Equivalent to a Management MBA

I have a good friend who is weeks away from successfully matriculating a two-year residential substance abuse treatment program in Durham, North Carolina.  The program is called TROSA, which stands for Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers.

As an aside, he will have also learned the equivalent of an MBA when it comes to managing people, every type imaginable in the workforce.

In addition to hours of therapy, TROSA teaches residents, who are willing, everything one needs to know to succeed in the workplace including how to work, how to adapt to organizational culture, how to resolve conflict, and how to be accountable.

But the organization also has an eye for identifying and nurturing people who have a talent for managing other people.

It isn’t based on tenure or non-managerial success in one of the many enterprises it uses to help fund the program and instill values.  They have learned what Gallup researchers have proven.

Those elements, while important overall, only count for so much when developing managers.

Much more predictive of management success, according to Gallup’s research is talent.

It is the natural capacity one-in-ten people have for management, which they have found enables people to “learn a role faster” and “adapt to variance in a role more quickly” than those without it.

Another two-in-ten have what they call “functioning managerial talent.”

Tenure and success as an individual contributor, which is how most are promoted to management, don’t lend themselves to being in a management role.

As TROSA has learned as well, talent to become a manager has five dimensions as outlined in Gallup’s State of the American Manager Report:

Motivator – they perpetually challenge themselves and their teams to improve and perform.

Assertiveness – they overcome challenges, adversities and resistance.

Accountability – they ultimately assume responsibility for their teams’ success and create the structure and processes to help deliver on expectations.

Relationships – they build a positive, engaging work environment and shield it from infiltrators who aren’t engaged.

Decision-Making - They solve complex issues and problems inherent to the role of thinking ahead, planning for contingencies, balancing competing interests and taking an analytical approach.

Gallup quantifies the percentage of the American workforce that is engaged or just putting in time or actually working to undermine others or the organization.

But it also surveys to determine the proportion of managers who fall in those categories.

Managers overall are only slightly more prone to be engaged, which contributes, along with personal traits, to employees who are not engaged.

But the report finds that high-talent managers are twice as likely to be engaged as those with limited talent and engagement in a workforce, not just putting in time, is closely linked to a slew of positive business outcomes.

Engaged employees thrive under high-talent managers who are open and approachable, who manage performance continually rather than just with performance reviews, who help them  set priorities and goals and who focus on strengths.

One of the most corrosive things an organization can do is to promote managers with limited talent for it and then tolerate those who are not engaged or even actively disengaged themselves.

Gallup has found that managers who work for highly engaged leaders are 39% more likely to be engaged themselves.  Employees who work for engaged managers are 59% more likely to also be engaged.

One of the cruel hoaxes perpetrated on people in most careers or organizations is to make being a manager a stepping stone from tenure or being a good individual contributor.

The former should never be a consideration and the latter is where many people can continue to thrive and showcase their talents in other areas.

Subjecting them to managers who lack talent in the five dimensions Gallup research has identified is negligent.  Leaving them trapped once a mistaken promotion has been discovered is near criminal.

I was rated highly as a leader, but guilty of both.

“Get Over It and Move On”

I’ve tried to shake it but I can’t -- for long anyway -- get a comment I heard three days ago in a news report from a small town in South Carolina, less than three miles along US Route 176 from the North Carolina line.

It is along this route, nearly 475 years ago to the day that I heard this quote, that Hernando de Soto marched up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, becoming the first European to explore inland across the Southeast.

It would be another 220 years before European settlers reached this area, a few bringing or obtaining enslaved African Americans, some as status symbols.

It wouldn’t be until 15 years after the Civil War that the little town was established, the year that a white supremacist organization called the Ku Klux Klan began to terrorize African Americans and white sympathizers along both sides of the border here.

Until now, I’ve only known the area from its reputation as a spectacular motorcycle route.  But the statement by a resident there last week ruined that impression.

It was a reaction to calls by the legislator representing the area to remove the Confederate battle flag from where it flies above the state capitol in the wake of a murder of nine African Americans 228 miles southeast along US Route 176.

He is also a former city council member and mayor of the little town and a close friend and colleague of one of those slain.

The quote from a constituent objecting to the flag’s removal from state property was:

“Is it hurting anyone?  No. If somebody has poor feelings about it, get over it and move on.”

Germany has many monuments honoring soldiers who were killed during WWII, including many in the areas my father’s American Tank battalion overran at the end of the war and then dismounted to search for pockets of resistance while liberating Dachau, first of the concentration camps established by the Nazis.

Remembrances for the victims is why places such as Dachau are now monuments.

I know people who lost their German fathers and husbands in that war before immigrating to America.  It is clear that many were caught up in that war without being part of its cause.

But Germany doesn't fly the Nazi flag anywhere, although it makes appearances in museum exhibitions.  In this country, while some collectors may have one that was brought back as a souvenir of war, it is viewed in disrepute, a symbol of white supremacist extremists.

Although, they too might rationalize it by saying “If somebody has poor feelings about it, get over it and move on.”

A far more thoughtful interview last week was with John A Powell, an African American law professor at UC Berkley and author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

From parents who were sharecroppers in the South, Powell reminds us on the program On Being with Krista Tippett that “race is deeply relational.”  Any discussion is about whiteness as much as about color. 

In her blog, Courtney E. Martin writes that “Black people, people of color in general, don’t have the luxury of forgetting, especially as long as white people, particularly the “good ones,” remain so fragile.  She’s referring to our inability to discuss race.

Professor Powell, in his interview, states that “race is in the DNA of this country…it is like gravity.”   Any history of slavery, such as From Slavery to Freedom by the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, Powell would assert is really a history of America told through that institution.

To illustrate that point, he notes that when he taught white students at the University of Minnesota about the history of Native Americans, it was just a lens into the history of America.

He repeats an observation by the African American author Tony Morrison that any discussion of the effects of slavery should include what it’s done to mark the white identity as well.

Powell noted in the On Being interview last week, “The human condition is one about belonging…how we define the other affects how we define ourselves.”

“And so when we define the other as extreme, it means we have to cut off large parts of our self.”

Powell, when he explains that the notion of being American is and has historically been an ever evolving and expanding “we” would agree with the opinion read a few days later by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The conservative Justice reminds us that the notion of freedom in the Constitution has been forever evolving.  It was first limited to property-owning white men and has been expanded ever since to include all Americans including now the freedom of gay and lesbian Americans to marry.

Kennedy wrote for the majority, “The past alone does not rule the present.  The nature of injustice is that we do not always see it in our own time.  The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions…”

He continues, “…and so they entrusted future generations to a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

Honoring war dead such as ancestors who fought to preserve a way of life called slavery is to respect their sacrifice without condoning the injustice requiring it of them.

But flying their flag is an insult, just as flying the Nazi flag is an insult, just as flying the flag of ISIS is an insult to freedom and justice.

The Confederate flag as an artifact of history is important to preserve.  But not when flown, as it has been in South Carolina beginning in the 1960s, to signal refusal to accept the end of desegregation.

But what’s far more important, in my opinion, than all of the energy we spend pushing and pulling over symbols such as a flag, is the need for us to discuss race, white as much as black or brown, beginning with implicit bias.

A wonderful start is to read or listen to the words spoken by John A. Powell.

Taking Up The Slack

In case you missed it, North Carolina where I have lived for going on three decades just missed ranking in the top 10 states for couch potatoes.

We came in #6 for average minutes watching TV, just below the middle of the pack for least amount of exercise, #11 for watching daytime soap operas and, drum roll, #14 for love of Lazy-E-Boys.

As a whole, Tar Heels are #15 when it comes to thinking about frozen pizza and #19 in our love of fast food, but in the middle of the pack again in our love of video games.

That is just a sampling of the metrics used to develop the Couch Potato index.

Regionally, according to Roberto Ferman, a reporter for Wonkblog, the South dominates the nation when it comes to Couch Potatoes.

It’s probably the humidity but that doesn’t explain why we don’t make up for it during mild winters.

North Carolina comes in #15 overall in the analysis compiled from various sources by bloggers for Estately, an online real estate research site.

Most fascinating to me was the variation across the country in the number of fast food restaurants per capita and the linkages to measures for Lazy-E-Boys, obesity and lack of exercise.

For many years I ate, on average, more than a hamburger per day, especially after moving to North Carolina, so it was no wonder then when my doctor told me I needed to lose 20-30 pounds as part of a regimen to lower my triglycerides.

I’ve eaten three hamburgers in the past year, two when traveling.  In the mean time, the number ordered per American has reached 28 compared to the nearly 550 a year I used to contribute alone.

The Burgers “ordered-in-restaurants” market is double the size of the market for pizzas, which is why it was smart of the index to include frozen pizzas.

A few years before I retired in 2009, Durham, where I live, jumped into the “better-burger movement,” led by a great restaurant that existed here at the time called Starlu.

It, in turn, helped spawn an early food truck called Only Burger, now also a sit-down or order-to-go restaurant with two locations.

At the time, better burgers were less than 2% of the overall restaurant burger market.  Now, they are double that share even though the overall market for burgers in restaurants has grown by another $13.4 billion.

Obviously someone is take up my slack.

Best Advice

By the time I arrived in Durham, North Carolina to lead my fifth startup, the first that would be totally from scratch, I relied on some advice I was given when I first became a chief executive.

“Don’t meet with the first 100 people who seek you out.”

This, it was explained, is because for the most part they will have an agenda.  The advice was also to wait to have introductions with the usual suspects until after I had time to seek out individuals whose roots or connections here preceded the community’s.

In Durham, that fortuitously turned out to be George Watts Hill, a banker whose grandfather and great grandfather were close associates with the city’s founders.

Another was Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, a philanthropist and civil rights activist who was the great granddaughter of Washington Duke whose roots in what came to be called Durham stretched back to before the Revolutionary War.

The third was John Hope Franklin with whom I learned I had become familiar during a college course at BYU entitled The History of the South.  Its syllabus included Franklin’s book entitled, From Slavery to Freedom.

I didn’t make the connection until I saw a copy in a small stack of books on the corner of his desk as I entered Dr. Franklin's office at Duke.

He chuckled as I silently mouthed, “You’re that John Hope Franklin.”

“That had to be the third edition that you studied,” he explained, after asking about my background.  He noted that the one on the corner of his desk was a sixth edition.

But he was more interested in making sure I knew how important from the outset it was to correct the way airlines and other tenants truncated the name of the airport Durham jointly owned.

All three are gone now.  Mr. Hill died a little more than 36 months after we met.  Mary, now also gone, became a friend whom I would run into in restaurants we both favored long after I retired.

But it is John Hope who stayed in contact the most, calling or stopping me at events to fill in details that were relevant to my job of marketing Durham right up to his passing a few months before I retired.

I miss him and I still regularly reread or consult From Slavery to Freedom, which reads as fresh, objective and insightful today as when it was written nearly seven decades ago.

Of course, it has been updated with each new edition, now in its eighth.

I recommend it far more than any book written since then, including those that scholars have recommended in the wake of nine African Americans including a pastor and state legislature gunned down last week by a white supremacist in South Carolina.

Although he had been the target of discrimination, a form of racism, and the Supreme Court had relied, in part, on his research to strike down segregation, Dr. Franklin always made it extremely easy to ask questions and talk about race.

The importance of seeking out individuals such as these this when starting or assuming direction of a community’s destination marketing organization is that they can give you insight into a community’s most temporal values and traits including insights into its sense of place.

They also guided me to useful studies and reports conducted over time in addition to pointing out the flaws or oversights common in politicized histories of various developments.

These insights prepared me to better decipher the agendas of those who would be lining up at my door.

John Hope Franklin, shown in his 20s in the image with this essay, had first come here in 1943 when he was 28.

In 1947, he had been granted time to research and write From Slavery to Freedom by Dr. James E. Shepard, the founder in 1910 of what is now North Carolina Central University.

Shepard had migrated to Durham first as a pharmacist and was prominent in establishing Hayti, an African-American commercial area here during a period when segregation had been legalized by the Supreme Court.

To grasp the values that truly began to differentiate Durham is to understand the period from the end of the Civil War through this period in particular.

In From Slavery to Freedom, Franklin traces the earliest roots of slavery.  It wasn’t racists, per se, who imported the practice to America.  The earliest Americans sort of backed into it, first as indentured servitude.

This was a way people of all backgrounds with little means could secure transit to America in return for working out the terms of a contract while earning a stake of their own.

Some slaves were dropped off in Virginia who had been on a ship that had been intercepted and it was greed that first motivated those who seized on this as way to make land productive and profitable.

By the eve of the Civil War in 1860, there were 31.4 million Americans including 8 million white Southerners.

By then, 1% of the population still owned slaves.  Telling is that slave holding states were growing at a fraction of the pace in states and territories where it was banned.

About 200,000 slave owners in 1860 were small farmers with five or less slaves each and 88% of slave owners had fewer than 20.  Economic historians estimate that it took around 40-60 slaves for it to be profitable.

So the practice was in steep decline by 1860 but the South and the U.S. Congress had been held hostage for decades by what was less than 9,700 slave owners whose hubris then propelled the nation into a war that cost the lives of 620,000 Americans.

At the Battle of Gettysburg alone, five times the number of Americans were killed compared to the slave holders perpetuating the war.

When I read or hear someone today claim the issue was States’ Rights, I agree.  But make no mistake: in the words of Southern officials at the time, it was a State’s right to condone slavery.

Was everyone who fought for the South a racist?  No.  Duped?  Probably many or who were at the very least conflicted.  Just as many who fought for the North were probably somewhat conflicted when it came to race.

It had been the source of a moral struggle about what it meant to be American since before Independence.

In fact, according to experts, it was the proponents of slavery who transformed the Constitutional “right to bear arms” from what was intended as a collective right, to an individual one in order to defend against slave revolts.

Even more tragic than the Civil War was the 90 year struggle after the war to perpetuate white supremacy in the South.

Triangulating responses to various Gallup surveys, I estimated yesterday that the number of overt racists now is probably around 7% of the population.

But judging by the actions of several state legislatures, there may be several times that proportion of enablers. 

The percentage of racists and enablers in America was probably around 50% by the time segregation was banned, down from as many as 6-in-10 Americans in the 1930s.

Racism is a learned behavior.  Some of us are obviously still unlearning it.

The Birthright for Being Hostile and Mean

Some of my most conservative friends undoubtedly rolled their eyes and muttered something dismissive such as “politically correct” when they heard news reports in advance of a warning issued by Pope Francis.

But ironically, isn’t ideology of any kind, itself, a form of political correctness?

All the hub bub has been about climate change, but the Pope’s warning was far more strategic than even that.

Readers of these essays who also actually read the Pope’s document before I did were sure to bring to my attention that it dealt with something about which I often write: community sense of place.

But first, it is important to put it in the context of the Pope’s earlier warnings about ideology.

In the course of delivering a series of morning meditations back in October 2013, Pope Francis warned about the corrosive effects of ideology, the excesses of which Catholics know something about from the church’s own history.

I don’t descend from a Catholic culture, at least going back more than four centuries.

In fact, nearly every line of my ancestors fled to America in the 1600s to escape religious persecution, often at the hands of Catholics, and always at the hands of other Christians.

They came to these shores as Remonstrants, Puritans, Quakers, Amish, Palatines, Huguenots and other forms of Christian faiths before helping to found yet another in the early 1800s, a restorationist Christian faith nicknamed Mormons.

I think they would all agree with Pope Francis when he noted repeatedly in 2013 that “In ideologies there is not Jesus: his love, his meekness.”

He noted, “When faith becomes an ideology, it makes Christians hostile and arrogant…it is a serious illness.”

No argument there.  But of course, those on the left claimed he was talking to those on the right while those on the right pointed right back at the left, all the while making the Pope’s point.

As moderates though, we know he was talking to all of us regardless of ideology.

In Chapter 4, part II, paragraph 143 of the encyclical or clarification of doctrine released a week ago is a paragraph that emphasizes “sense of place” (I’ve added some breaks for ease of reading):

“Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat.

This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city.

It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in.

Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity.”

Unfortunately, far too many of my former colleagues in community destination marketing are devotees of an ideology that enables, if not fosters, the destruction of sense of place to worship instead at the altar of mainstream sameness.

It is an ideology with roots in the late 1930s which, after a hiatus for WWII, mounted an all out assault on sense of place still underway today.

Intriguing is a series of graphs that chart the average ideological positions of members of various U.S. Congresses dating back to 1947, the year after my dad returned from that war and the year before I was born.

They not only show the positions of the two major parties, but also the average for each chamber over the years since.

You can see for instance, that as former GIs took office after the war, the Congress, on average, became more liberal overall, possibly due to first hand exposure to the excesses ideology can inflict.

This is also the period when legislators in South Carolina, angry at desegregation across the nation took the Confederate flag from inside their chambers where it had been hung since 1938 in the House and 1956 in the Senate, raised it in defiance above the Statehouse.

Estranged from voters by special interests, Congress is far more conservative today even as Americans are again becoming less so.  The advantage on social issues is down to 4 points and lower than it was on economic issues at the turn of the century.

Actually, the percentage of Americans who are extremely conservative on either metric is back down to what it was in 1999 while the percentage who are very liberal is three times what it was.

But neither, according to Gallup, is more than a single digit fringe.  Another survey appears to quantify the percentage of Americans who are just generally intolerant, I suspect due to ideological estrangement.

This, I suspect, would also be the same hard core 7% at one end of the spectrum, who, on average, say they would never vote for a Catholic, woman, Black, Hispanic or Jew for President.

Apparently, this is lost on news outlets, who fail to read the actual survey results, give this tiny, hate-filled sliver undue influence and cover.

There is also reason to believe this 7% is a measure of the number of Americans who are truly racist.

A testament to the fact that we do evolve as Americans is that in 1958, just after segregation was declared unconstitutional, more than half of Americans would not vote for a Black to be President.

In 1937, 64% of Americans would not vote for a woman to be President.