Quick Tip #4: It’s Good to be Nosy

YES - IT”S GOOD TO BE NOSY!

Hiring a good consultant can be tricky.  Good credentials, a solid resume, and great recommendations help.  But when dollars for consulting help are so scarce and the stakes so high (as they usually are when an organization decides to get outside expertise), there’s one more question you should be asking prospective consultants.

 WHAT ELSE ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?

A really good, established consultant will tell you without your asking.  A good consultant will turn down work if it’s unlikely that s/he can devote the attention the project requires.  But some consultants keep adding on, taking project after project, until none of the projects, each one near and dear to the client, gets the time and skill needed to be successful.  For example, unless a consultant is commanding a large grant shop (and the client knows that someone else may be working on their proposal), it’s not a good idea for the same consultant to write two federal proposals at once.   You have no way of knowing unless you ask!

So be nosy.  Ask prospective consultants what else is on their plate. Maybe it’s “too much.”

Employers and CCAP: What role do companies play in creating worker shortage?

Governor Walker’s announcement of the plan to use WHEDA’s bonding authority to raise $100 million to invest in Milwaukee’s 30th Street Industrial Corridor is welcome news in many ways.  Most meaningful in the short term is that this economically depleted neighborhood might become the battleground for the race for Governor.  If only for the next month, the issues of this once booming part of town could be on the front page.  The announcement also demonstrates that there are a lot of ways to tackle economic development.  Using the WHEDA bonding authority as an instrument for economic development rather than continuing the non-job creation strategy of more and more housing development signals an evolution in thinking that is long overdue.

The innovative features of the plan are overshadowed by its adherence to two old, very worn-out shibboleths; namely, that Milwaukee companies have job they are unable to fill and that Milwaukee workers are too unskilled and undisciplined to be good employees.  Each of these is true to some extent but neither is as important as policymakers want to believe.  It only takes one story of a major corporate CEO complaining that he cannot find skilled workers for the policy and funding waters to part.  The blame game then becomes hot and heavy. Elected officials and corporate leaders practically stand in line to take shots at the Milwaukee Public Schools and Milwaukee Area Technical College, never mind the huge numbers of graduates of both institutions who are employed in local government and businesses.

Could both of these institutions do better?  Sure, but so could employers.  In major initiatives like the 30th Street project, employers are frequently asked what they want in workers but they are hardly ever asked about their hiring practices.  There is an assumption that there hiring practices are appropriate and fair.  This leads to the companion assumption that applicants who do not get hired failed to meet employer standards that were appropriate and fair.  This does not describe what is really happening.

Equal opportunity laws forced public employers like police and fire departments to completely revamp their application, testing, and hiring practices to remove bias and facilitate fair employment practices. As a result, diversity in their ranks has increased.   It is time corporate CEO’s who are complaining about worker shortages to look critically at their own hiring practices relative to racial disparities. One place to start is the growing reliance on CCAP (Circuit Court Automation Program) to predict whether a job applicant will be a good employee.  CCAP is an online information system which makes everyone’s legal past available for review. CCAP lists an individual’s traffic tickets, civil judgments, divorce proceedings, as well as felony convictions.  CCAP even lists charges that were later dismissed.  Nowhere has the term ‘too much information’ been more apt that in the case of what employers can learn and use against applicants via CCAP.  Of course employers want to know if an applicant has committed a felony.  Whether a felony conviction should bar someone from employment is another question.  The key thing is that minor things, like speeding or disorderly conduct tickets issues years prior, can be used a reasons not to hire. 

Is it any wonder that our state’s glaring racial disparity in law enforcement – including traffic stops, charging decisions, sentencing, and probation revocation – extends its ugly hands into the employment sphere?  A history of municipal ordinance violations or other legal troubles which has nothing to do with employment history or potential should not be used as a reason to disqualify potential applicants especially when we know how prevalent racial disparities are in law enforcement decision-making.

Our state has convened a Commission on Racial Disparity, funded projects locally to address the persistent imbalance in the application of the law, and tracks its progress in annual reports issued by the Office of Justice Assistance.  Clearly, the existence of racial disparities is not in question. Yet, employers continue to use the consequences of racial disparity, as reflected on CCAP, to keep people out of work.

Milwaukee employers should stop complaining about MPS, MATC, and the pool of prospective workers and take a hard, critical look at their own hiring practices, especially their reliance on CCAP as a primary tool for evaluating prospective workers.  We have let the private sector off the hook for too long.   Now is the time for employers to own up and stand up.

___________

For more information on racial disparities in Wisconsin, go to the Office of Justice Assistance website at http://oja.wi.gov/section.asp?linkid=1344&locid=97

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.

Quick Tip #2: How to Get Traction on an Issue

A problem comes up.  A work group gets formed.  The work group meets and talks about the problem.  The work group adjourns and returns the next week and starts over. Again and again, the work group gathers, chats, adjourns, and returns until someone has the temerity to say, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. 

How many dozens of times have you been in a work group like this where a) you can’t afford not to attend because there is an off chance something important may happen; and b) the meetings are the ultimate Ground Hog Day experience with no progress and no product.

How to stop this complete waste of everyone’s time?

1.  Make a list of decisions that need to be made.  The quickest way to do this is with a traditional brainstorming/issue voting process:  Each person makes his/her own list of three major decisions.  Those are posted or written on large sheets of paper (sticky notes can be very helpful here). The list is discussed by the group.  Then each person gets three votes (not all three can be used on the same item) to select priorities.  The vote is tallied.  Voila!  Your list of decisions to be made magically appears!

2. Stick to the decision list.  Treat the decision list as if it is a holy document.  The list becomes your agenda for your next meeting. “At our next meeting, we will tackle decision items #3, 4, and 5 so be prepared to resolve those items at that time.”  Use the decision list as the organizing framework for the work group’s efforts, measure progress against the list, and organizing reports to the sponsoring entity using the list.

3.  Prohibit backward motion.  We’ve all seen it happen.  A work group labors for months to make progress and then someone new comes to a meeting and wants to start at Point A.  Very often, because people are basically nice and want to be inclusive, a work group will allow itself to be taken back to the train station.  To avoid that, practice saying, “We’ve discussed that.  This was our decision and we’re now working on decision items #3, 4, and 5.  In other words, there is no going backward, only going forward.  Of course, if there is something alarmingly wrong with the first decision, the group ought to revisit it but barring that, full steam ahead at all times.

 4.  Write everything down.  There is great power in the written document.  Having agreed-upon decisions written down and distributed at the next meeting reminds people that those discussion on those items is done and no longer open to debate.  I call this consolidation of gains.  This is how traction occurs:  by consolidating the gains (decisions made) at the last meeting and pulling people’s attention to the next set of decisions.

 This approach requires that someone in the group is able to take charge.  If there is an appointed chairperson who can’t seem to lead the group toward progress, then some of the members might have to gently offer to create a work group charge using the decision list model.  Often, the chairperson will be grateful for the assistance. 

This method has worked for me many times.  Let me know if it’s helpful for you.

Ask the Consultant: Evaluating a Program You Don’t Like

What do you do as an evaluator when you really don’t like or support the program approach you are evaluating; say, it’s something contrary to your principles or beliefs?

This was a question asked by an Alverno University student of me and several evaluation colleagues who were speaking to her class last week. One colleague recounted a major evaluation focused on a teen pregnancy prevention approach he couldn’t endorse.  I recalled instances where, in the course of an evaluation, I encounted agency practices with clients that made me uncomfortable, even angry.  We all agreed that this problem comes up a lot for evaluators since, being human beings, we have often have very strong personal beliefs.

When this happens, though, there is an enormous risk of one’s personal beliefs influencing the objectivity of the evaluation.  This can happen in such subtle ways that even the evaluator isn’t aware that his/her biases are shading everything – the construction/selection of evaluation instruments, the content of interviews, and the interpretation of observed activity. While it is far better and a lot more fun for an evaluator to evaluate an approach he/she fundamentally endorses, the opposite is often true.  When in this situation, a couple of possible strategies might be useful.

First, one of the evaluators on the panel reminded us all that every program deserves a decent evaluation, sort of on the order of everyone accused of a crime is entitled to legal counsel.  Good thing to keep in mind.  Every program approach benefits from a thorough, well-conceived and implemented process and outcome evaluation.

Second, when an evaluator is put in a position of having to fairly evaluate a program approach he/she doesn’t like, the bottom line is sticking with the process.  This means evaluating a program based on its program design/logic model.  Period.  This means not letting alternative or more philosophically attractive approaches enter into the analysis as implicit or explicit points of comparison.  This is tough, but essential.

Third, the evaluator simply must keep her/his biases in check and be extra vigilant about avoiding any opportunities to go looking for evidence to support those biases.  Because an evaluator often has a lot of control over how success is defined and measured, this can be extremely challenging.  Basically, to do right by the evaluation, the evaluator has to put on and keep wearing the mantle of objectivity even when it chafes.

 These are some ideas about handling this thorny situation.  In future blog posts, I’ll be tackling other questions that have been posed to me about planning, grantwriting, collaboration, and professional ethics.  If you have a question, let me know.  Be glad to take a crack at answering!

Ham Up!

Ask not what you can do for your country. 

Ask what’s for lunch. 

 – Orson Welles

If you are an up and comer, a bright little nova about to burst in the sky, one of next year’s Forty Under Forty, then you’re making a big mistake if you work through lunch.  Oh, I hear you.  You have tons of work to do.  You like working through lunch because everyone else in the office is gone and it’s really nice and quiet.  You don’t want a reputation for taking long lunch hours.

Yes, I hear you, but you’ve got this one wrong. 

When I worked for Milwaukee County as their first Grants Coordinator, I’d just come from an agency where lunch was an art form.  However, in the County Courthouse, lunch meant going down the elevator to the Homicide: Life on the Streets cafeteria, eating a tuna sandwich and hotfooting upstairs before your minutes were up.  So when I headed for the elevator and got off on the 1st Floor to walk outside into the sunshine and the vast array of eateries around 9th and Wells, people piped up real quick, “Where are you going?”

Well, I’m going to lunch.  Why was I going to lunch?

Because I needed to make connections in order to get some big grants going and the place that connections could get made was LUNCH.

Yes, I could have had meetings with the same people.  But a meeting isn’t like lunch.  A meeting is about the agenda, getting things done, leaving with assignments, and feeling super efficient.  Lunch is about having a relationship with someone that is bigger than a single project, a connection that is more enduring, more intimate, and more fruitful over the long term. It’s talking about your kids, it’s knowing that someone actually has kids, it’s sharing information about new developments, it’s cracking a joke and having a decent laugh, it’s building a business friendship for the long haul.  Valuable stuff.

Like many of you, I tend to work through lunch (and I actually had a tuna sandwich today) but I know about the value of lunch and intend to recommit myself to this essential business practice.  So – get on the phone and make a date for lunch!  And I’ll do the same.

And, oh, kudos to the County’s old dungeon of a cafeteria – because it used to open at 5:00 a.m. which let folks like me who’d spent their working hours at lunch come in early to get their work done.

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

Quick Tip #1: Protect Your Meeting from Hijackers

Facilitating a group meeting, especially about a thorny subject, opens the door for hijacking if you’re not careful.  A meeting hijacking is when someone with a very strong point of view starts off the group discussion, setting a negative tone and direction for the meeting.  When this happens, other group members who are less willing to be vocal shrink before your very eyes.  They become spectators rather than participants.  It’s not pretty.

Here’s one way to avoid a hijacking. 

1.  Prepare for the meeting by developing THREE KEY QUESTIONS.  For example: “How did this report help you better understand this problem in Milwaukee.”  “What concerns raised by the report need to be addressed in the next revision?”  “What are three ways we could improve our system moving forward?”

2.  Start the meeting by asking each person – on their own/with no discussion – to provide written answers to the questions. 

3.  Open the discussion by going from person to person to get their responses.  As facilitator, use your ability to tie ideas together and to suggest other areas for consideration.

4. Continue to ask for elaboration, new ideas, while keeping the general framework of the questions as the agenda for the meeting.

Why this works:

• The action of writing one’s ideas down on paper empowers people.  If they write an idea down, they want to be sure to express it.  It becomes more valuable to them.
• If there is a potential hijacker in the room, his/her ideas become equal to everyone else’s.  The imperative of the ‘paper’ means that all ideas must be heard.  This makes it very awkward to monopolize the conversation.
• The strategy reduces the likelihood that the group will take off on an unproductive tangent.  The facilitator can always bring people back to the key questions.
• Participants’ written answers are ready-made notes of the meeting.  It’s not necessary but I ask people to identify themselves on these little surveys and it helps later when I want to seek clarification.

 This works for me and I’ve used it in some pretty touchy situations.  Let me know what you think.

Fix the Right Problem

When something terrible happens, we want to do something to prevent a recurrence.  A baby dies while sleeping with his mother and local officials and the public at large want to see a strategy presented that will keep such an awful thing from happening again.  The rate of HIV/AIDS increases among young gay African American men and a new program targeted at this group emerges.  This effort to jump in quickly to try to prevent another accident, another death, and more community sorrow is laudable but flawed.  Here’s why.

We can spend a lot of time and money trying to solve the wrong problem.  The diagnostic process is very abbreviated when a group of people want to see action right away.  “I don’t care what we do,” I’ve heard more than once.  We just need to have some action on this. Send the community a message that we’re going to do something about it.  No one wants another study group or task force, they’ll say.  Let’s just get moving!

My experience is that people hardly ever really know what needs to be done.  Faced with a disturbing community event or trend, say an 11-year old waving a gun around on a local playground or the smoking rate among young adults suddenly jumping several percentage points, the leadership, including the content experts, will assume that they know a) the origins of the problem; and b) how to fix it.  More over, they will have a sense of certainty that will push all alternative explanations and ideas into a very small corner. This is a mistake. In order to solve a problem, we need to understand its origins. 

For example, if we respond the the 11-year old with the gun by implementing yet another violence prevention curriculum, will that prevent other kids from bringing weapons to school?  No, it won’t, unless we spend the time figuring out why kids think it’s a good idea to bring a gun to school.  First of all, why is there a gun at home where the child can reach it?  Second, what was this child’s and most children’s thoughts when they bring guns to school?  Are they wanting to impress, joke around, scare somebody?  Are they being bullied?  (This is our very favorite explanation now.)  Are they the bullier?  Is the point of intervention the child?  Or is it the parent?  If we up the violence prevention curriculum and there is still a gun lying on the dresser at home, have we changed this child’s mindset?  I don’t know.

It is very possible to have wonderful programs with great outcomes that have little or no effect on a community problem.  It happens all the time.  It happens because program designers, funders, and implementers are often too sure of themselves and their solutions.  Even an evidence-based approach is no insurance that a program will have an impact on the community even if the program’s participants have positive outcomes.  For example, taking our gun example, after a violence prevention curriculum, 80% of students thought it was a bad idea to bring a gun to school. Is this success?  Community change?  Not if the young person is having this positive thought while gunshots are being heard down the street.

The tricky thing about program design – deciding what to do – is that it requires time, patience, diligence, and courage.  New questions need to be asked of different types of people living in different neighborhoods and having different reasons for what they do and think.  By assuming we know what to do and how to do it, we sacrifice real impact for speed and the illusion of change.  Time to try a different approach.

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.