Every protest I’ve seen in recent months has come as no surprise. Of course, there is anger; there should be. Decades of lost trust, underscored by daily reminders of pain and inequity, exacerbated by political gamesmanship and transactional leadership, provide powerful fuel.
The key to engaging communities and addressing disappointment is listening. Disaffected students, customers, clients and employees aren’t interested in lectures and media statements. Come with questions, humility, an open mind and willing ear. Be vulnerable, recognizing that you won’t have the answers.
During our last global crisis, the 2008 great recession, a mentor shared a series of valuable lessons as we engaged communities around the U.S. for a Fortune 100 company. We talked then about deep, authentic community engagement, strengthening the license to operate and differentiating our institution from peers as a way to accelerate competitive advantage. Those lessons are exponentially more relevant today as institutions face a crisis in confidence, across the education, corporate, government, and non-profit sectors.
Lesson number one - respecting perspectives, often in hostile opposition to your own. This took a heightened level of active listening, learning to walk in someone else’s shoes, and Zen-like restraint. It’s not easy listening to full-throated opposition, powered by anger. My active listening was a work in progress, but you can’t empathize without understanding and I realized the full responsibility lay with the institution, not the community. We had to regain trust, not the other way around.
Lesson number two - exposing our flaws - was difficult. I’d traveled to dozens of U.S. cities by now and met with hundreds of community leaders, without a single press release or grant. By this point I’d begun to proactively raise issues we were wrestling with as an industry – the outcome of which would impact urban centers around the nation. By co-owning our problems, I was amazed by the intellectual capital and powerful solutions that emerged from critics.
The third lesson - building trust - was the toughest. After each city, we made a point of staying in regular contact with every person we’d visited. The industry had undergone a period of rapid growth and mistakes were bound to happen. They did. When issues were on the horizon, we reached out transparently to critics for counsel, no longer calling just after the release went out or embargo ended.
Over my career I’ve engaged challenging politicians and reporters at every level, and engaging communities is far tougher. The former typically transact in the short term, around an election, issue, event or news cycle. Communities, however, are rooted. It’s arduous work but the benefits are transformational and enduring. Twelve years later, I regularly encounter those community leaders. They’re now politicians, college presidents, civil rights leaders and CEOs. The bad news is that few others have since engaged them in such a way. The good news is that the trust we built has remained all these years.
Maya Angelou had it right when she said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”