Ron: How did you as the leader of the Federation convince your lay leaders who had that old paradigm to shift the paradigm to your vision? What’s the role of the leader in getting that to happen?
Barry: I think the most important thing, oddly enough, the first thing to do is to just build relationships, as much as you can, especially with people who have influence with other people. When you’re meeting with them, you’re telling them a story. You’re not changing the community all at once. What you’re doing is you’re telling people a story about how you see the future.
Barry Shrage, professor of the practice, Brandeis University
I had a supervisor once who was amazing. Every time I walked into the office, she would get around the desk and go to the other side to meet me, no matter what she was doing. I said, “You don’t have to move, you don’t have to.” She said, “You are my job.” That’s really what a leader says. It’s not, “You’re getting in my way.” It’s, “You are my job. You are my job.” When a student says, “Oh, sorry to ask this question,” I say, “Your question is my job. That’s my job. That’s a sacred job. That’s the holiest thing ever.”
Dr. Erica Brown, Vice Provost, Yeshiva University
Another important way to foster change in the organized Jewish community is to do something I call inverting the values pyramid. Rather than focusing on what the organization needs first, instead focus on what people need most. Most leadership and organizational strategy discussions are about “What do we do for the organization? How do we make the organization more vibrant?” Of course, way down in that paragraph is “by the impact the organization is going to have on the individuals.” But the topic sentence is focused on the institution. There is this research that shows the topic sentence is what becomes the primary driver of how we think and act. It’s the telltale of what our implicit curriculum is —the survival of the organization. What I am talking about is flipping this, so you begin with being obsessed with what individuals need. We focus on helping activate people in their Jewish lives and not just to come to our events. This means we shift the question from “What would people be interested in coming to?” to “How can we build relationships with people and push them to become co-creators in a thing that’s going to help them grow Jewishly and connect them with other people? ” Rather than simply planning programs, we start to see our work as primarily relationship builders and network weavers.
Rabbi Mike Uram, Chief Jewish Learning Officer, Jewish Federations of North America
Here are my top ten lessons I learned from my professional life that I try to apply to my role as a Jewish lay leader. These are my business truisms, all of them borrowed from many other people:
- Working hard does not equal impactful results.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate . . . and show your work.
- Be curious. Ask questions; never be embarrassed that you don’t understand something.
- Be an optimist, but not a fool.
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast or lunch or whatever Peter Drucker said.
- Beware of folks who would rather fight than win, or its corollary, beware of folks who would prefer to be right rather than effective.
- Budgets reflect values.
- Echo chambers are dangerous.
- Reputation and value get built over time but can be destroyed in an instant.
- Good ideas are not the same as good organizations.
Daryl Messinger, Chair, Leading Edge