Great leaders create cultures of innovation

BY JENN Y RAMO

NEW MEXICO APPLESEED

“How would you turn around New Mexico if it was a corporation with unlimited potential but terrible outcomes and even worse morale?”

Ann Rhoades answers my question with the one thing we all have on our minds: basketball.

“If you look at our UNM basketball coach, Richard Pitino, every single time they lost, he blamed himself,” she said. “Every single time they won, he gave credit to the team. When I think of the greatest coaches, the best coaches of our time, they said, ‘Hey, this is what we should have done better.’ They’ve already analyzed what they should have done better by the time the game’s over.” Ann is a magic wand. She is lightning in a bottle. She has the uncanny ability to diagnose, treat, and cure whatever ails you without you even knowing there was a problem in the first place. You feel better having been in her presence. She’s the only New Mexico Appleseed board member who said “I love you” before we hung up and got one right back.

I really love Ann Rhoades. I am a sucker for kind, smart, positive, no-nonsense, and effective people. Ann has these things in spades.

Ann climbed from humble Albuquerque girl to — still humble — VP of People at Southwest Airlines, alongside founder Herb Kelleher and then did the same at JetBlue. As a New Mexico Appleseed board member, she changed my hiring practices from choosing people who I liked during the interview to choosing people who would be effective at accomplishing our mission.

It is not a stretch to imagine that it wasn’t just her strategy and execution abilities that were the reasons both of those airlines had such happy employees and such incredible loyalty to the company. It was her values.

What can we learn from Ann Rhoades that applies to our own lives and to our own state?

“If you don’t have the right people in place, then you can make all the changes you want, but you’ll never get different.”

So, what do we need in our leadership that would bring up a stock value? Our ROI? What do we need from them to get the customer loyalty of our citizens and bring up the morale of state employees?

It’s all based on values.

Demanding leaders who have integrity

“We need people with integrity. It’s a non-negotiable part of winning, and I understand why. If you don’t have integrity, you will not be transparent about your failures. You cannot build trust with the public or your own employees. Without integrity, there is just no way to form a cohesive strategy and execute on it. There’s no way to bring everyone along in the process if they don’t believe in you.”

Good faith and fair dealing are the lubricants for the sturdy steampunk machine that manufactures durable, positive outcomes. Whether trying to get more passengers on your airline or fixing a broken educational system, none of it works without high morale and intellectual integrity from the leadership on down.

New Mexico leaders must have a strategy

A few months back, I wrote a column called “A common agenda to end child poverty.” It was a call to action for this same thing: a detailed and thoughtful strategic plan with benchmarks and accountability. If the goal is the opposite of poverty, which I think of as thriving, we have no articulated and co-created strategy to harness our assets or address our deficits.

“I don’t like keeping on hearing we’re last,” Ann says, “but the truth of the matter is that we must take one of those issues and say, OK, we’re going to fix this one at a time. We need to be positive, but it isn’t enough. Empathy is nothing except feeling sorry for somebody if you don’t action it.”

Ann’s point is critical here. You need to be known for your good faith and fair dealing and have the trust of your employees, but if you don’t have a plan and execute that plan, none of it matters.

So where do we get this plan to execute on, Ann? “When we started JetBlue Airlines, we were told we would never make it. New York said there have been so many airlines. Over 10 airlines had gone broke in the prior 18 months. And we said, ‘Well, let’s look at what made them go broke. Let’s do something different. Let’s make sure that we have New Yorkers loving us.’ We talked to New Yorkers, who were the biggest complainers in the world about flying, and they told us what they didn’t like. And we fixed it.”

You can’t just throw money at everything, she says. Without prioritizing a strategic plan with stakeholder engagement and empowerment, nothing is going to change.

And then, she goes in for the kill, “Just look at Mississippi and what they did with their education. They turn it around.” No, Ann. Not Mississippi. But instead of thinking it’s a sad day that we have to look to our square-dancing do-si-do partner for the worst in the nation to find an effective model, Ann suggests that we start taking notes. They focused on one problem at a time; they chose education, and they changed it.

Great leaders create cultures of innovation

And, according to Ann, we can’t be afraid of failure. We must have a culture of risk tolerance and reward.

“If you don’t try anything, if you keep doing the same thing, you will always get the same results. We have to be willing to take chances and accept the blame for failures.”

For our state’s hard-working public employees, I can’t help but wonder if they have the trust from above and the authority to innovate. Innovation requires the ability to fail and learn from failure. From what I can tell, the “error” part of “trial and error” is a deadly sin in public life and is not exactly rewarded. This has turned many public offices into rubber-stamping conveyor belts instead of laboratories for change that produce real results. As voters and citizens, we also must let them fail and applaud them for their risk and their effort.

The answer

Ann looks at New Mexico in the same way she looks at JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, and even Lobo basketball. We need to cultivate and support only leaders with high integrity and a clearly articulated and well-designed strategy with benchmarks and accountability.

I’m not sure about her basketball knowledge, but I feel confident saying that if Richard Pitino gets caught in traffic, I would call Ann.

Jennifer Ramo is the founder and executive director of New Mexico Appleseed.