Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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A Better Way to Teach Civic Leadership

July 20, 2017 By Otis White

If I could change things in cities . . . well, the list would be long. But one item in the top 10 would be making community leadership programs better at doing what they set out to do—train people in civic leadership.

I come to my criticism with respect for these programs and some knowledge. I’ve spoken to dozens of civic leadership programs in the last 35 years. I’ve studied them on behalf of a foundation. I’m an alumnus of two leadership programs myself. And I’m a member of the national Association of Leadership Programs.

I’m impressed by the people who participate in the programs and those who run them. The participants are exactly who you’d hope they would be: people in their 30s and 40s who are ready to step up to civic leadership and eager to learn how. The program managers often do their jobs with the skimpiest of resources.

And perhaps it’s too much to think people would emerge from these programs ready to lead. We don’t expect brand new college graduates to be fully accomplished in their professions. Surely civic leadership demands the same level of on-the-job learning as the law, medicine, or city planning.

And, yet, I think community leadership programs could do better.

Their greatest limitation is their structure. Most programs are nine-month affairs with monthly meetings, starting or closing with a retreat. In these sessions, the programs try to shoehorn two massive courses of study. The first is what is called “community awareness,” which is an introduction to the community’s issues and processes. So a class of 40 might visit the courts to learn how the criminal-justice system works, a charity hospital to learn about health issues, or the mayor’s office to learn the ins and outs of local government.

On top of this, some programs layer a second set of courses dealing with leadership skills. They might include sessions on diversity, team building, group facilitation, or conflict resolution—all things civic leaders need to know to be effective.

That’s a huge amount of learning for nine sessions. At the end, graduates are given a certificate, a better grasp of the community’s issues, a new set of friends and contacts, and an exhortation to get involved. Then it’s time for the leadership program to choose the next class of 40.

What more could a leadership program do? After all, participants’ time is limited (most have demanding jobs). The fees they pay barely cover expenses. Few of these programs have other financial resources.

Answers: You could stretch the learning process and take on a third level of leadership training. To do all this, you need to create a graduate program that invites alumni to return regularly and deepen their learning.

What would they learn in these sessions? They’d learn about strategy. In the community context, this means where you get started with change, how you overcome the obstacles you’re sure to face, and how you assemble the team and resources for the journey.

Where could a cash-strapped leadership program find people to teach this? All around. In every city, there are veteran leaders who would be delighted to explain how they mounted a successful referendum, raised money for building a museum, or took on a major community problem like homelessness. Oddly enough, they’re rarely asked about these things.

Leadership programs are the natural homes of this transfer of knowledge. And by bringing graduates back on a regular basis for “how to” seminars, the programs could increase their worth to their communities, deepen alumni support, and offer new opportunities for philanthropic and business sponsorships.

More important, when you hear enough of these stories of successful change, you notice they have common elements. That’s because in every city there is a path to success, a way good ideas become reality. Collect the stories, mark the path, and in no time the leadership program could do more than educate would-be leaders and award them certificates. It could offer them guidebooks.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Josh Hallett licensed under Creative Commons.

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.

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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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