Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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The Temperament of Great Leaders

November 11, 2015 By Otis White

Most of the qualities of a good civic good leader, I’m convinced, can be learned. A reasonably empathetic person can master the arts of relationship building, group management, and persuasion. An observant person can learn the processes behind public policy and, in time, see opportunities for action. With a little modesty, a good leader can find her role and, with a little audacity, fill it brilliantly.

But there’s one quality that the best leaders possess that I don’t think can be learned easily. And that is temperament. It’s an old-fashioned word that refers to a person’s nature or disposition, especially as it affects his or her behavior. And the temperament that the best leaders possess allows them to “quiet the self.”

The term comes from David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. He says it is the ability to “step out of the game” when criticized or insulted. “Enmity is a nasty frame of mind,” Brooks wrote not long ago. “Pride is painful. The person who can quiet the self can see the world clearly, can learn the subject and master the situation.”

Most of us can’t do this. If attacked, we inflate with anger. Our impulse is to strike back, quickly, with a cutting remark. What we learn is that, rather than ending the attack, it only escalates the conflict.

Or maybe we don’t strike back but seek revenge, using our positions to get even. A former president once went down that road. And, well, we know what happened to Richard Nixon.

Unfortunately, local governments are filled with those who can’t forget a slight or resist the impulse to strike back. I know of one elected official who no longer speaks to newspaper reporters, communicating only through emails that are filtered through an assistant. He then posts these emails online—as “the truth.” If asked, I’d offer one word of advice to him: Resign. He’s not cut out for this work.

That’s because being criticized in public life is like being hit in football. It’s not a flaw in the system; it’s a feature of the system. We give everybody a voice in politics in the belief that, in the din, the right way forward will emerge. But to get there, we have to endure a certain amount of nonsense and nastiness.

Successful leaders learn how to manage their reactions to the nastiness. Abraham Lincoln wrote what he called “hot letters” to his critics, then stuck them in a drawer with the inscription: “Never sent. Never signed.” Thomas Jefferson suggested cooling off by counting not just to 10 but to 100.

Some recommend a three-part response to being attacked in public: Listen politely, don’t get defensive, and ask for time before responding. This allows for a more thoughtful (and calmer) response.

But techniques can take you only so far. The best leaders do something deeper and better. They look at tense situations as if they were observers who are removed in time. They see their interests and those of their critics, and because it doesn’t feel personal, they react as calmly as actors on a stage. Attack these leaders, and they smile.

It unnerves their critics—just as it rattles other teams’ players when NFL quarterback Andrew Luck congratulates them for sacking him. Here’s how one cornerback described what it felt like when Luck popped up and said to him, “Great job!” “You know if you hear a quarterback get mad, you are in his head,” he said. “With Luck, you thought you hurt the guy, you hear ‘good job’ and you just say ‘aw, man.’ “

That’s what you want to hear from your critics as well, when you smile at their insults. “Aw, man.”

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Sarah licensed under Creative Commons.

Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”

May 14, 2015 By Otis White

Twenty-five years ago, as I was growing interested in how cities produce leaders and leaders shape cities, I heard a state business association president define leadership. A leader, he said, “is someone who helps people get where they want to go.”

He was speaking to a community leadership class, and I could sense the audience deflate. That’s it? Help people go somewhere? Like a bus driver? What about organizing constituencies, offering a vision, and persuading the public? What about standing up for people—or standing up to the powerful? What about holding office?

And, yet, I had to admit he was on to something. Organization and persuasion are skills. Visions can be supplied by others. Standing up to the powerful and holding office are roles. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that helping people get where they want to go (and, one hopes, need to go) isn’t a bad definition of what leaders do. It’s just . . . incomplete.

So allow me to complete the definition. A leader is someone who helps people get where they want to go . . . by seeing the opportunity for getting there.

Seeing the opportunity—the narrow, sometimes temporary passage through which change can happen—is the genius of leadership. And herding people through that passage is the practice of leadership. What the genius and the practice require is a sense of how things fit together, a tactical vision, a willingness to learn from experience, and a saintly patience with people—but a patience that’s bounded by the resolve to do something meaningful.

If this sounds abstract, trust me; there are examples all around you. Here in Atlanta, I’ve seen these traits in people who nurtured projects great and small, from the creation of the Beltline, a circle of parks and trails that’s transforming entire neighborhoods, to the building of a roundabout that fixed an impossible intersection at the gates of Emory University and breathed life into a small retail district.

In both cases, the leader was someone who recognized the value of these projects, sized up the difficulties, figured out the path forward, and patiently guided others along it.

But how exactly did they do it? What are the steps in seeing and seizing opportunities? And how can you become one of these everyday geniuses?

You can find some of the answers in a book called “A Kind of Genius” by Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter. It’s about a man who took on some of New York’s toughest problems in the 1960s and 1970s, figured out practical, even elegant solutions, and got them implemented. His name was Herb Sturz.

Herb who? Roberts’ point exactly. Sturz was an “unsung hero, shrewd social engineer and social entrepreneur” who had an impressive but largely unnoticed impact on New York, first by reforming New York’s bail bond system (and inspiring similar reforms around the country), then pioneering ways of dealing with substance abuse. His final challenge was the one most apparent to residents and visitors today, the cleanup of Times Square.

You’ll be impressed by these stories. But the real reason for reading Roberts’ book is to learn how Sturz worked: by listening carefully, studying systems, proposing small-scale experiments, quantifying the results, answering objections, and winning over even the most skeptical officeholders. You won’t be surprised to learn that, as a child, Sturz spent a long illness learning to play chess and could see six moves ahead in his mind.

Here’s how Roberts explains the Sturz approach: “He spotted things other people hadn’t seen, even things that had been staring them in the face every day. He would pose questions that they hadn’t asked, even when those questions seemed mundane. And by peppering participants at every level with even more questions, by meticulously dissecting the responses, by crafting hypothetical fixes and subjecting them to challenging testing and experimentation, he tried his hand at transforming illusions into practical answers.”

Herb Sturz was a remarkable leader, but I’ve seen similar traits in others who’ve accomplished big things in public life. They ask good questions. They listen intently. They experiment, observe, and quantify. They see how systems respond. They answer objections. They’re patient. But when an opportunity presents itself and the way forward opens, they are decisive and relentless.

At the end of the day, these leaders get people where they want to go, but often by a road no one else could have imagined. And that’s what makes them a kind of genius.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Steven Fettig licensed under Creative Commons.

Why Blame Is the Death of Reform

July 22, 2014 By Otis White

If you want to see what can go wrong with government reform, look at this editorial cartoon.

Notice first the cartoonist’s point of view: that it is condescending and counterproductive for “drive-by” experts to criticize hard-working government employees (in this case, teachers) for their performance.

Then see the teacher’s point of view: She cannot be held responsible if she has to deal with children who are homeless, watching TV around the clock, provided no discipline, pregnant, living in single-family homes, and on and on. In other words, while drive-by experts blame her for education’s shortcomings, she blames the students.

When reform efforts get to this point—all sides dug in, minds shut tight, blame hurled in all directions—you can close up shop. Reform isn’t going to happen.

Is there another way? There is, but it has to be done right from the start. In fact, before the word “reform” is ever uttered. Here are three first steps.

First, you must promise never to blame employees for poor performance. This is critical because you cannot change an organization without the support of those who work in it. In this sense, the cartoonist was right: It is counterproductive to blame the employees.

Second, employees must stop blaming others. Just as it’s a mistake for education reformers to blame teachers, it is wrong for teachers to blame their students for poor performance—or government workers at any level to blame citizens when things don’t work right.

Third, once the blame game has ceased, everyone must work side by side to understand where the organization is falling short, why, and what can be done to turn things around.

This sounds so simple, there must be a catch, right? Yes, and it’s a big one. You have to work against political culture, which is to point the finger at others. Reporters, city councils, and legislative oversight committees will want to know who was responsible when mistakes were made or deadlines missed. If you genuinely want things to work better, there’s only one response: I am responsible. Blame me.

This takes courage in a political environment, but it’s the only way you can move to the second step, where you persuade employees to stop blaming others. If you have their backs, you can say, they must have the citizens’ backs. Always.

And once you reach that understanding and the blame wars have quieted, you can move to step three, where you work as partners. But even then, you must keep working on trust.

One of the earliest trust issues will be about measurements. If you’re going to fix a broken system, you have to agree on ways of measuring brokenness and gauging progress. But once you start measuring things, you’ll raise again the fear of blame. So you have to make another pact: The measurements will be used only for pinpointing problems and measuring progress, not for punishments or rewards.

This requires that you work against instinct, which is to reward your best performers and punish the slackers. But if you go down that road, it will encourage the slackers to resume the blame wars and, in no time, you’ll be back to . . . well, what you see in the cartoon.

In addition to courage, this approach requires faith that the vast majority of people want to do good work and only a small minority do not. If you can enlist the majority in changes that will bring them pride and accomplishment, the organization will make great strides. And, over time, you can weed out the minority.

But nothing will happen until you stop the blame.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Illustration by E Theroit licensed under Creative Commons.

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

What I’ve Learned about Leadership from Reading Obituaries

January 11, 2012 By Otis White

This may sound a little odd, but for several years I’ve been collecting newspaper obituaries from around the country. Not just any ones, but obits about highly regarded civic leaders, a group I call “super-civic leaders.” My aim is to find out what they did to be so highly respected, and how they did it. I’ve come to some conclusions.

I’ll tell you my conclusions in a moment, but let me tell you first how I choose these people and introduce you to a few from my collection. To begin, I’m not looking for elected officials—mayors, city council members, county commissioners—or for executives of major community nonprofits, such as chamber of commerce presidents or community foundation executives. I’m looking for people who, at least initially, started as volunteers and found something intoxicating about civic work.

I’m also looking for people who’ve made such a difference in their communities that their obits appeared on the newspaper’s front page or the first page of the metro section. The kind of people whose funerals attract mayors, governors, and other prominent folks. These super-civic leaders could have been successes in any field (and some, in fact, were highly successful in other ways), but at a point in their lives, they chose to devote themselves to the places they lived.

Why? Well, unfortunately, obituaries aren’t good at answering that question. And my own experience with super-civic leaders is that they aren’t good at explaining their motivations either. My theory is that they simply tried civic work, found it deeply satisfying, and, like most of us, stuck with something they did well.

What’s interesting about the 50 or so obituaries I’ve collected is that, in almost every other respect, these people have little or nothing in common. They were business executives and neighborhood activists. Lawyers, entrepreneurs, retirees, and activists. Republicans, Democrats, or completely nonpartisan. Male, female, black, white, Latino. Several were born in other countries. Some were Forbes 400 wealthy. Others seemed never to have had two nickels to rub together.

Let me introduce you to five from my collection. There’s Warren Hellman, the quirky investment banker from San Francisco who loved politics, bluegrass music, civic causes, and nearly everything about his city. (The things he didn’t like he worked hard to change.) On the other side of the country was Rob Stuart of Philadelphia whose occupation was unclear to most who met him. (The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as a communications consultant.) What is clear is that he was a passionate advocate for civic improvements and effective lobbyist at city hall. “He was like the 18th member of city council,” one council member said of him.

There was Noel Cunningham, a charismatic Irishman who turned his restaurant into Denver’s unofficial civic club, where mayors, governors, and do-gooders met and planned projects—always with Cunningham at the center of things. “Forget paying for the meal,” one nonprofit leader said. “You’d walk out of there with a checklist of things he wanted you to do.”

Seattle’s Kent Kammerer didn’t have a place for meetings, but he had a talent for creating serious discussions. He started a monthly forum called the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition at which political and civic leaders appeared for fair-minded but tough grillings. A retired teacher with gray hair and a bushy beard, Kammerer used these discussions to write about how to make Seattle better. He was so knowledgeable of the city and its neighborhoods that one journalist called him a “mossback Yoda,” after the wise and wizened Star Wars character.

Finally, there’s Eleanor Josaitis, a saintly Detroit woman about whom a book should be written. In 1968, as Detroit was experiencing a tidal wave of white flight, Josaitis, her husband, and five children went the opposite way, moving from the suburbs to the city so she could work with the poor. Over the next 43 years, Josaitis’ nonprofit became the place presidents visited to learn about Detroit’s needs. At her funeral, 900 people, from former mayors, governors, and business leaders to the people she served, sat shoulder to shoulder in Detroit’s downtown Catholic cathedral.

Again, I can’t tell you why these people gave so much of their lives to their communities. I do know they are so rare that, when they died, people mourned them as irreplaceable.

Given their vastly different backgrounds, what did these leaders have in common? Two things, I’ve noticed: First, they brought something valuable to civic work. Sometimes it was money, more commonly it was people, energy, or ideas. In a few cases, as with Josaitis, it was simply her moral force. Second, they gave astonishing amounts of time to their civic work.

Let me go a little deeper with both of these qualities. The old saying is that nonprofits need one of three things from board members: their time, talent, or treasure (that is, money). That’s true of super-civic leaders as well, but it understates their contributions because not everyone’s time, talents or treasure are the same. The truly great leaders bring something unexpected and sometimes unique.

Hellman, the investment banker, gave money, of course—his own and that of other wealthy San Franciscans he solicited for causes. But he also had a rare talent for solving civic problems, from government finance to bolstering Golden Gate Park. So when a civic problem needed a creative solution as well as cash, Hellman was there. And he didn’t just solve other people’s problems. He created things for the city, including a music festival called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass that brings hundreds of thousands of people each year to Golden Gate Park. Not your typical millionaire, Hellman would sometimes join musicians like Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle on the stage, plucking away on his banjo.

Almost as quirky as Hellman, though not nearly as wealthy, was Rob Stuart of Philadelphia. Stuart combined a talent for research and enthusiasm for ideas (“he was like an idea merchant,” one neighborhood leader said) with almost superhuman persistence. Among his many initiatives, he battled the railroad company CSX for four years to create a public crossing of its land near a riverside park . . . and won. Said one civic leader of Stuart and his supporters, “They weren’t rabble-rousers. They weren’t suing. They just got a lot of people together, worked nights and weekends, and wore the railroad down, and we’re all going to benefit from it for the rest of our lives.”

Cunningham introduced people he met through his restaurant, connecting people with needs to those with resources. Kammerer did something similar in Seattle through his forums.

But having access to unusual resources was only part of it. These leaders also gave incredible amounts of their time. That was true even of Hellman, who had an investment firm to run. He spent hours negotiating with San Francisco politicians on city pension reform. And Josaitis, of course, gave 43 years of her life to rescuing a city that others had given up on.

There’s one other thing about these five super-civic leaders and most of the rest in my file: They come across in their obituaries as utterly sincere. Obituaries are almost always respectful of the dead, of course. But you can’t fake what people said of these leaders. “The world is a worse place without Noel,” one mourner said of Cunningham. His eulogist, a former governor, called him “the most persistent and selfless person I have ever met.” Said the cardinal of Detroit at Josaitis’ funeral mass: “She was one of those special people that comes along every 100 years. . . . She was able to do things most people weren’t able to do.”

And what do these rare people tell those of us who aren’t super-civic leaders? Three things: First, it pays to be strategic, to look around for things you—and only you—can bring to civic work. It could be a new set of ideas or contacts, or a new source of funding, such as grants or some kind of private funding. This is how you go from being a volunteer to a leader.

Second, to be effective in communities, you have to be willing to put in the time. Cities are complex environments that are devilishly difficult to change, and there’s no substitute for persistence and patience. (Think of Rob Stuart’s four-year crusade to convince CSX to let people cross its land to get to a park.)

Finally, authenticity is important. Because civic work is so long term, people will sort out the sincere from the insincere. So care about your causes. It’ll draw others to your work . . . and who knows? It might win you a wonderful obituary one day.

The Blue-Ribbon Exception That Proves the Rule

December 17, 2010 By Otis White

I was amazed to hear on Nov. 9 that the co-chairs of the bipartisan commission on reducing the national deficit had issued a detailed plan for doing just that. Former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, offered a plan that was a mix of spending cuts (to domestic and military budgets), policy changes (gradually raising the age for Social Security benefits), tax reforms (goodbye mortgage interest deductions) and revenue increases (hiking the federal gas tax by 15 cents a gallon). While the plan wouldn’t eliminate the deficit, Simpson and Bowles said, it would bring it under control—assuming American citizens and their lawmakers were willing to take strong medicine.

It wasn’t the details of the plan, though, that surprised me. It was Simpson and Bowles’ decision to release their plan before the 18-member commission had finished its work. The commission had been given until the first week of December to make its recommendations, and under the rules laid down by legislation, if 14 of the 18 members agreed to a plan, it would automatically go to the Senate and House for a vote. Why hadn’t the co-chairs waited for the other 16 members, I wondered.

Background: I’ve managed blue-ribbon committees over the years. And my advice to committee chairs has been consistent: Stay focused on managing the process and trust that the group will come to good decisions. Be positive. If members argue, give them room for debate and make sure it doesn’t get personal. If some members grow impatient or frustrated, talk to them privately and do your best to keep them on board. When you see the group moving to common ground, call it to everyone’s attention and push for consensus and agreement. Most important, keep your opinions to yourself.

The model I’ve suggested to chairs was George Washington in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and others fought over the big issues. Washington rarely offered his own solutions, focusing instead on process and looking for areas of agreement. That has been my idea of a chair’s role. So why had two respected, experienced political leaders like Simpson and Bowles done things so differently with this commission? What was their goal? And would it work?

It took several weeks for the answers to reveal themselves. Some came in an hour-long interview with Simpson and Bowles on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show on Nov. 16. Rose never asked the question I most wanted answered—“Why not wait for the commissioners to act?”—but the co-chairs’ thinking became clearer as they talked. (Important to know: 12 of the commission’s members were current senators or representatives.) Said Simpson, “When you have 12 of these 18 of us who are members of Congress, it is so tough for them” to act decisively. He added later, speaking for himself and Bowles, “We’re not going to put out some whitewash (plan) that’s just a bunch of principles.” Bowles agreed. “I think we had to lay a predicate out there that would force action by this Congress and future Congresses.”

Let me translate: The commission’s goal, as Simpson and Bowles interpreted it, was to lay out an honest plan for reducing the deficit. But honest plans, especially those prescribing the level of pain that deficit reduction would require, rarely get much support from risk-averse politicians. Most of the commission members were, ahem, risk-averse politicians. So rather than offering “whitewash that’s just a bunch of principles,” which is what Simpson and Bowles believed the commission would have done on its own, the co-chairs decided to lay out a “predicate” (a bold plan) that would at least get people talking.

It certainly did that—and more. When the Simpson-Bowles plan finally came to a vote on Dec. 1, many were surprised that a majority of commissioners (11 of the 18) voted for it, including six of the 12 elected officials. It was enough to win the commission’s formal recommendation, though not enough to require a vote in Congress.

But Simpson and Bowles weren’t aiming for a mostly symbolic vote in Congress. They wanted to shift public opinion and political discussion away from hand-wringing and empty resolutions and toward actions that would make a real difference. They knew that others on the committee would be reluctant to champion such things because of the political costs, and they were willing to take the heat themselves.

Did it work? Well, their plan was adopted with few changes and was probably more realistic than the commission would have drafted on its own. It made an important point: Liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans could agree on deficit reductions, as long as they included some of each party’s ideas. 

And it shifted the political discussion, at least for a while. Within days of the commission’s vote, politicians were talking openly about ideas that were previously taboo, like reducing the mortgage interest deduction and raising the age for Social Security. President Obama got on board, announcing that he had asked his economic advisers for ways of simplifying the tax code along the lines that Simpson and Bowles had suggested.

So, is it always wrong for blue-ribbon committee chairs to advance their own ideas, to “pull” the committee rather than “push” it? No, not always. The deficit reduction commission shows an important exception to the George Washington model. And that is when:

  • The committee is charged with describing a course of action that will require serious sacrifices.
  • Public discussions of the issue have been sidetracked by unrealistic expectations.
  • For political reasons, members are reluctant to take the heat for recommending serious sacrifices.
  • The chair or co-chairs are willing to take the heat themselves.
  • The chair or co-chairs are reasonably sure that when the shock wears off, the committee will accept their core ideas.

In a way, what Simpson and Bowles did proves the larger point, that being chair is about putting the committee first. If you care more about a specific solution than you do about a successful process, you should be a member, not a chair. What Simpson and Bowles saw was a commission that wanted to do the right thing but feared the consequences. By stepping out front, they helped their blue-ribbon committee succeed, and that’s the highest calling of committee chairs.

Footnote: This is speculation, but my guess is that Simpson and Bowles told the other members what they were doing and, in the wink-and-nod environment of Washington, got their private blessings. The worst thing you can do in politics is surprise public officials. In reading the news articles after the plan was released, I saw no hint that other members were angry at the co-chairs’ actions. My bet: They weren’t because they knew it was coming.

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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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