The Virtues of a Leader, Part 1-From the Vault

Hey everybody, welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster, I'm Andy Stanley. So this month I get to welcome to our podcast for the very first time and I can't believe it's taken me this long, Jonathan. My friend, Jonathan Reckford, so welcome, Jonathan. Thanks, Andy. Great to be with you. Well, again, we talked about this so long ago. Today our conversation is going to focus on what Jonathan calls the seven virtues and specifically the seven virtues of leadership from his new book, Our Better Angels. But Jonathan, before we get to that, a word about you for those in our audience who don't know who you are and they're going to be shocked that they don't know if they don't know and I'm sure many of them do. Jonathan is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, not Habitat for Humanity USA, which would be a large enough responsibility, but Habitat International. So the entire organization, which let's just all pause together and think about, can you think of a larger responsibility in the world than to be the CEO of Habitat for Humanity right now? His responsibilities are getting bigger and more complicated all the time. We're going to talk some about that. No surprise though, his career did not begin there. So Jonathan, you have a very interesting career story and so I didn't tell you I was going to ask you this ahead of time. Could you give our listeners kind of the one or two minute version of your career path because it's so fascinating and when I first met you, of course, one of my first questions was, okay, how does a person get to be the CEO of this gargantuan organization? So just a little bit of your background. So thanks Andy. I think the summary would be God has a sense of humor, but it was a circuitous path. I started on Wall Street, was a terrible fit. Went off and coached in the Olympics and God really grabbed my heart in South Korea. And then came back and went into business with the idea of learning the skills to eventually take that to a nonprofit or ministry and spent good chunk of my career helping grow organizations within large companies. And then in a big surprise, ended up serving full time in a large Presbyterian church as the administrative executive pastor. And then when I wasn't looking, about 15 years ago was called the Habitat, which if I could have picked one thing that kind of put together all the things I cared about, this would have been it. Wow. So a lot of guys grew up dreaming of Wall Street. So been there done that, then a lot of people grew up dreaming about the Olympics, been there and done that. Very few people grew up dreaming about serving in a Presbyterian church, but you went ahead and did that anyway. And then you end up. So the other thing I would love for our audience to appreciate because when I first met you years ago, you know, everyone is, aren't so many people are familiar with the work of Habitat in their communities or in their cities or parts of their cities. But the breadth and the scope of this organization is amazing. So just real quick, best guess, I know it changes by the minute. The number of employees/associates that are a part of Habitat International. Just take a wild guess. I'm sure there's no way to keep up. So we are federated, which means they're only about 750 people that work directly for our umbrella organization, but then we have almost 1,200 local chapters across the United States, our U.S. affiliates, and we serve in 70 countries. So all apart, I think we've got about, when I've tried to calculate it, 15,000 full-time people, and then about 1.4 million volunteers serving Habitat. Yeah. So not a casual endeavor when you wake up. And that's one of the things I asked Jonathan when I first met him, I'm like, so what do you do on Tuesdays? And what do you do on Wednesdays? And so of course, he's on the road a lot. He has seen things, and one of the fascinating things about your book, our Better Angels, is the stories that you tell and the extraordinary people that you have met through the years doing extraordinary things. One more thing about what you do at Habitat, under your leadership, this is amazing. You came in 2005, is that correct? That's right. Yeah. So get this podcast audience. When Jonathan showed up, I know he doesn't like to brag. Habitat was serving about 125,000 individuals a year, which is a lot. I mean, if you're a running an organization that's serving 125,000 people that need to be served, you know, you get a gold star. But since that time, Jonathan has grown Habitat to where last year alone, just last year, they served 7 million people and created safe environments, safe living environments, along with all the other things they do, all the services they provide for over 7 million people. So in a nutshell, for those of us who want to grow things, how did you do that? What? I mean, you came into a somewhat healthy organization with a great reputation, were there any quick takeaways from those, I don't know, those early years where you, hey, you felt like some things needed to happen and my goodness, that is extraordinary growth. And that's not just extraordinary growth in terms of a product. This is harder than that. You're not selling things. You're serving people. So, you know, just top of mind, leadership things as you think about that big transition. Thanks, Andy. First, I would say, it's very rare, you know, it wasn't that I came in with all these great ideas. It was really listening and learning and seeing what people on the ground were doing that was working. I think there were a couple of things that were catalytic for us. One was we had this audacious vision. Everyone in the world should have a safe, decent, affordable place to live. Everyone's a lot. And we were growing really fast. So, I want to, sorry, I got to pause right there because we love, we love to talk about mission and vision. So, one more time, the vision statement or your vision statement for Habitat say, one more time, a everyone should have a decent place to live. Wow. Everyone. No wonder it grew. So, go ahead. So, everyone should have a decent place to live and you went from there. So, everyone is a lot. And we actually did the math and we said, even at our current quite fast growth rate, it was going to take over a thousand years to achieve our mission, which seemed slow. And therefore, that forced us to think about what would it take. And a couple things were helpful, one, which was controversial, we said, rather than try to build our way out of the problem, we were going to try to demonstrate Christ's love by being a partner and catalyst for worldwide access to safety and affordable housing. And then the second was we changed our framing question from how many houses can we build to what would it take to meaningfully reduce the housing deficit and every geography that we serve. Wow. Which is a more complicated and scary question. A little more complicated, yeah. But it opened up, and one of my personal axioms I've used relentlessly is we should be religious about our principles but not our tactics. So we actually first went wide and gave freedom for our countries and affiliates to experiment with all kinds of new things. Then we started converging on some of the ideas that we thought really could scale. And in a way, the biggest jump was to start thinking about how do you make markets work better for low-income families? And if you're a quick version, if you're a poor family in Cambodia, you might have lived on your land for generations, but not have the legal right to stay there. No bank would lend you money to improve your house or build a house. And even if you could get alone, you might not have access to good building products or skilled mason's. So the whole value chain wasn't working, and so we started attacking each piece. We launched a big global advocacy effort around property rights, particularly for women in disadvantaged groups, to give them the legal right to stay on their land. We actually became a global leader in housing, microfinance, convincing the microfinance industry to start doing home improvement loans, very small, unsecured housing loans to low-income families. And now we've created a shelter venture lab where we're actually investing with entrepreneurs who are coming in with better building products for the poor, as well as finding ways to give better technical information to communities and families so they can get better value for their money and find skilled mason's or increase the supply of skilled mason's. So all of that's being done with partnership, but those have given us a way to scale in addition to not instead of our traditional work. Wow. So again, there's so many takeaways from there, and I know we need to get to the book, but that initial idea of a vision that was so large that it broke or made inadequate all of your systems, you had a vision, an oversized vision, and your current systems just wouldn't support it. So you're forced to come up with new and innovative ways to tackle these things and to divide it up. That's remarkable. Now, again, before we get to the book, so the other thing I love to ask folks I get to talk to during this weird season, because things are so unusual, we're having to lead different and we're having to approach things differently, but you have something I don't have, and you have something most of our listeners don't have. You have a global perspective. So with that global perspective in terms of what's happening all over the world, our tolerance for pain is so low, you know, we are freaking out, we are drawing weapons at Walmart over mask, okay, our tolerance for pain is so low. But of course, as you know, there have been people all over the world who have been facing far more severe things than COVID-19 for generations. So with your global perspective, what are you telling leaders right now? Or if you were just to, you know, speak into the microphone and say, you know, corporate leaders, nonprofit leaders, is there something you focused on as you think about what you communicate to leaders in light of what's happening right now? You know, one, thanks for raising it. I do think one of the risks of this season is people are turning inward. And so countries are becoming more nationalistic and turning inward, not outward. And as tough as things are in the U.S., and I view it as a both-hand, we have a huge housing problem in the U.S., we need, we have a huge number of people are hurting in this country and we need to address that. But one of the things that just breaks my heart is we have literally hundreds of millions of people who may be moving back into extreme poverty around the world. I know you've traveled heavily and seen it first and I was talking to national directors in Ethiopia and Cambodia and where Guatemala and in these cases so many of the advances of the last 20 years are being undone. Wow. Wow. And you might think about, oh, well COVID's not that bad in Cambodia, but the reality is if you take away all the tourism and dollars that uphold the economy and then you lose all the remittances of the people who were working abroad and sending money back, that is devastating the economy. So these spillover effects of the economic pain are much greater than COVID itself. And so I think back to the message side would be we need to focus here at home and also make sure we keep the global economy and from a humanitarian perspective that we don't let all the development progress we've made over the last 20 years disappear because of COVID. Wow. Yeah, the dominoes that we don't think about in our nation. I'm glad I asked that question and thanks for a global perspective, most of us certainly miss. Okay, I do want to talk about your book because it's a wonderful, inspiring book full of great principles and great stories. Of course, this is a leadership podcast and you have so graciously agreed to talk about these seven virtues through the lens of leadership, which you are an extraordinary leader. And that's part of why I wanted you to talk a little bit about yourself and your background because it gives context and I think adds weight to again, your insights in terms of how these seven virtues connect with leadership. Again, the book is our better angels. So let's just jump in and talk about these seven virtues. I'm going to just name them real quick. It's kindness, community, empowerment, joy. I love the joy one because joy is not a term we ever talk about in a leadership context. So kindness, community, empowerment, joy, respect, generosity and service. So again, virtues that are important everywhere, but specifically within the context of leadership. So let's just talk about kindness. How do you define kindness and how does it intersect with what you're doing in Habitat? To me, kindness is the first, we intentionally put it first because kindness is really for me love and action. It is the tangible expression of love and love would be the umbrella of all of this, something from a faith perspective, love is the starting point. I would actually argue from the basis of all human interaction. That's a starting point. And if I can pull back one step, the motivation, I wasn't looking for this book. I had just written a work on a book that was more for Habitat about strategy and how we were going to keep moving forward. And after you remember Hurricane Harvey hit, and this was way before COVID, but President Carter, our most famous volunteer, wrote an op-ed with us where we talked about how after the storm hits, you see these incredible examples of neighbor helping neighbor and people doing these incredible sacrificial things to go serve on another and respond. And his question, which other so powerful, is, why can't we behave like that every day when it's not a crisis? Now I think COVID puts a whole other lens on all of this. But to me, kindness is where it really starts because this is how it goes back to the golden rule. It goes to how we want to be treated. It goes to I think the time as well. I have a friend, Gail, who runs the American Red Cross. We were talking last week. And she said her new title is Chief Compassion Officer because we're in a moment where not only are the families we serve at greater risk than ever. We had a housing crisis before COVID, it's even greater now. But on top of that, I look at our team members and we have people all across the country and world who are lonely, scared, anxious. And so in some ways kindness is the expression of grace to a world that needs it more than ever. In a leadership context, especially in a corporate context, I think kindness is often viewed as soft, unnecessary, that's what you do at home, that's what you do at lunch, that's what you do at the ball field with, you know, so just a little bit about that because nothing could be further from the truth. I mean kindness is essentially loaning somebody your strength instead of just constantly reminding them of their weakness. And you know, within a corporate context, it's so much easier and it seems so much more natural to remind people of their weakness all the time to try to get them to be better. So you know, within a corporate context because you're an extraordinarily kind person, anyone who meets you. I think this one seems to be maybe easier for you than the rest of us, I don't know. I don't know about that, but thank you, it's, and but I agree so much with what you said about, I love your definition, but I love what you said about it not being softer, it could be perceived as soft. I think kindness isn't always about soft and fuzzy, it's about treating people well and that often includes, you know, hard conversations, but it's the way you do the hard conversation. And we have a phrase internally we use of graceful candor, which is now, especially in nonprofits, even more in faith-based nonprofits, you can tilt towards passive aggressive behavior. I would argue that's not kind. No. That's actually unkind. And so we've got a lot of people who are really kind, but not always clear, we've got a small number of people who are clear, but not very kind. To me, they are, you know, neither of those models work in an organizational or corporate environment. We need to, you need to integrate them together. And in fact, it's only kind to be clear, but the way that that can be packaged can be done in a way that includes respect, includes these other pieces. And I pick, you could pick a whole bunch of other great virtues, but we pick these because in some ways they all tangibly tied into creating the kind of society that I, and I think most people want to be a part of. And I think that's the same for corporate cultures. Yeah. That this ultimately, you know, these virtues don't replace having a great strategy, having a great product, having great execution, but they're all really elements of culture. And I don't think actually was Peter Drucker, but as his famously said, culture eats strategy for lunch, you don't have a culture that is strong, then you won't be able to have the people and leadership to do all the other important stuff. Yeah. And when you take any of these virtues and flip them upside down, you realize how detrimental they are to even a work culture. I mean, do you want to, is it easier to communicate in a culture characterized by unkindness or kindness? Is it easier to trust in a culture characterized by kindness or unkindness? So on the surface, they seem a little soft. Do you take the underbelly or the opposite of these and ask yourself, do I want to work for someone who's unkind or in a culture that's characterized by unkindness and of course not? And I don't want my kids or my wife or husband to work in a culture like that either. All right. The second one you talk about, this was a surprise I thought was community, community, the virtue of community. How do you define that within, within, you know, general culture, but specifically what you're doing at Habitat? So community, of course, is literally in our mission. So you know, we are about bringing people together to build homes, communities and hope. But community, me, is bigger than that, which is, it's that being part of something greater than yourself, where you can experience belonging, mutual care and accountability. And I think people are desperate for community. And now COVID, of course, has been a community disaster. And we're seeing some real bright spots out of it. But I know for me personally, I so miss the chance to actually be physically together with people in community. And so in terms of what you've done internally with Habitat, because again, it's part of your mission. But at the same time, you're trying to create community within the organization itself or anything specifically come to mind that you're done there. So I've taken on two levels. The first level is within Habitat for our staff themselves, we try to create community. And I do think philosophically, if you remember bowling alone, there is a loneliness epidemic. And I think if we turn back, there are a lot of flaws in society, but there used to be more intermediary organizations, more people belong to church or a faith organization, more people belong to a service organization, more people had neighborhood associations, and we've lost a lot of that. So people are looking to work for community in a different way. One of the big retention drivers in those questions we ask in our employee engagement is, do you have a friend at work? And that turns out to be really important to whether people stay. So it's a business imperative. I think there's a higher level at which, for Habitat, we try to foster community in some very tangible ways. With COVID, we have daily global prayers, and actually, if you bring some good out of it, we're better being virtual than we were before COVID. So now we can have the whole world gather, and voluntarily, anybody who wants to every U.S. time morning at 7.45. And then we have weekly devotions. We try to have big and small celebrations, we try to create opportunities for community. And one thing we do that I've always loved is we have mission leave, which is we give people paid time off to go volunteer together in the local community or to go internationally on one of our international global village trips. And that to me makes them part of the global community, but also lets them experience the mission in a way that is really powerful. And so then they become connected. If I can tell one quick community story that's more the mission side of what we mean by community, one of my favorites from the book is this community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And I think this is so relevant in this age where we're having an important and hard conversation about racial equity. There's a community that was known locally as the Cherry Street community in Winston-Salem. Historically, African-American, redlined, underserved, had well located, quite close to downtown, but had been under-invested in for decades and decades and had really gone downhill. Hike when we talk to the families there and ask them what they wanted. Their vision for the community was do something about the crime and let's make this again a place where young families would move in as opposed to a place where people would move out as soon as they could, as they could. And the community created a map and a vision with Habitat's facilitation, Habitat made a commitment initially to build 16 new homes to replace some of the most dilapidated and terrible homes and then later expanded that. The city committed to a stronger police presence and more support. They created a new charter school, private developers based on Habitat's commitment came in and bought off some houses, rehab them and turned them into affordable rental housing. When I visited after about a two and a half year period to dedicate the first big bank of houses, climate gone down 75% already from where they had started and I remember this policeman named Billy who was showing me around and he said, "You know, if you've been here two years ago, I would have been here to protect you." I remember this big sweep of his army said, "Now look what we've done." And now that has Habitat's built 64 homes, they actually moved into the community there. All the sweat equity and training that they provide for Habitat families, they've extended to anybody in the community that wants to participate and we're seeing truly a transformed community and that to me is what it's all about, that it is not only the well-being of the individual family but that translates into a healthy, sustainable community that is vibrant and beginning to thrive. That's amazing. Again, I think as we listen to that, we think, wouldn't it be nice to drive home every day knowing that we did something like that or we're a part of something like that. That's amazing. I love what you said about asking of your staff survey, "Do you have a friend at work or who's your best friend at work?" We have a similar question. I think ours is, "Do you have a best friend at work?" When I first saw that on our list, I thought that was the oddest question just because of my personality. I'm like, "I don't know that I want a best friend at work." But you know what? I do have best friends at work and there are people I look forward to seeing, so that's amazing. We're going to wrap up. This is going to be a two-part conversation because there's so much good stuff in the book, but let's talk about one more virtue in the book that you talk about. The third one is empowerment, empowerment, which certainly has a lot of intersection with what we're doing corporately or what we're doing as leaders. How do you define empowerment as it relates to being a virtue? I would define empowerment as investing in others so that they can acquire the skills, opportunities, and responsibility to grow into all that got intended for them. It actually aligns so much with Habitat. One of Habitat's catchphrases is we give a hand up, not a hand out, that it's about that. We all need a helping hand at different times. I know I've benefited so much from people who extended that helping hand to me, but it's in a way that creates and doesn't create dependence, but invests in people in such a way that they can then go and invest in others. And basically that is to the public, that is the role of Habitat in any neighborhood they show up in. There is a sense of empowerment and the story told just a few minutes ago, it certainly illustrates that. As you think back over your amazing career, there were certainly people for you, as I know there have been for me, that empowered you, that gave you those first opportunities. I know for me, I look back and I'll give you a minute to think, the opportunities, a couple of people gave me, I look back and I think they were crazy, what were they thinking to give me that much responsibility, to give me that much budget to, and I think even of my dad at times, I feel like he risked his entire reputation with some of the opportunities that he gave me, but those opportunities were empowering. And now I look back and realize I'm standing on several people's shoulders and would never have gotten to where I am today, if somebody hadn't empowered me personally. And I think this is something that every leader has the ability to do. I think at times we're just moving too fast to maybe recognize those opportunities. How do you respond to that? First, I just agree completely. And in my life, I can think both first of those teachers who believed in me and pushed me and stretched me, but then some of the giant growth experiences, I laugh because it seemed so unlikely. But the Korean Olympic team would ask me to help coach at the age of 25 when I was wildly unqualified. Now, they only qualified because they were the host country. So it's sort of like the Jamaican box lead team, but that was a, what did you coach? What did you coach? What did you coach? It was a competitive role a long, long ago and Korea is, Korea's actually graded a bunch of sports, but not rowing. That's not one of their historic powerhouses. So I'd set up a job doing marketing work for the Olympic Organizing Committee and then they surprised me with the growing opportunity. Wow. But that really led to both faith, you know, that was life changing from a faith perspective that year as well as the stretch, just learning cross-cultural communications. I was living in a training camp with a Russian boxing coach and 500 Korean coaches and athletes and you couldn't have had a more complete, cultural disconnect from anything that was familiar. That's amazing. All right. So we're out of time for episode one of this two-part conversation. So again, thanks for joining us into all of our listeners. We want to thank you for joining us. Make sure you visit anti-stainly.com, anti-stainly.com, where you can actually download a leadership application guide that includes a summary of today's discussion and some questions for reflections. So if you want to sit down with your team after you have been listened to this conversation, we have already created questions for you at anti-stainly.com to help take this conversation into your organization. Also, make sure you check out Jonathan's book, Our Better Angels, Our Better Angels by Jonathan Reckford. It can be found wherever books are sold. And don't miss next month as we conclude this fascinating conversation with one of the most fascinating people you will ever meet, Jonathan Reckford. Thanks, Jonathan. We'll see you next month.