Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

The Opportunity: The Door to Civic Progress

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For two years, I’ve been interviewing civic leaders for a podcast. I look for two kinds of people to interview. Most are leaders who’ve accomplished something strikingly successful in their communities; a smaller number are people who, through their experiences, have learned a leadership skill that’s valuable for others to know.

The format is simple. I introduce the leaders. We talk for about 15 minutes about their successes or skills, and I close by asking them for advice: If someone from another community asked how to take on a difficult project or master this skill, what would they say?

In the 23 interviews I’ve done to date, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about what civic leaders do and how they think. I’ve learned that most of their work isn’t heroic or visionary. It’s more like project management, as they move from one meeting, planning session, or presentation to another.

I’ve learned something about the motivations of these people. They seem driven to accomplish something meaningful, and communities offer an ideal stage for these achievements because civic projects often end with things you can reach out and touch—buildings, roads, and parks—things that will endure for decades. This concreteness and sense of permanence appeals to civic leaders.

And finally I’ve learned that despite the long hours of unpaid labor, the tedium of public meetings, and stress of occasional conflict, many of these people consider civic work an escape from their regular jobs. One civic leader told me away from the microphone that his project, which had occupied him for a decade and a half, was, outside of his family life, “the most fun I’ve ever had.”

These are valuable things to know. It explains why cities are undergoing a renaissance these days. Somehow cities have learned to attract and harness the work of these leaders more effectively than in the past. And it assures me that this isn’t a phase. People will always seek meaning in their lives, and if cities continue offering a stage for these seekers, they’ll be successful.

Interesting as all this was to learn, though, it wasn’t why I started the podcast. I’ve actually been looking for something else: the structure of civic progress.

This is an old interest of mine. In fact, I started this blog four years ago so I could think out loud about civic progress, how it worked, and how we could make it work better. Along the way, I’ve made some stabs at a grand theory. A few years ago, I created a map of community change showing step by step how leaders moved from awareness of a need to a widely accepted solution.

Most of the map still seems right to me, but I’ve learned from the interviews that an important element was missing. You can’t, I’ve come to understand, view civic progress simply as a process. You have to see it as a system as well; one that, in the right circumstances, can be mobilized as a process. Leaders, then, have three responsibilities: Make sure the system is healthy, learn how the process of civic progress works, and know how to transform the system into a campaign for community improvement.

And what is the spark that mobilizes the system into a process? I call it “the opportunity.” It’s not the same as a need nor is it necessarily a solution. It’s more like a path to the solution. If civic progress were a sport, we’d call it an “opening” the hole in a line of scrimmage that a running back sees, the pass a point guard makes to set up a score, the moves a chess master sees that lead in five turns to checkmate.

If this sounds confusing, bear with me. It’s harder to understand the opportunity in theory than in practice, and the interviews offer plenty of examples. Maybe the best was in my interview with Cathy Woolard, the former Atlanta city council member (and, later, council president) who stumbled across a transformative project called the Beltline and saw, in an instant, how it could solve many of Atlanta’s transportation and land-use problems.

Here’s how she describes that moment of insight: “It was literally the right day, the perfect council member, the perfect district, for me to be able to look at (this idea) and know immediately what the benefit would be to the residents of my district in particular.” Because she saw the opportunity offered by the Beltline and figured a way through a maze of political and bureaucratic processes, Woolard was able to move this visionary project from grad-school planning thesis to urban reality. Today the Beltline, a circle of trails and parks around downtown Atlanta, is being built, and the sections that are open are wildly popular with cyclists, runners, and strollers.

You can see another opportunity in the interview with Scott Tigchelaar, a movie studio president who talked the small town of Senoia, Georgia into turning itself into a permanent film location. What triggered this, he said, was the sale of some land in downtown Senoia. Over the years Tigchelaar had used the town for movie locations (if you watched the 1991 movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” you’ve seen Senoia). He feared a new owner would put up something that would ruin the town for movie shootings, so he approached the mayor and council with a deal: Create new design and zoning laws, allow us to buy the land and build some appropriate new buildings, and we’ll bring you a steady stream of movie productions, along with tourism opportunities. (It worked. Filming goes on year-round in Senoia, tourists flock there to see where their favorite TV shows are filmed, and the town has a host of new restaurants and shops.)

And then there’s John Turner, the businessman who helped restore a river through downtown Columbus, Georgia and, by doing so, turned a slow, muddy stream into roaring whitewater. Some had speculated as far back as the 1970s that Columbus might have world-class rapids beneath its downtown dams. But it wasn’t until Turner and others learned 20 years later that those dams were failing that he saw the opportunity to tear them down and create the longest urban whitewater attraction in America.

Opportunities arrive, then, when a long-felt need (to change land use and transportation in Atlanta, to preserve a small town’s unique economy, to do something about a neglected river) is connected with a sudden change in the environment (a visionary plan drops on a council member’s desk, tracts of land are offered for sale, old dams show signs of failing) and a way forward is seen (master the transportation planning process, get the city council to agree to design standards, gain government approval to remove the dams and alter the river).

And who connects these things and sees the way forward? Leaders do.

In fact, this is probably the most creative thing that leaders do in cities. Like great business innovators (think Steve Jobs) or talented politicians (think FDR or LBJ), great civic leaders see paths that are hidden to most of us and connect things others hadn’t put together. Not all civic leaders can do this because it takes a special mind to see an opening to success and a strong will to push an entire community through the opening.

If you’re not that kind of leader, don’t despair. There are other things civic leaders do that are critically important, such as tending the system and managing the process of civic progress. I’ll talk about these leadership roles in future posts.

For the time being, though, keep this image in mind: Civic progress is neither a system nor a process; it’s both. And the door between the two is the opportunity. Trust me on this. I had 23 great teachers who showed it to me.

Photo by lau.svensson licensed under Creative Commons.

Like/Unlike

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Thinking is hard work, and if we had to think our way through every thing we did, we couldn’t keep up. That’s why we use mental shortcuts, which come in two forms: Framing for making sense of things and models that give us strategies for action.

Most of the time, these things work so well that we hardly notice them. We see something new (merchants complain about teenagers loitering near their stores), we frame it (public safety threat) and know what to do (send in the cops to warn the teens and, if that doesn’t work, write tickets). But what if the usual models don’t work or if the thing that pops up doesn’t appear to fit any previous frames? That’s when it’s time for something I call “Like/Unlike.”

To understand why this is helpful, you have to know how the shortcuts work together. The key step is the framing, which is a fancy way of saying we’ve put something into a category (teens loitering = public safety threat). The point of putting things into categories is to limit our options for response. There’s nothing wrong with that—it gives us a manageable list of actions to take—and as long as we put things in the right categories, these actions should work. Mind the caution: As long as we put things in the right categories.

If you look around, you can see this framing process at work in cities. One of my favorites is the dilemma posed by food trucks for city regulators and health inspectors. Are food trucks more like restaurants or hot dog carts? If you put them in the hot dog cart frame, then you should regulate where they operate but not worry too much about health inspections. If you put them in the restaurant frame, then you shouldn’t say much about where they operate but you should be diligent about health inspections. (My suggestion: Consider them a third category with their own set of regulations.)

The key is to pause before applying the frame. And Like/Unlike will help with that. It’s a simple way of checking your assumptions. You can do it through a quick mental checklist or you can pull together a group and do it more formally.

Either way, it involves listing attributes and categories, then asking whether the attributes fall into any of the categories. In the food truck example, food trucks are like hot dog carts in that they do business on public rights of way (which raises concerns about location) but like restaurants in that they prepare food in non-standard ways (which raises concerns about public health).

If you have enough attributes and categories, you can make a grid and do check marks. When you’ve finished, you should be able to stand back and see if the evidence points toward an obvious category (and resulting set of actions) or if you should approach the problem as something entirely new. (Don’t be too surprised if you find that you need more information. After all, why are those teenagers standing on that corner?)

Again, the key is the pause. The best leaders are those who are thoughtful, who don’t rush to judgment, who see dimensions to problems that others don’t. The thoughtfulness doesn’t paralyze good leaders. They understand full well the need for action, but they want to be sure the analysis that drives the actions is as accurate as possible.

And what makes it accurate is putting things in the right categories from the start. Like/Unlike will help.

This is part of a series of brief postings called Rules for Reformers. For an introduction to the series, please click here.

The Leader as Strategist and Persuader

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I’ve met a lot of mayors over the years. Some were smart, a few were philosophical, many were shrewd, but only a handful were strategic. One of the few, Frank Martin, died a few weeks ago.

Martin was the mayor of Columbus, Georgia who, in a single term in office in the early 1990s, changed his city. Yes, you read that right: He served a single four-year term. (It was his decision. He finished his term to acclaim but chose not to run again.) And in that single term he set in motion changes that are still being felt, 20 years later.

I met Mayor Martin when I was researching a book about the remarkable turnaround of Columbus’ downtown, which was a desolate and hopeless place in the 1970s, only to be reborn three decades later as a thriving business, cultural, entertainment, and educational center. I wanted to know how these things happened, and that led me to the political leader who had changed the arc of the city. (If you’re interested in the book, you can find it here.)

We had three long conversations, one by phone, one in his office, and a third for a podcast. Each time we talked I was impressed by how his mind worked. He had the ability to look at something familiar (the city he had lived in his entire life or the government he presided over), see assets and opportunities that others couldn’t, and move decisively toward them. And, in a nutshell, that’s what great strategists do.

And one more thing: He knew how to change people’s minds. That’s important because, in civic work, it’s not enough to see the right thing to do. You have to bring others along with you. Martin knew that words weren’t enough. If you wanted to change people’s minds, you needed actions as well. Bold actions.

When he became mayor in 1991, Columbus was at a very low ebb. For 15 years, a handful of business and civic leaders had been searching for ways to turn around the downtown, without much success. For one thing, there was the sheer size of the problem: Block after block of empty storefronts, sleazy bars and porn shops, and some of the tackiest retail imaginable. The good stores had moved out of downtown in the 1960s, and many of the offices had joined them in the 1970s. (No one lived downtown then.) A few new projects had been built—a convention center, a hotel, a new office building or two—but the tide was still running out for downtown.

And beyond that, there was a huge impediment to change, which was the citizens’ deep-seated cynicism. After seeing decades of decline, they thought the downtown was hopeless and any effort to help it was throwing good money after bad. In fact, they thought the same of the city itself. In the citizens’ minds, Columbus was, if not declining, going nowhere and nothing could change it.

So, where do you begin when you’re trying to save a city that doesn’t believe in itself? Martin’s answer was to start with a bang, with what he called his “man on the moon project,” a project so ambitious and difficult to achieve that, when it does succeed, the civic self-doubt fades away. He found such a project on his first day in office, when he opened a closet in the mayor’s office and discovered a complete set of plans for a civic center. A previous mayor had commissioned the plans and then quietly rolled them up and stowed them away, defeated by the project’s politics and finances.

That, Martin decided, would be his “man on the moon project.” He would build the civic center that a line of mayors had talked about but been unable to deliver. To make a long story short, he did just that, and Columbus has an impressive new civic center today. But Martin didn’t stop there. While he was working on the civic center project, he put together a huge bond referendum that in addition to financing the civic center would make sewer improvements, build sidewalks and parks, and construct a major new softball complex near downtown. He campaigned furiously for the referendum and got it passed.

From the outside, this may not seem like much, but in the sleepwalk that was Columbus in the early 1990s, it was a huge awakening. And Martin was just getting started. The sewer project had an interesting feature, he came to understand. It involved running miles of storm water pipes alongside the Chattahoochee River. And here’s where Martin’s knack for strategic thinking came in: Why not turn this sewer project into a major new public asset by placing a river walk on top of it? (The idea wasn’t his, but he once he heard it, he grasped what it could mean.) He approached the city’s foundations and businesses, and they agreed to put up the additional money. The result is one of the largest and most attractive urban river walks in America today, stretching more than 20 miles.

And the softball complex? It became the way that Columbus got a share of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when it served as host for the women’s softball competitions. The city that doubted itself was suddenly seeing itself on international broadcasts, with its beautiful new riverfront improvements as a setting.

I could go on and on about Martin’s accomplishments and how they laid the groundwork for the downtown’s revival. (Again, if you’re interested, read the book.) But at the center of things was a civic leader who combined the mind of a strategist with a shrewd understanding of human nature and what it took to move people.

And these are the things the best leaders do: They see unnoticed assets, find ways of making them greater and far more apparent, and bring others along on the journey. Cities need an army of such people, but sometimes it takes only a few. Or, at the right time and in the right place, just one.

Photo of the Columbus Riverwalk from The Great Project, used with permission

Civic Work and the Importance of Relationships

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In early 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an all-out effort to deal with his city’s traffic problems by proposing that the city charge drivers who entered the most congested areas. Mayors don’t have that kind of authority, so he asked the New York State Legislature to give it to him. Over a week’s time, Bloomberg turned on the charm, with dinners for legislators at the mayor’s residence, a team of lobbyists working in Albany, and elaborate presentations showing lawmakers how their districts would be affected by the changes.

Didn’t work. Legislators barely considered Bloomberg’s proposal, and some seemed to enjoy snubbing the mayor. Why? One reason was the hurry-up nature of Bloomberg request; legislators thought the mayor was being disrespectful by asking for a quick vote. But another reason was Bloomberg himself. As one legislator, generally considered a friend of the mayor’s, told the New York Times, “All politics is relationships, and if he hasn’t built the relationships over time, he can’t suddenly create those relationships with 48 hours to go in the process. It just shows that six and a half years into his term, the mayor just does not know how to approach the legislature.”

Ouch. And, yet, unquestionably true—both about Bloomberg, who clearly isn’t comfortable rubbing elbows with politicians, and politics in general. All politics are relationships, but then again so are most human endeavors. And nowhere is that more true than in civic work, as I’ll explain shortly.

But, first, a word about relationships in general. It goes almost without saying that we need other people to have productive and meaningful lives, but we sometimes don’t appreciate how much. Here’s a hint: Academics who’ve studied natural disasters, like hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, earthquakes in Italy, and tsunamis in Asia, have found that the people most likely to survive and later restore their lives are those with the greatest number of relationships. Partly it’s because they have support systems that others don’t, and in times of great trauma, being surrounded by those who care about you makes you want to go on. But it’s not just psychological, researchers have learned; the well-connected have access to a storehouse of knowledge about getting things done. One researcher who had studied a tsunami’s aftermath in India explained it this way: “Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals, and weddings, those were the individuals who were tied into the community. They knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid.”

And it’s not just during disasters. Researchers who’ve studied corporate CEOs have consistently found that those promoted from within companies do better, on average, than those hired from outside. This isn’t true in every case, of course, but it’s true in the aggregate: Those hired from within last longer in their jobs than those recruited from other companies. There are many explanations for this, but one that researchers point to again and again is that home-grown executives know from day one how the company really works—what academics call “private knowledge” (unlike information you could get about the company from looking at its financial statements and organizational charts or looking things up on Google). And private knowledge—about how decisions are made, who is reliable, where and why initiatives have failed in the past—can be decisive in a CEO’s career.

Or in a civic leader’s career. Why is it so important to have a big and diverse network in civic work? Two reasons:

  • Power and resources are diffuse in cities. You can’t make major changes in cities by having one or two people, or even a small group, say yes; you have to get large groups to agree. The only way to do that is by knowing the decision makers well enough to win their commitments at the right time. And that takes long-established relationships. (Are you listening, Mayor Bloomberg?)
  • Communities are incredibly diverse: economically, politically, religiously, ethnically, in educational attainment, in years spent in the community, and on and on. As a result, you have to work harder at building relationships in communities than in companies or most other human activities, for the simple reason that the people whose help you’ll need won’t always run in your circles. The first task of community relationship building, then, is to consciously seek out people who aren’t like you.

But on the other side of these obstacles is a big reward for those who overcome them: Because communities are so diverse and power so diffuse, there’s a great deal of private knowledge in cities—basically, information about getting things done that isn’t widely known. The result is that the person with the best relationships—deep in trust and broad in diversity—is the one best positioned to accomplish things. If a project is stalled, she’ll know how to get it back on track. If a crisis blows up, she’ll know the critical constituencies who’ll need to be reassured and how to do it. If there’s financing problem in an important project, she’ll know those most likely to step in with resources.

This leads us to the next big question: If relationships are so important to civic work and the benefits so great, how do you form them? How do you meet people and turn acquaintances into friends? And once you’ve deepened your relationships, how do you use them to benefit your civic work and the city?

Sociologists who’ve studied the connections between people say there are four things that strengthen relationships: the time people spend together, their sense of identification with one another, the trust that’s formed between the two (especially how free they feel in sharing confidences), and how they reciprocate, which is an academic’s way of saying trading favors.

When you look at this list, you can see how things work pretty much in that order: First, people spend time together, then they see things in the other person they identify with (even if, on the surface, the other person seems different), they begin confiding in one another, and finally they help each other out. By the time you get to that final stage, trading favors, you have a deep relationship.

As a side note, don’t let the term “trading favors” turn you off. It’s one of the oldest and most beneficial human instincts. If someone helped you move from a dorm room to an apartment in college, and you later helped him move, you’ve traded favors. If you swapped turns driving the carpool to soccer practice, you’ve traded favors. If a civic leader helped you raise money for your project and you did the same for hers, you’ve traded favors. Trading favors becomes a bad thing only when it involves trading things you don’t actually own, such as government resources.

Still, I haven’t actually answered the question. It’s important to understand the stages of relationships, but knowing them doesn’t explain how to move through them. Here’s where civic work becomes the answer to its own problem: You do it through volunteering. It’s the best way—maybe the only sure way—of meeting large numbers of people and working alongside them. Want to know who’s reliable? Work on a Habitat for Humanity project. Want to know who’s wise? Serve on a nonprofit board. Want to know who truly knows their parts of the community? Raise money with them.

And this brings us, finally, to the reasons for the relationships. For friendship, sure. To be a more civically engaged and culturally aware person, of course. But the reason you set out to build those civic relationships was to get things done in your community. And for that you have to ask people to do things: to serve on a committee, donate money, or turn out their friends for an important event.

I understand why some are reluctant to ask; they fear it makes them seem pushy. In fact, just the opposite. It makes you look like a leader. Rather than thinking less of you, people will think more of you when you ask for their help. And when they agree, they’ve invested in your success. And that may be the ultimate stage of a relationship.

Chris Matthews, the television commentator, wrote not long ago that this was something John F. Kennedy learned early in his political career: You have to ask. Matthews says it’s what has been missing from President Obama’s administration. Yes, he raised enormous hopes (and donations) among his followers in 2008. But once in office Obama didn’t ask them to do anything other than cheer for him. (Unlike, say, the Tea Party, which has continuously asked its followers to do things in opposition to President Obama.) “There are certain basics to becoming a leader,” Matthews wrote in an essay for Time magazine. “The first is asking people to follow you. Kennedy asked. Obama used people to get elected.” Matthews supports Obama, but, he adds, “He needs to start asking.”

So do you. If you want to create loyalty, which is the deepest level of relationship you can have in public or private life, you need to ask people to do things for you. But first, be prepared to spend time with people who aren’t much like you. And be quick to help them with their projects.

Photo by United Way of Greater St. Louis licensed under Creative Commons.

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

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The best thing about writing a blog, I’ve come to learn, is that you sometimes surprise yourself. I’ve been writing one since February 2010, a little more than two years’ time, and I can already see small changes in my thinking about the things that interest me: how communities change, how people become leaders, how citizens figure into civic progress, and how local politics works. Don’t get me wrong; in re-reading my postings, I largely agree with the central ideas, but I see changes in how I’d put things today.

Here’s an example: the core skills of community leadership, which I wrote about in April 2010. I still believe that leaders who want to be effective in civic work have to master a set of skills, and the five I listed—empathy, facilitation, strategy, learning and motivation—are the right ones. But I’d call some of them by different names today and place them in a different order.

What has caused my thinking to evolve is the work I’ve done in how change happens. In a set of postings, beginning last August, I mapped out how deliberate change comes to communities. (Literally, I called it a map, with starting points and steps along the way, ending in adoption and implementation.) There’s a lot to the map—it took seven postings to explain it all—and one result of spending so much time studying the process was a new appreciation for what it takes to move things through it. That’s the role, of course, of leaders.

And that brought me back around to looking at those five core skill sets. Here’s briefly how I described them two years ago:

  • Empathy: These are the skills that allow leaders to understand others and work with them, “particularly those with whom you have the least in common.”
  • Facilitation: These are the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies. Think of this as putting empathy to work.”
  • Strategy: These skills “help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward.”
  • Learning: These are the skills that “help you search for, find, and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources.”
  • Motivation: These skills “help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.”

As I said earlier, I agree that these are the key skills, but I’d put them in a different order, using different words to describe them. Here’s how:

The first skill set is still empathy, but I’d call it relationship building. And, yes, empathy is still important to relationships. But the aim of civic relationships, I’ve come to know, is not to understand people but to enlist them in civic work, and it now seems to me that “relationship building” is a more purposeful and action-oriented term. I’d still put it as the first skill to be mastered because relationship building is where community leadership begins. Without a group of people to call on for assistance and advice—and, ideally, a diverse group—it’s impossible to be a civic leader.

The second skill set is the one I put as number four on the list two years ago, learning. It’s not a great name, but I’ll stick with it for the time being. These skills are about seeing community problems and finding their solutions. Why have I moved it up? Because this is the engine of community change. Change begins when people with strong community relationships meet problems they believe they can solve. So mix relationship building with learning and you have ignition. My caution is that learning is a process and not an event, and the process has two parts: seeing the problems and finding workable solutions. As I wrote in this posting, leaders sometimes get the order reversed. That is, they fall in love with a solution they’ve seen elsewhere—a river walk, say, or a streetcar line—without thinking much about the problem it’s meant to solve. If they did, they might realize that plunking a river walk or streetcar in their community may not improve things . . . and could make things worse.

The third skill set is strategy, and I think my description two years ago still works. It’s about seeing the “critical path” that the change process must follow—the necessary steps of citizen meetings, private consultations, fundraising, committee meetings, public hearings, and government approvals—and marshaling the people and resources to make the journey. If relationship building and learning starts the engine of change, then strategy gives it a map.

Facilitation is the fourth skill set. It’s not a great name, but I can’t think of a better one. I was right to say two years ago that it was the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies” but wrong to describe it as “putting empathy to work.” It’s more focused and strategic than that. At various points in a change process, leaders have to work with groups of people who are more or less peers, and facilitation teaches you how to do that with good results. Think of the best committee chair you’ve ever seen—the one who kept the group moving forward and pulled the best from its members—and you have the idea.

The final skill set I now call persuasion, which seems a bit more hard-edged than motivation. And that’s on purpose. Change, I’ve come to learn, does not come easily to communities, especially change that requires us to make conscious choices (unlike changes that are mostly beyond our control, such as economic change due to globalization) and meaningful sacrifices. Machiavelli described the problem with change rather well in 1513:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

Let me paraphrase: People who might benefit from a change have trouble valuing what they don’t yet have, but those who are asked to give something up know to the penny what it will cost them. Given this “order of things,” it takes something forceful to push change forward. And that force is persuasion, done in a hundred ways.

These, then, are my new core leadership skills, in the order in which they come to bear on community change: Begin with relationship building, followed by learning. When you have ignition, you bring in strategy, and facilitation. If all goes well, they will bring you to the 20-yard line. And to get over the goal line you need that final skill, which is persuasion.

Photo by Julie Faith licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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