For at least 40 years, the Spokane Public School District has picked its superintendents from among educators with some past connection to Spokane. Except once.

Gary Livingston’s whole career had been spent in Topeka, Kansas, until 1993 when he arrived unknown in Spokane. In the following eight years, he earned broad respect. Today, he’s chancellor and CEO of the Community Colleges of Spokane, and his reputation as an organizational leader has continued to grow.

He recently sat down with Spokesman-Review editorial board members Doug Floyd and Rebecca Nappi and videographer Colin Mulvany to talk about vision and values as components of leadership.

Q: What does good community leadership look like?

A: I think it really starts with a passion for what you’re doing and how what you’re doing fits into what the community’s doing. In my case, education and seeing it, not in isolation, but seeing it as part of the whole. And really just having a passion for that. And I think in some cases it’s easier in education because it’s so easy to get excited about kids and watching them mature and so exciting about new programs if you get a chance, and then you have a context within that community that you just make it work. I really think that someone who has a passion about what they’re doing, making it fit in the community, it just becomes a winner if it’s authentic.

Q: What role does vision play?

A: I think it’s critical. I mean you have to have some sense of where that organization is going and over what kind of time period and what kind of benchmarks are you going to get. One of the first things I always do with an organization and with the board is to walk through a strategic planning process where we talk about what we think we can do based on where we think we’re at and then identifying how we’re going to measure whether we get there. And really challenging them to think outside the box.

Because so often in strategic planning, you’re willing to have the vision, but you’re not willing to step back and then make the incremental measures of how you’re going to get there. And I think so often when people have a vision they want to be there tomorrow and if it’s a large organization that just doesn’t work. You’ve got to think about the whole complex conversation about change, knowing that change has to be incremental; it has to be owned by the people who are making the change, so that takes time. So the vision is one thing, but the commitment to doing that over time with measurable steps really is how you get there. Because it’s so easy to walk out with a vision statement that excites everybody for a day or two.

The proof is, three years later, are you there? In fact, you can almost follow leaders’ careers and if they’re not there for five years, it really wasn’t about change. Because if you’re leaving every three years, you can make lots of promises, but the accountability falls on someone else. If you’re cutting budgets, you don’t have to live with it. So I think leadership has to be tied to that vision, incremental measures, and a willingness to sustain over time that commitment.

Q: What happens if the leader’s vision is in conflict with the community’s vision?

A: Some of it will always be in conflict with some parts of the community. I just think leadership is about identifying the changes that are necessary, and changes always connote some conflict with some group that is interested in what we have. If you’re looking at making improvements, you have limited resources. Change usually does involve making some segment of that organization of that community uncomfortable. And whether it’s identifying in education where you’re underserving kids in poverty, whether you are not holding faculty accountable. All those kinds of things dictate that you’re going to make some decisions and with limited resources, some of those resources are probably going to come from some other place.

It’s over time, how do you bring that vision in for change, that does have opposition, and include those who have concerns about that to buy into and maybe even help through the process. If you look at education, if you’re not about change, then you’re really not about kids.

You’ve got to keep changing, because their life and their world is changing. That’s a pretty uncomfortable situation if you’re really doing it. I think you have to measure those changes in the context of what is acceptable to the community. But if you’re not asking the community to look differently, in my case at the educational system, then you’re probably not doing the job you need to do.

Q: Would you differentiate between vision and goal?

A: I think the vision is the broader picture of what you think that organization can become, and what it can do for the students,, and the goals are the incremental steps that lead to accomplishing that vision. The goals become the measurable kinds of pathway that takes you there and again, so often the vision doesn’t come with those measurable goals and so there isn’t any accountability whether the system really does make the change and that vision starts being realized. Because it takes a couple of years for just the things to start getting in place, the changes to start making sense and so much of that involves processing.

When you look at an organization like community colleges or public schools, they are such large organizations that it just takes time. The first process is sharing the vision and creating the passion where other people own that vision and understand that vision and figure out in the context of what their job is how they become a part of that. So you’re almost a salesman. You help create that vision and then you have to go out and sell it because if it’s only your vision and only the board’s vision, that’s all it is.

It’s those goals that incrementally get sold and become the goals of the organization that really allow you to do it. I go back to saying creating the passion in the organization is really how you create that vision. Because the people do it, you’ve got to have in my case great teachers who are motivated but just need to have a direction to dedicate that motivation. It’s tough being in education right now with all the accountability and the pressures and it’s hard to sustain that passion when there’s such pressure on things that they may think are extraneous to the vision and you have to keep going back and talking about how that can fit and does fit. The passion has to be in those who deal directly with students, but a vision doesn’t become more than just somebody else’s vision.

Q: Where do values fit?

A: In leadership it’s all about values because everyday you come to a decision that has to be based on values. It’s who you are and what you believe that creates the passion that sustains. If you don’t have the values, you’re just wallowing all over the place. I grew up in a large family and that’s probably why I spent a lot of my time in K-12 advocating for special ed, alternative ed, because, I really grew up in poverty and I appreciate what education does and can do. My values tend to be along that line. I think that’s why I probably chose to change careers and go into community colleges because if you look at it, in some cases it’s the alternative education of higher education.

We’re the first choice for some, and we’re the last chance for some. That value kind of followed me into the higher ed arena which I always thought I’d be kind of end up in. Again, I think your values are who you are and beyond the values you may make mistakes but it won’t be for the wrong reasons.

Q: Which is more important, patience or impatience?

A: I would say tempered impatience. I think you have to be a little antsy about wanting things to happen faster. But if you are too impatient, it won’t happen. I think some errors in judgment that I made go back to wanting some things to happen quicker than the organization was ready to support them, and you mandate something and it’s not going to sustain. I wanted full-day kindergarten when I first moved here, and I wanted them in title schools, and I tried to work the process and it just wasn’t happening fast enough, so in the next year’s budget I mandated that we had Title I full-day kindergarten in seven or eight schools and there were budget problems at the time; it required shifting some money.

Everyone understood the value, but it wasn’t a priority because of the budget cuts. So I basically said we’re going to do it, and we did it, and within three years the full-day kindergartens were gone because there wasn’t the passion from the people who were delivering the service. And it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in it, it’s just that change doesn’t work that way. So tempered impatience: In other words, being impatient is OK but you have to understand, if you act on it too quickly, you’re not going to gain what you want. People have to believe in what they do because they believe it, not because someone said it.

Many of the mistakes I made go back to being impatient, I think, so you have to temper that and understand it takes two or three years sometimes to change practices, strategies, and people’s understanding. People are very comfortable working hard at what they do, doing a very good job, and there has to be a reason for that change. So they have to understand it and that takes time.

Q: How many mistakes can you make and maintain your status as an effective leader?

A: I guess probably it depends on how many times it’s on the front page. We all make lots of mistakes, some of them are just bigger than others and some are more visible than others. I think the community has to have confidence in leadership. When there’s confidence in an organization, and in K-12 we can measure that, because every two years, you had to go back to the taxpayers and you had to ask them support of a levy or you had to ask them to support a bond. So they got to walk into that little private booth, and they could close the door and what they were voting in most cases — because many of them didn’t have kids in school before — is whether they had confidence in the organization, whether they believed that they were getting their dollar’s worth.

Everyday you’re trying to build confidence in your organization because that confidence builds the kind of support in terms of resources, in terms of volunteers who come. Who wants to volunteer in an organization they don’t believe is producing results?

So, we all make mistakes, and you have to just deal with that and if you make a mistake you have to admit it and then you have to fix it. Because you’re going to make mistakes. The other thing I think is really, really, really critical is if you bring to the organization the very brightest people you can bring and you listen to them, you’ll make fewer mistakes. I know what I know how to do, and I also know what I don’t know how to do, and you’ve got to be honest enough to bring people in who know that you listen to them and as long as they’re performing and they have your confidence, you’ve got to leave them alone and let them move. And you’ll make fewer decisions.

In any big organization, every day Spokane Public Schools, the Community Colleges, there are hundreds of decisions, some of them have more significance than others, but that’s what you do every day. Everybody will tell you who’s made decisions. When you get up in the morning you don’t know what they are until you get there. And things happen the day before that you had no control over, but the press is going to expect you to be responsible and the principal is going to expect you to be supportive. You make the mistakes, hopefully you learn by them and then you solve them.

Q: A lot of leaders say they want alternative points of view, they want to be challenged and hear from people who don’t necessarily think the way they do. I would assume it’s also important to have people on your team who share your vision. How do you reconcile those concerns?

A: It goes back to your values question. First, you have to find people who have values similar to yours. I don’t think you can have vision if you don’t have values. The values you have create the impetus to challenge yourself to have vision. It’s your values of wanting to be better, your values of wanting to make a difference, your value of that kind of public service that motivates the vision.

Without the values, you’re not really visioning, you’re just trying to get to the next day, you’re trying to get to the next budget or you’re trying to get to the next contract. The values drive the vision. So if you find people have the same values but they have to have the skill set. In other words you’ve got to find someone, in my case, who knows school finance. And you have to have confidence in them and you have to have confidence that they’re going to come to you with recommendations on the budget to support the values of the vision, the values of the organization, the value of putting kids first.

Then you leave them alone and you let them make those kinds of recommendations until they prove that they aren’t making a decision and or they prove that they aren’t walking the values that you hired them for. So I tend not to micromanage. Unless I find an area where things just aren’t working the way they’re supposed to work and then you start spending a lot more time questioning decisions and processing decisions. I think that if you ask people who I’ve worked with, they will tell you that in general that I don’t.

We meet regularly, I get updated, so there’s no surprises. I suspect that that’s probably my No. 1 rule that I have in my relationship with my board is that there are no surprises both ways. I don’t surprise them; they don’t surprise me, and the relationship I have with people who work with me.

Look, if you know there’s a problem, come in and tell me. And if you have recommendations fine, but if you don’t then… but no surprises. I don’t want to read about it the next morning on the front page of the paper. So, yeah, you’re going to make mistakes.

Q: As a leader, people look to you to be decisive and to be knowledgeable and to have solutions, and you’re expected to be confident in all of that. Do you ever worry about appearing to be pompous and overbearing?

A: You know, there is another word that I would add to the words that you used. And that is that you — fairly publicly (and publicly means within the organization) —contemplate. In other words, you’re asking questions, you’re putting important decisions through process. You don’t process every decision. But after a while you’ve made enough mistakes that you’ve learned how to differentiate the decisions you just need to make and those that really need to be contemplated.

And when I say contemplated that means you put into place the processes within your organization. For instance, there are some decisions that you need to take back to the school level. And need to actually get input at the faculty level or the principal level or it could be at your cabinet level. I don’t think that anyone just makes important decisions off the top of their head. Not that’s going to last very long. So you learn to differentiate which decisions you can make because you’re expected to make all of them, but you need to know when and how the processes for that conversation takes place, and in some cases you really need input at the grassroots level.

Q: Is the notion of the social contract secure? If you look at all the whole polarization and divisiveness you see in political discourse right now, the idea of the good of the whole versus the interest of the one?

A: Unfortunately, and I have said this in some of my comments with community groups, I almost feel like we’re losing some of our social conscience. And maybe it’s the economy. Maybe it’s the split between the haves and have-nots. But I see a lot of really important programs going to the side. It doesn’t seem like we are willing to support some of the things we used to support because we knew it was the right thing to do. You hear: I don’t have kids in school anymore. I don’t use that social service. Maybe it’s because money is tighter and people are strapped. But I sense that we are losing that collective conscience of the good that I have some responsible for the common good.

The people still pay their taxes, but I think they are more discerning about what they are willing to pay for and sometimes it relates to how closely they are connected to that service. I have a grandkid still in school. Or I’ve got someone who’s using that mental health services. So it bothers me a little bit that we’re moving away from what used to be a much more commonly accepted belief that we do have a responsibility, regardless of whether it’s a direct service to us or not. That bothers me. Maybe I’m misreading that, but I hear that more than I used to.

Q: You alluded a few minutes ago to the intense pressure for accountability for education in education right now and as an educator and hearing all of those talks about the high-demand courses in science and technology and math and WASLs and all that sort of thing, are you concerned that the civics component is not getting as much attention as it should?

A: It really is a difficult conversation, the issue in education of accountability. Having exit goals and standards is really important, and there are some standards that all kids need to meet. As you look at kids, and we’ve all raised kids and we know how different they are, in terms of their interests, their discipline, where they want to be, where their talents are, where their weaknesses are. I see more division when kids come to kindergarten now then I did.

Poverty today has a much more damaging impact on kids than when many of us grew up poor, grew up in families of working poor, when there were still conversations around the table about you could be better if you work hard. I’m not sure that those same conversations happen in a lot of homes today. So kids are coming to kindergarten very differently prepared with very different kinds of goals. Then, as they go through the process, there is a group that just moves quickly and another group that is just struggling just to survive.

So then if you have one common measure, is that really fair? Do we set up barriers that challenge kids? And isn’t school supposed to be not only challenging you academically but creating the environment where you develop some of those values we talked about? So yeah I think schools have much broader vision but clearly kids have to be able to do math and science. They have to be able to read. But once you get into the real world it has to be in the perspective of who they are and their ability to get along with other kids and to have the values about working hard and we expect expectations to be respectful.

How you mix all that up with the same thing five or six hour day, you’re now mounting emphasis on measurable accountability. We’ve always had that intuitive accountability. We knew when to bring kids into groups and we knew when to spend time on things that are not measurable. So we always valued education. So it really is a tough balance and I struggled with that.

When I was on the accountability task force in Kansas when I was there as superintendent of Topeka, and we went through basically the same process that Washington went through when I got here in ‘93, I thought that I had finished that in Kansas. I worked on what we called Creating Kansas Tomorrow and I co-chaired the education piece and we were looking at how do we measure? What are the standards of science, what are the standards in math? You can get so overwhelmed with that, that takes over, so how do we balance it? Clearly we have to set standards that we can measure.

It’s a struggle to fit in the other important stuff in the time that teachers have left. If you interview teachers, I think you’ll hear that, that it really is a challenge. They understand accountability, they understand the hard stuff, but they also intuitively know that soft stuff.

Q: You have referred several times to growing up in poverty. And I’ve heard you before talk about the impacts of poverty on readiness for learning. To what degree does one’s own life experiences growing up inform the vision, the values that are essential to leadership?

A: When you look at yourself, honestly, you are who you are. And you are who you have been. You grew up with those experiences. I think that’s the same thing in your administrative skills. Various administrative jobs prepare you differently and you learn from those jobs. Sometimes that’s why it’s so difficult in some of the public positions of really large organizations. You get elected to a position to make decisions and to run a large organization and you really haven’t come up through (the ranks.)

You’ve made the mistakes in terms of understanding an organization and understanding the culture of communication in the organization, understanding the processes involved in making decisions in the organization, and so you’re thrust into that where the learning curve hasn’t been there.

You’re yet to be very successful. I haven’t been I guess in some ways unsuccessful. You made that mistake and you say, “Oh my gosh, I have to do that over again.” And so you have enough of those “I have to do it over agains” that you kind of put together your experience. You are who you are because of who you have been and the experiences you have had.

When I say I lived in poverty, I was the oldest of seven kids. Now we didn’t know we were poor, like so many people who grew up in working poor (homes), but you always knew you didn’t have what other people had.

But today poverty is very, very different. That may be one of the big things that goes back to the issue of social conscience. We all think back of being poor and we were able to handle that and we were able to work our way out of that. We don’t understand that today. Poverty is so devastating, that they don’t have those conversations that I mentioned around the table. They don’t have the same hope. Poverty is different today, it’s the lack of understanding of how poverty is different that I think makes people reluctant. So they can just do it if they work harder.

Well, that’s not true in the same way it used to be. And I think that has tainted that social conscience, because I got here because I was willing. All they have to do… Boy, the devastation of poverty and third-and fourth-generation welfare is very, very different, and I think that contributes to it.

Q: What’s the worst part of being in the spotlight and being high-visibility.

A: Most people who see people who are in controversy form an opinion that they’re callous and that it doesn’t bother (them). Every one of those decisions hurts, every one of those segments of the community that you alienate by a decision, whether it’s changing boundaries or closing schools or cutting budgets or laying off staff, those are agonizing, and anyone who doesn’t feel the agony isn’t really in the mix.

Those decisions hurt. You know you’ve still got to portray the confidence, you’ve still got to keep the organization moving. You understand the pain but you can’t necessarily share it. I mean there’s a persona you have in leadership that you have to have to be successful and trusted and valued. But those are tough. When you lay someone off, that’s tough. When you close a school, when you change a boundary, when you change a program you hope that the pain here is going to result in an improved service or program.

Again it goes back to that issue of change, you’re making change, and at the point of change it’s hurting someone because it disrupts what they’re doing, it disrupts their comfort, or it may be taking a program that they have a lot of value in that has just become, in the context of the larger organization, less important or less affordable. So, yeah, I mean those are tough. I mean every day you… I can think back on some decisions and mistakes and mistakes that maybe you didn’t make but the organization made that caused a lot of pain. Those are frequent; those are tough.

Q: What suggestions would you make to voters in this community regarding how they should decide which candidates they’re going to support?

A: Well it’s hard to discern this in a public election. And it goes back to that values question. You try to figure out if there is a shared value, and that’s hard when you’re electing, but you look for someone with shared values. I think, too, people have to understand that in public office in particular, that there is much more expected than there are resources to do, and at any given time you are going to have some segment of your constituents upset or disenfranchised from the decisions you’re making. To some extent a little tolerance, but I think finding the values and finding someone who is willing to come out and talk, someone who you believe can put the processes in place, who will do the listening and who will make the tough decisions.

I’m reading the book “Team of Rivals” right now. I don’t know whether you’ve read that but it’s incredible, and it’s really Abraham Lincoln, and she (author Doris Kearns Goodwin) is so insightful in terms of the way (Lincoln) puts the things in processes. They come back to them, and then he makes the decisions, and after he makes that decision, he creates that passion and creates that momentum and it’s an incredibly powerful book. Anyone running for office, anyone who aspires to leadership, that’s a book worth reading, because he actually went out and brought into his cabinet everyone who ran against him in that presidential election in 1860. And they were all in his cabinet. It’s just a powerful model.

But I think that they have to find the values, find someone who you know is a good listener. Someone who understands management. I mean there’s a point where politics kind of ends. And I don’t say that in a derogatory way. But the politics end and then the art of managing a large organization, which means how do you have this vision for the organization, the school district or the community and how do you impact that secretary at the desk? How do you impact that custodian? How do you impact that delivery person? That they understand the vision, communicate the vision that relates to — and people don’t like the term customer service — but what you believe should happen to the customer, the student, happens here, and not just here, which means you’ve got to have the communication systems in place, the decision-making processes in place, the feedback loops up and down, and the empowerment.

So how do you become a manager? Because that’s what you ultimately have to be after the politicking is finished. Does that make sense? You have got to manage the organization. So then you have to have your management skills. I think they ought to look for that. Sometimes a good manager may not be the best politician.

Q: Why did you never run for public office?

A: You know, people have asked that about a lot of people. You have to do what you have a passion to do. It goes back to that. Education’s what I’m interested in. I started out as a special education teacher, but my passion was really for people who weren’t given a chance, because it was really before special ed laws even passed. And it was back when special ed was in the basements and kids were not being served, and so my passion really was about kids, and I feel like if I make the decision based on what I think is right for the kids, if it’s a mistake, again it goes back to it’s the mistake I made with the right intent.

I don’t know that I would be that passionate about looking at a whole city or a whole region or a whole state and having to worry about whether they have sewers and roads and all that stuff. And schools.

That would be a much harder job because you are really looking at trying to make everyone happy and focusing on everyone’s different interest. I get to focus on education. I can be very, very parochial about advocating for education dollars and for kids and for programs. I can be obstinate. I mean while I’m doing it in the context of the community, I can have a passion for this and try to make this the best part of the community it can be. And I don’t know that I would be good at being the generalist. I guess I’m more of a specialist if that’s what it is.

Q: Leonard Doohan, (retired from Gonzaga) had big leadership sessions here for a few years running and he said once that the best leaders have a deeply committed relationship — their wife, or husband or significant other — and I know you’ve had a long-term marriage. Can you talk a little bit about how your marriage has allowed you to lead?

A: When I first became superintendent in Topeka in 1988, I knew everything was going to change, because basically I had no nights. Literally, I was out four nights a week. And so we talked about it, and what I did is I blocked off weekends and I basically said to the board in the interview process I’ll do whatever it takes, I know the hours and the expectations, because Topeka was the capital city and so there were all the urban expectations plus all the capital city expectations of the superintendent, and I had seen the predecessor.

So I made a commitment that I was rarely going to do weekends. Weekends were for the family, and when Nick came along we went through with my assistant and we put all of his music recitals on the calendar, we put his basketball games on the calendar. So I didn’t miss those kinds of events because we just scheduled them. But candidly, Amanda scheduled things that she thought were important on weekends, or if there was a special thing in the evening it was on my calendar. So it was on there and assistants just knew that unless it was a real crisis or something that no one else could do…

So we planned that, and I wasn’t home many nights, but I didn’t miss many of Nick’s activities, and I kept weekends mostly free. And it worked and it was a good balance.

When you take those jobs, you just know that you work for the community and you’re going to be out there. But if you don’t plan it, it won’t happen.

Q: Has your religious faith informed your leadership style?

A: The answer is yes but I think it’s more than just a formal religion, it’s a value about treating people right, trying to be fair, making tough decisions where you try to mitigate as much as you can the harm to some people if you know it will be there.

I think it’s both the religious and how that becomes broad, because I’m a very private person. I don’t talk about my religion. I’m Catholic and…we’re pretty active, but I don’t talk about that, but I think it’s the religion that creates the values. It’s the values that become who you are in that public sense. So it’s tied together but I don’t go around doing the religion thing.

Q: What traits do you share with other effective leaders?

A: Well, let me think about who I think are some really effective leaders. Bill Robinson (president of Whitworth College), Bob Spitzer (president of Gonzaga University). If you’re working in an organization that serves the community you have to be in the community, you have to be engaged in the community. I spend a lot of time, and some can say, is that really an important way to spend your time? I serve on a lot of boards, community boards. I think that’s important, that visibility and that engagement in other parts of the community…but I try to pick those boards where there’s a connect to the organization.

For instance, I’ve been on the mental heath center board in this community since I got here, as I was in Topeka. Again, my background was special ed, so I could participate in community activities, but it was aligned with some things that I thought were important. As I got involved with the community colleges, it was clear to me that they were not engaged as much as they should be at a high visibility level with the business community. So getting involved with the Chamber and the EDC very actively and trying to bring the organizations close together. Now we have a wonderful partnership with what was the Chamber, the EDC and now the new organization, which is imperative because we’re training adult workers that tie it to the work place, and we’re being more successful with the Legislature, we’re getting resources.

The people who I see as successful leaders in the community aren’t just leading their organizations in isolation. LeRoy Nosbaum (President and CEO of Itron Inc.,) Tom Fritz (Inland Northwest Health Services chief executive officer). You know people who have big jobs, big organizations that could take all of their time, but yet you see them in leadership — Shaun Higgins (director of sales and marketing for The Spokesman-Review) — you see them in leadership roles in other organizations. I think that’s important. The visibility, but also the reaching out to other communities.

Q: What gives you the confidence to lead in the first place, especially during those periods when things aren’t working out the way they’re supposed to?

A: No one thinks they’re a successful leader, because you just kind of go day to day. You have your visions and stuff, but you go day to day trying to pull the organization together, looking at the resources you have, figuring what the next day, the next week, the next month… I don’t think if you interviewed the people I mentioned they would say they’re good leaders. They find an organization that they are compatible with, that they have a passion for. People they enjoy working with. I don’t think most leaders think about whether they’re a good leader or not. They just try to just keep the organization going towards that vision and going back to the troops and rechecking it.

But it is hard, though, because again you have that passion, and so when something doesn’t work and a mistake gets visible, becomes very visible and then taints, if you will, in some people’s minds, the credibility of the organization, that hurts. I’ve experienced that a lot in my career. I’m still experiencing it. We’ve got a situation going now that’s been very difficult.

Q: What kinds of mistakes do you see that keep others in the community from being effective in their own leadership roles?

A: The common answer for someone who works for the public is to say not enough resources. And that is true but that is the challenge of leadership is trying to do more with less. Because I haven’t experienced having more money than we needed.

I think getting diverted from the mission. Getting embroiled in a controversy that becomes so public that you start trying to spend more time dealing with the image than the issue. And so you maybe get diverted from your values a little bit. So public mistakes and public conversations are much more difficult to solve because you’re dealing with it in a much broader context than just within the organization. So that’s always challenging when the problem becomes to the magnitude that a broader community’s looking at it than just those engaged because usually there are the public issues of a challenge, and then there are the issues of a challenge between the constituents. And if you can deal with it at this level, often times you get down the road but when it gets broader and more perspectives come into play, you get farther away from the real issue. It becomes much more difficult to solve.

Q: Is there a certain type of personality that makes a good leader? Do you see a consistency of personality across the board when you see an effective leader?

A: No, and I don’t want to overuse this word, but I think it’s passion. You really believe in something, and you just go for it. And you don’t even realize, because the energy is spent in such a positive way that it feels good. You get the bumps in the road and you have the challenges. But I’ve seen people who are very quiet and unassuming but very effective in that style because they really believe in that mission and, again, maybe it goes back to that generalist vs. that specialist.

You know, if you are running a company, like LeRoy Nosbaum running Itron, you know he has a passion for that business and for that niche of that industry. Or, as I mentioned, Tom (Fritz). And it’s easier to do that, to have the passion when you’re focused on a product or a particular service. I think it is much harder when you become a governor or a mayor or a representative where you’re responsible for this broad area and each constituency expects you to be passionate about theirs and you can’t be equally passionate and equally successful and so I think that is a much, much, much harder job than that and I’ve seen all personalities in leadership who’ve been successful, but it boils down to they really believe in what they’re doing and they really know where they want to take that organization.

Q: What must be changed to get others with leadership potential to use it in the political arena?

A: I know that that’s the focus of this conversation. That’s hard because it goes back to what I said about being the specialist or being the generalist. Well, let me give you an example. I have been very, very impressed with Gov. Gregoire. She’s got this huge job, but think how many times she’s been to Spokane, and Spokane is just one of many communities. So she understands that visibility, and she’s sharing.

For instance she came here to announce her higher education budget, which would have been easy to do at the University of Washington in Seattle, but she came here. And I see her demonstrating for education, for health services, for being globally competitive. She’s able to niche these and have a passion for those niches. You listen to her speak about globally competitive or listen to her speak about early childhood, and so somehow she’s been able to have this generalist responsibility but to silo them in ways that she could be passionate — health care — in bringing people together. So somehow she’s been able to do that.

Q: In terms of private sector leadership, do you see private sector leadership as being able to come into the political process and be successful? Is that where our leaders are, do you believe, for the political arena?

A: I don’t know because, again, it goes back to that personality and that ability to have a passion that can be generalized. I guess there are people who can say, “I am about this city and I am passionate about this city and I am passionate about everything that is a part of this city,” and I guess there are those who could do… I don’t know that I would be able to do that.

It goes back to who you are and what your values are. And your ability to convince people to be passionate about things that will make the city better. I’m not answering your question because I don’t think I have an answer for it.

Q: Let’s go back to values then. When and how did it become apparent that you are a leader?

A: I still don’t know that I am. When Christine (executive assistant) told me that you were inviting me for leadership, I thought, “OK what are they setting me up for?”

Q: What about as a child?

A: I was the oldest of seven. And my father worked so I was always bossing somebody around. That’s just what you do when you’re the oldest of seven kids. I was always willing to kind of stand up and say what I thought. I don’t know that people who are in leadership think of themselves as just leaders. You do your job and you’re dependant on everybody else doing their job and if you interviewed the people I mentioned and you said why are you a successful leader they’d hesitate and they’d say, “Well, I’m not sure I am,” because taken out of education I probably wouldn’t be. And I suspect when I retire I no longer will be.

Q: I teach out at the community college at Spokane Falls and I give my students the passion speech every time. Do you find that effective leaders, that it comes down to the word passion to have a certain drive within them?

A: You know, I think it is that, but it’s also knowing what you know and it’s knowing when you know what the organization needs. And when you’ve gone past knowing what the organization needs. When I left Topeka, for instance, I’d been there for 20-some years and was superintendent for a little over five years, and they had some challenges and some needs that I connected to the curriculum. And when I was finished with that, I understood that it wasn’t going to go like this anymore, it was going to start going like this. And to a great extent that’s exactly what I said here after eight years. I came in and there was some challenges that the school district was facing. A lot of it had to do in the curriculum area again so when we kind of got that under control I kind of felt like it was time for me to go to another organization, because I probably wasn’t going to take the organization to the next level and they really needed someone else. So I think it’s kind of knowing what you know and being able to do it but, just as importantly, knowing when it’s time to change organizations, that you’re not going to make the changes because you’ve kind of done what you know how to do, I guess.

Q: Who, preferably someone still living, gave you advice that still serves you in your leadership role?

A: Boy, I’ve had so many mentors. I mean that’s one thing. That would be a characteristic, I guess. Most people who you would identify as leaders, if you asked them about mentors, they would all know – and you never have one, because at different stages you have to have different mentors.

When I was a classroom teacher, I got tied up with a doctoral candidate from the University of Kansas who was doing a lot with behavioral modification kinds of things with severely handicapped, and he challenged me to think about research as a part of being a teacher. That really motivated me to go to graduate school, and that whole idea of putting education and using research came from that experience.

A fellow who was the associate superintendent in Topeka when I was a special ed administrator, said you need to move into regular education, you need to broaden this … You’ll make more difference for special-needs students. Because the mainstreaming law came into play. So he made me the general director of education and forced me to leave my comfort zone in special ed and become the director of math and science and history and all the areas which I wasn’t… And so he really just made me stretch.

Then the superintendent who was an African American fellow who left Topeka and went and became the superintendent of Dallas — very, very community-minded and was the model of this getting out in the community and talking about education and talking about kids with a passion and trying to be that ambassador for kids in our community. So it’s been different mentors at different times and they’ve all been important for that stage. So I don’t know that there’s just one but there’s a series of them that I kind of ran into.