Quick Tip #3: Take a Little Walk

The other day, a friend of mine who works in a large Milwaukee nonprofit joked that her boss only said hello to staff when she was showing a board member around the agency.  Otherwise, the boss is unseen or walks by without acknowledging anyone. 

Wow. What a tiny, no-cost, missed opportunity to build morale!

That boss should learn about the Wes Scott rule of starting your day when you’re the CEO of a large nonprofit.  Mr. Scott, a long time director of the Milwaukee Urban League, also served on the Social Development Commission as a board member and served a stint as Interim Director for a few years after a particularly tumultuous time in the agency.  Mr. Scott was charming, urbane, wise, and funny.  He could chat up anyone.

So Mr. Scott would start his mornings at SDC by pouring a big mug of coffee and walking through the agency to personally greet everyone.  A “Good Morning” here, a “How’s it going?” there.  Every morning.  Then he’d go back to his office and get to work.  When I asked him about that years later, he explained that it got his day off to the right start.  Note – his day.  But from what SDC employees told me after he left, it was something that meant a lot to them.  The executive director thought they were important enough to greet every day.

A little thing, right?  Maybe not.

Women and Leadership: We’re Still Not There

Women are better leaders but poor self-promotors.  That’s the conclusion of a study of 7,280 leaders done in 2011 and discussed in a recent Forbes article. They’re better than men at taking initiative and driving for results.  I think this is a hoot since those are characteristics that have been perceived as so exclusively male.  At last, research confirms what I know from watching powerful women handle tough groups and challenging projects.

Women know how to get things done.  They know how to push a project to completion and usually know how to keep a team intact and focused.  What they haven’t figured out and what the author of this piece points out is how to play the ‘getting ahead’ game within an organization. 

Two things are at play here.  First, I think women are very performance-based and they tend to think that rewards will follow good performance.  Second, I think most women are blind to the enduring influence of male social networks (using the term Old Boys Club would be inflammatory).  The going out for drinks after work, playing golf, being in the same softball league, hey, even the constant talking about sports – these are the ties that bind for men.  So when a man in a position to promote thinks about who to promote, he thinks about his friend.  He’s not necessarily discounting the woman’s experience and skill, he just knows the guy better and feels in his gut that he can trust him.

Meanwhile, the unpromoted woman is counting up all the extra projects and hours, the accolades, and the recognition and she is wondering what happened here?  She is discounting the male bonding that’s been going on while she’s scrambling to pick up the kids at day care (yes, I know, men also pick up kids from day care) but worrying about kids, dinner, grocery-shopping, all of that end of the day business is still mostly  in the mom’s job description. 

For a long time, I think women figured that if they could get in the door, they could rise to the top through great performance.  That is sometimes true, but it isn’t the norm, otherwise, we wouldn’t think a female executive of a major corporation is all that noteworthy.  However, we are still seeing headlines about someone being the first woman to run a large corporation.  This morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinal ran an article on the business page about Pat Kampling, the first woman to run a Wisconsin utility corporation and, as the paper said, one of a handful of female top executives in the State. 

So much has changed for women in the last thirty years. It’s easy to lose sight of that.  But so much is the same.  The in-group, the clique, the network — it loves its own and marginalizes outsiders.  That’s a sociological fact from the ages.  How to bust open that closed, subtle, amorphous web is the big question.  Or, better yet, how can we replace the old network with a new one that has a lot of doors and windows – an airy, transparent place  where everyone can hang out.  That’d be great.

Here’s the link to the Forbes article:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/26/the-results-are-in-women-are-better-leaders/?goback=%2Egde_2825126_member_104106429

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal article:  http://www.jsonline.com/business/plugging-into-customer-needs-nr496vp-145595375.html

My Take on Youth Violence, Part 2: Why are Kids So Angry?

We have an opportunity to connect the dots on this community’s youth violence and maybe start to do something meaningful about it. 

We know that Milwaukee’s gun violence situation is getting worse all the time.  Even though homicides are down, shootings have increased.  This is the first dot, our starting point. Hearing shots fired in many neighborhoods is so commonplace that no one bothers to call the police anymore.  Many Milwaukee kids could tell us more about where shots were fired and by whom than the beat cops probably could.  They hear it all the time.  This should make us wonder whether it is still scary for them.  Maybe, the terror has evaporated and gunshots have become a lot like a car alarm going off.  They hear it but it doesn’t have any impact.

The second dot is the level of violence in many Milwaukee schools.  It isn’t obvious every day but the potential for violence is always bubbling in our schools, particularly high schools.  The hallways can be rough and the security personnel know it.  That’s why they’re stationed with walkie-talkies in strategic places at the top of stairs and the bends in hallways.  Things can go south in a hurry in a public school.  A jostle, an insult is all it takes for physical violence to erupt.  A phone call to mom or siblings brings reinforcements that escalate the fight into a lot more serious business.

Predictably, public officials look at the growing violence and start talking about teaching kids conflict resolution skills.  They say we need to teach kids to handle their frustration and anger without shooting each other.  They have to settle their fights with their fists.  If only Father Flanagan would come back to life and show us the way.  To me, saying that kids need to handle their frustration and anger better begs a very large question and that is, why are kids so angry in the first place?

That’s the question we need to be asking.  It isn’t going to do any good to create one more conflict resolution program or paint any more peace symbols on the wall until we face the ugly truth about why so many of Milwaukee’s kids are so volatile, so hyper-vigilant, and so ready to fight and hurt other people.  My theory is that they’re hurt, badly hurt, and the hurt started when they were little kids and hasn’t let up for a single day.

And here is the third dot.   Why is it that African American students, particularly boys, are three times more likely than White kids to be suspended from school?  Why are African American boys so frequently placed in special education?  Beginning even in kindergarten, school can be an unwelcoming and even hostile place for an African American boy.  What does it mean to put a child out of the school building, not once or twice but dozens of times over the course of a single school year?  What does it say to the child?  Leave.  We don’t want you here.

Being put out of school is just one part of the anger-building process but it’s a fundamental one.  Add to the equation a young boy thinking his father doesn’t want him either.  Add to that the stress and strain of coping with poverty and wanting what other people have like a decent house, a car, and a job.  Anger and frustration takes years to build to the level where a young man can whip out a gun and shoot somebody.  How do we replace the early hurt suffered by so many young men in our city with attention and compassion?  How do we stop rejecting and start embracing?  Those are the questions to ask.

When in Doubt, Blame: Reflections on Milwaukee’s Infant Mortality Problem

This isn’t the first time that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has gone on a star search.  Remember last year’s fawning over Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone?   What was the matter with Milwaukee?  How come we don’t have a Geoffrey Canada?  Why aren’t we having phenomenal success educating low-income, African American kids?  What’s wrong with us?  If the education establishment knew what it was doing, it would replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in Milwaukee.

Now, about a year later, the new subject of adoration is Mario Drummonds, leader of the Northern Manhatten Perinatal Partnership.  Like Mr. Canada, Mr. Drummonds is a charismatic figure whose zeal, commitment and talent organized a blitzkrieg of activities on a single housing project, the 1,500 unit St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem.  (See “Milwaukee infant mortality rate still high, despite years of effort, millions spent,” in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 5/7/11))  http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/121449039.html

Immediately, the conclusion is drawn that if Milwaukee had its act together, our infant mortality rate would plummet.  If Milwaukee would marshal its resources and not have 112 different initiatives working throughout the city (a list which, by the way, seems to include every parenting program, research project, and child development effort in the city in addition to programs specifically addressing infant mortality), then we could beat this problem and get out from under being one of the worse places in the U.S. to be a baby.  In essence, if we could replicate Mario Drummonds’ program in Milwaukee, we’d have it made.

It doesn’t work like that, folks.

Because it’s not about Mario Drummonds’ program.  It’s about Mario Drummonds.  Just like it’s not about the Harlem Children’s Zone.  It’s about Geoffrey Canada. Each of these men is what is called a Monomaniac on a Mission (MOM), a very technical term for the one person who is willing to move heaven and earth to achieve something and can convince other people to leave their cars running in the street to come and help.

There are a million things that are different about the places where Mr. Drummonds and Mr. Canada developed their projects.  History, politics, access to wealth, receptiveness to innovation, diversity, and culture of challenge and confrontation are some of the elements to be considered.  Their programs were shaped by the environment, by opportunities that were presented, and by their own personal ability to convince others to invest substantial resources — millions of dollars — in achieving the desired results.

Rather than blaming the hundred small, shoestring agencies that are trying to help young parents do a better job, maybe we ought to look at what kind of environment Milwaukee provides for budding MOMs.  When one comes along, do we listen or tell him/her to sit down and wait their turn?  Do we get behind big dreams or resent them?  Embrace vision or write it off as tilting at windmills?  Do we recognize community anger and frustration as the growing power of change or run away from it?

Like 99% of things in the world, “it’s complicated.”  Replication of programs from other cities rarely works unless virtually all of the environmental features are the same.  The adult drug court model is an example of a very successful replication process throughout the country.  Programs that have been shaped and developed around a single personality usually fall flat.  It’s not a committee that makes those innovations work, it’s one absolutely electric person at the center.

We’ve got those live wires in Milwaukee.  We really do.  Time to let them loose and see what they can do.

Put That Damn Thing Down!

There are a lot of people I know – or know of - who  just can’t wait to get the hammer.  You know the type.  You’re sitting in a meeting, get up to sharpen your pencil, and by the time you get back, the nuclear option is on the table.  Times are tough, people not doing what you want?  Let’s knock ‘em upside the head with something extremely heavy. 

Why talk when you can put a gun to someone’s head?  Which is, I think, the reasoning of the stick-up guy at the gas station who declines having a conversation about his personal unemployment issues in favor of jacking a guy out of $20 right now. 

There seems to be a lot of this hammerhead thing going around right now.  If I was a political analyst, which I’m not, I’d say that Scott Walker has made kind of a fast leap to the heavy tools.  What bothers me about this isn’t what you might think.  I’m not a big defender of public employees or unions for that matter.  Public employee pensions really irk me – probably because as an independent business person, I pay a huge amount of social security tax and have no pension.  But I realize that pension benefits were a negotiated benefit and that the government and the unions agreed to this stuff fair and square.  It’s not like the unions crawled through a window and stole these benefits off the kitchen table.

What irks me is this:  the hammer wielder’s presumption that his opponents are unreasonable, selfish, and unaware of the community (or in this case, the state’s) crisis.  Another shade of that is his presumption that he  absolutely knows the right thing to do and there’s no point in discussing it with anyone who doesn’t agree.  No dialogue. No listening.  No allowing for a spark of genius or creative solution.

I really can’t stand that.  It’s a level of arrogance and dismissiveness of other interests that irks me a lot more than enormously fat pensions ever could.  Not cool.  Not smart.  Not in Madison or right here in our fair city.

Where You Sit Is Important

There aren’t a lot of lessons from the corporate world these days but there are some.  I was struck by the profile of Oshkosh Corp. retiring CEO, Robert Bohn that appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over the weekend.  “CEO to stand at ease, Oshkosh Corp. has thrived under hands-on leadership, 12/5/10, http://www.jsonline.com/business/111307789.html

Here’s the sentence that caught my eye:  “One of Bohn’s first moves (when he took over management of the company) was to put a desk on the factory floor, where he learned the operations and production issues.” 

From this birdseye view, Bohn restructured the production line to be more efficient and offer a more interesting and challenging work environment for employees.  While much of Oshkosh Corp’s tremendous growth over the past many years is the direct result war (Iraq and Afghanistan) and the aftermath of 9/11, it was Bohn’s connection to the day-to-day that created the company’s ability to successfully manage that growth.

There’s a lesson here for nonprofit and government managers, especially those in human services.  Having a desk on the factory floor is a little harder for them but the idea is the same.  Staying connected to the day to day lives of line staff, hearing firsthand what clients want and need, and having a solid understanding of the complexity of the work all add up to smarter leadership and a better team.  I also think it leads organizations to the nonprofit equivalent of profit — better outcomes for the investment. 

Just something to think about.