Keep Leading!® Podcast Episode 041 | Cross Sector Leadership | Richard Marker

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of facilitation, coaching, and professional speaking.

We live in a world of the non-traditional athlete where a quarterback is now also a running back, a basketball center can dribble and shoot the three-point shot. At one point, these folks were told to pick a lane – “You can’t do more than one skilled position well.” That is no longer the case in athletics. The non-traditional athlete is here to stay but what about in organizations when we’re talking about leaders and leadership? Can you play multiple positions as well? Can you lead across sectors? With more than 50 years of experience, my guest today, Richard Marker, says the answer to that question is an emphatic yes and he is here to explain.

Richard Marker is an internationally known expert in philanthropy. He is an author and frequently-quoted thought leader in his field. Richard is a much sought-after speaker who has spoken in 39 countries on five continents. He has served as the CEO of a large international foundation, a university professor, and a chaplain. As a volunteer leader, he has sat on 60 foundation and nonprofit boards and shared 12 of them, including sharing two international religious ones. So, I am excited to have Richard Marker here with me today.

Richard, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Richard Marker:

Eddie, it’s a great pleasure. And listening to your introduction, it strikes me that, first of all, I wish I were good enough athlete to do all the things you talked about but beyond that, the distinction that you made is an appropriate distinction for people who are above a certain age. If you talk to younger people today, millennials and people around that age, they scratch their head and say “what’s the big deal about having multiple careers and accomplishing things in a variety of sectors?” They take for granted that they’re going to have a multi-faceted lifetime career and do interesting things. People above a certain age assume that they chose, as you said, they pick a single lane, develop a single expertise and stick with it. So, in a way, the career that I’ve had is more typical of somebody who’s up and coming, maybe a full generation younger than me, than people of my generation but I think that introduction is going to be so routine when you introduce the people who are the next generation as they’re going to say “What’s the big deal about it?” It’s an important cultural distinction, a social distinction but it certainly is something that has informed my own life and my own career. So, anyway, thanks for those words and I appreciate the context you put things in.

Eddie Turner:

Well, thank you for that, Richard. And I was really excited to get you on the show to talk about cross sector leadership because of what you’ve done and you, to your point, accomplished these things at a time where that just really wasn’t allowed in most cases. And I want to highlight for leaders the fact that not only is this something that is possible and to your point that younger leaders will take for granted because it’s acceptable today, it wasn’t always the case because you stay at a company for 25 years and retire but they are changing jobs every two or three years and they may find opportunities in a completely different area, completely different skill set than what they may have started on. So, I’d love to have you explain to the audience why this matters.

Richard Marker:

Sure. And I will say that if you would ask me, you mentioned how many years I’ve been doing things and just to put it in historic perspective, and it’s going to be relevant to one of the stories I talk about, I began my career with my first Masters in 1968. If you had asked me in 1968 what the next 50 years are going to look like, I absolutely positively guarantee that I would not have had the slightest clue as to which directions things were going to go, what stops I would make along the way, what things I would be proud of and accomplishments I’ve had. So, it’s also an important thing to bear in mind that you can’t plan your life, you can’t plan all the things that are going to come along, the opportunities that are going to be there, the challenges, the way in which your interests change. And if I were to look back and say “What are the leadership opportunities that I’ve had and what are the things that I feel proudest about?”, it’s precisely because I wasn’t afraid to follow my emerging and evolving interests even before anybody was willing to pay me for them. And that ended up opening up opportunities that would probably not have happened if I said “Well, jeez, I can’t do something until somebody pays me for it.” That was an important thing that developed. And when people come to me for career advice, I always tell them “Don’t be afraid to follow your interests and don’t worry for the time being. If you have a job, keep the job but make sure your cultivating your skills, your knowledge, your interests because that’s going to make you interesting for yourself and open up the opportunities along the way.”

Eddie Turner:

So, you were willing to do a role because that’s where your interests, and I love how you said emerging interests were, whether you were paid for the role or not. So, talk about, if you would, please, your ability to have served as a formal leader in an organization where you were paid and then, on the other side, how you served as a former leader in a volunteer role.

Richard Marker:

Sure. For one sentence to use a kind of a quasi-academic context, there are two kinds of leadership, to put it in general terms. There’s ascribed leadership and there’s earned leadership. If you are hired to do something or even if you’re elected to do something, the definition is that’s an ascribed role. You’re the president, you’re the CEO, you’re the supervisor, you’re the head of something, that’s a role that has certain kinds of authority that comes along with it. There’s another kind of leadership that doesn’t depend exclusively on what the titles are but is, in fact, the role that allows you to have maybe a greater influence and that’s earned leadership where people trust you, where people learn that you have insights, that you have a level of wisdom, that you’re an empathetic kind of person, that you’re willing to take risks and encourage in a way that doesn’t overwhelm people. And we can talk about some examples later on. So, it’s important to recognize that there are different ways of being leaders and both are important. You can be an ascribed leader who has not earned the leadership role but the likelihood is you’re not going to have people that are really following you unless it’s under pressure or power but an earned leader who also then has an ascribed role as somebody that people are willing to follow. And I have to say that that was something I had to learn along the way both in good ways or bad. And what I found, to answer your question, is very early on I felt that it was important to demonstrate my commitment to being involved in a community even when it was not paying me to work but the job was because, after all, if you’re living in a community, you have a responsibility to it. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It doesn’t mean you have to give to everyone. It does mean that if you’re a good citizen, no matter what your job is, you probably want to support the larger society. And earlier on, long before I could have articulated that, I intuited that. And one of the things that’s been very helpful for me in having a career where I did play leadership roles is precisely because I was willing to do those kinds of things along the way even when somebody was not paying me to do it. It gave me a breadth of experiences. I got to understand something about a variety of elements of the society, some industries that I never would have known anything about, the nonprofit sector, even some related to government in ways that I never would have done if I had strictly restricted myself only to be working in a single sector.

I want to go back, if I can, jump ahead because, if it’s alright with you, I’m going to tell a couple of anecdotes of very transformative events early in my professional life that had a great impact in my understanding of leadership. Is that okay if I took that route?

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely, please.

Richard Marker:

Okay. It underscores a lot of the things. In 1968, I know that your readers are all very young, but trust me, in 1968 the world was changing. It was a very different world. And I am still in grad school but I got a part time job working as a chaplain at the university. And in those days, my hair was long. And those of you that have seen a current picture, you know that I don’t have much but, in those days, I had hair and it was long. And the world was changing. I became a kind of a charismatic leader. I had groupies. People who call me their guru. And I’m on this campus and I would walk around the campus and they would follow me. If I was in an or I was doing something, they would gather around me. And I was so proud that I thought I was developing something really terrific. And I have to say it in parentheses. If only there had been somebody like you in my corner in those days, I wouldn’t have made the mistake that I’m describing. And I’m serious about that. I really wish that I’d had a mentor that could have said “You know what you’re doing? You’re creating a cult of personality.” What happened was that the minute that it became clear that I had been offered a very prestigious job at Brown University and was going to move there, that entire group dissipated, it disappeared. And what I realized in a very sobering fashion was that without meaning to, without trying to abuse anything, I thought I was doing something great. No one was telling me otherwise. And I created a cult of personality and had not really built a community and not built an institution. I did not build anything that was going to last my involvement there. And that was a very sobering lesson at age 25 or 26.

So, I then went on and I spent the next 11 years at Brown University. I committed myself to a radically different kind of leadership. And I realized that the kind of leadership that has sustaining value to it is what I call, and I think others would now call it too, facilitative leadership. The issue isn’t that people are following you but rather you’re enabling people to accomplish what they want to accomplish, what they are able to accomplish. And, obviously, when you’re working in a place like Brown University, the faculty and the students are first rate. So, you don’t have to work hard to give them opportunities to accomplish what they’re able to accomplish. I went there and I said “I don’t want to have that disillusioning experience of building something that just falls apart when I leave.” So, I committed myself to be very low key, to be behind the scenes, to be the kind of person that other people think about.

The second lesson though was when I was being evaluated for tenure. And a number of students came to the people evaluating tenure and said “We have a lot of respect for him, we like him a lot but we would like him to be more of an upfront leader.” So, apparently, what I had done is I had been so far the other direction that I hadn’t cultivated the kind of leadership that people wanted. They didn’t need me to be a charismatic guru type leader. What they needed is for me to be a courageous person who articulated vision, who could describe what the community could become, who would help them think through what their own potential was in ways that maybe they weren’t yet ready to do. So, the second major transformation for me in leadership skills was learning how to become the facilitative leader to be a visionary. That’s not the same as charismatic, to be a visionary, to articulate visions that can help people fulfill what they want to do.

Eddie Turner:

Well, thank you, Richard. I appreciate your summary there of the types of leadership that you had to exercise and the fact that you learned that, something I was closing every episode saying that, once a leader, not always a leader and that your leadership style has to change. And you went through very nicely how you experienced formal authority and informal authority, as Dr. Ron Heifetz at Harvard would define it, and your ability to massively do both. You had a following. You were the guru. And then all of a sudden that went away. So, you recognized a need to shift and get something that was more sustainable in terms of leadership styles.

Richard Marker:

So, then the next chapter was when I became a senior executive because in a senior executive, in a certain way, you have a narrower range of followers. You have the people that are doing the work. And, as a matter of fact, many of them are leaders in their own right. And the next challenge there was how do you become a leader when you’re dealing with people who have tremendous potential as leaders in their own right, have their own followers. And if you’re not careful, you can become somebody who’s in the way of their leadership or somebody who’s enabling it. And so, one of the things I learned in the next stage is how to be an empowering leader. How do you enfranchise people? how do you make it safe for people to be the kind of professional leader that they can be so that they don’t feel stifled, so that they feel that you’re going to have their back, that they feel that in fact that you’re not competing with them. And that was something that was very important during the years when I was a senior executive and had, frankly, at the end people all over the world reporting to me to be a successful leader in that way. And that was the third kind of leadership that I think is applicable. And not one I think is applicable both in the private sector and in the nonprofit sector because anybody who’s at the top of a pyramid has to make a decision “Am I at the top that everybody looks up to or my at the top who’s enabling everybody who are technically below to be the top of their own pyramid and feel good about it and to be successful at it?”

Eddie Turner:

Very good.

Richard Marker:

And that was a lesson that also served me well when I became head of a foundation because when you become head of a foundation, you’re getting money out. And what you’re doing is you’re funding nonprofit organizations to accomplish something. If you want to be the one that takes the bow, the likelihood is that you’re not helping them do what they need to do. You need to have great ego strength to recognize that even though you may have the power and the money that you’re only successful if the people that you’re enabling are doing what you want them to do. And if you get in the way of that because you have your own ego needs or your own power needs or your own organizational needs, the likelihood is that none of the things that you’re trying to accomplish in the philanthropy world are ever going to be accomplished. So, the final stage there, what I think of that progression, it goes back to facilitating but at a much different, much more powerful level, much more where you have all the power because you have the money and you have the role and you have those kinds of things and how do you make it possible for others, for that power not to get in the way but for that power to be used so that the ultimate goals that you have, the ambitions that you have for that money, for that foundation, for that philanthropy to accomplish what you want to do. If you don’t have your ego strength, you’re going to fail.

Eddie Turner:

So, Richard, thank you very much for your answer on that and your insights, especially how you capture facilitative leadership. And that’s something that I find very exciting. I hadn’t heard that term. I’m starting to hear it more lately but you’ve been using that for a while. That’s something I’m actually going to be addressing in my next book. So, excited to hear you talk about that and all these components of leadership that you have exercised and how it has shifted over the years. And you ended up talking a little bit about your philanthropic efforts. And so, I want to visit that on the backside here as we come back from break.

So, we’re talking to Richard Marker and we’re talking about cross sector leadership. We’ll hear more from Richard right after this.

Eddie Turner:

Okay, we’re back and we’re talking to Richard Marker. And Richard is talking to us about cross sector leadership. And before the break, Richard gave us a lot of insight in terms of what he has done as a leader and stressed a few things, I felt, were really important, especially as you talked about facilitative leadership, difference between formal and informal leadership. And you highlighted that it’s not important for leaders to just be a great leader who’s performing well but they must also give back to the community and you’ve done that in rolls as a volunteer but then formally through organizations. So, I want to talk about that a little bit more as we move into the second half of the interview but I also want to isolate something else that you’ve done and more on that informal side. Not only have you held paid positions. What on the informal side have you done?

Richard Marker:

Well, over the years, I think you said it at the very beginning, somebody asked me recently, so I did the arithmetic otherwise I wouldn’t have done this, I counted that I had been on over 60 volunteer or foundation boards over the years and chaired about 12 of them and they’ve raised everything from very local organizations doing advocacy and political work to international, as you mentioned, interreligious ones. That’s unbelievably fulfilling. First of all, you meet people in a very different way. It’s a very different kind of leadership. It means you’re doing it because you want to. You’re doing it because you care but at the same time, anybody else who’s involved, they don’t owe you anything. They’re only involved if you as a leader make it gratifying for them and they also feel as if they’re interests and needs are being fulfilled. And perhaps to show off a little bit, I’m going to talk about one of those boards because we don’t have a lot of time and it’s nice to show off. One of the boards that I’m a past chair of and was actually the first chair of this organization called the Board of World Religious Leaders. It’s made up of religious leaders from six religions, the most famous of whom is the Dalai Lama, but there were other major world leaders from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh traditions. And it was sort of ironic because all of those people were leaders of organizations and flocks and things like that and I wasn’t. So, I was a leader of leaders.

Eddie Turner:

I just want to interrupt you for a second and just to check in, you have led a board that was interreligious where six different religions were there at the table including the Dalai Lama?

Richard Marker:

Yeah, yeah.

Eddie Turner:

Because you can’t get six people from the same religion to agree on things anymore. So that’s pretty impressive.

Richard Marker:

For your next 30 minutes that nobody’s going to listen to, I can tell you nice stories but you don’t have the time. What was interesting is it was fascinating that they chose to elect me to do that because I was there as an individual. Whatever my credentials are, and I have legitimate religious credentials, but that’s not what I do. It’s not what I’ve done. And the fact that they chose to elect me to play this role, I took as one of the most moving endorsements of the kind of respect that they had for the leadership style that I had developed. Some of that was intellectual. Some of it was an ability to communicate and to articulate kinds of things and the degree to which their confidence as people that didn’t need somebody to authenticate them but they were willing to do that. I have to say that among the many wonderful things that happened over the 50 some years of my career, the fact that I was selected as the first chair of that group and was for close to 10 years was really one of the most moving things in my life. And, frankly, some of those people are still wonderful friends. I’m not the chair anymore still but I’m still invited to the board meetings. And it’s an extraordinary kind of experience but you also get to see, and this is relevant to the topic, you can get to see when you’re there a couple of other phenomenon and attributes that I want to mention when we’re talking about leadership. What you learn when you see these people who are really accomplished is that they have a unique understanding of what does it mean to be a leader and what does it mean to be humble. Every one of the really successful people, the people that sit down in those rooms, that have those conversations have an extraordinary sense of their own humility as well as an understanding of what the responsibility is to be a leader in the voluntary sector. It’s profoundly influential to watch that on an up-close basis, which isn’t always evident. The people that don’t have the humility don’t sit in those rooms because they are not able to sort of bring themselves back from it.

Eddie Turner:

It’s interesting because a lot of people don’t consider humility a leadership trait. Some people call that weakness.

Richard Marker:

Well, this is not a nice thing to say but they’re wrong. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a role for somebody to be proud of what they do. It doesn’t mean that there’s not an important role to understand that you need to be courageous and sometimes be out front but humility means that you know the limits of your capacity, that you know that it’s not about you, that it’s always about others, it’s always about what your leadership can bring about. And so, the truly great leaders are the ones that never lose sight of that and that’s what I mean by humility.

Eddie Turner:

Yes. Well, thank you for that distinction because you’re right, there’s a difference between lacking courage and understanding one’s own limitations. And many might argue that when a leader does get to the point that they understand that they have limitations, that they then will exercise their leadership in a more effective way because they understand the need to look to others and elevate them to leverage their strengths as a leader.

Richard Marker:

Right. And also, the understanding of the limits of what any one human being can ever do. As successful as you can be, no one human being can do all the things that have to be done in this world. And that goes to the question that you really wanted me to make sure I get in there during the last couple of minutes, is understanding what I call the inter-sectors working together. The further you get to understanding the philanthropy world, the further you get to understand the systemic challenges, whether you talk about climate change or whether you talk about homelessness or whether you talk about food insecurity or whether you talk about migrants, you learn very quickly that there’s no one sector that can solve these problems. If you don’t understand the potential of your own sector, whether it’s philanthropy or government or private industry or the social service sector, those kinds of things, you have to understand its potential, you want to maximize that but you also understand very quickly that you can’t do it alone. And you have to understand, therefore, how do you bridge those things, how do you make them work together so that at least you create the possibility of solving the very big problems of our time.

Eddie Turner:

Richard, you said a word several times and that is one of the things that you really have become known for, you are a true thought leader who is cited in many publications, as I said at the beginning, around your philanthropic efforts. Can you please describe what you mean when you say philanthropy and how that differs from charity or volunteerism?

Richard Marker:

Good, absolutely. Okay. So, first thing I want to say is I have a talk that I gave that nobody ever pays me for is a talk called How to Be A Philanthropist on 5 Dollars a Week. And people always scratch their head and say “What do you mean? Look at all these people that have billions of dollars. They’re philanthropists. They can give a hundred million dollars without thinking about it.” The truth of the matter is that there are people who give a hundred million dollars that are given to charity but they haven’t given one thought as to what it can accomplish or how does it reflect their own values or how do they know what they want to accomplish with it. And so, they can be very generous, they can be altruistic but philanthropy means that you want to do something that can accomplish it and you do it thoughtfully, hopefully do it ethically, you do it in an informed fashion and it doesn’t matter how much money you have. Somebody with 250 dollars can probably play a key role in her local soup kitchen. Obviously, they can’t do it in a big museum or in a university but 250 dollars in her local community might be somebody taken very seriously and that 250 dollars may make the difference of 100 people or 200 people or 500 people eating that week. So, it’s important to understand that the issue is not how much money you have. It’s a matter of putting your altruistic instincts, your wanting to do something that can make a difference, and doing it with thoughtfulness, ethically, and with as much information as you possibly can. That’s what I mean by it. Charity is nothing wrong. Charity is very important. Charities existed for as long as they’re there. Charity is when somebody pulls at your heartstrings and say “Oh my goodness, here’s somebody who’s sick, here’s somebody who’s homeless, here’s somebody who needs something immediately. So, I’m going to take a dollar out of my pocket or I’m going to give to the Red Cross because of the flood.” That’s legitimate. That’s great. That’s charity but philanthropy is one step beyond it. It’s where you step back and say “What can I do that’s really going to accomplish the greatest good with the money I’m going to put on the table.” There’s room and everybody’s life for both of those.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. Thank you for that distinction. That makes me think about things a little differently now because when the definition you shared, any of us could be a philanthropist. We don’t have to be an ultra-wealthy person to do that.

Richard Marker:

That’s right.

Eddie Turner:

And that goes back to what you’d said earlier about a leader giving to our community, giving to causes to make a difference.

Richard Marker:

Yeah.

Eddie Turner:

Okay. So, Richard, some two decades ago, you developed a distinct approach for funding strategies. Can you talk about that?

Richard Marker:

Absolutely. One of the things we, because of time, I didn’t spend time talking about a few years that I spent doing private sector strategy consulting and worked with manufacturing firms, other firms as well, thinking about the strategy, one of the things I learned in that process which has been very useful in developing what you’re talking about is recognizing that it doesn’t matter how elegant the strategy is. If the culture of the place does not know how to integrate it, absorb it and implemented, it’s going to fail. And I discovered in the process that if you don’t address the underlying culture of people in the room up front, you never quite solve the strategy question. And when I started to get into this field, I discovered the same thing was true in the philanthropy world, especially in families, and we all know this, in families, everything is true, except it’s more so, so that if people disagreed with each other, that was not simply a disagreement, it was a character flaw. And one of the things when people would sit around a family foundation table, one of the things I realized is the vision was not where they wanted to give very often. It was often about the way they wanted to do it. And by getting to the underlying culture, the way they thought about it – Do you need recognition or do you want anonymity? How risk tolerant are you for the kinds of things you want to fund or are you very risk averse? – and then I have a whole series of categories that are relevant to this, by addressing those things up front, it in an unspoken elephant out of the room. It allows people to recognize that there’s a legitimacy to a variety of approaches to being philanthropic and making all sorts of other kinds of decisions so that when you’re there next making the decisions, the decisions are informed by a recognition of what’s motivating other people and not simply what their priorities are. So, people who are listening and probably going through a strategy approach where they start with mission and vision, I’ve discovered that I like to end with mission and vision and start with culture a) because it means the mission and vision really emerges out of a very good thoughtful process and b) because it gets people to articulate who they are, what their motivations are, what their values are right up front and in a way that it helps decision making along. So, that’s an approach and, as I said, about two decades ago, I was one of the few people, I don’t want to say it, nobody’s ever the first but not too many people did it, I’m happy to say that it’s now used much more widely and used so widely that most people who use it don’t even know that I helped to articulate that in the beginning but it’s an important way for people to think about decision making.

The second thing I want to talk about, which is an area that you want to cover before we finish, is what I call Philanthroethics. And that is philanthropy, especially when you get to the levels that most people think about it, is very closely attuned to power. And who has the power? People with a lot of money. People who have a lot of status. And who are the people that need to be served? People who have less power. People who have less enfranchisement. How do you behave properly? How do you control the use of power? How do you not abuse it? How do you make sure that you make decisions that are equitable for the population that has to have them where you show respect for them so that you learn how to listen to them, so that you enable things to happen that allow them to feel as if your philanthropy is accomplishing something. And so, by helping people go through a process of understanding the ethics and the equity of the kinds of decisions they’re making and the way they’re going through it is the second stage of the philanthropy process that I like to work with people on because it helps them be much more self-aware of the implicit power role that we play in this area. And I think, on the whole, it helps us make better decisions.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. Well, thank you for sharing that, Richard. You are truly a very accomplished gentleman and I mean it in every sense of the word. Anybody who meets you immediately sees that you are quite debonair, very striking in appearance with a strong sense of fashion that you and I [inaudible] spiritually met from that regard. So, thank you for this insight and the wisdom that you’re sharing. And the work that you’ve done around the globe has just been absolutely phenomenal. What thoughts or quote would you leave with our leaders who want to keep leading?

Richard Marker:

I think, underlying all of this, if I were to summarize what I’ve learned about leadership over this period of time is that authentic leadership, real effective leadership, the kind of leadership that has a long-term sustainable impact is never about you but it is always about what you enable.

Eddie Turner:

I like that. Authentic Leadership is never about you but about what you enable. Well, we appreciate that and that will absolutely help us keep leading as leaders.

Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Richard Marker:

If they wish, they can look at our website which is WisePhilanthropy.com. You’ll see there a blog which has lots of articles written over the last 20 years about philanthropy. I have a book out. It’s getting a little out of date. There’s another one that’s probably going to come out but lots of the ideas that we’ve talked about were first developed in a book called Saying Yes Wisely: Insights for the Thoughtful Philanthropists. And we’re going to put a plug here. I guess it’s still available on Amazon. And, by all means, if people have further thoughts, they can email me at Marker@WisePhilanthropy.com and I’m happy to continue the discourse offline.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. I’m going to put it in the show notes so people can reach out to you, connect with you, and be able to follow your work.

Thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Richard Marker:

Eddie, it’s a great pleasure. Thank you so much.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you for listening. This concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.