Episode 155: Leadership Basics - Leaning in to Make a Difference

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall", your weekly podcast about making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett philanthropy Randall Hallett.

Thank you for taking a few minutes of your day to join me on this edition of "Around with Randall". Today we talk a little bit about the idea and concept of leadership, which is something that there have been a several podcasts dedicated to, too. And certainly aspects of leadership in many of the other content that I speak about here in the podcast, on the blogs, that are posted at Hallettphilanthropy.com, two a week, always circling around it. But I want to hit it head on today as I have traversed with clients through various aspects of their engagements, which is an honor for me to do.

I am watching leadership challenges. Part of the reason why is that there's a lot of indecision or unknown around just what we think of as our economic world, whether it's healthcare and it's reimbursement, race whether it's universities and less people going to college, whether it's social services and we have less disposable income for many people, whether it's just in charity in general. There's less people giving. If we look at the numbers from 2002, 66 and a half percent, or two-thirds of the households in the United States making a gift to today where it's probably below 47%, and then just the general economic climate where I think there's a lot of people asking what's kind of going on. All of this brings us to a lot of unknowns and this is where leadership is most important. Leadership is really pretty easy when things are going well. If everything's falling in your direction you look great as a leader.

As an example, if we look at Athletics something that I love watching and certainly coaching my my kids, when we went undefeated in the spring season with my son's soccer team I look like a great leader. Now the truth of the matter is a lot of things fell into place that had nothing to do with leadership. It was just the way the games were played. We had good kids. It just worked out. Some kids weren't playing on other teams. You can classify it as you want, but I looked really good as said coach. I got credit for things probably I didn't deserve. We're heading into basketball and I co-coach with another outstanding dad and really good person who knows the game pretty well, and between the two of us we yin and yang really well together but we also know that we don't have a lot of great basketball players. How's leadership going to look then? And by the way, I don't think we're coaching in fourth grade all that differently between soccer and basketball. They're fourth graders. I mean, just getting them to like know there's a game going on sometimes with boys that are nine and 10-years-old, who I think we're all grateful for that the neck connects the head because if it didn't I'm not sure where the brain would end up. We will have other challenges.

Leadership really, if we wanted to be honest, at least great leadership is truly defined when there's challenge, when things aren't going well. And if we look at some of the greatest leaders in our history, and this is a jaded kind of narrow sense of history, so I'm not here to elevate my knowledge of Far Eastern history beyond what I actually have, which is limited to say the least, but if we just name a few people and look at what was going on on that gave them the opportunity to lead. If you look at Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, it's the Civil War and bring our country trying to bring it back together. Churchill, World War II, refusing to capitulate to what was going on, coming from Germany, and that he rallied his people. Nelson Mandela, a completely different kind of leadership, maybe in three stages, frankly one of the greatest leaders in the history of our world in that he had his early days where he was fighting for the removal or the conclusion or the death of apartheid, to his incarceration for nearly three decades, and a third act becoming the president of the country after being finally released. An amazing leader in different ways all within challenge. You could add Mother Teresa. Maybe not a political leader but can you think of a person, person that was a better inspirational service leader than Mother Teresa going to India and spending her life serving others in need. Not easy giving up a lot with a lot of challenge. You certainly look again at another President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and certainly the depression in World War I and what he had to deal with. I'll give you a leader more locally, Martin Luther King Jr. Do you think it was easy to stand in front of people and advocate as you were being yelled at, screamed at, discriminated, to articulate I'm willing to go to jail. You think that's easy? That's leadership.

For what's right, which we'll talk about here in a moment, I'd even add somebody like if we go back in history like Galileo. So here's an intellectual leader. He posits correctly that the Earth is on an axis spinning and it's moving around the sun, and the Catholic Church says well that's in violation of what we believe in that everything revolves around us because of God, and they basically imprison him. Now the next day they made a house arrest but he spent the rest of his life after positing all of this, based on what Copernicus has said, in his home. And house arrest not easy, but stuck to it. That's leadership.

All of this is to say is that when we look at for the people who should be and can be leaders, what are the things we should look at in ourselves. If you are the leader or if you're looking for someone to follow, and that could be a manager, supervisor, that could be a service area leader or a Dean, or it could be a department head or it could be the CEO, it could be a board member, it could be an inspirational leader in your community, what are you looking for? And then we're going to talk about maybe some things tactically that should be leaders, should be pushing into in the nonprofit world.

I think that leadership is best defined by something that my mother has said for my entire life. Three simple statements that when combined together illuminate what you want in a leader. Do the tough things. Do the small things. Do the right things. These three simple statements have been with me most of my life, and as I've said in other contexts, we didn't have many rules as a kid. The big one was don't screw up. And the three little ones were these, and what I learned as I became an adult and was asked to become a leader, formally and informally, from coaching Youth Sports to being responsible for nonprofit leadership, for coaching and mentoring others, for leading departments, for being the chief development officer in various organizations, then in Consulting, and people looking at me like can you get us through what we need to in terms of assistance? And help is that these three simple principles do the tough things, do the small things, do the right things, were the embodiment of leadership. And if you think about Mandela, or you think about Martin Luther King, or you think about Galileo, or you think about Mother Teresa, Churchill, Lincoln, or any other person you classify as an inspirational leader ,they did these. They they embodied the principle of doing the tough thing. The easy thing, for any one of these situations, would have been to roll over and not worry about it or just kind of wait and see what happens, and leaders from the Civil War to World War II to the evolution of how we view the world in terms of the earth and about Moon and the Sun, and into how we treat others, and whose rights they are, they didn't capitulate. They did the tough thing to personal consequence.

Something that's interesting about almost all of them in some way, shape, or form, not all but most of them had negative things happen to them. Mandela's imprisoned because it was tough. You have Roosevelt that probably died earlier than he should have because of the pressure that came with it. Certainly you have assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There was a negative consequence but that did not dissuade the possibility of those consequences. Lincoln's assassination did not dissuade what was doing the tough thing, do the small things. The ability to do the small things is to realize that there's nothing that's a nuance that shouldn't be ignored. These are tougher to identify and some of our leaders, because we weren't there, maybe Winston Churchill's written the most about his life. Certainly there were immense biographers about Lincoln and others, and you know, Galileo lived so long ago certainly there are biographies. But we don't have the day-to-day memento, moment, life that we might see in a leader today.

But doing the small things is embodying trust in others, and I mentioned in my last podcast that's why I love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on "Team of Rivals" and Abraham Lincoln. It was the small things he did in bringing his cabinet together, of people that didn't like him, didn't respect him, didn't want to work with him, and then molding them together to bring our country back as one. Do the right things. Doing the right things are not always easy. Sometimes they're not even seen.

One day, I don't know 15-20 years ago dad and I were down in Lincoln, Nebraska and he says gosh I'm hungry. I want a hamburger. I said great let's grab a burger. I don't remember if it's a Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King. Doesn't make a difference. We pull up and we got two burgers and two Cokes, and I gave, I was driving and I gave the person cash and they gave back too much change and I don't think anybody really knew but I could tell real quickly that it was too much, and so I quickly counted I said no you gave me a couple dollars back that was not mine, and I gave back to him. Didn't think much of it. Just kind of, you do the right thing. That's the only thing I've ever known. I'm not sure I get it right all the time, to be honest. I work at it. We're driving away and I kind of turned to my father and he looked at me and he says, that's my kid. I never thought about it from the context of what he was watching and what I was doing, but it was the right thing. I didn't think anybody was watching. I didn't know any differently. Doing the right thing, much of the time, actually doesn't take place in front of others. It's when nobody's looking. And I think if we had actual view of these lives that I mentioned just as examples of leadership ,and moving the ball forward in their difficult and challenging times, I think you'd find a lot of things they did right when nobody watched because they knew it was important. It's who they were and engenders trust.

So with all of this context, what are the things that we should be thinking about that fit this mold when we talk about leadership...The idea of doing the tough things, doing the small things, doing the right things. Give you a couple of examples. I'm actually seeing a disturbing trend when I look at boards. There seems to be two kinds of prongs of challenges. Number one is that when we talk about the concept of size, I'm seeing well it's easier to deal with fewer people, do the tough things, do the small things, do the right things. We need more people in the community advocating for what we need and why it's important. What our nonprofit can do, not less. Don't you want more people that are out there telling the story of why your particular nonprofit is important, and what it does, and what value it has, what good that it produces? Don't you want more of those ambassadors and advocates out there, not less? Do the tough thing? Enlarge your board with the right people. It's tough because that means you got to manage more people, do the small things, get them involved, make them feel as if they're critically important, do the right things by getting them involved. They be become partners and the more partners you have the better off you're going to be.

The second part of that is actually what they do not just come and sit in board meetings, but about changing their responsibilities and pushing into the tough thing. We need you to introduce us into gift officers, staff members, CEOs, into certain sectors of our community. We need you to introduce us into conversations that are going to allow us to find out if people are interested in what we do. That's tough because board members don't want to do that some of the time, and they hold a governance structure. The small things, that small introduction is worth how much? If you've done this for any amount of time how much is that worth? It's worth a ton because we're being introduced into their cone of trust. Do the right things. You embody being right by reflecting the values that you want your board members to have in you.

The partnership donors is another area. So boards was one. Donors have real conversations instead of us being transactional. Let's build longitudinal relationships where we're trying to maximize anybody's desire to want to partner with us. That means changing metrics and not worrying about transactional numbers for just this year. But how do we maximize and how do we fit that into the larger, your picture of what our organization is trying to do. And it's our ability to want to listen more than we talk about what we need versus what they want to do. That's tough because there's a current need for money and it's the small things. When you listen you engender trust because you're actually interested. If you do it the right way and legitimately so in what they want to get done, and then figure out how to partners with you and do the right things because we should be donor-centered donors. Different way of looking at it. Staff kind of, two prongs here, our organizations in the nonprofit world are have are any kind of this I would not even say evolutionary, it's almost revolutionary change in how we function because we have job shortages in terms of people. And there's pressures on inflation and we have pressures on our nonprofit finances. Change is occurring. Trying to get others as a leader to embrace it is critical. Part of that is being honest. Say we have to change what we do. Everybody's going to see this differently. That's a tough thing. People don't like change. I don't want to change but what I know is that when we change and do the right things, the right kind of change.

So we go to number three. Do the right things. The right kind of change. We get better outcomes. Do the small things. Don't just announce the change. Lead the change, which means sitting down and listening to others, articulating why it's important, talking about the outcome, spending more time on the process of the announcement of the change and of the change than just telling people we have to change. That one may not actually be small, but it's amazing how simple it is. But how many people don't do it? A part of that also is, and this is something that I did a survey on, and then it was published and it was in journals, about salaries, is doing the right thing, and the tough thing, and the small thing is getting people who generate revenue to be seen as revenue generators and not just other employees in the organization. I'm not saying that makes them more or less important, but the turnover rate in some of our fundraisers is astronomical. Part of that is because I don't think some of them are ready or prepared to actually do their job well because they haven't been educated and trained correctly. But we got a lot of other people, like inflation's occurring, I'm not getting a raise, I'm going to take the immense skills and talent I have and I'm going to go to another organization and the lost opportunity there is enormous. We have to pay fundraisers as revenue generators, not just the staff members. And the equation here, I know it's a crazy one, but there's a reason that the football coach and the basketball coach make more than the governor, the athletic director, and the University president, because they generate money. I'm not saying it's a utopian perfect world, but at the end of the day if your football coach at your University is winning, other things happen. More revenue comes in. More television exposure. We've actually can now showed the connection. Admissions goes up so they get paid more. Supply and demand. Fundraisers should be in that general conversation. And I'm ask, saying fundraiser should be paid 11 or 12 million. Be a nice dream, but I don't, just don't cap that. It means changing relationships with our internal leaders of physicians and faculty, why they're important beyond just the teaching, the application of medicine. Or maybe it's the frontline provider of being able to get them engaged in communication outreach. We don't need them to ask, but getting them involved because that's a change to what they're used to doing.

The last thing about this, doing the tough things, the small things, and the right things, is how you do it. There is a leadership style, not one that I recommend, where you force people to do it or they get out. I just don't believe in that. Can you influence by listening and building trust, building a long-term plan, taking small steps that allow you the opportunity as has been articulated in the idea of small bets. How many small bets can we do to continue our change? Yes you can force it, but I think if you gather people along with you and you bring them into the team that change happens more naturally, more holistically, and is longer lasting because everybody's been brought in together. Leadership is an interesting place right now, but I'm not sure that it's been more needed. There have been some economic issues in the past 30, 40, 50 years. Probably where that is true as well. So I'll say as much as some other times in the past, to me leadership is all about three simple concepts that are embodied in everything my mother stands for, believes, breathes, and does. Doing the tough things, doing the small things, doing the right things. If you can do those you're a great leader no matter what circumstance there is.

Don't forget check out the blogs Hallettphilanthropy.com - two or three a week, just things I'm reading, things I give you something, 90 seconds, give you something to think about. You do an RSS feed, comes right to you. And if you'd like to get a hold of me it's podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. In all of these opportunities for leadership, there's a moment for realization that philanthropy is needed so much now, and so what you do if you're a board member, an executive, you're working on the front line of the nonprofit, you're a volunteer in somewhere in the nonprofit, you're the fundraising people in the nonprofit, all aspects of these responsibilities are critical because what's going on in our communities needs philanthropy to fill gaps. Remember my favorite saying, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened, and at the end of the day philanthropy is all about finding people who want to make things happen and being people leadership who want to make things happen, partnering together for the people and the things in our community that are wondering what happened, and that is a worthy way to spend a professional life, and to make a difference. And I hope you feel that at least a little bit each and every day. I'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of "Around with Randall". And don't forget, make it a great day.