Next Level Blog

A Few Tips for USAID’s Rajiv Shah and Anyone Else Leading a Turnaround

Earlier this week, President Obama appointed Rajiv Shah to head the US Agency for International Development. The appointment comes after a 10 month vacancy at the top of the Agency and a 40 percent reduction in its full time staff over the past 20 years. Since the effective deployment of foreign aid is a critical component of the United States’ diplomatic and security strategies, it’s important that Shah get off to a fast and successful start in his job.

In spite of his relatively young age of 36, Shah has a background that seems perfectly suited to the role.  He’ll be moving to USAID from the US Department of Agriculture where he has played a number of roles including overseeing USDA’s participation in the global food security initiative. Prior to USDA, Shah worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the director of agricultural development and manager of the Foundation’s $1.5 billion vaccine fund. Shah has an MD from Penn, a masters in health economics from Wharton, an undergraduate degree from Michigan and spent time at the London School of Economics.   It’s pretty hard to argue with those credentials.

Still, Shah is stepping into one of the tougher challenges a leader can face which is leading the turnaround of a highly visible and critical organization. Especially in a political environment, it’s important to get off to a fast and successful start in this situation. What you do in the first weeks and months on the job largely determines the path for success or failure over the longer run. With that in mind, here are a few tips for Dr. Shah or any leader getting started on a turnaround:

Five Change Leadership Lessons from the Five Dollar Foot Long

First, let me apologize for implanting Subway’s Five (five dollar), Five Dollar Foot Long ear worm in your head for the rest of the day. I hope that you’ll agree with me that it was worth it to learn five lessons about winning support for change from the top leaders in your organization.

The lessons were inspired by a story in the current issue of Business Week on Miami Subway franchise owner Stuart Frankel. He owns a couple of Subways close to Jackson Memorial Hospital and five years ago was tinkering with ways to boost his sales on Saturdays and Sundays. From that, the original five dollar foot long was born. Since then, the sandwich has generated $3.8 billion in sales for Subway and put the company on pace to surpass McDonald’s in worldwide store locations.

So, you’d think it would have been easy for Frankel to win everyone over to such a great idea, right?  Not so fast, my friends. Even though he was raking in the dough (bad pun intended), Frankel had to work hard to convince the top brass at Subway that the five dollar foot long was the way to go. In reading between the lines of the Business Week article, I’ve come up with five (what else?) lessons for anyone who is trying to convince senior leadership to take a good idea and run with it. 

Here they are:

Feedback – Why You Need It and What to Do with It

One of the things that I’ve come to count on over the past couple of years is that my blogging friend, Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership blog will write consistently grounded and practical posts on how to be a better leader. His latest post, 10 Ways to Get the Most from a 360 Degree Leadership Assessment,  is the most recent example of the contributions he consistently makes. If you care about leadership, you need to subscribe to his blog.

As an executive coach, I read through a few hundred 360 degree assessments a year in my company’s Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program. From that experience and the experience of being the subject of six or seven 360’s in the 15 years that I was a manager and executive myself, I know that Dan’s advice is spot on. I also know from talking with my clients and HR professionals that have been around the block a few times that it’s often the case that not much happens when someone gets a 360. From the standpoint of your leadership development and your credibility in the organization, you’re almost better off to not get any feedback at all if you’re not going to communicate and act on what you learned from the feedback. It can be hard to admit to your colleagues that you’re not perfect, but guess what, they already know you’re not perfect. All of us have something we can improve on. By asking for feedback, telling people what you learn and then visibly acting on it, you get better and your organization gets better.

 So, with that in mind, I want to pick up on three particular points that Dan made and add a little bit of my own coaching perspective and advice to the mix:

Leadership Questions Raised by the 2009 Elections

The morning after election day 2009 was probably not a particularly fun one in the White House. As noted in a first rate summary by John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico, the outcomes of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and even the New York City’s mayor race didn’t really go the President’s way. As an historical analysis by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post points out, it’s important to not over interpret the results,  but one thing about the 2009 election results does seem clear. Voters who identify themselves as independents are looking for  leaders who seem to address the issues that are most important to them. 

As an example, since I live in Virginia, I had a pretty direct line of sight into the governor’s race here.  The winner, Bob McDonnell, ran a very effective straight down the middle campaign centered on jobs, transportation, taxes and government spending. His opponent, Creigh Deeds, seemed to never get any traction on explaining exactly what his priorities would be if he was governor. (See Dan Balz's post election analysis in the Washington Post for more on this.)

In connecting the dots on the different races, I find myself looking for some common denominator lessons we can learn about effective leadership communications.  After all, that’s what a campaign is ultimately about.  In reviewing this week’s results, I’ve come up with four questions that I think leaders need to address either implicitly or explicitly if they hope to win over their followers. These strike me as important questions for any leader – not just political candidates – to address when they’re attempting to mobilize people in a challenging situation. Here are the questions:

Leadership Takeaways from Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust

In its almost always interesting series, Sunday’s New York Times ran a Corner Office interview with the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust. I’ve often thought that because of the range of different stakeholder groups involved that running an academic institution is one of the toughest leadership jobs there is. It was interesting to read what Faust had to say about what she’s learned about leading in this type of environment. Most of the points she made apply to leaders in all arenas  whether it’s academia, the private sector or government.

Here are some of the takeaways (in bold face quotes) I had from the Faust interview along with some of my thoughts about how they apply to the world beyond the Charles River.