Transcription of Bettering Businesses (and Nonprofits) #205
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 205, Bettering Businesses and Non-Profits. Airing for the first time on Sunday, August 16th, 2015. Small businesses and non-profits often have much to offer, but may not have the resources or support they need. How do we help them maximize the work they are doing? Through mentoring and leadership programs, both of which are readily available in Maine. Today, we discuss these with Jula Sampson, a mentor with the Top Gun Program and Jan Kearce of Lift360. Thank you for joining us.
I always enjoy spending time with people that I have had a prior conversation and relationship, that sort of thing with. This is Jula Sampson that I’ll be speaking with now. She owns A. E. Sampson & Son with her husband Paul. Jula is a mentor for young businesses through the Mid-coast Top Gun Program. She lives in Lincolnville with Paul and 250,000 bees. Thanks for coming in.
Jula: Thank you Lisa.
Lisa: We’ve known each other because we have kind of a Mid Coast connection. I think the Camden International Film Festival is one place that we’ve connected over the years. You’ve been in Maine for quite awhile.
Jula: Yes. I summered here quite a bit when I was a child and then in the 80s, I decided to move here because of the lifestyle. I had spent a year teaching and Chicago in the South Side. I really enjoyed teaching and enjoyed Chicago create our community, but I really missed Maine. I had a rural background, grew up on a farm and just missed it. I chose Camden and moved to Camden and really have never left.
Lisa: It must be your farm background that has caused you to be in close contact with 250,000 bees.
Jula: Yes. When I was growing up, we had chickens, goats, ducks, hens, and an apple orchard, those sorts of things. There was a cow farm down the road that always had animals. Bees are not quite like animals, but I’m really enjoying having them and taking care of them and harvesting the honey.
Lisa: You have an interesting business. It’s one that I don’t know that much about, but it’s one that’s quite in demand these days. A. E. Sampson & Son works a lot with flooring and wood products. Tell me about that and how you got into that.
Jula: A. E. Sampson & Son actually first started as a full architectural firm, meaning that we made doors and trim and flooring and, way back, cabinets when I first started. My husband, Paul, and his father had the business back at the family farm and the business was expanding and at that time, I was managing the Lord Camden Inn. They really realized that they needed somebody to come in and sort of pull them together because they were really at odds with all the business they had and they needed somebody really to production manage the business for them.
I came in. I did not have a woodworking background, but the way I started was they had me picking wood and running the machines and actually helping making all the products, so I would understand the business. Then slowly, I moved out of the shop and just did the business sales. Now, I order the wood and do all those parts and pieces.
As the business grew, it became important to focus the products down, so early on, we stopped making cabinets and then slowly we stopped making doors. Now, it’s really just focused on flooring. We’ll do stair treads and trim, but it was just becoming more focused so that we could make a better product rather than being very scattered making all these different products.
Lisa: How long has A. E. Sampson & Son been in business?
Jula: Over 30 years. It’s over a long time and Paul’s father, that’s what he did before Paul started the business with him. He worked with somebody else for another business doing cabinet making, but that was his career and then Paul came onboard and they started their own business.
Lisa: What was that like for you to come in to a family business as an outsider and learn about something you had never had any prior background in and then have to kind of turn it around and manage it?
Jula: Fortunately, I was young, so I didn’t think too much about it. I just said, “Oh, okay, this will be fun.” I had a very scientific, artistic background and woodworking has lots of math in it and there really is an art part of it where you’re looking at the wood and trying to figure out how it will best make the product that you want.
That part, it wasn’t that difficult for me. Machinery, I actually like machinery. I’ve always been sort of one of those people that have taken things apart and put them back together. Working with the machinery was actually fun. The hard part I think for me is I hadn’t thought about it that it was a very male-based business. The people that I would be dealing with, the contractors and the architects were mostly men in the 80s.
Initially, that was the most difficult part, because people would come to the shop and they wouldn’t want to speak to me. They would want to speak to Paul or Alan and I was really the person they were supposed to speak with. They had a learning curve and I had a learning curve on the best way to handle that.
I eventually learned that the best way for the business, and me was to handle that was to ask them to just give me a shot. Just start talking to me and let me know what they were looking for, what were they asking Paul and Alan about. At the point in time where I could no longer help them, I would go get Paul and Alan.
That worked. They would start and after a while they realized that I really did know what I was talking about and we would work through the process of finding out what they wanted Paul or Alan to build for them or what piece of wood they were trying to get. Over many, many years, that became, in essence, not a problem. Nowadays, I find most people would rather talk to me than Paul.
Lisa: How did this translate into your desire to give back through the Top Gun Program?
Jula: It actually started with, I think, my involvement with the Camden International Film Festival. I really started as a volunteer there. Then I realized from volunteering with it that Ben in the program could possibly use some of my business experience. Manufacturing is like one big production and the film festival is one big production.
I approached Ben and some members on the board and said, “I have some of these ideas. What do you think?” They were very open, very receptive to my helping them and so it was a board member of [SIF 00:09:23] that actually said, “What do you think about mentoring with Top Gun?” I said, “I would love to do that.”
I really enjoy helping people get their business up off the ground. Some of the reasons why I enjoy that is Paul and I had a hard time getting our business up and off the ground. We went through many pitfalls and really learned the hard way, and really had no support at all.
I see now that with just talking through to somebody about a business, you can be so much further ahead. Just networking or just sort of having that person with business experience to bounce ideas off of and say, “What do you think about this? How can I do this? What have you been through like this?” That by having that person, you as a business owner can then have your business grow much quicker than it might without somebody like that to bounce ideas off of or to give you advice, or to hook you up with somebody else.
Lisa: What types of businesses did you work with as a mentor?
Jula: Quite a range. We worked with two fellows who are trying to develop a piece of medical equipment to help the medical profession. We worked with a company that is designing a dock to grow muscles on, a woman who has a dryer ball business, a wool dryer ball business, and a woman who is trying to build temporary shelters for refugees around the world.
We also have worked with a woman who wants to do fashion high-end shoes in Maine. Someone who wants to do an online business for hooking up galleries and artists so that they don’t have to go through different process of being there physically. Then there was a marine hardware business that was trying to grow. It was really a huge range. The other one was a woman growing eels to market to Maine.
Lisa: That is a range.
Jula: Quite a range.
Lisa: What are some of the commonalities?
Jula: The commonalities are everybody had a great idea. When you’re in the Top Gun Program, you are a little bit vetted. Before you can actually be in the program, you apply. The people that are accepted to be in their program have a business idea or an existing business that they felt can grow, has really good growth potential and a good idea.
The commonality was all these people were really energized, had great ideas, but couldn’t get to the next plateau. For many different reasons, and sometimes a variety of reasons, financing was one, but that wasn’t always it. Some of it was just resources. Some of it was just not understanding how to tackle the next step. Like three of the businesses or actually a lot of them, four or five were about manufacturing and they couldn’t really embrace the square footage they needed to grow their business.
Some of that was because they piecemeal parts of the business out now, so they didn’t have it in one space. Some of it, it was because they wanted to grow 10 times and they couldn’t really picture how that space would be. Some of them were shy, had difficulty speaking or doing sales pitches or writing. Even though their businesses were very diverse. They had great ideas, but they were just shy.
It was amazing that when we were all in the room, a lot of the advice they needed for mentors or a lot of the programming they needed was incredibly similar, in just how to get your message out, how to approach people, where to find legal and financial help.
The other thing was how to grow your team. A lot of the businesses were only one person or two or three people. It was like, “What’s the next step?” That’s very similar regardless of what sort of business you have. Then what physical plant do you need, and it was amazing how similar that was too in some ways.
Lisa: As you’re going through that process as a mentor for Top Gun … I don’t know what the timing was exactly, but there was a downturn in the economy here in Maine that impacted your business and all of construction related businesses and a lot of other businesses too. What was that like while you’re mentoring other businesses, and simultaneously trying to figure out how to best move your business forward?
Jula: It actually was very helpful, because to be in a room with all this energy. There was a wide range of ages, so that actually was great too. It was very helpful for me in re-energizing my business too, because sometimes, you need to hear how other people are, in essence, going to market their new business or how they’re going to approach financing their new business. Or how they’re going to grow their team.
You look at what you’ve been doing for the past 30 years and saying, “Some of this was pretty good while we were doing this, but some of it could use some improvement.” By looking at what they were doing and, in essence, mentoring them, helping them, it was much easier to look at what I was doing and saying, “This is what we need to do better. This is what we need to fix.”
Whereas I feel if I hadn’t been helping the other businesses, I would not have had the energy to look at my own business or positive energy to look at my own business and make the corrections that I needed to make.
Lisa: That’s interesting, because there is a necessity of some objectivity and yet when you’re so invested in something, you’ve been doing it for such a long time, sometimes it’s hard to be objective because it’s personal.
Jula: Yes. Sometimes, you feel like you’re doing everything right and that it’s easy to blame the recession on why you’re not doing well which clearly has a lot to do with it, but what can you do better to make whatever little piece of the pie you have, either bigger or at least better for you. That gave me the energy to look at that and tackle that.
It was also just great to be in a room of people who are excited about business, because sometimes I feel like people don’t like to talk about businesses and the work of being a business, of having a business. One of the sessions we had was life and work, how do you manage that.
It was great to be in a room with people who love the challenge of starting a business or being in business, but also recognized the challenges of that. That provided a lot of support between all of us, but also, again, a lot of positive movement forward.
Lisa: We interviewed the founder of Bixby & Co, the Bixby Bar woman. She shared kind of a very interesting story about the creativity of business. A lot of us think of business as very linear. I guess it would be left-brained, but there is a creativity that goes along with managing and organizing and putting out a product. Did you find that this is so as well?
Jula: I did. I’m not sure. I could have probably said it as eloquently as she had, but a business is your whole life. When we talked about life and work, I think if you own a business, it’s never too far away from what you’re doing. You have to find some creativity in it, some joy in it, some happiness that you can bring with you all the time.
For some people, it’s definitely the creativity of the business. For me, I think, sometimes, it’s just the beauty. I mean I find business sort of beautiful in that working with wood. I enjoy it in a rough, but then I enjoy it when it’s a final product of the flooring. Then in the process, like I said, I like machines. I like what the machines and people can do to the wood to make it a product.
Starting with something rough and then making something beautiful out of it. I guess like baking, you start with five different ingredients and then you come out with one beautiful thing. Yes, that’s creative and beautiful. There’s an order to it. I like the order I guess too.
Lisa: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the house that we’ve lived in for a year. The wood was used by the person who designed the house was an architect and it’s fir, so there’s a very warm feel to it. It really makes the experience. It makes the house, and yet that’s not something that I think a lot of us really tap into when we’re considering designing our houses.
Jula: Right. I don’t think most people do. We have a showroom with at least 50 to 60 species in there. I love it when people come into the showroom and the first thing we’ll have to decide is what would I want, but I want to make sure that I find the right wood for me and it will work in my house.
Occasionally, I go to people who seem really worked up about making this choice, like thinking they could make a mistake. I say, “Now, look at all these. As you’re standing in this room, look at these 50 to 60 species. How do you feel about them all?” They’re like, “Well, this room is beautiful. I love all of them.”
I get to say to them, “Well, wood isn’t like paint. You can’t really go wrong with any different species. They all have warmth to them. They all have a beauty to them. They’re all natural, so just sort of take a minute and relax and then find the one that you feel is the best match for you and your personality and how you’re going to live in your house. But, is there a right one or a wrong one? No. You’ll be fine whichever one you decide.”
You just see this huge weight that’s lifted off people’s shoulders. They then can look around and really embrace every species and make a choice on the one that really speaks to them, but know that there’s no right or wrong. Whatever one they pick will work fine in their house.
I’ve never walked into a house where you’ve said, “Oh, that piece of wood does not work here.” You can do that with paint in other materials, but generally, wood will work with whatever you want to put around it.
Lisa: I’m intrigued and really drawn to the word species; because as you’re talking about this, it’s a reminder that this is not a static … It’s not like metal. It’s not like paint or glass. It’s a living being, a living entity. Well, no longer living, but it once was, so it has its own character, because it once had its own living character. It’s almost like you’re inviting this character, this species into your house to live with you.
Jula: Yes, it’s definitely … It’s no longer living, but it still has properties of being a natural product in that wood can come and go a little bit and move and it just has a real warmth to it like a living species, wood.
Lisa: It is interesting in New England too, because we aspire to live in the old farm. Well, many of us I guess. I will say I always aspired to live in the old farmhouse with a pumpkin pine board on the floor and the bead-board paneling. There is just a sense that there’s something wooden that kind of needs to come with whatever your environment consists of.
Jula: Yes. I think a lot of people dream of the old farmhouse and the wood because there’s just this peacefulness to it. Wood has natural warmth and I think has a real calming effect for most people because of that natural warmth and the peacefulness of it. Every single piece of wood is different, so it has a natural variety that I think people sort of embrace in terms of we’re not all the same. People are not all the same, so every piece of wood is going to be different. It all sort of flows together naturally, you never really see three or four boards together and sort of feel like that was a bad idea.
Lisa: It seems as though one of the things that just needs to be present if your business will be successful is that one has to have the passion for whatever it is that they are putting out there. Your passion for wood and wood products and the manufacturing process and even the conversations with contractors and customers, you just have to really believe in what you do, because otherwise, you probably would get old pretty fast.
Jula: Yeah. You do have to really believe in what you do and you have to really enjoy what you do, because at the end of the day, when you go home, what you’re taking with you is whatever you’ve produced, made, and that’s where you need to find the joy. Hopefully you really are passionate about what you’re making and doing, because that really is what you’re all about.
Lisa: In your case, you live with your co-owner, so you live with your husband Paul who is the son in A. E. Sampson & Son. You both have to really feel passionate about what you’re doing, because it really is a family affair, let’s just say.
Jula: Yes, we do.
Lisa: Did you find any of this in the Top Gun program or maybe even the Camden International Film Festival? Did you find any similar family situations where people were trying to understand how to work with relationships that were close?
Jula: Yes. I found that that was a skill that a lot of people came to me for as a mentor. It maybe was less family, but it was very close relationships that people were starting businesses with. As they grew, we’re trying to figure out how to define those relationships.
It was actually interesting. I talked with some of the businesses that I felt I had the least common with and I ended up working with them. Sometimes more than the businesses that I maybe thought I had more in common with, because they were having challenges with defining relationships as they grew because they may have started out being a whole bunch of friends. Then as you grow, you want to keep that friendship, but you’re a much larger business and that becomes far more difficult to grow a business and a friendship at the same time.
Generally, for us, for my husband and I, this success has been defining. Basically writing job descriptions. Every two or three years, we treat each other like employees of the business and review our job descriptions like, “What are we both supposed to be doing?” Make sure we have a double check with each other.
The other thing is we’ve defined times when we will talk about business and then times when we won’t talk about business. There are times when it won’t come to the dinner table.
Lisa: Well, this is good and it’s important to be reminded that especially in a state like Maine where there are so many small and medium-size businesses, so many of them that have families that founded them are still actively involved. It’s lovely to believe that we can all support church and state or home and business, but that’s just not the reality, especially in Maine. It’s not, “You go over here and I’ll go over here.” It’s, “Okay, we’re both going to have to coexist in this, in our work and in our life and how do we figure out how to do that.”
Jula: Right. I actually think Maine is one of the better states to do that, because there are so many businesses that are family businesses or strong relationships between business owners that there’s a lot of support and a lot of recognition that that’s how that business operates.
Lisa: Jula, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Jula: Well, thank you.
Lisa: I must say that in our conversations that we’ve had at the Camden International Film Festival when we’re there supporting Ben Fowlie and his group, it’s hard to get into some of these layers that you and I have had a chance to talk about today. You’ve got some good stuff that you’ve been doing.
Jula: Thank you Lisa. It’s been very nice to be here with you also.
Lisa: How do we find out more about A. E. Sampson & Son?
Jula: We are online at www.aesampsonandson.com where you can stop by our shop on Route 90 in Warren.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Jula Sampson who owns A. E. Sampson & Son with her husband Paul. Jula is also a mentor for young businesses through the Mid-coast Top Gun Program. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Jula: Thank you Lisa.
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Lisa: Today in the studio, we have with us Jan Kearce. Jan is the executive director of Lift360, a Portland based non-profit that builds the capacity of leaders and organizations to achieve their goals. Jan lives in Falmouth. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Jan: Thank you for the opportunity.
Lisa: I was enjoying my conversation with you and with John. You used to live in Falmouth with apparently flying squirrels and bats and all sorts of wildlife and you are a nature lover.
Jan: Absolutely.
Lisa: That’s good, but you haven’t always lived in Maine.
Jan: No, I haven’t, but I was born in Key West and made my way north slowly over time and found different opportunities that finally drew me to Maine. It was all primarily connected originally to the outdoors and to the fantastic people I met here when I first came here on vacation.
Lisa: You probably had not flying squirrels and bats in Key West, but likely some equivalent.
Jan: Well, like scorpions in my bed and things like that occasionally when I was a kid, and snakes, things like that. Yeah, no bats, flying squirrels, but I’m not going to complain about any of them. I’m very much a nature lover as you said a moment ago. I’ll take all the flying squirrels and bats in my yard, just not in my bedroom with me.
Lisa: You used to work with Outward Bound.
Jan: I did, with Hurricane Island Outward Bound School up in the Rockland area. That’s what drew me to Maine. I had been on vacation here and I loved Maine and I just knew that I’d come back on vacation again. I came here searching for what I wanted to do next in my life. I worked in manufacturing for 20 years and I was doing good work always building capacity of leaders and organizations. Always still focused on that, but I wanted the end product to be something different than building materials.
I started looking for something that was more socially focused or environmentally focused. I interviewed with organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and others and learned about Hurricane Island Outward Bound School which has this marvelous blend of putting people in the outdoors to learn the lessons that they need to learn about themselves each other in life.
I was offered a job at Hurricane Island Outward Bound School as the human resources director at the time and just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. It took a huge pay cut. I said, “This is where I want to be. This is the work I want to do.” The organization that I believed in at the time and still do.
Lisa: Now, you’re a part of and the executive director of Lift360. That’s kind of interesting and I love the name, Lift360. It’s sort of this idea that you’re moving people upward in a 360-degree manner, so you get to work with all kinds of non-profits now.
Jan: I do. Actually, we work with all sectors. Not only do we work with non-profits, we work with municipalities. We work with some of the biggest corporations in town. We provide leadership development to a broad cross-section of organizations to doctors and lawyers. We do provide it to a lot of different people. We’ve been doing that for the last 22 years, not as Lift360, but as the Institute for Civic Leadership.
Last year, the Institute for Civic Leadership and Common Good Ventures merged to create Lift360 to create a more powerful, stronger organization with its own capacity to help lift communities as you were talking about a few minutes ago. Doing that, we believe that the non-profit sector is vital, but equally vital as each of the other sectors.
When we think about building strength of community, we do it by working with leaders from across all sectors and we do most of our consulting work with non-profits. The non-profits range from people that are working on issues of homelessness, to domestic violence, to healthcare, to education; it is a big range.
Lisa: The Institute for Civic Leadership has a great reputation for really helping people to gain skills that they might not otherwise gain in their workaday lives. I don’t know as much about Common Good Ventures, but it seems as though this has been a priority for a long, long time. Why do we care? Why do we want people to be civic leaders? Why do we want to lift people up? What’s so important about this?
Jan: You have, as I understand it today, interviewed several hundred people as you have been engaged with this radio show. I bet you could answer this question really well as well. I’m going to answer and say, because we have so much going for the State of Maine, when I talk with the people who are working on the issues, who are looking at how they can contribute either on solving issues of homelessness or working on a new business that helps to boost the economy, there are so many people out there who have that interest passion.
Those people need, want, to help organizations like mine to build their capacity, to do what they do best. You may be passionate about radio shows or health or whatever it may be. I have my own passions. I’m going to learn as much as I can about doing the work that I do, but there are times when we all need someone to come in and help us to do that work better.
How can we be more organized? How can we build stronger boards? How can we create a strategic plan that leads us in the direction that we really need to go? Our organization helps to build the capacity of those people to do their work even better. We do it because as the radio show says, “We love Maine.”
We think Maine has so much going for it and we have a certain set of issues that we need to resolve that we read about in the newspaper and that we talk about in our social circles. The people that we work with are doing something about it. For me, it’s a way to give what I do best to what they do best. In the long run, it serves our community, it serves their organizations and it serves them as leaders.
Lisa: Talk to me about the term building capacity.
Jan: Yes.
Lisa: What does that mean?
Jan: Building capacity ranges from being a leadership coach, so someone one on one that wants to explore their own leadership and how they can be a better team leader or a better communicator or a better delegator. We work with people to do that on one end of the scale.
On the other end of the scale, it’s going into an organization doing an assessment, finding out where they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they can work with us to build their capacity to achieve their goals. Building capacity is really about strengthening people and organizations, so they can do what they want to do.
Lisa: How did what you learned in manufacturing translate into what you did with, say, Outward Bound, Hurricane Island Outward Bound and now what you’re doing with Lift360?
Jan: You may think those were very different environments, but the common ingredient is it’s all about people, people doing jobs; people wanting to be engaged in the work that they do. As we often read about manufacturing and think of people doing manufacturing jobs, we think those are boring jobs or we could think they’re boring jobs and don’t have meaning.
In my work in manufacturing, it was all about engaging people at the front lines, on the manufacturing floor and not only using their hands but their hearts and their heads and service to the work. They weren’t left out of the big picture. They weren’t left out of making the decisions.
When I think about how that all builds toward what I’m doing today, my passion has always been about how do I get that work, that team working together. How do I get that leader on track? How do I support them and achieving their goals, because there had been people that I worked with in manufacturing that people thought they were kind of lost causes. That person is never going to turn around. Never going to contribute in a very positive way.
I beg to differ and was successful in getting that person engaged, taking ownership, doing really managing his part of the factory in a way that wasn’t in his job description, but it was in his head, in his heart and his capacity to do what he just needed an opportunity. I think about that and translate it into Outward Bound and on into Lift360.
Outward Bound is about building capacity. It’s about that person, young or old, that comes to an Outward Bound course that is in that discovery mode or looking internal to self and saying, “What can I do? What more can I do?” Then they’re looking external at the team that’s working around them and say, “How do we work together to do this?”
At Lift360, it is about that individual leader, but it’s also about the we. As an organization, we partner a lot. As consultants and as teachers of leadership practices, we focus on collaboration, facilitation, and adaptive leadership. How do we work together to achieve goals.
There are far too many people trying to operate independently and not that that’s bad. I mean people do have dreams and aspirations that they need to go after, but there are many times when the issues are bigger than you and me and have to be solved by a collective answer.
Lisa: I’m thinking about a conversation that I had this weekend as I was watching a soccer tournament and it was about the strange thing that we expose our children to early on which is that some people make the team and other people don’t make the team. The only people who make the team are the excellent people and then the rest of the people; they just don’t exist somehow.
In business, in manufacturing and in life, you deal with whoever is in your team. There are not necessarily cuts. When you discuss something like making the best out of a person that everybody thought was a lost cause, that’s a reality. That and collaborating with people that you don’t necessarily understand, get along with like that is something that exists in real life.
Jan: Yeah, absolutely. There are times we can choose our team. We do that. People move in and out of organizations and in and off of teams, but often, we’re looking for ourselves when we’re assessing. When we’re saying, “Who do we want to be in our team?” We don’t realize, “Oh, we need all of these differences.” We need the person who is the introvert who is going to go off and contemplate. We need the person who thinks out loud. We need the person who’s organized and the person who’s spontaneous.
As different as we all might be, we’re all part of the mix, the ingredients that are necessary to make whatever it is work. What I think is great about the work we do is that part of it is we introduce that whole concept of difference. Who are the different players who come to the table? Who are the stakeholders?
Not just inviting the people that we know and like and love and who care about the same things we do, but the people who may be the roadblocks, because they are the folks who have a different opinion. They’re the people who could potentially, down the road, undermine an initiative. We want them at the table early on. Part of our work is thinking about how do we engage all of those differences to achieve a goal.
Lisa: That must be an interesting challenge, because there are so many different things that contribute to an individual. Their educational background, their learning style, their socio-cultural background. Every individual comes to the table with some different mixture of something. It’s not always entirely clear what it is that you’re trying to help them with.
Jan: No, it’s not. A piece of it … We work with an organization last year who is going through an initiative to change some policies that would allow all different types of people to be part of the organization, say it that way. Part of the work that this organization did was to help their staff to be more receptive to differences.
Being receptive to differences doesn’t mean that you have to like the difference, approve of the difference. It means that you treat people with respect and dignity no matter who they are and what their differences or what their ideology is. That’s a hard path to follow.
I’ve had this conversation recently with another group of folks to say, “Wait a minute. That person believes this. Why do I have to respect that?” You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to act on it as part of your life, but that is what they believe. That’s the stance that they take.
What we, and the community have to do is going to be able to parse all of that out and still move forward to achieve whatever goal we have set for ourselves. It’s extremely difficult to do if we jump into owning it all, but we don’t have to own it all. We own our stuff and let that person own their way of being and respect that that’s their right too.
Lisa: Sometimes on the other side of it, if a person, at least, feels heard and respected, it can actually get you to a better place than if you only ever worked with people that you didn’t have to understand had differences from you.
Jan: Right. I think that part of what we teach people in our programs when it comes to understanding differences, we put people in situations where it’s all about listening. It’s all about people having an opportunity to be heard. That creates an understanding. While you may still not agree or you may not like it, at least have an understanding of where the other individual is coming from.
Lisa: Some of the most interesting and rewarding relationships I’ve ever developed with patients have been in situations or even with the radio show, other aspects of my life. I’ve been in situations where I’ve really had to work through something that wasn’t easy.
Maybe if I went in with a patient and I’m thinking, “This patient really doesn’t like me.” Yet, I still have to be this person’s doctor. Working through the process and really trying to wrap my head around whatever it is, on the other side of it, it can feel really rewarding. It can feel like something was accomplished somehow. Is this something that you have experienced as you have done the work you’re doing?
Jan: We have. Actually, there’s a client situation I’m thinking of right now. We went into a surgery center and worked with a number of nurses who had to work together day in and day out. They each had a different set of responsibilities depending upon whether they were doing prep or surgery or aftercare, whatever it was.
I’m still working with them over a period of time. They’re spending a lot of time just getting to know each other. A piece of it is them hearing, “This is the work that I do.” Hearing this is how people will react to the way that they do their work. Actually, switching roles and acting out each other’s jobs and seeing how difficult they may be, what’s different about it. Engaging in long-term conversation. None of this happens over night, so you have to practice it and you have to work on it.
This organization that we’re working with has committed a lot of time, energy, dollars, etc. into building the relationship and creating stronger teams, but it takes that listening and making room for the other in that work relationship.
Lisa: I often wonder if the way that we encourage kids to be excellent at a young age where they’re pursuing goals, which I think is admirable. I have three kids. I want them to pursue goals, but if this sort of singularity towards one’s own personal excellence leads away from an excellent and collaboration. I don’t want to blame the educational system. There’s not any blame, but I wonder if maybe we could do a better job as a culture and encouraging collaboration in an earlier age.
Jan: I think that’s the time to start. If you read all about brain science and what’s happening at zero to five in terms of children and their brains and how they learn to be collaborative. Or whether they get sucked in to video games or whatever it is, that’s the time to start. Actually, to think we are raised more in a competitive culture, so we don’t tend to naturally collaborate like other societies and cultures do. It takes some work to get people to start dropping some of those competitive ways of being in order for them to collaborative.
Competition is not necessarily a bad thing, because we all … It encourages us to excel. How do we excel in a way that is complementary to other people’s goals is how I look at it from the community perspective. For example, one of the ways of working today is called collective impact and organizations are looking at how they can work on homelessness or work on graduate rates or whatever it is collectively.
If you think about that from a big picture community perspective, each organization has a way that’s working on such an effort has a way that they work on it. Their expertise comes to bear. Their energy comes to bear in a certain way on those initiatives. In that way, we want people to strive hard to achieve their individual goal as part of a collective effort.
I think that the more we can do to incorporate that in the way that we teach children or we raise children, the better off we’ll be as we bring them in to meaningful work roles in our society. I think that’s happening to some degree. I’m maybe optimistic as people call me, but as I think about some of the schools that I have been talking with lately about the way they approach education, there’s more and more of that I see and hear about.
People being taught, little kids being taught systems thinking. Systems thinking as an eight year old, what does that mean? “Oh, my behavior on … When I do this, Johnny feels this way or Sally feels that way or whatever.” How does it all fit together to create the environment that we want to be in? That’s the kind of training and education that will be great for all of our youth to participate in.
Lisa: I agree with you. I do think it’s getting better. Having had two kids graduate from high school and another one in high school now, I have seen this personally happening. I think a lot of people are spending time with that goal. You’re right. I think there is also the importance of being personally excellent.
It’s kind of a simultaneous thing that we all need to individually strive for things, but also collectively strive and accept that other people’s roles are complementary to ours. That’s a very high level and sometimes not always easy tight rope to walk on.
Jan: No. We are in a “we want to win” culture. Even in the work that we do, sometimes we see a lot of those kinds of power plays where people want to … The organization that comes out on top or particularly in the non-profit world, there’s a lot of competition for donors and grants and all of that. People feel little, at times, envious of another organization that gets the big grant or the big donors aligned with their cause or whatever it may be.
It’s hard to be egalitarian, we’ll put it that way, at times when you have a cause and you believe in your cause and you don’t have all the resources that you potentially need to carry it out. What we do about that, that’s … We recognize our humanness I suppose and then we move on and say, “Good for them.” We work on getting our next grant or our next dollar to do the good work that we do.
Lisa: I was interested in how you are going to frame that so that we could bring it back to the positive, because I think that that is exactly what happens. That at some point, you just come to some place of peace with regard to that. Then live your life again and move forward.
Jan: Right.
Lisa: The humanness I’m sure is very interesting for you given that you work with such a broad diversity of individuals and organizations.
Jan: It’s what that … That’s what makes it interesting. I have to say I also have a minor in psychology, so the people that we work with always fascinate me. Oftentimes, when we go in to an organization and people are struggling in some way with their staff or their boards or whatever it is, the personalities all come to play, but no one there is trying to do a bad job. They all believe in the cause or they wouldn’t be there. It’s just that their belief systems or their value systems, or whatever, their ways of being, they come into conflict.
A piece of what we do is try to get people on the same path that we … Not to be the same people for sure, but the same path that they can move forward together.
Lisa: Jan, how can people find out about Lift360?
Jan: That’s easy. Just go to www.lift360.org.
Lisa: I’m fascinated by the work that you’re doing. I love thinking about the systems theory. I just love the stuff, so it’s been very exciting for me to talk to you. I’m hoping that Lift360 continues to do amazing work for decades into the future. We’ve been speaking Jan Kearce, she’s the executive director of Lift360. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Jan: You’re welcome. It’s been my pleasure.