Advice on Leading in Turbulent Times for Planned Parenthood and Nature Conservancy

Following is an open letter offering advice to Alexis McGill Johnson, acting CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and to Sally Jewel, interim CEO of the Nature Conservancy, from Pat Nichols, who has worked as an interim nonprofit chief executive at many organizations facing leadership challenges.

Dear Alexis and Sally:

First, congratulations and thank you for taking leadership of two of America’s most venerable organizations, each with its own compelling mission.

Both of you have agreed to lead through traumatic periods. Managing change is perilous so I offer here some advice that I hope will help you. By offering it publicly, I hope it will also help others who seek to manage nonprofits through disruptive change — or to avoid such disruptions entirely.

My experience is not as an expert in either of your organizations’ missions — though I do have ties to and deep affinities for both reproductive health and land and water conservation. I offer, instead, the vantage of an interim CEO focused for 22 years on managing disruptive change in nonprofits.

I served, Alexis, as the first male CEO of two of your proud partners in the women’s movement. Planned Parenthood appears to face formidable political, financial, and managerial challenges. Your federal funding, an important source of revenue, is under assault from those who object to your defense of abortion as a tool for reproductive health. At the same time, you must recover from the scars left by a short-lived succession to the long tenure of the estimable Cecile Richards. News reports and friends in the women’s movement tell me that the departure of her successor, Leana Wen, after only eight months leaves major strategic and managerial rifts.

Sally, I have led a couple of environmental organizations and advised another through difficult transitions. Having a profound concern about climate change, I felt elevated by their missions and their work. Your challenges, related to a set of #MeToo allegations, would not appear to be existential, but they have been deeply disruptive — by nature of the allegations themselves, the management turnover they prompted, and the ensuing public attention.

Listen self-critically.

My first suggestion to both of you will not surprise. It is to listen. You are both insiders of sorts, having served on your organizations’ boards. That means you are way ahead of an outside interim CEO like me. However, it also means you are enculturated to some extent and so will share some organizational blinders. Deep, self-critical listening is essential.

You will need a formal system for listening including one-on-one interviews, informal focus groups, and private and public online dialogs. Listen not just to the board and staff but to constituents, to partners, and to your critics.

Why critics? Allies may pull some punches, but critics will offer their sharpest blows, with relish.

Be careful, though, that you don’t merely invite diatribes. Structure your questions to allow you to see behind the complaints to the critics’ deeper motives and anxieties. And though these critiques are likely to be about mission and programs (they’ll decry your pro-choice positions or argue that you are too market-friendly), be sure to ask them their observations about governance, communications, management, and any other topics that concern you.

With your allies, ask, “What is urgent?” and, “What must we do to succeed, strategy aside?” Their initial answers are likely to be cultural. Your allies, and staff, especially, will feel a sense of injury that they need to work through. Make sure, though, that you encourage them to connect their stories and their complaints to mission and values and to the impact of your work. Don’t let them obsess on their pain. Prepare questions to move the conversation beyond grievances, such as, “What should we be doing that this problem is keeping us from doing?”

Finally, start this listening exercise immediately, if you haven’t already. Begin when listening is all anyone can expect of you. Once you’ve been the CEO for more than a few weeks, people will expect you to offer solutions. And, even when others want that, resist the temptation. Keep inviting people to tell you what they think. Telling them what you think, and watching them defer to you, is seductive but not instructive.

Be clear how decisions will be made.

Be very clear, for every decision you will face, who will make decisions, when, through what process, and with whose input. As new leaders, you may feel compelled to validate yourselves by producing results quickly. Before you build consensus on specific decisions, though, you’ll need to understand how decisions now get made in your organization, formally and informally. You will need to ensure that an honest, transparent process creates credibility for future decisions. This will help you reduce the risk of getting bogged down later in second guessing and foot dragging.

Be wary — be very wary — of those who decide they can wait you out because you are temporary. When you encounter them, and you will, you will need to move decisively to thwart them. Your success and theirs are inimical to each other.

The most common mistake a successful temporary leader makes is to allow herself to be the savior. Then all of the greatness achieved seems to go away when she does. Others, not you, should make most of the decisions during your tenure. Your organizations will be faster, stronger, and more resilient if only the most crucial decisions require your approval. That will allow you, also, to leave behind a culture of decisiveness and a distributed ownership of the decisions made.

Move forcefully and experimentally.

Within a month or so set some short-term goals. Make them clear and sharp-edged so that success or failure will be obvious. Then create teams. Assign one of your best leaders to each but be full partners to them.

These short-term goals will allow you to sharpen your organization’s focus, meld yourselves into the staff, and create early momentum tied to your leadership. Also, your efforts on these goals will be demonstration projects for further changes you will need to make.

These initial goals will likely be about nuts and bolts, not major mission or programmatic change. They could be about rebuilding a function damaged by your turnover or sorting out a systems problem (e.g., financial reporting) or rolling out a new communications strategy. You’ll be amazed, though, how easy these are to identify. Whatever your operational or managerial problems, nearly everyone around you knows them. By your fifth or sixth listening session, these patterns will begin to form. And once the work on these goals is in motion, you’ll have the latitude to make your listening more strategic.

I have no way of knowing how much impact your challenges have had on your fundraising, for good or for ill. My mailbox and my inbox tell me that Planned Parenthood, at least, is making the most of the external assault.

If, though, you need to do serious cost cutting (and this is by far the toughest advice I have to offer), don’t whittle: Cut clean and deep.

Decide what is inessential, even if important, and cut deeply enough that you are not likely to have to cut again. That will be especially difficult if funding ratchets down rather than plummeting, but small cut after small cut after small cut is a form of torture that few can endure. And incremental cutting keeps you, the CEO, in the weeds, diverting you from new opportunities and next-generation strategy.

Also be mindful of where you cut. Nonprofits, even large and sophisticated ones like your own, usually try to be “fair” to their people in ways that compromise the effectiveness of those very people.

Because success rests on your mission and people, if your organization does have to cut, make the decision to do less and fully support those who do it. Don’t try to hire cheaper. Don’t strangle your professional development or travel budgets. Don’t freeze expenses for technologies that make your people better. (Your client-management and direct-marketing systems come first to mind.)

You should be prepared for blowback on this, however. Your team is composed of people who care about other people. That’s why they want to make sure that mothers and their children are safe and well. That’s why they want to save the land and the water on which life depends. If you do what I suggest, they will see you as spending money on “things” rather than people. But that’s not the right framing. Help them see that you are sharpening your focus by cutting deeply and then spending on them and on their ability to protect the planet or women’s right to choose.

Crucially, frame all, or nearly all, of your decisions and actions as both “forceful and experimental.”

Acknowledge that your organizations will be making decisions on imperfect information. Recognize aloud that some will be wrong and that you will need to reverse them. But do not let that be an excuse to proceed tentatively. Insist that the team, once decisions are made, move hard and fast to implement them. Again, clarify what success and failure will look like. And when a decision fails, move hard and fast to acknowledge and reverse it.

Disruption has created opportunity. Maximize it.

Disruption always creates opportunity. It has already created one immense opportunity for each of your organizations in the form of your new leadership. To maximize that opportunity, you will need to be conscious and explicit about your own biases and limitations and about those of the people to whom you listen. Discount their advice accordingly.

That also applies to the opinions offered here. My suggestions are informed by a great deal of experience in managing disruption. They are not informed by the kind of listening about Planned Parenthood or the Nature Conservancy that you intend to do.

I join your many other supporters in being confident that you will succeed in advancing your great missions.

Pat Nichols
President
Transition Leadership International
Washington, D.C.