LEADERSHIP VERSION 2.0
A new Oregon requires a new way of doing
business
By Christina Williams
Complaining about a lack of leadership is practically a sport
in Oregon.
The leadership gap has been blamed for everything from
paralysis in the Legislature to dismal funding for public
schools to trouble retaining businesses to a lack of support
for local philanthropic organizations.
The standard leadership lament in Oregon usually conjures up
the days of Tom McCall as the kind of moderate but decisive
leader who's absent today. As governor from 1967 to 1975,
McCall is credited for the bottle bill, land use laws and
environmental stewardship efforts such as cleaning up the
Willamette River and restricting development along the coast.
The 1970s-era business community was also different. The
state's biggest industries were more likely to be
natural-resources based. And Oregon's homegrown companies
— Willamette Industries, Fred Meyer, U.S. Bancorp, Meier
and Frank, all of which have been acquired by out-of-state
companies — were still based at home.
Back then, leadership was one person stepping forward to lead a
like-minded community toward a shared goal. The names of
leaders were well known — the captains of industry, the
politically anointed — and the top-down version of
communication was the accepted norm.
"I'd say the state under Tom McCall was a pretty laid back but
not very dynamic place," says Rick Mowday, professor of
management at the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business at
the University of Oregon.
Oregon has changed dramatically since then and so has the
definition of what it takes to lead this state.
Sure, Oregon is still a small state — and, most would
agree, laid back. But its population has grown a hefty 71% (to
3.6 million in 2004) since 1970. The makeup of its industries
has slanted away from timber and fishing and toward high tech,
manufacturing and services, businesses with contractors,
customers and partners all over the globe.
Oregon's ever-present urban-rural divide has deepened —
in 1970 urban Oregonians made 14% more than their rural
counterparts. By 2003, that gap had stretched to 29%.
Life at the Capitol has also become trickier. Changes to the
state's tax structure wrought by Measures 5 (passed in 1990)
and 50 (passed in 1997) shifted the tax burdens of services
such as schools from local to state governments and from
property taxes to recession-buffeted income taxes. Piled on top
of an unbalanced tax structure are such wedge-driving issues as
gay marriage, property rights post Measure 37 and ongoing
tensions between environmentalists and many Oregon industries.
"Leadership in Oregon is worse today than it's ever been, in my
experience," says Russell Dondero, adjunct professor at
Portland State University and longtime observer of Oregon
politics. "But the problems are more acute and there's more
political scar tissue."
In other words, leading in Oregon — or anywhere in a
world where competition and markets are global and changes come
fast — is no longer an easy task.
"It's a totally different environment," says Mowday. "You need
different skills to be successful."
And maybe the problem in Oregon isn't leadership, but how we
look at it.
TO SURVIVE IN TODAY'S WORLD, leadership has changed. It had to.
Just like businesses have had to become more nimble to survive
in the slick, global economy, leadership has morphed into
something that's smarter, more flexible and more comfortable
with change.
At the heart of the new model is an inclusive style that brings
in a variety of advisers to collectively hammer out the best
method to achieve agreed-upon goals. "Is it not the height of
hubris to think that one person has all the answers?" asks
Robin Teater, executive director of American Leadership Forum's
Oregon chapter. "Leadership is being willing to trust other
people. It's not Jack Welch."
In addition to collaboration, the new leaders empower others,
providing the hope and inspiration and keeping a low profile to
the extent that when goals are achieved, the stakeholders in
the process come away believing they're the ones who did it.
"Leaders trust others, even if the risk seems great," says Jay
Casbon, campus executive officer at the Oregon State
University's nascent Cascades Campus in Bend. "They aren't
control freaks."
Peter Senge, founder of the Society for Organizational Learning
in Cambridge, Mass., says that the old powerful-boss model
actually impedes the creativity and risk-taking that leads to
innovation and survival. Another leadership scholar, Ronald
Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers and
professor at Harvard University, advises leaders to keep
employees and constituents in a "productive discomfort zone."
It's precisely when you shake things up that great ideas
emerge.
In addition to shaking up the status quo, today's leaders have
a laser-like focus on the end result. They have a clear sense
of where they need to be, even though the path to get there is
likely to change along the way.
And what about the charisma factor? It's highly overrated. In a
class on CEO leadership at U of O, Mowday hosted several
big-company executives. "Each of them was very different but I
wouldn't call any of them charismatic."
Still, communication is important and so is the emotional
intelligence required to connect with people. Melody Rose,
program director for the NEW Leadership Oregon, a leadership
training program for women at Portland State University, sums
it up: "If you're not going to bring people with you, you
aren't going to be a leader."
FOR ALL OUR MOANING about a lack of leaders in Oregon, the new
rules of leadership are actually in play — they're not
just theories.
Oregon's American Leadership Forum chapter, for example, has
been up and running since 1986 and has put 392 Oregonians,
between 20 and 25 each year, through a rigorous yearlong
training in adaptive thinking and collective intelligence. Its
graduates include Duncan Wyse, whose Oregon Business Council
launched the collaborative Oregon Business Plan effort in 2002.
Others include Susan Castillo, superintendent of public
instruction, U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer, Judi
Johansen, CEO of PacifiCorp — and this magazine's
publisher, Gillian Floren.
Statewide efforts such as the Chalkboard Project, which has
worked to bring parents, teachers unions and state school
officials to one table with a goal to improve schools, and the
Oregon Business Plan, which deploys volunteers to work on
initiatives to enhance the state's business climate, provide
solid examples.
Regions far away from the Portland Metro region also have
something to teach about collaborative leadership. Take
Southern Oregon, for example. Two hundred miles from Salem, the
residents of the towns and cities of Southern Oregon often
describe themselves as stepchildren when it comes to relating
to, or getting attention from, the rest of the state. But their
seclusion has evolved into a benefit.
"When you have fewer resources, you do a better job of working
together," says Kathy Bryon, executive director of the
Medford-based Gordon Elwood Foundation, which backs and
organizes myriad community projects.
Bryon isn't worried about leadership, especially not in her
neck of the woods, but what she does worry about is
connectedness.
"In Oregon, well, really in society, we have all these silos
— education, different industries, different branches of
government. You can talk about collaboration but it's
very different in reality," she says.
Setting out to work on connectedness, Bryon followed on the
heels of some ambitious regional planning work done by the
Rogue Valley Civic League's Healthy and Sustainable Communities
Project in 1997. The Gordon Ellwood Foundation formed the
Learning Community in 2004. Based on Peter Senge's idea of a
learning organization (team learning around a shared vision),
the group brought together leaders from a variety of
organizations throughout the Rogue Valley and has tackled
community issues such as poverty and methamphetamine use.
The group has at once capitalized on the commitment of local
leaders who are already knee-deep in local issues — "The
people who are business leaders here are on 10 nonprofit
boards," says Bryon — and supports them to take on new
challenges as a group.
In La Grande, the Eastern Oregon business community has
coalesced around Eastern Oregon University as one of the
region's primary economic engines. Beyond attracting students
to the area and providing training for the workforce, EOU is
putting the finishing touches on a $30 million science center,
built with the help of business leaders who pitched in to raise
funds. The school also buddied up with the city and the Union
County Economic Development Corporation to buy land and draw up
plans for the La Grande Business and Technology Park.
Recruitment for tenants is already underway.
"It doesn't hurt that our mayor is an economist," says Tim
Seydel, EOU's assistant vice president for university
advancement. "We look at things from a business perspective. We
have to."
The university, Seydel explains, is pretty well entangled with
the business community, and while it's more a function of the
community's small size than anything else, the closeness is an
effective means of pushing leaders of different silos to work
together. "It's what we call supermarket checkout line
accountability," he says. "People will come up to us and ask,
'What's going on with the new building?' We answer them."
THE TOUGHEST TASK of new leadership is translating attributes
such as checkout line accountability to a larger scale. How
many Oregonians, for example, run into their state
representative at the supermarket (or even know what they look
like, for that matter)? Same goes for running a small company,
where it's easy to collect input and communicate goals, as
opposed to a large company where a certain amount of
bureaucracy is a must.
Playing by leadership's new rules is by no means easy. It's a
long, messy process designed to make people uncomfortable. It
requires an unwavering directional compass and a passion that's
not easily extinguished. And it counts on good followership
— citizens, employees and stakeholders who don't just sit
back waiting to be told what to do.
"Oregon's got to get real," says OSU's Casbon. "If you look at
the data — what we're doing with hunger, what we're doing
with basic infrastructure — we don't look so good.
Oregonians want to kick back but the shadow of that is a lack
of excellence in some key areas."
The old model of leadership works well for people who prefer to
kick back. But the one-guy-with-all-the-answers routine just
doesn't fly anymore.
In an online survey of Oregon Business readers (see
Input, p. 10), 49% strongly agree that there's a lack of
leadership in Oregon; 42% say they somewhat agree. Fewer than
10% of readers see enough leaders around the state.
There's a lot of work to be done in Oregon to restore the
state's reputation as a place from which bold ideas come.
Oregon companies that are led with openness for feedback and
that offer a welcome mat for change will be stars in the
constellation of a healthy economy. And most agree that
collaborative model of leadership is the best chance to bridge
the divides between urban and rural, red and blue and actually
move forward on an agenda for fixing the state's problems.
"The role of business leadership is to realize that if things
continue to go the way they are in Oregon, the business
environment is going to deteriorate," says Russ Dondero of PSU.
"In their long-term interest, they become problem solvers, not
flame throwers."
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RULE #1: TEAM UP.
Listen more often than you speak. Seek out a diversity of
voices. Don't pretend to have all the answers.
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RULE #2: NURTURE
OTHERS. Empower your stakeholders. Let others win.
Motivate and inspire.
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RULE #3: LOVE CHAOS.
Question the status quo. Stay out of your comfort zone.
Embrace conflict.
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RULE #4: FOCUS ON
RESULTS. Clearly see what's to be accomplished.
Establish your vision. Know that the path will change, but
the endpoint won't.
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RULE #5: SPREAD THE
WORD. Bring people along with you. It's not about
charisma. It is about communication.
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