The stories the bureaucracy can’t see: Faith Kidder speaks on the importance of contextual care
By Hannah Sweet
2021: A Year in Review for Bellwether Consulting
Happy holidays from Bellwether Consulting! We have so much gratitude for our community of changemakers, and the work we have been part of in 2021.
Our Team
We added a full-time employee to the team! Welcome, Mike Bell!
We rounded out several projects with our dynamic and super-talented associates Joanna Hubbard-Rivera, Vincent Frazier, Rachel Speck, and Rachel Brummel!
We brought on Piper Wood to lead communications efforts such as this one!
Our Work
We did lots of transportation equity work this year, including:
Forming and facilitating the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT)’s Equity Work Group to inform long-range planning;
Applying an equity lens to the Minnesota Electric Vehicles Assessment in partnership with Great Plains Institute;
Applying an equity lens to the Highway 77 Study; and
Applying an equity lens to the Metropolitan Council’s Electric Vehicles Study in partnership with Great Plains Institute.
We partnered with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs to build leadership skills among 36 senior leaders across the State of Minnesota through a 10-week program.
We worked with regional partners to build and operate a Federal Funding Hub, and helped to secure a Build Back Better Regional Planning Grant.
We did two cohort-based workforce projects with the Department of Labor and Industry:
An intensive DEI workshop that brought together changemakers from 27 companies to discuss strategies, share experiences, and produce action plans, and
A comprehensive Train-the-Trainer workshop aimed at building up equitable training infrastructure and best practices at 22 healthcare and manufacturing companies.
We supported an assessment of the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ Integrated Service Delivery.
We conducted focus groups and interviews with people experiencing homelessness, people with a history of incarceration, refugees, and other Ramsey County residents to understand and document their barriers to wellness.
We featured 9 Herocrats from 7 states who are leading with courage, creativity and connection in their communities.
What’s Next?
Our team is energized for the work that we will be a part of in the new year, and we plan to lean on our “simple rules” in order to see bigger, work deeply, and build more just and equitable communities together in 2022 and beyond.
Herocrat Spotlight: Meleesa Johnson builds understanding of the public policy process
“In this time of division, how can we build one another up? How can we support one another? How can we build capacity? How do we help people to understand this is hard work? Don't ever think for a minute that this is easy.
We need to set a policy agenda that is not reactive to attacks, but one in which we can work collaboratively to advance sound public policy. And it has to go beyond just one little community, to a broader level.
I'm trying to demystify the budget process so that people, when they show up for a budget meeting, don't think ‘I don't want to ask a question because I don't want to look stupid.’ I'm trying to help shed some basic light on the public finance process so that people can understand. What are the expenses, where's the money coming from and what are all these special funds? What does it all mean?
This is an education job. And it's worth it. Especially when you recognize that you're not alone, even though you feel like you are sometimes. I want my legacy to live on in the capacity of other people. And so you lift them up, you build them up, you give them tools, you guide them, you find their strengths and build on them. That's what we should be doing. And that's what someone did for me. And that's why I try to do it for others.”
Meleesa Johnson is a public servant that holds dual roles as an elected official and government employee. Meleesa Johnson was elected to the Stevens Point City Council to represent the fifth district in 2016, and was elected President of the body by her peers just one year later. She also has 10+ years of experience as a public servant directing the Marathon County Solid Waste Department, and is currently serving her 3rd term as a Supervisor for the Portage County Board.
Herocrat Spotlight: Dawn Beck Brings Her Lived Experience to Work
“I'm the child of an incarcerated parent. I wasn't okay with sharing that with anyone until I was in my forties.
I worked for Olmsted County for nearly 20 years. In 2017, the Minnesota State Community Health Services Advisory Committee, a group of county commissioners and public health directors, formed the Children of Incarcerated Parents Workgroup. The group was charged with advancing how Minnesota and local governments can better support children of incarcerated parents. At that point in Minnesota, having an incarcerated parent was the most frequently reported adverse childhood experience.
After I heard about the workgroup, I went to Olmsted County Commissioner Sheila Kiscaden—one of the group’s co-chairs to let her know that I was the child of an incarcerated parent, and that I was willing to help by giving insight from the child’s perspective.
I felt really courageous because it's not something that we’d ever talked about. A few months later, she called and said, ‘I just talked to your boss and asked if you could participate in the workgroup.’ After I joined, I found out I was the only person with the lived experience of parental incarceration serving on the workgroup. Advocating for families and children affected by incarceration has since become a calling.
When we plan to engage communities, it’s important to include community leaders and those that care about their community, and it’s vital to hear from those who might feel disengaged, the people who have lived through the issue. In order to appropriately address systemic issues, including the voices of lived experience is essential.
Ultimately, the group did accomplish its original charge, which was to study the issue in Minnesota and come back with recommendations. The big takeaway is that we need to raise awareness in order to change attitudes and move to action. Kids with parents in jail or prison don't talk about it, and teachers don't know about the traumatic experiences these kids may have encountered. There’s a huge lack of awareness. When we you start talking about it, people say things like, ‘‘those criminals did a crime, so I don't feel bad for them.’ They assume that there are services and systems for addressing the impact of parental incarceration on the kids, but there aren’t.
Although I was set to be the workgroup co-chair in 2021, I was nearing the end of a special assignment with Olmsted County and made the leap to starting my own consulting business. I’m still working on the issue as a strategic advisor for the Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee of Minnesota and other organizations with missions in support of families experiencing incarceration.”
Dawn with her grandsons
Dawn Beck worked for Olmsted County, MN for 19 years. She currently runs New Dawn Consulting, where she helps organizations transform individuals, teams, and communities with strengths-based leadership and team development, organizational excellence via talent optimization and collaborative problem-solving.
Herocrats in Action: Melissa Wiley
“Every person on the earth needs to speak their truth. People’s lives get bad or good depending on how comfortable they are with speaking their truth. If they can’t, it can lead to depression. If they can, they can bring it out in other people. They can help people live their best lives.
Public speaking is a way for me to speak my truth. My face was disfigured in a dog attack when I was a child. As a young adult I was the happiest when nobody mentioned it. I lived in fear of people asking blunt questions. I wanted to reinvent myself and have a new chapter.
In grad school I had a public speaking professor, Buck Benedict, who encouraged me to give an inspirational speech about being attacked and how I dealt with it. I thought, ‘what if I did, and it gave me the power back? I’d no longer be at the mercy of people’s questions.’ I gave my speech and you could have heard a pin drop. Buck sat in the front row and stayed with me. He said it was one of the best speeches her ever heard.
That was the beginning of my journey in how my life improved and how much connection I’ve been able to make with people. I take it to my work in local government where I open up spaces full of grace and ask people to speak truthfully.
I do this exercise with government employees in which I ask them to finish this sentence: ‘I want to innovate, but. . .’ In their answers, the number one category is always people. Usually, co-workers and bosses.
So the barriers to serving the community better are the people they see every day. We can’t tell citizens that ‘the reason you don’t have this service is that I don’t like my co-worker.’ We need to humanize each other and listen to each other’s stories.”
Melissa Wiley is the Deputy Town Administrator in Erie, Colorado.
Herocrats in Action: Jordan Laslett
When Jordan Laslett was hired for the summer of 2018 as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the City of Philadelphia, he was energized. A rising senior in college, he knew that this job was a foot in the door in government, where he wanted to make his career. It wasn’t well-paid; he did the math and it would have worked out to about $13,000 for a year’s work. But it paid the bills and allowed him to do innovative work with the community, coordinating a career empowerment fair to teach others how to get jobs in state and local government.
As project manager of this initiative, he got to work with other interns around the City, including those in the Mayor’s Internship Program. Jordan worked side by side with a handful of them to implement the career empowerment fair, which was a success.
They became friends, and throughout the experience, the interns joked about the fact that they were doing the same work, but Jordan was being paid and they weren’t. The dozens of young people who served in the Mayor’s Internship Program were working as volunteers, with no guarantee of a future job in the agency. After hearing their stories over many lunches, Jordan got passionate that they, too, should be paid for their work. He also recognized that the interns who were able to work for free were, in a sense, the lucky ones. How many people with less financial means were excluded from the program?
At the end of the summer, Jordan was left with a few weeks on his contract and nothing left to do on his assigned project. So he checked with his intern friends and asked if they would support him making the case that interns in their program should be paid. They did. With that, he got to work gathering the data he needed to make a surprise presentation on the topic at the big end-of-the-summer event:
“I did not start off by telling my supervisors about it. It was one of those things where it was like, I know this was going to ruffle feathers and I knew that there were a few key folks that knew that I was working on something for the interns but I made it very abundantly intentional to not really expose my hand too much, knowing the Mayor was going to be there, knowing HR was going to be there. At the time I had this streak in me.”
Jordan worried that making a scene at the final presentation could ruin his chances for a career in government, or at least at the City of Philadelphia. But he pressed forward and gathered the data. Meeting with the interns frequently, he passed out surveys that asked about their commutes, their rent and expenses, whether a third party was sponsoring them, and so on. He also did the math on what a paid internship program would cost: he calculated it would only be $80,000 to pay 50 interns minimum wage for 25 hours a week in the summer.
When the big day arrived, Jordan was ready. When he was called up for his presentation, he asked the other interns to come up front and join him. It got immediately uncomfortable in the room when as began to share each other’s stories of working as unpaid interns. For an hour, in front of the city’s senior staff and the public, Jordan presented the data and argued that if they city wanted to live up to its progressive values, it needed to pay its interns.
After the presentation, a journalist from Temple News who had been in the audience approached Jordan for an interview. The next day, he and his pitch for paying interns was featured on the newspaper’s front page. After that, he says, “it was a domino effect and everything moved quickly.” Other media picked up the story, and national advocacy organizations reached out to him to offer support. Within three months, the City of Philadelphia announced it would be paying its interns moving forward, a decision that has been met with celebration locally and nationally. And Jordan, personally, has experienced only positive feedback from city officials and staff.
Of course, at the beginning, he didn’t know it would turn out this way:
“I definitely put my neck out there without realizing it and I think I took a huge risk in terms of having that go nowhere and having nothing to show for the effort.”
It took immense courage for an intern to take this kind of stand. It also took the connection he had with other interns and supportive staff to formulate the proposal.
Today, Jordan is putting those same superpowers of courage and connection into his work as legislative assistant for State Representative Matt Bradford. Working with constituents with urgent needs is tough because it exposes system failings, and how they create pain for real people. Gaps in the systems affect their constituents, who come to him for solutions. Every day he’s faced with difficult situations, such as people potentially losing their homes due to issues like overdue electricity bills.
How does he deal with the stress of the job, and the disappointment of witnessing unjust systems up close and personal every day? He grounds himself in his purpose, and why he chose public service. He takes satisfaction in building relationships with constituents and finding creative solutions for them. He notices and documents opportunities for improvement, then identifies the right time and decision-maker to bring them to for consideration.
But what is his #1 strategy for keeping healthy, sane, and motivated as a Herocrat trying to make systems work better for people? He latches onto the success stories and savors them. Like that time he saw his shot to get city hall interns paid, and he took it.
Herocrats in Action: Marlon Williams
Imagine you’re in an interview for your dream job: making pies at a top-notch bakery. You are excited because you know you have what it takes to be the best pie-maker they have ever seen.
The interviewer starts by asking how many years of experience you have making pies. “I’ve been making pies my whole life,” you answer. “How many of that was paid?” she asks. “Well,” you say, “It was all volunteer, but I’ve had a job making cakes for the last 5 years.”
The interviewer furrows her brow and writes a “0” on her paper next to the question.
“What is your training?” she asks.
You explain that you have a master’s degree in bakery management.
“What about pie engineering?” she asks.
“Nope.”
Again, she writes a 0.
Finally, she asks why someone with your background would want to be a pie-maker.
You explain that you grew up in a pie community – making pies, eating pies, selling pies. You’ve seen the joy on someone’s face who is eating a great pie, and the disappointment when the pie looked better than it tasted. You tell her it’s your personal mission to spread as much joy as possible in your community by delivering the best pies imaginable.
The interviewer folds her hands and smiles.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “But what we’re really looking for is someone with a masters in pie engineering, 5-plus years paid experience making pies, and a passion for using technology to most efficiently make pies. Thanks for your time.”
You leave feeling dejected and undervalued.
Then you go home and eat a pie and feel much better.
~ ~ ~
So, what does this silly story have to do with public service? If you’ve ever worked in government, you might already be making the connection. Like the bakery, public agencies have a lot to learn about what makes a great employee.
Just like the bakery missed an opportunity to hire this highly valuable pie-maker, government agencies overlook people with relevant lived experiences or professional training in related but different fields. They are often so focused on deep expertise within a silo that they don’t see how someone’s slightly different background could be even more valuable to the organization and the community.
Marlon Williams believes that if government is to succeed in its mission – to serve the people – this mindset needs to change. I recently sat down with Marlon to discuss what makes a great Herocrat. Among other things, he shared:
“What I've come to believe is that Herocrats are people who live at the intersection of things, right? I think there is a danger to specialization because when you become too specialized in the work you do, the cliché of when you're really good at hammering things, everything looks like a nail. And anything that doesn't look like a nail, you either pretend that it is, or you don't even see it.”
Marlon’s own resume checks all the right boxes: Masters in Public Administration from New York University and 10+ years climbing the ranks at the City of New York. And he has some unconventional Herocrat credentials: he’s a dancer and a veteran Burning Man attendee (aka “burner”).
Marlon contains multitudes.
He’s appropriately sober about the structural racism inherent in our systems, and also upbeat about efforts to change it. Regarding the promising but still-emerging trend of government agencies approaching racial equity from a healing perspective, he says “everything starts little.”
He tells me that the best compliment he ever received in that he “speaks frameworks like poetry.” I can second that compliment. As we chatted I was struck by his eloquence in describing his observations of the problems and potential solutions. Even the interview transcript reads like a carefully crafted essay.
And he’s much more than a good talker. I’ve met many academics and foundation folks who mesmerize with words but ultimately lack the practical experience to make them useful. Not so with Marlon. He came to his wisdom the hard way: through his years of experience learning and growing as a Herocrat working in government.
One of his hard-earned lessons is that bringing one’s full self to work is the way to go. But that wasn’t his thinking when he first started:
“I kind of took the messaging that is largely out there for all public servants that when you show up for work, you put your humanity in a box and leave that in a locker and then you go into a system of which you're a cog and you process paperwork and you try to serve the public good mostly by trying to exclude the public from the services that you're charged with providing.”
For Marlon, who is African American, this meant leaving his racial identify and experiences at the office door. In meetings in which staff discussed neighborhood data, he would hold back from sharing his insights from living in the predominately African American neighborhood because he felt it would threaten his authority. His position felt tenuous, like his “ability to stay in those rooms was contingent on me making people comfortable with [him], making them forget the fact [he] was a black individual.”
This didn’t stop colleagues from asking him to be the spokesperson for all black people. In one particularly painful incident a colleague turned to him and asked “why are black men not getting married? Marlon, do you have any insight on this?” In this moment he was asked to represent the people they were trying to “fix or change,” which carried the implication that he didn’t belong in the room.
Over time Marlon began to integrate his identities of African American man, community member, and city employee, and today he proudly proclaims that at heart he’ll always be a “black bureaucrat.” As he began to bring his whole self to work, he grew into his power and became even more effective, at one point organizing a network of public and nonprofit changemakers who changed the system of workforce development in the city.
Today, through his job at a foundation, Marlon travels around the country to inspire Herocrats who are reforming their agencies to better serve the people, with a focus on advancing racial equity. He urges them to reconnect with their humanity to transform their institutions. He’s interviewed racial equity directors and other changemakers to understand what makes them extraordinary.
The common thread?
They work at the intersections of issues, not necessarily deep down in them. They have often lived and worked in many different of communities. Many of them have changed careers in their lives. They’ve learned the rules of a system and found ways of innovating within it.
In short, they’ve moved to the beat of more than one drummer. This allows them to make connections that others might miss.
Likewise, Marlon says the best parties are those in which highly skilled dancers from different genres come together and improvise to a new type of music. A similar dynamic happens in government when you bring together people from different disciplines, like finance and housing, then put them to work on a new question about medicine – effectively changing the tune and clearing the stage for new moves. When you’re used to rolling with questions about how a system can be more efficient, questions about how a system can enable longer life expectancy can use different muscles – with refreshing and surprisingly effective results.
Marlon finds that these kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations hold the most promise for rethinking our systems and better serving the people.
Here are some other ways Herocrats use their superpower of connection to move their work forward:
Herocrats focus less on the cult of specialization, and more on the cult of getting things done with the community.
Instead of giving employees plaques for their years of service, Herocrats give employee awards for the number of new partners they brought into the work.
Instead of making a program so complicated that nobody else can run it, Herocrats aim to make their programs so collaborative that any number of co-workers can support and grow it no matter who might be heading it up.
Herocrats evaluate themselves and each other on their ability to translate and adapt information, not to recite it.
Herocrats talk less and listen more, and they support their co-workers to do the same.
To be clear, Marlon’s message applies far beyond the actions of government employees.
It’s about how the public sector defines “expertise.”
It’s about what counts as data, and whose perspectives matter in making decisions about how and where to invest public money.
Reflecting on his own journey, Marlon says:
“Why did I think that I had to minimize my voice as the only way to be on the agenda? And who do we allow to legitimize things, particularly for the government? Shouldn't it be the public and the entire public that legitimizes our actions, or legitimizes our strategy? But for too long only part of the public, generally white men, have been listened to and seen as having a legitimate voice. What I do in my work is to live closer to the shared value where everybody's voice matters in that conversation.”
~ ~ ~
What’s a time in your life when a skill or experience from one part in your life made you more successful in another? What was it? How did you apply it? What happened?
How have you communicated the value of your background to someone who doesn’t initially see the connection? How would you handle the pie-maker interview?
How can government attract employees who have different types of expertise? How can it reward employees who are creative and make connections?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
Herocrats in Action: Alex Jackson Nelson
Imagine you’re in a meeting at work. It’s the weekly one with all the managers and supervisors. This meeting is a prime influencer and the play that your organization puts on to perform its culture. To an outsider it might seem like a boring government drama, with some tired comedy mixed in. But this meeting serves real purposes: it communicates the organization’s values, delineates the hierarchy, rewards those who have behaved according to the norms and ignores or possibly punishes those who haven’t.
You know what your task is in this meeting, and you’re nervous. Last time you had the same item on the agenda and it didn’t go so well. You had suggested a change to the way the organization does business, but it didn’t take hold. You got a few head nods but no culture change. After talking with your boss, you decided to go for it again this week.
As you sit in your seat, waiting for your item, you feel like you don’t quite belong. You’ve gotten the message that as a new employee, your voice doesn’t matter as much. You don’t look like the other people around the table. Or perhaps you look like them on the outside, but you feel a chasm between yourself and them in terms of your values.
After failing to move the group to action last time, how are you going to approach your item this week? How can you make them see how important it is to make your proposed change? What tactics can you use to persuade them?
~ ~ ~
Maybe you’ve never been in this exact situation, but we’ve all had similar experiences. If you’ve worked in government, you’re familiar with performative, formal meetings. Most of us have been at organizations in which we feel we don’t fit the mold of the typical employee. And if you’re a Herocrat, you’ve been in lots of situations in which you’re advocating for a change that others don’t see the need for. Yet.
Alex Jackson Nelson is someone with a lot of experience with all these things. In fact, the above story is his own, and later on I will tell you about what he decided to do, and what transpired afterwards.
But first there are some things you need to know about Alex. He’s a trainer, supervisor, licensed therapist, American Sign Language interpreter, and longtime equity advocate. He’s most definitely a Herocrat.
When I met him for coffee at 7am a few weeks ago, his passion was powerful, his analysis was shrewd, and his stories were funny. He claims he’s not a morning person, so I can only imagine what he’s like when he’s at the top of his game.
His track record gives us some clues. In just three years at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services (DHS), he’s led nothing short of a cultural revolution in his corner of the sprawling agency of 7,500 workers. Alex is a training supervisor in the Child Safety and Permanency Division within Children and Family Services. Among other duties, the 20 people he oversees are responsible for training all new child protection workers across the state.
Prior to coming on as a state employee, Alex was a contractor to DHS, creating curricula and training employees on LGBTQ issues. After years of asking, his DHS contact finally convinced him to make the leap to full-time employee. As he put it, “it was time. I trusted my friend who said, ‘now is the time.’” And after years of working in nonprofits, the dental insurance also didn’t hurt.
As an employee, he was affected by the bureaucracy in ways he hadn’t been as a contractor, including having to wrestle slow, inefficient processes and outdated technology. But what really got him was the culture. As he describes it, “there’s something that occurs when you enter this building . . . All of the sudden you’re on a different planet.” Communication is uneven and sometimes nonexistent. One day he walked into the office to find out an entire team had been reassigned to him, even though he knew nothing about their work or the system they used. But he was up for the challenge!
And then there’s the hierarchy. While he understands how agency power structures work, he doesn’t buy into them too much. When it comes down to it, he’s not impressed by titles, he’s impressed by courageous leadership and action. And that is exactly what he has provided to his unit.
Alex’s Herocratic superpower is boldly being himself, which creates an environment in which others can do the same. Amid a stifling culture, he lets the full force of his personality shine. He keeps his eyes fresh, refusing to start seeing the negative aspects of the culture as “normal.” He stubbornly rejects mediocrity. He adapts to the system enough to get things done, while never compromising his values.
Among those values, his top priority is always people: the families that DHS serves and his own staff. He demonstrates this value to his staff by investing in relationships with them, understanding each person’s unique strengths and needs so that he can “meet them halfway.” As HR seemingly coaches supervisors to build cases for employee dismissal, Alex instead dives deeper into relationships to better understand the needs of his staff. He has learned that employee communication and learning styles are sometimes not understood or valued in the dominant culture. So together he and his supervisees make minor adjustments to their team practices, including how they structure meetings, which has had a positive impact on several employees.
Flying in the face of Minnesota Nice, his unit has instituted “radical candor”. This practice, which requires the foundation of strong relationships, has helped staff members to grow individually and as a team. He and his boss have created a more collaborative decision-making process. Staff are able to have autonomy in flexing time to promote work/life balance and they are trusted, and held accountable, to getting their work done.
A trainer and therapist at heart, Alex not only coaches his staff on how to deal with difficult situations, but he also role plays with them. Through this practice, they are fully rehearsed and ready to bring authenticity to those performative meetings.
And perhaps most revolutionary of all, Alex and his team have fun. They’ve infused a unicorn theme throughout their work, culminating recently in “Camp Unicorn,” a retreat in which they successfully revised a nine-day training curriculum as a team. About this experience, Alex said, “It was amazing. I can't even believe it. We did it. We met our goal, and everyone was together for five days in one giant room, working in small groups. And we had camp activities. It was so much fun!"
The culture change within his unit has taken a lot of hard work and will require diligence to maintain. But it is taking root and paying off. Staff morale and productivity are up. People like their jobs and each other. The folks who didn’t like this leadership style have left for other units or organizations. And everyone else is helping to build a new culture of openness, candor and true partnership, fostered by Alex’s Herocratic leadership.
More than that, they are creating a ripple effect. Given their role in training child protection workers across the state, one can imagine how the team’s openness and positivity will radiate out to the families that DHS serves.
The next frontier for Alex? The rest of DHS, of course! As he knows, it’s one thing to change the culture of the team you lead, and it’s quite another to affect the broader organizational culture that it operates within.
One tactic to spur a more open, inclusive culture in DHS has already begun to emerge. To a veteran social justice activist like Alex, it’s almost embarrassingly basic: institutionalizing the practice of sharing one’s pronouns during the introduction round at meetings when new people are present. This is something that has been commonplace in many professional settings for years. But not at DHS.
As straightforward as it might seem, it took a lot of courage on Alex’s part to get it started. Here’s where the opening story about the stuffy meeting comes in.
Alex first proposed the practice at one of the division’s weekly manager and supervisor meetings. He was nervous, and despite his best efforts at explaining it, the practice did not take hold. The next meeting, nothing had changed – people did not share their pronouns with the meeting’s visitors.
It wasn’t until Alex brought the item back another time, and changed his approach, that the practice started to take hold. This time Alex told his own story of being a transgender man, explaining why the practice of sharing one’s pronouns is important to him personally. Although he was already very much “out” at work, it was still uncomfortable for him to talk about this personal topic at that large, formal meeting, in which typically no one shares anything personal. But Alex said that’s what it took: “I was really being vulnerable and talking about what inspires me, and that inspired other people.”
Alex flexed his Herocratic superpower – boldly being himself – to make the change. It worked, and now because of it, he’s helped to create an environment where more people can be themselves.
Introducing one’s pronouns has taken off in his division. People are doing it without any prompting. Some employees have taken it on as a personal mission. One woman hung up a poster about it in her cubicle. It’s becoming a norm.
A recent community meeting was a hopeful example. When the round of introductions reached a community member who is a Native American woman, she paused, noting that she had not introduced herself with her pronouns before. And then, building on the exercise, she also shared her Ojibwe name and said “good morning” in Ojibwe, as she does in her community. It is these spontaneous, intersectional moments that makes Alex excited. As he says, “It's not about the pronouns. It's about bringing what you do in your community, and who you really are, to the table.”
Despite all this, Alex is uncomfortable talking about “the pronoun thing” as a success. To him, it seems wrong that it’s revolutionary. The distance between where DHS culture is and where it needs to be is crushing. And he doesn’t want people to think it’s enough to say their pronouns and carry on with business-as-usual.
At the same time, he recognizes that pronouns are serving as a gateway for change. Introducing one’s pronouns is a conspicuous sign that employees are using to say, “I’m open to learning and I’m open to change.” Other employees and community members see that signal and it changes the conversation. It is creating space and energy to have larger conversations about equity at DHS. As co-chair of the division’s new equity committee, Alex has plenty of ideas for future issues to take on.
Watch out world, because unicorns and pronouns are just the beginning.
~ ~ ~
I’d love to hear from you about your experiences leading or taking part in organizational culture change!
What does Alex’s story bring up for you?
When have you chosen to boldly be yourself? Or have you witnessed a co-worker who does this?
How did it enable others to do the same?
Have you ever used the tactic of sharing why something is important to you personally as you made the case for it? How did it feel? What were the results?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Herocrats in Action: Amber McReynolds
In her 13 years at the Department of Elections for the City and County of Denver, including 7 as director, Amber McReynolds led an organizational transformation that resulted in dramatically improved voter turnout and lower costs. And in 2013 she was a key player in designing and passing a state law that has made Colorado a national model in elections. Her accomplishments are impressive, and she has a stack of national and international awards to prove it.
It would be easy to look at Amber’s list of achievements and write her off as some kind of superhuman Herocrat. And she certainly is. But after getting to know Amber, I also find her story to be relatable, and I think it contains lessons for anyone leading change from inside government. Here’s how she went from mid-level staffer in a dysfunctional environment to leading an award-winning department.
Amber’s first interactions with the Elections Department – in the hiring process – were less than encouraging. In her first interview for the supervisory position for which she was hired, the man who would later become her boss asked her, “aren’t you a little young for this job?” (She was 26, with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and several years of director-level experience.) A few days later, the then-director kept her waiting an hour and half for her second interview. Then, sitting at her disheveled desk, the director proceeded to apply lipstick and mascara while asking Amber questions.
Despite these red flags, Amber accepted the job offer out of her passion for elections and an adventurous spirit. Quickly she saw that her interview experiences were, indeed, indications of trouble in the organizational culture, which was plagued by in-fighting, lack of resources, outdated technology, negativity and resistance to change.
Amber spent the next two years learning, observing and taking notes about problems and potential solutions in a notebook. She wrote down everything, from the security protocol to the customer service interaction, to the data, to the metrics, to the inefficiencies with paper, to the number of forms they could eliminate if they streamlined processes. She also made small changes that were within her purview.
Struggling with the culture, she made the case to attend a leadership training, highlighting how it would benefit the department and ultimately reflect well on the department’s leaders. They agreed, and the skills she gained helped her navigate the political environment. She also made connections with other employees throughout the city who were experiencing similar challenges, which bolstered her.
And then in the 2006 election there was a high-profile technology failure that led to a departmental shake-up. Several people were fired, including her supervisor (the one who had asked about her age in the interview). The debacle also led to a new governance model, including an elected clerk. During her first meeting with the clerk, she shared that she had been keeping a notebook of ideas for change for the past two years. The clerk was impressed.
With the support of the newly elected clerk and her credentials from the leadership training under her belt, Amber was promoted to an operational manager and then a few months later, to deputy director, where she served for over three years. A few years later, she became director. Over those ten plus years in leadership, she led not only innovations in election process and technology, but also internal culture change. Here are some lessons from her experience:
Model what you want to see. Amber strived to use open communication and honesty with her staff. She encouraged her staff to do the same, inviting them to share both the good and the bad news. If she made a commitment, she worked hard to make sure she delivered on it. If she couldn’t deliver, she was transparent and authentic about why not.
Create a flexible and professional work environment. Amber worked hard to institute flex schedules and a 4-day work week in the department. She also changed the performance evaluation process, making it an on-going, 12-month collaborative effort in which the employee and their manager work together on setting and monitoring goals (rather than an annual review).
Prioritize learning. Amber worked hard to always be open to new ideas from her staff and community, and she told her staff that they always needed to be learning as well. She brought in the city’s Peak Academy to train the department’s employees in process improvement, which empowered them to identify and fix inefficiencies. She also encouraged staff to attend training that was relevant for their responsibilities or would bolster their skills. This included Election Center certifications, technical training such as GIS and data analytics, and other specialized training.
Mentor and be mentored. Amber sought out opportunities to mentor interns, students and other young people she encountered. She saw this as part of the job, even though she did not always have strong mentorship from her own more-senior colleagues.
Don’t treat everyone the same. Amber got to know her staff as individuals and tailored her approach according to their personality. She had the team do “Strengthsfinder,” which gave them a point of reference and shared language to collaborate with one another.
Build trusting relationships with community members. With the newly elected clerk in 2007 and the new elections director, Amber helped to create an elections advisory committee comprised of community stakeholders from all walks of life and engaged it in the decision-making process. At first it was difficult for the department's staff to be vulnerable and open up its process to the committee. But over time they built strong relationships that helped to leverage big changes, such as the state election reform in 2013. Amber continued to expand this group and engage them in the operations of the department.
Be customer-centric. Amber's motto is “election policy and administration must be about who votes, not who wins.” She engaged voters directly and the people who work with them at the counter to better understand what needs to changed and how. She also recognized that to be customer-centric, she had to build a positive environment to support employees, so that they can best serve the customers. She encouraged her team to make process changes and suggest improvements proactively.
Amber’s superpower is how she relates to people: building relationships with her team and empowering them to do awesome work, building relationships with community members, centering customers, providing vulnerable leadership and humane management. It’s her people orientation that drove the transformational change. As Amber reflected on the passage of Colorado’s voting reform law in 2013,
“It was really those relationships that I had built that set the stage for us to be able to work together to get something done that was literally, still today, one of the most comprehensive election forums in the country. It's made Colorado one of the top states to vote, one of the top states for turnout and engagement, and one of the most secure states to vote. All of those things we built over time, as a community that made a commitment to the voters and put voters first.”
Many of us are in a hurry to make change. Like Amber, we sometimes enter jobs and are struck by the brokenness of the system and the toxic workplace culture that enables it to persist. We want to fix it immediately. Amber saw that, pushed through it, worked her way up, and changed it over the course of 13 years. When she left in 2018 to be Executive Director of the National Vote at Home Institute, she had been at the Denver Elections Department a third of her lifetime! We can either be depressed at the slow rate of change or inspired that when we do the right things over a long period of time, change can happen. I choose to be inspired.