Driven by Mission

Have you discussed the values that guide you with your team, why is that conversation so important?

I think the conversation is critical, first of all, and the fortunate thing that we have at the Kellogg Foundation is many people come to the foundation driven by a connection to our mission, right? Who doesn't resonate with improving the lives of children and ensuring that the most vulnerable children in society have an opportunity to thrive? So, we end up with, our entire team is there because of the mission, but one thing that I found in bringing our leadership together is there's a lot of passion around the connection to the mission, but they're still needs to be a commitment to the journey of the Kellogg Foundation and those values related to bringing people together, work through partners in the community, and uplifting the voices of communities, and sometimes being in a fellowship space as well as a leadership space, that is more the type of leader that we look for when we're looking for someone to lead the foundation. Mr. Kellogg was a very humble person. He believed in the capacity of people and felt that the role of philanthropy was to promote them, to advocate for them, to support them, to allow them to pursue their own aspirations, and that means for a foundation leader, you have to understand the power that we have and how to share that power in a way that people feel valued and feel as if they are controlling their own direction and aspirations.

Is that what you meant when you said you have to focus not only on the leadership but the followship, the followship, meaning people that you serve?

Correct. Absolutely. This is servant leadership, and so what I found in my journey is people who are more individualists don't perform as well in the collective leadership model that I believe we need in philanthropy, and we've had cases where we've taken a very strong individual contributor, and then promoted them to a level of leadership, I think beyond even what they wanted to achieve because those are different strengths, and I believe in philanthropy, collective leadership, servant leadership, the models that encourage you to lead with others and in the partnership are the models that work best in our field.