Showing Up in Crisis & Complexity: 3 Questions for Patty Williams-Downs of OneGoal Houston
Last week, I got to speak on a human resources panel with Patty Williams-Downs, the Executive Director of OneGoal Houston, a post-secondary completion nonprofit. I was struck by a few things Patty shared during that conversation and wanted to hear more about how she’s navigating the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Watch the video version of our conversation, or read an edited version below…
KHP:
Before we get into what you're doing for and sharing with your team and your organization, I'm curious to learn more about how you are navigating this time just as a human and a person. What are you thinking about and doing for you in this time of stress and uncertainty?
Patty Williams-Downs:
Before I answer that, I want to share what is on deck and what is on stake. What’s on deck: OneGoal is a national organization with the mission to ensure that every student in the nation has an equal opportunity to pursue their postsecondary aspiration and complete it. We span high school and college and it’s a pretty unique set of services across six cities. As a nonprofit, a large portion of our funding came from the oil and gas industry, which took a sharp downward turn just as COVID-19 was beginning. We’re trying to figure out how to reposition our services which were traditionally done in a classroom with teachers at the same time as cancelling our million-dollar gala and trying to ensure revenue coming in to keep our organization afloat. I paint that picture financially and programmatically to share that it feels cuckoo bananas in every way possible, and it’s very high pressure and very high stakes. I’m smiling but probably doing that to stop from crying because it’s a lot. And I’m also a mom and a wife- I have two children and am expecting a third. We’re really excited but have a LOT on our plates.
So, I’m trying to follow your advice from the panel and take care of myself first. I’m using a three-pronged approach: learning, balancing, and breathing. All three of those are things I can do now, but also independent of a crisis- I’ve sort of unbound myself from the feeling that the crisis is all-consuming. In learning, I’m trying to stay dedicated an executive director, but also step away and say, “Patty, what’s happening here? If you had to do this in a different role or you had to be a role on your team or the CEO, what would you do?” I’m trying to take away gems from this time so that when the smoke clears, I feel like a more empowered leader who's walked away not having just having escaped a crisis, but having taken away lots of learning from it.
The balancing is balancing complexities of people’s experiences and also the world right now. In Italy, for example, when they went on a lockdown, the country decided that they would suspend all rent and mortgage payments for 60 days. That was one of the best humanitarian efforts I've ever seen- a great way to take care of people. But they also had to assume that they were going to take on a significant amount of debt, and the way that they're going to have to make up that debt is to raise taxes at some point. I’m trying to live into that balancing act and saying it’s just hard, and it’s just going to be hard. The second thing is that everyone is living this very differently. It’s a storm we’re all in, but everyone has a different boat. I want to understand people’s boats and not presume that they are the same as mine, and that is hard because I have my own biases. I want my own comforts and sometimes I mentally just want everything to be the same. But in this time, as a leader, in order to take care of myself, to take care of others, I have to just say it's hard and it's complex and there are differences here. T
he last thing I would say is breathing, which can help my baby girl who's arriving in October… and it also helps me get a sense of mental clarity. Literally, if it’s just five deep breaths in the morning when I wake up so that the only thing that arrives in my mind is clarity before chaos, it helps so much. So learning, balancing and breathing are the three ways that I'm taking care of myself.
KHP:
Last week, you said something that really stuck with me- leaders go first. Tell me what that means for you, right now, and how you’re going first with your team.
Patty Williams-Downs:
I'm so happy you pulled that out. The way I’m doing that on my team is in a literal sense. If I am going to ask someone to do something that is really hard, what I want to do is I want to literally do it first. One of that ways I’ve done that is to normalize vulnerability in a time that can feel really high stakes for people. I’ve recognized that because I recognize that in myself. When things get high stakes, I tend to want to be reserved and show more strength and calm than actual feelings. And I know that lots of other people experience that too. And so the way that I've gone first is to say to my team via Staff Notes or in team meetings, is to say, “Y'all, I am really struggling. I am trying to have a meeting and set my daughter for online learning because I'm afraid she's going to get behind and here are all of my fears.” And it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be strong in the midst of this. It just means that we're all human. And so I've tried to normalize vulnerability in a time where it could feel scary to do so. I also try to normalize ugliness and my own biases. I’ll share that as a former division one student athlete, I’m walking in here with a bias towards winning. Or, based on my experience growing up in a family that navigated the challenges of poverty and moved a lot, I have an orientation towards going. You make a decision, you pack your stuff, and you go. And I know that can feel really dismissive to people who want to process their feelings. I try to go first publicly as often as I can do people feel they can name their biases and not feel ashamed about them either. Whatever I feel like is hard or necessary to do to help us become a collective force to combat whatever's happening, I'll do it first.
KHP:
I love how you are proactively bringing your own history and your own story into the conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to bring that into the rooms that we’re in, but they come in anyway. You hinted at this earlier and I’d like to hear more- how are you balancing supporting your staff members as people and also making sure that things get done?
Patty Williams-Downs:
That is such a good question. I hope this muscle in me is like Mr. T after all of this, because it was probably like veal before! It’s a balancing act, a measure of duality. It also has a lot to do with my identity markers. I'm an African American woman working in a sector that has historically been pretty white, and because I’m a first-generation college student I come from a different environment than I interact with more often now. I am living in two worlds and literally always have. The same thing happened when I was a basketball player- I lived in the inner city and played on a team where I was one of two black girls. We won a lot and had a lot of great exposure, and I also had to learn the culture, the language, the goals, the orientation of that new world. What I have found is that duality doesn’t go away. I have to keep in mind the full breadth of complexity. In my work, we’re a nonprofit and driven by our mission, but our economy is still largely driven by capitalism and we pay our bills with money. Sometimes, if people are really on fire for the mission, it blinds them from understanding that the operations and the financial components that actually allow them to actually serve. In OneGoal Houston, we’ve said, “No mission, no money.” If we don’t have a strong mission, no one will buy into it. And if we don’t have donors and investors, we won’t have the salaries to deliver on the mission.
The way I’ve tried to live into that is to say you should absolutely take care of yourself and your family, and to take advantage of the policies and spaces that help you do that best. AND to recognize that when this season changes and the snow clears, we need to be on the bike at the top of the mountain, ready to go. We have to prioritize the top thing and do it. And we have to examine division of responsibility. If you aren’t able to deliver on the need, we need to shift it to someone else, and maybe that means you don’t actually have the final decision-making power on this thing anymore. We have to have some very clear, empathetic, and mindful conversations that go from vision to strategy to tactical execution. We have to be on top of this thing while taking care of ourselves.
KHP:
Thanks, Patty. I loved hearing you talk through all of this complexity. As I listened, I was thinking how hard it is to name and discuss all of these hard places, but that the only thing that is probably *harder* for your team is NOT discussing them. Especially when we as leaders need to be on top of the mountain when the snow clears!
Patty Williams-Downs is the Executive Director of OneGoal Houston.
Kelly Harris Perin is the founder of Little Bites Coaching.