As you know, since we're sitting here on the border, we get a tremendous amount of drug cases and illegal entry cases, and the case loads have just skyrocketed. The key to solving this problem is through resources. The federal judiciary has taken its case to Washington, and Congress and the White House are hearing the message. Our Southwest border courts are basically beyond capacity to handle our increasing criminal dockets. While the battle for new resources continues in Washington, judges and court staff along the Southwest border have come up with their own solutions to help cope with the crisis. We've had a lot of cross-functional work where the docket clerks are helping the courtroom deputies who in turn help the docket clerks. We've relied a lot on systems, really stressed them out with all the programs we want, because the only way we can stay current is by harnessing automation. We have drafted, I guess is the word I would use, judges from the Eastern District of Louisiana and the Western District of Louisiana in large numbers to come to the Southern District of Texas and the Western District of Texas to help with the criminal case load. And also, I might add, with some of the civil case load, it has been an enormous help. We have a lot of deportation cases after previously having been deported, some of them after previously having been deported, having been convicted of a violent felony, and many of them drug cases. We put out a request for anyone that would like to come down. They could work for as little as a week. They could stay for as long as six weeks. Most of our people came in and stayed about two weeks. We had a few that stayed six weeks. They've come from Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Alaska, a few from the other districts in Texas, not Southern, because they're as much under the gun as we are. But it was just kind of a mixture. It was about 14 officers, and without fail, every one of them was totally amazed at the amount of work that's being produced. They leave with a tremendous appreciation for what we do out here. And that is good for our staff. They find it professionally challenging and very rewarding, and I'm glad they do, because without them, we couldn't make it. The challenges of the Southwest border are enormous. Visiting judges and court staff, as well as streamlined court operations, have demonstrated how administrative flexibility and creative management can offer relief for a system in crisis. Several new bills before Congress and the president promise to bring a more permanent solution soon. That's all for today. We'd like to know your evaluation of the program and to hear your suggestions for future topics. You can contact us at the address on the screen. Click on court to court to select the evaluation form. There are two forms. One can be printed, filled out, and mailed or faxed to us. The other can be completed online. Please join us again in January 2002. We'll hear from two courts about dealing with the public, especially at the front counter, and we'll listen in on a naturalization ceremony to see how the court enhances the significant event for new citizens. Thank you for joining us today. We leave you with this admonition from our good friends in the district of North Dakota. Fill out your evaluation forms or we'll come visit your court.