- Just ahead on leadership lessons for homework and life, we explore what it takes to implement change.

Tonight's critical conversation brings discussion from four more great central Illinois leaders, and it all starts right now.

(upbeat music) Good evening, thank you so much for joining us for part two in our leadership series, people often have very mixed feelings about change.

If you're the one creating the change, you usually like it better than if it's being forced on you.

Albert Einstein said the measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

Let's learn more about change management now by meeting our panelists, we begin with Kevin Moody, who is owner of KAM Shooting Sports.

Talk to us a little bit, how do you handle change?

- We get change a lot in the gun business.

It's usually a change in a law and we get informed via email and we have to, we go through a training class, we go through usually a meeting to discuss with all the employees and do the best we can.

- Very good, next up.

Cindy Morris, President of Peoria Public Schools Foundation.

You've seen a lot of change during COVID, Cindy, talk to us about it.

- Yeah, we are so fortunate in the Peoria area to have some wonderful non-profit organizations and through the pandemic, it definitely was a challenge, but the Peoria Public Schools Foundation pivoted well, the first week of the shutdown we were in shock, like most people were, but then you have to figure out how to proceed and keep moving forward.

And we've done that so well, it hasn't been easy, but there's some nonprofits that collapse during the pandemic and it just takes a lot of work.

- Absolutely, Zach Oyler is our next guest from Oyler Real Estate.

Zach talked to us a little bit of how you've handled the real estate industry has seen a lot of change during COVID as well.

- Yeah, not just real estate, but I'm fortunate to wear several hats in the community between board president for Preoria Historical Society and a city council member, each one has and had its own different impacted circumstances with COVID, especially in the real estate industry.

A lot more focus went to online, showing of houses, doing video tours, not able to do the in person thing, which is challenging when it's the biggest investment that you make in your life is your home.

And how do you do that when you can't be in person viewing something and trying to catch all of the details for someone when they're not there in person to do it.

- Thank you so much.

Next up, Dr.

Dawn Harris Jeffries is the President of the Tri-County Urban League.

Dr. Jeffries, thanks so much for your time, talk to us about how you've been handling change.

- So, we've been handling change just by staying nimble.

We are just open to what people need and we will do whatever it takes to get their needs met.

Sometimes it's a matter of bringing all hands on deck or just reassigning somethings, reassessing somethings, and then doing it all over again.

So just really staying nimble, being innovative, enjoying the opportunity to be creative, to change lives, so just being nimble.

- We like that.

Cindy talked to us a little bit, school districts.

I mean, we're just turned upside down by this, we're in year two.

How has the foundation been able to help with some of the change that's come along?

- Well, we have really shifted a lot of our emphasis instead of on programming, which we still have, we've shifted how the programs looked, which a lot of them have gone to virtual, but we've focused on our families and looked at emphasizing on our basic needs support.

You know, during the pandemic, we have a lot of families that had truly difficult times and we have a very large issue with food insecurity.

So we focused a lot on that food insecurity, through our little free pantries, and providing supplemental food for our families, our snack pack programming.

And then we applied for grants, which was new to us and focused it on rent and utility assistance, that was kind of a new area for us.

But our families were struggling to pay the bills, so, we really shifted instead of a complete focus on programs to the basic need support.

- Zach, talk to us a little bit about the change that by leading an organization, what change have you had to implement on your team?

- Probably the biggest impact that we've had is fundraising.

And when you're used to doing in person fundraisers, and that's what really generates the dollars is getting people in a room and talking about the topic or the charity that you're focused on and hosting dinners and events and things like that, and suddenly you can't do that anymore.

Your significant part of your budget is based on those fundraisers and suddenly it's just gone.

And so we've had to adapt to doing things virtually, virtual tours of the historical homes, the historical society homes as well as private homes and turning those into special events, doing tours in person outside, rather than doing them on tour buses and things like that.

Trying to be able to create the social distancing, but still coming up with new and innovative ways to generate fundraising dollars.

- It's been no easy task, I lead a nonprofit too, and that lack of the ability to have those large fundraisers, which bring in significant portions of our budgets has really been a challenge.

- It's huge and it just wiped out overnight, and there's no way to recover that, and so you have to act quickly.

- And Zoom doesn't seem to be as significant of a fundraising tool.

We've learned how to do it but there's nothing like being face to face with someone.

- Yeah, I think a lot of the tie to donations is emotion and being with people in the room, the excitement, enthusiasm of the cause is what generates the dollars and trying to do it over the computer just doesn't have the same impact.

- Kevin let's talk a little bit.

In the gun industry, what change have you implemented that wasn't tied to some sort of legislature?

- We had a tough time with our training, training went up incredibly with the pandemic and the lockdowns and people being maybe scared of certain things, our concealed carry classes and everything else, and I dealt with the same issue we couldn't put 20 people in a room together.

So we had to do smaller classes, we had to do them more often.

So, I had to hire more instructors, we had to expand in that direction.

So, I know it doesn't sound like much, but it was a pretty big change at the time.

- Dr. Jeffries, talk to us about the change.

What change have you implemented in your organization that you've seen perhaps the most fruit from?

- We've done a lot more barrier reduction type work.

- And what does that mean?

- Barrier reduction means, if you are trying to get a job, you need daycare so that you can get the job, or you just got a job, you don't have slacks to wear to your new job or you are in between, you just don't have enough food.

You just got a new house, you have no furniture.

So things like that.

So we have expand, we actually started a pantry.

So we have a women's closet, a men's closet, as well as a food bank.

And so weekly, we make sure that our constituents have food.

People have started to come in for transportation, we've expanded we now use our vans to bring people to work.

So, we're focusing in on the things that reduce barriers.

We've also sort of retooled the way that we use our space.

We do have a virtual STEM program now.

So there's some kids who are actually in our building doing our STEM Saturdays, but we also have some kids who are at home.

And so it's all virtuals, we have kids sort of spread out all throughout the building and they enjoy it.

And so, just being able to retool has been the way that we've kind of managed the process so far.

- Let's talk about resistance to change.

The school, and we've gotta begin with the schools.

I mean, so many people saw so much change so quickly.

What kind of resistance did you have to deal with with the change that was happening in the schools?

- Well, I think our school district, our Superintendent, Dr. Crot did a very good job right up front communications number one.

And I think that communicating with our families and students was key for the foundation.

I felt that was a big emphasis for us.

We started, it was, I would say, almost a basement live chat via social media, just to communicate with our families and the community, with what was going on in the school district, and those that are connected to the school district, we call it Buzz Chats we still do it.

But it's just that constant communication to our families and the stakeholders to our school district.

- Did you see much resistance to change you had to have in the foundation even?

- No, and you know, we were fortunate, our fundraising for nonprofits is like Zach said, it's huge.

And we felt fortunate to receive some grants that we would've never applied for before and received even a very large one for the school district that was a pass through for rapid COVID testing.

But it just, I think in the nonprofit world, the people that were persistent and out there were the ones that had the success.

- Zach, did you see resistance to change with your employees and teams that you worked with?

- Absolutely, people get used to doing the same thing all the time and you get, and especially when you're dealing with volunteers and they get into a routine of this is the thing that I wanna work on, this is what I'm passionate about in the organization.

And then you turn that upside down and suddenly, you need to learn more about doing things with videos and social media and a lot of platforms that volunteers have no familiarity with.

- Probably technology challenges for folks as well.

- Absolutely, the technology just gigantic challenge for people and myself included you know, people joke that with my age demographic, we should know all about social media and how to do these things, but that's not my forte either, and suddenly that's the only method of communicating is getting out to people with emails and social media and showing them things through a video and trying to do stuff with my phone that I haven't done before, and it's a new environment.

- Dr. Jeffries, talk to us a little bit about the resistance to change that you saw in your organization with your teams.

- So coming into the Tri-County Urban League, I'm a banker, so I have a corporate background.

So I also expect somewhat of that corporate feel if you will, and bringing that expectation to the team internally and externally, I think was a bit, perhaps a bit shocking for some of the employees, but I think after a while.

- Talk us about some of those changes, what was the difference?

- So, when it comes to reporting, for example, you know, typically reporting for nonprofit is a quarterly and sometimes monthly, whereas I wanna look at it weekly, right?

We wanna focus on understand where our numbers are coming from, how are we meeting our goals and objectives for the funders who are supporting us.

And so, some of those things, reports that they wouldn't have done in the past or taking views or having events that they may not have been used to having before, and I'm sort of pushing, pushing us along because the need doesn't change and those needs just because we're in a pandemic or whatever people's lives are still that people are facing trauma all the time.

And so, I was trying to make sure that we were addressing those needs as quickly as we could and making again, making sure that we were nimble enough to address those needs.

So sometimes it was a bit of a trying start, but, you know, and even now, we're still just sort of going through the motions to make sure that we can change and impact lives, and we are.

- Excellent, Kevin, that resistance to change in your industry, have you seen it?

- Well, absolutely.

I'm very fortunate that I have awesome employees that were willing to work, but again, they all face challenges.

So I guess that would be my biggest resistance was the challenges that people faced individually and in having it conflict with work schedules or when they could or could not be there.

One of my employees has three kids in three different schools, so, she couldn't make the same hours that she made before.

So challenges like that were the biggest resistance we saw.

- Well, Harvard Business School has these tips for us.

First, you've gotta understand the process of change, and there are three parts to that, preparation and implementation, as well as that process and follow through.

Kevin, which do you think is the hardest, implementation, follow through, when we're talking about process and preparation?

- Preparation, if you don't know about it, you don't have time to prepare.

If it's a change that comes suddenly, then how much preparation do you have?

And then implementation is all about communication.

So, how do you communicate something you haven't prepared for?

So, I'd say the first step, implementing.

- Well, let's get back to our Harvard Business School list of change management tips.

After we understand the process of change, we've got to understand the forces of change.

Now, this is where knowing why the change is necessary is so critically important.

What pressures are driving the change?

Cindy, how important is the why behind the change for you?

- Well, I would say the why in everything is the important question.

So, for us as a nonprofit, the why we were still needing fundraising events and fundraising dollars, we learned right away because we shut down in March, we had a golf outing planned in June.

The why was we had to make a change, we were fortunate enough that it was an outdoor event.

We pushed it back a month and we were still able to have it just cutting the numbers down.

But we did that throughout all of our fundraising events and our fundraising dollars, and throughout the pandemic, our foundation numbers were better than we've ever had.

- Congratulations, so great.

Well, the third tip is to create a plan, and you've gotta communicate the plan to staff and key stakeholders.

Zach, talk to us, what techniques have you used to communicate change with your team?

- A lot of it obviously has had to be virtually and all of us adjusting to the Zoom and which media platform that you're gonna use, and how do you get everybody in the same room and cut through the technology difficulties.

But it took some adjustment, but I think for the most part, we made it there.

It's just staying in close communication and working together on the fine details, 'cause you're used to being in the same room, hashing something out and implementing that plan, but now you're giving direction on a phone call and having to let somebody do it on their own.

- Well, the final step Harvard Business School recommends when creating change is to prepare for roadblocks, anticipating takes some of the mystery out of the equation.

I like to call it pitfall planning, problems will arise.

Talk to us, Dr. Jeffries, a little bit about some of the problems that have arise in how you handled the pitfall planning.

- So, in my doctoral program, we looked at something called rapid prototyping.

And so one of those things was really just to be able to sort of change on a dime, right?

From time to time I would find a pitfall that either it's resistance, or we just can't do it in that way, or just in natural nonprofit area, we just may not even have the funding.

So we had to be creative with how we manage to do the work for the people in our communities.

And so we just had to learn how to fix something, do it real quick.

Okay, we can't do it this way, let's get, we have to get the change, we have to get the goals accomplished, and so we just had to do some rapid prototyping to address the pitfalls.

- And it was get it done.

- Get it done.

- Get her done.

Well, here are some more change management tips from Forbes, assess current state of your organization.

Clearly define the end goal, understand change isn't a one person job, benchmark against best of class, prepare for resistance as we mentioned and realize success requires failure.

Now I have often called failure, the dirty F word because people don't like failure, I don't like failure, but sometimes failure is really just a stepping stone to success.

So let's talk to folks a little bit about this change management and the role that failure has played.

If you're willing to share any failures that you've had and how you pivoted and adjusted from that, Dr. Jeffries, you smiled at me, so that means you're first.

- You know, sometimes you just don't get those grants you really were counting on, right?

- Oh, you hate it when that happens.

- And so sometimes people are nice enough to explain why, and there's always lessons learned.

And so after everything that we do, we just sort of sit down and assess, what did we do?

How did that go?

What went well, what didn't?

And how can we make it different the next time?

So it's just always really about assessing and looking at the lessons learned.

- Cindy, tell us some lessons learned from the failures that you've had over these last two years with change.

- Well, I'll tell you about that, but I'll also tell you more.

That's something I talk about often in life.

And I think as a young person, you get so hurt and it really stresses you out to have failure and mistakes, but the older and wiser you get, I believe that that happens for a reason and it makes you so much stronger.

And my work with the foundation over the last 12 years, there have been things we've tried and failed.

And I think if you have perfection and things go right all the time, you don't grow as an organization or a person.

So, it's okay to fall, it's okay to make mistakes.

And we've been fortunate through the pandemic where a lot of the things we've pivoted to, have worked out, but I'm very much believe in mistakes and failure is a good thing.

- Kevin, can you share with us maybe one example of a failure in your organization when you were trying to change?

- I call 'em teachable moments.

You have to be teachable otherwise you're as good as you're ever gonna get.

So, everybody makes mistakes, it happens and you have to learn from that mistake, and be teachable and get better.

- Zach, you got a failure experience during all of the change that you've had to implement over the last two years?

- It really comes down to trying new things and what the attitude is to that.

And I think I don't know that I'd call them so much failures as learning experiences, figuring out what does and doesn't work.

And you're trying new platforms to reach people and new ways to do fundraising, and you have to go into it with an open mind, and that's, I think what we really tried to focus on this year is, this may not work, and some of the things that we did didn't work and it didn't generate the dollars that we thought it was going to, but it allowed us to tweak the next event after that, to capture a different group or cut our expenses in a different way to make sure that we still were able to raise the dollars that we intended to at the end of the year.

But it's really adaptability and having an open mind.

- I wanna give each of you an example, an opportunity rather to share an example of the change that you've implemented, that maybe people don't realize, maybe your secret source to change, and I'm gonna begin with you, Cindy, what do you call your secret source to change?

- My management style is the communication piece and we have a, I would call our organization, a mid-size organization, Dawn has a large organization, and I base that on the financial aspect of it.

But I would say that, you know, I have a smaller staff and team and it's, again, that communication piece and realizing that some people do get stressed out over, I mean, this was a very big shock in our system, so, we had to move and pivot and it wasn't easy, but there is a little bit of a silver lining because you get so comfortable in doing things, events, and fundraising the same way over and over again.

And this really forced us to look at doing things differently.

And for us, the events that we've changed, it's been in a good way.

- Kevin, the change that has worked so well for you.

Advice for others.

- I also focused on communication.

We set up meetings, we started bringing in lunches, and I have a very small crew.

You know, we're just a small business, but communication is key building relationships.

And so, anything that I can do along those lines is the change that I've made prior to the pandemic.

- Zach, talk to us about the change that has worked for you and your organization.

- Doing it together.

You can't just have one person or group cook up the idea and pitch it off on somebody else to go run with it, you've all gotta be working together, coming up with a plan and then implementing the plan so that you can react more quickly to things that happened that you didn't expect, and allowing the new ideas to build into something.

If you're all in it together from beginning to end, it's a lot more successful.

- Dr. Jeffries, we've talked about you having a large organization.

So what are the change management tips that have helped you?

- Engaging stakeholders, and stakeholders are internal and external.

They are all around, right?

They are the people we serve, they are the employees, they're our board members, they are the donors, they're people who haven't heard of us yet, but may hear of a success story from someone that they know, so that brings in new calls.

So, I think once we continuously share our messaging with our stakeholders all around, typically that has been sort of the thing that's worked for us best.

- Okay, with two minutes remaining friends, I wanna just kind of quickly round-robin down through for those folks who are resistant to change.

What is the piece of advice that you want them to know?

And I'm gonna begin with you, Dr. Jeffries.

- It is so important to stay nimble.

I mean, things, life changes, and when you're open to it, it becomes magical at the end.

So I think being able to accept change and being open to change, you never know what's coming.

- Zach.

- Sometimes those things that you didn't want to change end up becoming the things that you wanna do long term, even after the environment conditions go back to normal, you find something that you didn't anticipate.

- Great, Cindy.

- I would say realize that there's hope, and there are also people that are hopeless.

So really try to help the people that feel hopeless because there is always hope.

- Kevin, final thought, you get the final words on change.

- Look for the good part of it, look for the positive part of the change, don't jump on it right away and say, now this is never gonna work.

You have to look at what could work and what could be positive and the best way it can benefit you because the change is gonna happen.

- Excellent, well, thank you so much to these great central Illinois leaders for helping us learn new change management strategies.

Next week on leadership lessons for homework and life, we're talking about constructive conflict resolution.

You won't wanna miss our conversation.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Good night, my friend.

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