I recently recorded a podcast featuring Al French, Spokane County Commissioner and Chair of the Board of the Spokane Transit Authority (STA) and Susan Meyer, CEO of STA. They describe, from their different perspectives, how they worked as a really cohesive leadership team in getting a truly high-stakes, out of the box change initiative accomplished at STA.  What happened under their leadership was the transformation of the STA Board of Directors into a higher impact governing body, primarily by putting an updated Board standing committee structure in place. 

I was fortunate to work closely with Al and Sue in strengthening STA governance, so I was able to see the “Al and Susan Show” in action close up.  Four factors appear to account for their functioning as such a productive Board Chair-CEO Leadership Team:

1.      Both Al and Sue are united by their passionate commitment to the STA vision and mission, and they don’t let narrower, more parochial agendas get in the way of serving STA’s customers and stakeholders.

2.      Al and Sue not only have tremendous respect for each other, they also very consciously help each other succeed in carrying out their related, but different, leadership roles as Board Chair and CEO.  Over the course of the several months I worked closely with them, I never saw Al and Sue compete with each other.  I don’t mean to say they never disagreed; of course they did.  But compete with each other?  Never!

3.      They clearly understood and observed in practice the basic division of labor governing their roles:  that the Board Chair leads the Board’s deliberations, the CEO  is responsible for all international operations, and they share the external relations role.

4.      And they never kept their distance, communicating openly and frequently and taking the time to work through complex issues.

Over my quarter-century of working with nonprofit and public organizations, I’ve identified the board-CEO partnership as one of the preeminent keys to organizational effectiveness and success over the long run, so STA is, indeed, fortunate to have the “Al and Susan Show” playing in Spokane.

  Listen To Podcast Here

In my new book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change, I talk about the normal resistance many, if not most, people, have to contend with in getting major change initiatives accomplished in their organizations and their lives.  As I say in the book, experience has taught me that fear – for example, of failing to perform up to standard, of being exposed as inadequate in some important way – is often at the heart of the resistance that can impede or even halt change.  Now, since I write and speak about how to lead and manage high-stakes, complex change, I really wish I could hold myself up as a model for angst-free change, but, alas, I must, truth be told, number myself among the normal human beings who find changing in important ways immensely challenging.

I re-learned this about myself over the past month in the process of making the decision to return this coming May to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where  I served for three years as a Peace Corps teacher, for a ten-day visit.  This will be my first trip to Addis since returning to the States for graduate school in 1967.  I’ll be reuniting with a former student, Tesfagiorgis Wondimagegnehu,  who, along with another student, Tariku Belay, lived with me and my Peace Corps housemates in Addis for two years.  The die is cast:  I’ve purchased my round-trip ticket and booked a room at the historic Ghion Hotel in Addis.  I know it’s the right thing for me to do at this point in my life, and my wife Barbara, my kids Jenny and William, and my siblings have been tremendously supportive. 

But, believe me, in taking this out-of-the-box initiative, I’ve had to contend with some major-league internal resistance.  There are the usual suspects, of course:  nagging questions about whether I’m being hopelessly self-indulgent or whether I can really afford to take the time off work in such a challenging business environment.  But lying awake in the middle of the night not long ago, it came to me that the anxiety I was feeling had less to do with practical business concerns than with that familiar old demon, fear of failing.  You know, what’s insidious about that old demon fear is that it can all too easily masquerade as what appear to be very practical, eminently rational reservations.  So you can, if you’re un-self-aware, stifle change without realizing that you’re giving in to fear.  You’re probably saying to yourself, “That may be so, but how can you turn your impending trip back to Ethiopia into an opportunity to fail at something?  What could you possibly fail at?”  Strange as it might seem, I’m positive that, being a writer as well as a consultant, I’ve conjured up the possibility of falling short in writing something really good – one or more articles, or even a book – about my upcoming Ethiopian adventure.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is I’m going; it’s too important to let cleverly masqueraded fear win so easily!

Now, I’d like to tell you a bit more about the story leading up to my decision to return to Addis after almost half a century.  Tesfagiorgis and I had managed to stay in touch after my return to the States in 1967, while he earned his undergraduate degree at what was then known as Haile Selassie University and launched his public management career, but we lost track of each other as the revolution that toppled Emperor Haile Selassie in the early 1970s turned into a reign of terror under the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.  Now and then, as the decades passed, I’d ask Ethiopians I met in this country about Tesfagiorgis and Tariku, but no one could tell me anything.  Much as I hated to, I eventually had to admit that they’d probably perished, along with hundreds of thousands of other victims of the Mengistu regime.

So the years passed, and in the fall of 2007, checking voice mail in my hotel room in Seattle before heading downstairs to the ballroom where I was speaking, I found a message from Tariku Belay, asking me to call if I was, indeed, “the Mr. Douglas Eadie” who’d taught at Tafari Makonnen School in the 1960s.  Returning the call, I learned that Tariku was teaching in a high school in Minneapolis.  Hearing about his harrowing odyssey to the States – escaping from prison, becoming a refugee in Sudan – I realized it was a miracle he was alive and well in Minneapolis.   What about Tesfagiorgis?  Tariku said he’d been out of touch with him for years and had no idea of his whereabouts.

In March 2011, the day before I was to catch a plane to Minneapolis to spend a day with Tariku before speaking at a conference, he called to share breathtaking news: he’d located Tesfagiorgis, who was living in Addis.  Tesfagiorgis and I talked by phone that very afternoon, and we’ve corresponded frequently in the year since then.  It turns out that Tesfagiorgis had also been imprisoned for two years in Addis Ababa and had come within a hair of being executed.    

Returning to Ethiopia this coming May is an out-of-the-box change initiative that I really do believe will enrich my life.  I’m truly grateful that I was able to get the best of old demon fear this time, but it surely won’t be the last time we’ll be doing battle as my change journey continues.

Experience has taught me over the past quarter-century that nonprofit and public organizations that succeed in leading significant – out of the box – change are always led by a strong CEO serving as “Innovator-in-Chief.”  In this capacity, one of your CEO’s most important roles is “Chief Motivator.”  Your Chief Motivator’s primary tool is direct communication — preferably oral and whenever feasible, in person. The written word is a much more distant, less direct tool that is a notoriously weak motivator, not only because many people tend not to pay close attention to the written word, but also because it involves far less of a commitment on your CEO’s part and so makes less of an impression on people. As you no doubt know, the spoken word really can make a powerful difference, no matter how weary, scared or even cynical the audience you’re speaking to, serving two important, closely related purposes in the out-of-the-box change game:

1.      Education – Explaining to staff and volunteers:

·         Why it makes the best of sense for them to participate in the out-of-the-box change process — in terms of need (for example, to deal with such threats as increasing competition, declining governmental support, a dramatically changing membership composition) and benefits (for example, a more secure and competitive organization that is growing).

·         How they are being asked to participate: the key elements of the planning process, the roles that staff and volunteers will play, and the timing.

In my experience, anxiety and fear go hand in hand with ignorance, and people who know in detail what to expect are much more likely to buy into a process than people who feel in the dark.

2.      Inspiration – Building emotional commitment by appealing less to the head than the heart, raising people’s sights above the proverbial trench and infusing the change process with higher meaning by interpreting current events in terms of fundamental values and overarching vision.

At the national level, two of the most effective Chief Motivators in American history were Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, and their success at leading significant out-of-the-box change in their very different eras undoubtedly owes much to their being masters of oral communication. Strolling through the FDR Presidential Library at Hyde Park a few years ago after facilitating a board retreat at the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center, I stopped to listen to a recording of one of FDR’s radio fireside chats. If I recall correctly, he was explaining why it was necessary for the federal government to close banks around the country temporarily as part of a national bank holiday. What an effective teacher he was, calmly — sounding like an older brother or kindly uncle — describing complex economic matters in simple terms easily understood by the average American. As I listened, I recalled my parents telling me how frightened they’d been in the early days of the Great Depression — newly married and living on the handsome income of $10 a week. The economy had ground to a halt, the future looked bleak, hope was in short supply. FDR’s educational radio chats were a godsend to my parents and millions of other despairing Americans, a wonderful example of the power of carefully chosen words to allay fear and restore a sense of hope and optimism in even the direst of circumstances. As president, Ronald Reagan presided over a rebirth of American optimism and pride, after the dark years of presidential assassination, the Vietnam War, and a disgraced president who’d been forced to resign. President Reagan spoke to a nation less frightened than dispirited, and his words, eloquently spoken on many occasions, told the inspiring story of America as a beacon on the hill, radiating the promise of democracy throughout the world.

I could talk about many other master communicators whose words have had tremendous influence on the course of human events. There is Lincoln redefining the fundamental meaning of the Civil War in his brilliant address (under 300 words!) at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, asking his fellow American to resolve “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”   And there is Dr. Martin Luther King in his stirring, unforgettable “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, envisioning an America that will one day “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ ”

Adapted from my new book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (www.leadingoutoftheboxchange.com).

CEOs who succeed in the Innovator-in-Chief role are what I think of as change-savvy. The change-savvy CEOs that I’ve worked with and observed:

• Are technically very knowledgeable about best practices in the rapidly changing area of change planning and management, which means she isn’t wedded to conventional planning wisdom and out-of-date approaches. You’ll never hear a change-savvy CEO extolling the virtues of traditional long-range (or strategic) planning as a change tool, much less catch her fondling a ten-pound five-year plan.
• Realize that successfully bringing off out-of-the-box change against all odds requires that she make leading the change planning and implementation process a top-tier priority. In practice, this means that the change-savvy CEO makes a firm commitment of time to leading change from the top and never tries to delegate one piece or another of this leadership role to lieutenants.
• Recognize that leading out-of-the-box change as Innovator-in-Chief of the organization is more psychological and political in nature than technical. Not only does the change-savvy CEO understand that fear is more often than not at the heart of staff resistance to change, she also takes strong, visible steps to allay that fear through the clear articulation of vision and other motivational steps that are intended to inspire and energize participants in the change process. The change-savvy CEO also pays close attention to the transformation of key stakeholders into ardent change champions.

• And command the respect of staff members and key stakeholders, primarily by playing a very aggressive and visible change-leadership role and practicing what she’s preaching in the change arena. A change-savvy CEO knows that her leadership credibility depends on walking the talk, never contradicting in practice what she’s saying publicly.

            In addition to the characteristics I’ve just described, the CEOs I’ve observed who have been most successful at accomplishing out-of-the box change have possessed three powerful character traits: courage; deep emotional self-awareness; and fundamental self-confidence. Being courageous and steadfast in leading change planning and management is a critical CEO trait. It never fails: The farther change planning moves outside the box in your organization, the more fear, anxiety, tension, and often anger you’re likely to see. As you’ve probably observed, fear (which feels quite weak) is often quickly transformed into indignation (which feels far stronger), and who’s a more convenient culprit and target of anger than the highly visible Innovator-in-Chief who’s leading the change charge?  The CEOs I’ve seen do a great job of leading out-of-the-box change are loaded with calcium. That doesn’t mean they’re insensitive Genghis Khans bludgeoning staff into change — quite the contrary. But it does mean they don’t cave under pressure. They expect the resistance and frequent anger, and they withstand it.

            The absence of deep emotional self-awareness can seriously limit the impact of a CEO in leading out-of-the-box change. I’ve seen CEOs who couldn’t capitalize on the talents and commitment of strong women on their executive teams because they found such strengths threatening. I’ve observed CEOs who were unsuccessful in building critical partnerships and joint ventures with other organizations because they saw the world as a dark and dangerous place filled with competitors waiting to do them in. And I’ve come across CEOs whose need for security and control made them intolerant of the give-and-take of wide-open discussion and led them to impose on their organizations mechanistic long-range planning processes that substituted neatness and order for creative questioning and exploration. In these and other cases, what has struck me over the years is how hidden, unrecognized emotions can sabotage CEOs, causing them to see the world through an internal lens that distorts objective reality, and, hence, leads to inappropriate behavior.

            I know that this might sound like psychobabble to some readers, but long experience has convinced me that the most effective change leaders are emotionally so self-knowledgeable that they aren’t easily sabotaged by deep-seated emotions they aren’t aware of. A few years ago, I worked with just such a CEO, who headed a large and highly successful senior services nonprofit. We were chatting one evening after getting through the first day of an intensive 1 ½-day work session kicking off the organization’s change planning process, when she confided that at one point in what’d been a great day she’d felt like lashing out at two of her board members. She said that when they’d raised some pretty pointed questions about her decision to pursue a merger with a sister agency a couple of months earlier, she out of the blue felt like a little girl again, being harshly judged by her parents, and the sudden surge of anger caught her off guard. Fortunately, she didn’t lash out, knowing that the anger — while a real emotion that she’d truly felt  — was totally misplaced, having to do with a vulnerable little girl inside, not with the strong CEO she’d become. That’s what I mean by self-awareness.

            The fundamentally self-confident CEOs I’ve worked with and observed have embodied a character trait that I think of as true humility. They are so secure, psychologically speaking, that they are able to celebrate — and capitalize on — the strengths of the people around them, both board and staff members. They’re blessed with robust, healthy egos that aren’t easily wounded and don’t require constant protection. They are able to keep things in perspective, seldom seeing a personal challenge, slight or even insult as a cause celebre. Rather, they are able to take the long view, resisting the impulse to lash out now in the interest of achieving an important objective down the pike. They’re keenly aware that the person who’s treated them with apparent disrespect today might very well turn out to be a valuable ally some day if they bide their time.

Virginia Jacko, my colleague and coauthor of our book, The Blind Visionary, is a great example of a fundamentally self-confident CEO who’s wasted absolutely zero time defending a fragile ego. President & CEO of the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Virginia, who is blind, recounts a story in our book that vividly demonstrates the value of a healthy ego. Not long after her appointment as the first blind CEO of the Miami Lighthouse, Virginia learned that a prominent Lighthouse volunteer had commented to a current Lighthouse board member, referring to her appointment, “Can you believe the inmates are now running the asylum?”  Were Virginia’s feelings hurt?  Of course. Did she lash out in anger?  Of course not. She didn’t take any action, and when she eventually sat down in a meeting with her detractor, she made clear her desire to work together, letting bygones be bygones. The upshot?  The person who’d made the derogatory comment became a close ally, even nominating Virginia for a major community award. That’s the kind of emotional maturity that makes Virginia a highly successful out-of-the-box leader.

  Excerpt from Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (Doug Eadie, Governance Edge Publishing, 2012) www.leadingoutoftheboxchange.com

The absence of deep emotional self-awareness can seriously limit the impact of a CEO in leading out-of-the-box change. I’ve seen CEOs who couldn’t capitalize on the talents and commitment of strong women on their executive teams because they found such strengths threatening. I’ve observed CEOs who were unsuccessful in building critical partnerships and joint ventures with other organizations because they saw the world as a dark and dangerous place filled with competitors waiting to do them in. And I’ve come across CEOs whose need for security and control made them intolerant of the give-and-take of wide-open discussion and led them to impose on their organizations mechanistic long-range planning processes that substituted neatness and order for creative questioning and exploration. In these and other cases, what has struck me over the years is how hidden, unrecognized emotions can sabotage CEOs, causing them to see the world through an internal lens that distorts objective reality, and, hence, leads to inappropriate behavior.

I know that this might sound like psychobabble to some readers, but long experience has convinced me that the most effective change leaders are emotionally so self-knowledgeable that they aren’t easily sabotaged by deep-seated emotions they aren’t aware of. A few years ago, I worked with just such a CEO, who headed a large and highly successful senior services nonprofit. We were chatting one evening after getting through the first day of an intensive 1 ½-day work session kicking off the organization’s change planning process, when she confided that at one point in what’d been a great day she’d felt like lashing out at two of her board members. She said that when they’d raised some pretty pointed questions about her decision to pursue a merger with a sister agency a couple of months earlier, she out of the blue felt like a little girl again, being harshly judged by her parents, and the sudden surge of anger caught her off guard. Fortunately, she didn’t lash out, knowing that the anger — while a real emotion that she’d truly felt  — was totally misplaced, having to do with a vulnerable little girl inside, not with the strong CEO she’d become. That’s what I mean by self-awareness.

 This blog is adapted from Doug Eadie’s new book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change (Governance Edge, 2012)

Visioning – painting a picture of the life you aspire to lead over the long run – is one of the most powerful tools for growing and enriching your life professionally and personally.  However, experience has taught me that you shouldn’t think of visioning as a straightforward planning exercise.  I’ve never come across a person who regularly updated a formal, personal vision statement, and I can’t imagine formally updating my own vision on a regular basis as part of some sort of personal strategic planning process. Instead, in real life, so far as I can tell, a person’s vision, rather than being formally planned according to some kind of schedule, unfolds over the course of a person’s life, through a largely informal process of learning from — being educated by — experience. Sometimes the experiences are dramatic and abrupt, easily commanding our attention and eliciting a strong emotional response: for example, you lose your job or your spouse initiates divorce proceedings.

To take some real-life examples, at the more dramatic end of the spectrum is the experience of a close friend and former teacher of mine, then in his mid-seventies — a distinguished professor of management, a Jew who had for years adamantly resisted any involvement in the religious aspect of Judaism. One afternoon he was walking by a storefront Orthodox synagogue, when he heard loud singing. As he told me later, he felt a powerful emotional jolt out of the blue. Not understanding what was going on, he stopped and looked in the open door to see dark suited and hatted men in a circle singing and dancing. Tears streaming down his face, he stood there for a few minutes, until the circle opened up and he was motioned in. He danced for a few minutes, feeling, as he told me, that he’d in some deep sense come home. For the rest of his life, “Grundy,” as I knew him, was an observant Orthodox Jew, attending synagogue faithfully and observing dietary restrictions for the first time in his adult life.

Another example of being dramatically educated by experience involves a woman I know well — a highly creative graphic artist — who’d taken a job heading the graphics department of a consulting firm, lured by the salary and other perks. You might say this was an example of poor visioning, in contrast to Grundy’s discovery of a part of himself he’d kept at bay for years. Fired after less than a year on the job, Karen — humiliated and devastated (she’d never failed in any major way professionally before this) — curled up in a ball to lick her wounds, bitter at what she saw as brutal mistreatment. But as she reflected on her experience, she eventually realized that her true professional vision — her fundamental source of satisfaction and fulfillment — was to create directly, as a graphic artist, not to manage a shop of artists. She actually came to believe that she’d sabotaged herself in her corporate job, unconsciously asking to be fired, as a result of straying from her true vision, even though she wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

At the less dramatic end of the change spectrum is a vision that unfolds over quite some time and feels like discovering some true side of yourself — of what you are meant to be and do. I have always loved the true story of a teenager who the summer he turned fourteen worked in his dad’s bakery in the small Illinois town where he’d grown up. With the money he saved that summer from his $36-a-week paycheck, he bought a cheap record player and, without thinking much about it, joined the classical division of the Columbia record club. Every month a new record showed up in the mail, and over a couple of years he was introduced to the mainstream classical repertory: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mozart — the whole crew. As he observed years later, “Listening to those records taught me that the good life I aspired to live had to include easy access to classical music, not just on record but even more important, in live performance.” 

Can you get better at visioning?  In my opinion, you definitely can, but it won’t be by sharpening your technical planning skills. Rather, the preeminent key to visioning is paying close attention to the emotional signals that are elicited by events you experience in your life journey, whether positive or negative, and asking yourself what the feelings mean, whether they might call for moving in new directions in your life. And you’ve always got to be on guard against blocking out uncomfortable feelings, such as fear and anxiety, or, worse, using alcohol or some other anesthetic to blunt the pain.      

This article is drawn from Doug Eadie’s forthcoming book, Leading Out-of-the-Box Change:  The Chief Executive’s Essential Guide To Nonprofit Innovation and Growth (Governance Edge, 2012).

After six weeks, I earned the privilege of being relocated from the ICU to a standard hospital room. It was pleasing to know that the medical experts no longer considered me on the verge of death. I was now on the miraculous road to recovery.

My first reward was a visit from my teammates. Before they entered the room, my mom thoroughly briefed them about what to expect in the hallway. She tried to explain what their friend, her son, had been through for the last six weeks, but words would not do it justice. As they all clambered into the 8x8 room, I mustered up as much enthusiasm as possible to demonstrate my latest achievement. Because I had limited mobility in my upper body, I mastered a clumsy and awkward flinging motion of my right forearm to my face. This was a shocking and grotesque action observed by my friends. They didn’t know how to respond to their teammate who once bull-dozed through the defensive line. Attempting to break the tension in the room, I jokingly, but very seriously, called out for help. “I haven’t learned how to get my hand back down.” It was warming yet painful to see my friends again. I knew for the first time how hard it was going to be to complete my mission. The way they looked at me is indescribable. It’s more than shock and empathy. It was the same “unknown” expression I had seen earlier on my father’s face. Their distance surrounded me, and the barrier between us was already built; little did I know that I would see the “unknown” look for the rest of my life.

This excerpt from JR Harding’s powerful new book, Now What? (SokheChapke Publishing), describes an incident early in JR’s inspiring true story, which is about mustering the courage and discipline to overcome quadriplegia and become a successful executive, policy leader and consultant.  JR’s courageous odyssey certainly illustrates every one of the four lessons of The Blind Visionary:  Reach out aggressively; Act on opportunities; Don’t let fear win; and Keep things in perspective.  It has been a privilege to get to know JR as a friend and colleague.

Check out JR’sFacebook page - http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100002428955547 and website - www.Jrharding.com.

 
JR Harding, Author of Now What?

The surest sign of likely success in the out-of-the-box change game, in my experience, is a chief executive officer (CEO) who is passionately committed to playing - and well prepared to play - what I call the Innovator-in-Chief role.  CEOs who excel at the Innovator-in-Chief role first and foremost make accomplishing out-of-the-box change a top-tier chief executive leadership priority.  They also bring to the out-of-the-box change game  substantial technical planning know-how, strong psychological and political skills, a large dollop of discipline and courage, and the internal stature to lead the change charge.  . . .

The CEO is the only person in your organization who can wear the Innovator-in-Chief hat for the simple reason that no one else brings to the change game the formal authority, influence, access to resources, and time required to spearhead an out-of-the-box change effort and to overcome the inevitable inertia and resistance that can sink a change ship early in its voyage.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that out-of-the-box change is just a top-down process or that your CEO could get the change job done on his own.  Of course not!  Without the backing of his board your CEO couldn't possibly succeed in the Innovator-in-Chief role.  And it's obvious that the bulk of the nuts and bolts work of planning and developing out-of-the-box change initiatives must be done by staff and volunteers.  But the fact remains:  Without a committed, capable Innovator-in-Chief ensconced in the chief executive suite, out-of-the-box change will almost certainly be the impossible dream.