Leadership in Focus: Alan Broadbent
By Elisa Birnbaum
June 1, 2009
This month in our Leadership in Focus series, we feature Alan Broadbent, chairman of the Maytree Foundation, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, and the Tamarack Institute. Ever since launching the Maytree Foundation in 1982, Alan has established himself as one of Canada's foremost advocates of poverty reduction. Chairman and CEO of Avana Capital Corporation, Alan is also the author of Urban Nation: Why we Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong. Thanks to a profound commitment to the sector over the past few decades, Alan has garnered a number of other titles, including, Chairman of the Tides Canada Foundation, Senior Fellow of Massey College, and Member of the Order of Canada.
CharityVillage: Since establishing the Maytree Foundation in 1982, has the mission and focus of the organization evolved significantly?
Alan Broadbent: Well the basic mission - an anti-poverty mission - is the same. And what's happened over the years, having been able to put more money into the foundation, we've been able to expand the activities and broaden them somewhat but with the same focus.
CV: What would you say are the primary obstacles to achieving poverty reduction and promoting equality today? Are they the same obstacles from 25 years ago?
AB: Well, I think the biggest problem in dealing with them is an ongoing lack of public will to really deal with them in a serious way. It changes from time to time; you get the odd change - we're having one now in Ontario with the poverty reduction strategy and with some other jurisdictions that are paying attention to it - but still a general lack of understanding that people have of the collateral costs of poverty and of maintaining poverty the way we do. And I think both politicians and the press need to understand and begin to make these arguments themselves. If they really understood the collateral costs of paying for poverty, they'd do something about it. But they go on paying costs through the healthcare systems or the criminal justice system or whatever, and never make that connection.
It's been pretty much the same for 25 years. There's periodic, little glimmers of hope and society has definitely done some good things over time, like poverty reduction and child tax benefits etc. Those have been good steps, but we still have too many people living in poverty and there doesn't seem to be a real fervent desire to do something about that.
CV: Taking into account the recently launched DiverseCity Project, what do you hope to accomplish in Toronto in terms of diversification of its leadership roles?
AB: I think Toronto has a great aspiration to be much further ahead in its leadership roles. It's clear to us and clear to the mayor, the premier, and other people that we need to do something about this and move this forward. We just need to put in place the mechanisms. People don't really have the tools to do something about it. Very often people have good intentions about things but just don't quite know what the right moves are and how to get there. So you actually have to begin to show them how to do it. It's like learning any complex task, be it a sport or how to change a tire; you really need to go through the intricate steps. And it helps if someone shows you how to do it so you don't have to learn it all on your own. That's what we're trying to do with all the programs we run through TRIEC (Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council) and others, such as the diversity project. It's not like people are bad people and don't want to do it. They just may need a little help to get them moving in the right direction.
CV: Can you name an initiative you are currently working on, or have worked on in the past, that you are particularly proud of?
AB: It's hard to say one program is better than another, but I think Maytree itself has done a lot of good stuff. The Caledon Institute, which we are co-founders of, has done a lot of tremendous work too. And The Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement has done some great things around building collaborations across the country and is really making good strides. One recent thing that we've been engaged in for the last three years is working with UBC law professor, Ben Perrin, on modern-day slavery and working on some issues that have come to light recently. There's a lot of slavery-like conditions that exist that people don't generally recognize. We thought slavery was over 200 years ago but it persists. And it's probably even more widespread today in terms of pure numbers. So we're working with Ben Perrin and supporting his work and getting legal remedies and more publicity so that people are more aware of the science of it when they see it, or when they may be engaging in it unwittingly themselves.
CV: Do you feel the role of the nonprofit sector has evolved over the years? What are its main challenges today?
AB: I think it's always been pretty important. If you look back over the years at some of the old charities we had in Canada, like the Canadian Organization for Development Through Education or the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the sector has always been important and always played a hugely important role in country-building. Like the country itself, it tended to be smaller and less formal. As time has gone by, and the country has become bigger and issues more complex, a lot of them [organizations] have become more formalized.
In that sense, I think their challenges are pretty much the same as other sectors, such as, how to get better management, how to be more open to innovation, and how to be prepared to implement good innovation. So I think the challenges are pretty much organizational, but not dissimilar to what people in other sectors are trying to do.
CV: Do you think being a leader in the nonprofit sector differs from leading other sectors?
AB: No, I operate in both the business sector and the nonprofit sector and I really don't think there's a huge difference. I mean, there are obvious differences. In the commercial sector, we use profits and numbers as measurements and they are reasonably, though not always, easy to identify. We don't have quite as clear and simple measures in the nonprofit sector. But, on the other hand, for leaders, that vagueness or lack of simple measurement can quite often make it easier to be a leader because you don't get your feet held to the fire quite as often. So I think the sectors are different, but the exercise of leadership within them is very similar. You need to have the same ability to deal with ideas, people and strategy.
"Ideas, plans and people are really the key elements in exercising leadership, regardless of what sector." |
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It boils down to three things. First, you need to be able to deal with the ideas, identify good ideas, and see the difference between good ideas and bad ideas. Second, you need to be able to put plans together that can actually make some sense out of those ideas, to operationalize those ideas. The capacity for strategic thinking and operational thinking and putting together reliable plans is very important. Third is people, making sure you have the right people in place doing the right things, and keeping them motivated and moving toward the objectives. So ideas, plans and people are really the key elements in exercising leadership, regardless of what sector.
CV: What practical advice on leadership would you offer others?
AB: I think there are two main pieces. One would be that you really have to focus on the quality of the work you do and that your organization does. At the end of the day, you live and die based on the quality of the work you do. And if you let the quality of the work slip, even in part of your work, it can taint all the work. This is particularly true of people opposed to your point of view who will see one shoddy piece of it and smear that into the whole thing, saying, "These people don't do good work." So you always have to focus on the quality of work. You can compromise on a lot of things, but not on that.
The second thing is don't require credit for what you achieve and what you do. People can get fixated on that, on getting recognition, but in the long run it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who gets the credit; it just matters that you've been able to achieve what you were setting out to achieve.
CV: What leadership mentors have inspired you over the years?
AB: I haven't had mentors per se, but there are a variety of lessons I've learned over the years. One was from a fellow named John Deutsch, former principal of Queen's University, the first chairman of the Economic Council of Canada, and a well-known federal public servant. He always said that very few people in the world have the power to dictate and the power to just make things happen. What you always have to do is develop the power to persuade, because it's probably more important at the end of the day than the power to dictate. So, I've always taken that to heart.
The other person I always found interesting was Branch Rickey. He was a famous general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and he was the man who made it possible for blacks to play baseball. He broke the colour barrier by putting Jackie Robinson in the line up in 1947. He was a great integrator of the game, but also an innovator in a lot of other ways, having brought in other modern measures too. He always dared to think differently than other people. Baseball was a tradition-bound game, like a lot of other things, and he had the courage to focus on what was a good idea and to break down all the prejudices and the ways of doing things and finding a better way.
I was aware of him from a very young age and always thought of him as one of the great leadership figures who never got recognized in the larger world. But he had one great quote that I think is always useful to remember: luck is the residue of design. What appears to be luck is very often just the result of people having done a bunch of very smart things to set up that moment where it looks like luck, but actually they were prepared for it. Some of those things that would, in effect, fall in your lap wouldn't have fallen into your lap if you hadn't put the design in place.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance journalist, producer and communications consultant living in Toronto. She is also president of Elle Communications and can be reached at: info@ellecommunications.ca.
Next week:
Profile of the philanthropy course at McMaster University.
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