So it really has transformed me and I have a confession to make, which is when I showed up. I thought, I pretty much know all there is about leadership. I mean, 28 years running teams, pretty soon you can kind of think you know it all. And I'm saying this in a humble way because after 28 years, I shouldn't have had to be a leader, but surprisingly the Red Cross just changed the way I lead. I'll give you an example. I mean, I am a left brain thinker. I love data. I love histograms. I love pie charts. I live for this. And when I saw our financials when I first walked in the door, frankly it wasn’t that hard to get us operationally breaking even again. I was able to do a back of the envelope thing and thought, this isn’t going to be that hard. Just gonna lay it out with my pie charts and all my data, and I was ready to roll, and I learned the first lesson, which is when you have 19,000 employees and 300,000 volunteers, you can’t lead with data and analytics. In corporate, I would say, “Ok, everybody jump!” And they would say, “How high?” So here I am, I think I have this solution that’s gonna get us to a good financial footing, and I lay it out, and it’s like, “Ok, so what do you think? Jump!” And the volunteers are like, “No!” It just was this big aha moment for me, which was I am going to have to lead through influence of my ideas, the power of my ideas, not through the power of my office. They could care less about whether or not we were breaking even. They really couldn’t. All they cared about was fulfilling the mission. And that’s when I learned the biggest lesson of all, which is you can lead through your heart, and get people way more inspired than just leading with the numbers.
And it just completely transformed the way I would ask people to do their jobs. We have a mission, and the country needs us, and people are on operating tables that need units of blood. We have to be there. And I would talk about the mission before I would talk about anything else. It’s inspirational when you do that. I didn’t do it at AT&T, and I didn’t do it at Fidelity Investments, and I could have. There were times I would say, hey people, we’re not saving lives here, calm down, but at the Red Cross, we are, so you couldn’t say that. I felt like, if I had told people at AT&T, people, this is important, we are connecting individuals to the people they love. Or at Fidelity, we are making people’s financial dreams come true, we’re helping them retire, we’re putting their kids through college. I think I would have been a more inspirational leader. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wasn’t cold, I was warm, I was encouraging, I was a good boss, but I’ve learned at The American Red Cross how to inspire, and when people are inspired, they will do what they need to do. It’s really quite an experience to lead from your heart, not just from your head.
