Leader to Leader: Don Tucker

Foreign Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us here at JLC Media. This is one of our podcast series that we've been working on and we're very grateful that you took some time to be with us today. I'm excited about this one because you're going to have someone who has an incredible background in leadership and you'll learn about him in just a minute. He's a very, very good friend of mine, someone I just adore and glad it is in my life, frankly. As you know, this is the leader to leader work we've been doing and we're going to take up a topic that our client base has given to us a few times over as we do that I think you're going to find real nuggets in here to grab onto and I urge you to do that whenever you feel comfortable. Jot it down and we'd love your feedback going forward at the end of this if you enjoyed it or not. If you didn't like it, send a note to someone else. Don't, please, but please just listen to learn, listen to learn. That's the whole thing. So before I set the stage for the question I want Don to answer, I'm going to ask Don to introduce himself and tell you a little bit about him and what his leadership experience and journey has been. Don, welcome. We're so grateful that you're here with us today. So tell us about Don Tucker.

Well, thanks for having me. I really didn't know what the background is that you thought categorized me as a leader, but I started to look back in my life and I, it appears, have always sought some kind of leadership position in undergraduate school. I became the president of the largest student organization on the University of Michigan campus. I ran for the student senate in law school. I, during law school, sought out a position with the United States Senator who tapped me to lead a student organization throughout the 83 counties of Michigan with at that time about 35 colleges to organize students in a campaign statewide. Shortly after law school, I was approached by two different presidential candidates for the 72 campaign and accepted one after being, excuse me, after being excused from my obligation in the Army. The army was cutting down its number of officers and so I was able to go to work for George McGovern, a war hero, somebody I looked up to. And I was asked to run the Illinois primary, the Michigan primary, and then the Connecticut general election campaigns, which was interesting because you flew into a state other than Michigan that you didn't know anything about and had to land on the Run on your feet and motivate people to support the campaign. And then I went to Washington to work in the Senate for a while. That was really not a leadership position, more of a staffing position. I went back home to Michigan, intent upon raising a family, establishing a law practice and maybe running for office. Became the chairman of the congressional district committee for 17 years. Became the county chairman of the of the county party, which was the second largest county in Michigan, about two congressional districts. I during that time, of course, got involved in my university fundraising, leading committees. I was on Ted Kennedy's finance committee, not in a leadership position, and continued to be active in my children's school activities. And most of this was all voluntary.

Right.

I built my law firm, became the CEO of that entity. And that's, that's really hard leadership because you're part of the troops and you are also the person who makes the business decisions and the legal strategic decisions. Motivate the lawyers, recruit the lawyers, teach the lawyers. Very challenging position. I found, but thoroughly enjoyed it and went on after that to, to a more, if you will, corporate position in a much larger law firm that acquired us. Beyond that, I stay active in organizations. I generally don't stay inactive anywhere.

I haven't noticed that you're inactive anywhere. I agree.

And now here I am in my dotage trying to organize Democrats in a Republican community and doing the best I can. And we have wonderful dinners that bring a lot of like minded fellow travelers together.

That is wonderful. I just, I could take any one of those edges and begin to ask you questions and learn more. And the objective here, for those of you that are listening, is to learn. In the last set of podcasts, if you were listening, we were talking about leaders who learn, learning leaders. And you can do just listening to Don. There's so many questions I would love to ask him and probably will if he'll put up with me. But today he and I chatted beforehand for a few moments. And what's happening in the client base right now, those that work with JLC is they are very, very concerned with the fact that the pandemic did not go away. In fact, if somebody says this is post pandemic, people get actually angry and said, no, it's not, it's not in any way, shape or form. So with that incredible complication in leadership, here's what we're getting from the leaders that we're working with. And this is what I want Don to talk with us about today. And how do you deal with the incredible ambiguity that comes to you as a leader, because everybody's got a different. There's so many priorities. What did you do? And this is all about stories from the field. So if you've got a story that you. I know you got hundreds. Give us a little story about how you have dealt with ambiguity before, because it will be just as valid today as it was when the first time you were dealing with a lot of priorities and lots of ambiguity. As a leader, does any one particular situation pop up in your mind?

Don't. It's an interesting. That's an interesting question. There's ambiguity in every decision you make. There's no question about that. I am not in a leadership. I serve on a couple of boards of directors now, and I'm chairman of committees of those boards. And we've had to go through the process of dealing with the pandemic and whether we close offices, whether we bring people back. What kind of choices do you make with regard to allowing staff to come back in to the office? Or should we change our corporate pattern of having pretty much a bricks and mortar format, or do we allow staff to make choices? I'll be in part of the time, out part of the time. And you do this all the while trying to make your business goals and serve your business mission. And those have been very difficult, difficult decisions to make. Similarly, in that same capacity you're dealing with, if you are a mature corporation, questions of diversity and equity and inclusion and how to expand awareness in your key personnel of the sensitivities in those areas. And how do you teach people who perhaps don't have a proclivity to learn those lessons? And. And it's just not part of their personality or their DNA. And yet they serve an extraordinarily important purpose. Otherwise, in the corporation, these are very sophisticated issues, and I serve only in a board member's capacity and therefore an advisory role. But I see how we are doing that and the questions that come to me as a chairman of the board committee that need to be discussed at the board level. These are very difficult times and create very sophisticated questions.

Diversity, equity, inclusion. The fact that, and I'm happy to say in that board relationship that you have right now in those spaces and all of the competing issues that you're that are pushing forward into the house. Can you describe one situation where you actually said, this is something we must talk about, it's something we can't put aside, or as they sometimes say in the Beltway, kick the can down the road. What is one particular issue that you remember working on in that, in that committee that was very, very important to resolve.

Yes, it comes down to budget and priorities. It came to the board that there was a recommendation very positively responded to by the board conceptually about bringing in, bringing in outside expertise to counsel, not just the top members of the executive team and not just the board because your board needs to be taught as well, but also your rank and file workers, people you hopefully are grooming to become the executive team 20 years down the road, 10 years down the road. But it becomes a question of time allocation. We're busy. We've got to get these deals done. We've got to get the projects built. We've got to get the investors on board. This is our job. And time investment. And having the corporation embrace the, the necessity of it when it may step on the toes of the principal goals of the corporation. And by God, when that question came.

Up.

We'Re sitting around the, the board table and you know, they're, we're going through the if then that, then what scenarios and how do we balance this? And you know, I don't want to pat myself on the back, but it came down to a point where not only I, but several of us said this just has to be done. We cannot be a leader in this sector of the economy and be able to hold ourselves out consistent with our mission, which is affordable housing in this case. The. You can't do it without doing this first. And, and the board accepted it. The.

They did.

And the, and the. And a lot of our board members are outside directors who are bankers and investors in our, our funds. And, and they all signed up. Everyone. You know, once we got to that point, it did. It was not something that required, you know, 20 hours of labor to give birth. We. It popped perhaps a bad analogy.

Now, now I think it's really a. I don't mind the analogy at all. So what I'm really hearing is an incredible conversation where there was a need to accept and embrace a value. And by accepting and embracing that value, some people thought that would detract or distract us from our mission. How did you bring that to fruition? What did you. Because obviously you were a big part of that and I don't. I can pat you on the back all day long. I think you're marvelous and you're at an extremely insightful leader. So let's talk about specifically, what did you do to bring that question to a space where they could talk openly about it in a safe space where they could say what they were really feeling? And what they were really thinking.

Well, it's fair to say that I helped start this corporation nearly 30 years ago when I was chairman of the state housing Authority, which I left off my resume because she wanted to cut me short. Lifestyle we provided the seed capital and created and we tapped this young man as our CEO to create this startup and he's still there, he's getting ready to retire now and we've seen his entire career. But what happened of course is that we were really lucky to have found a CEO that was not closed, was not single minded, was not sort of focused only on that which would make his bonus bigger. And, and that's if you can, if you have a, A, a corporation that has, that is in part mission driven, driven other than profit and we're, we're very profitable. But if you have that additional mission of doing good while doing well, you, it is essential that you have the right leader. We had it. Which meant that as these things percolated up inside the staff of the company.

Right.

And of course the societal impact is very real on them sitting around that board table. And most, whether public or private, closely held corporations in both cases, those are smart people. Those are people who are, they read the newspaper, they hear the news, they're generally extraordinarily successful in their own non board life. And so they bring a lot to the party, not always good. And so you've got to make sure that you keep the focus on the mission. And our CEO, as I said, has been key in doing that.

Yeah, so that's, let's go right there. That's beautiful. So that CEO in your mind was extremely successful and he actually modeled something that we talk about as well as a little community of executive coaches and whoever we are and working on leadership issues that people find the ability that you may be very powerful in your thinking, but somehow that person was able to suspend their certainty to listen to more possibilities. Talk a bit about that.

Well, I couldn't have said, I'm not sure I can add anything to that. That is precisely the case. We are all, and I certainly was when I was younger, driven within our own paradigms. And whether those paradigms are, you know, personal achievement, personal recognition, getting your organization to goal one first, regardless of what that is. We all bring, whether unformed or uninformed points of view to the party, many of which have nothing to do with enlightened leadership or open mindedness. And you've got to catch yourself, you've got to be willing to listen to people who are your peers. Or even your subordinates. I have had lawyers walk into my office and ask to shut the door and essentially dress me down having said something inappropriate, potentially offensive, something that needed to be acknowledged and apologized for. And these, you know, if. If you're headstrong and you are goal driven, and I confess to both of those. Yep, the. It's hard. The younger you are and the more bulletproof you think you are, the harder it is to acknowledge that you're not perfect.

Mean, we're human. Yes, we are definitely human. And I love that. I love that you're actually speaking to the literature about effective leadership. And so I'm going to just give you the snippet that you just laid on the table right now. The work we're reading is leaders need to over communicate and create a space that is safely dangerous. So when you said somebody could come in the door and talk with you, you did that. You said, come in here and tell me, did I do something that screwed up your thinking or embarrassed you or did I make you wrong? See, we have a big thing about it's dangerous. Dangerous to make people wrong publicly. It's dangerous to do that. Talk about that a bit. Don't.

Oh, yeah, there's no question about. Well, I'll give you an example relating to one of those situations in which a young lawyer who became a judge, a great guy, he was a former cop, and I liked his demeanor. I liked his, if you will, critical thinking. I was particularly involved in trial work, commercial trial work, and he really brought a lot to the party. So I brought him in as a wingman on some fairly sophisticated commodities litigation around the country. So we'd go to California or Florida or Chicago, New York City, where our client had major offices, and I was the chief litigator for the company and we really became friends. But in that I developed, if you will, a far too intimate relationship with him. And I started to refer to him, which I do now. I mean, I do with a lot of people. I nickname them. And when you nickname someone, it can be a diminutive, it can be condescending, it actually can be offensive and old. You know, the wizard of everything here who thought he walked on water. I got told off because I was using in the office context where other ears were hearing names that I considered endearing to a friend, which were not upon any meaningful reflection. So shame on me.

So I'll do a thank you for the vulnerability. I'll give you my own. I at one time was a principal of a school, and as you know, if you ever worked in school systems, you don't always get to pick your assistants. Somebody else does that for you. So I got this guy who I loved him, he was just great. But he was, I think, 5 foot 2 or 5 foot 3 and I would say, so tell us a little bit about what you learned about X. And I go, stand up. Stand up, please. Come on, will you stand up? And of course, right now, nobody really knew the intimate relationship I had with this guy. And 250 people heard that and 249 people were saying, I don't want him to talk to me that way. And in an effort to really be friendly, jovial, getting along, etc. I created terrible space because it made everybody realize that could happen to me in front of my friends and peers. So, Don, what you just gave us is a nugget. And the whole game here is, for those of you that are listening to this conversation, is think from a leadership perspective about how your words, and this I learned from a Pennsylvania leader, she said to me how words land on people because sometimes they don't land as you expect them to land. And when that happens, things are very different very quickly.

No question. And sometimes you don't manifest intent. All it is is that if you're glib, and I have always had my brain and my mouth running far ahead of my comments.

Guilty. Yeah. I think the work we do is all about conversation and words. So I'm going to lay one last thing on the table and I'd like you to react to it for our. I hope that we have a bunch more of these to do. So this is now many, many years of thinking about leaders. And one of the things our little team says all the time is excellent leaders, effective leaders, generate and sustain quality relationships. Why do you think that's so important? Well.

You know, I sit at my desk and I am honored every day by people who. I'm looking around for a couple of things that just, you know, fit right into that. Leslie, my wife, tells me that I am remarkable at what she refers to as networking. What I refer to is just maintaining my relationships and. And it's a two way street. Two weeks ago, one of my associates in the practice 30 years ago contacted me and said, don, can I have an hour of your time to talk about how I should be running? She was a sole practitioner, principally. She got into family law, divorces, and she finally had to hire someone. And of course that caused her to have management challenges. Of course. My associate sign. How do I teach her? How do I, you know, make sure I'm getting my, my value out of the money that I am committing to this, this person. And that was, you know, it's not that this, the woman that called me that we're close, but we're friends. We've always been friends. I, you know, I, I keep track of them and, and you know, my history is littered with the bodies of people who think they really owe me a lot. And they tell me on a regular basis. And that's such a thrill. That's such, you know, you know, I, for a while after I left the practice of law, continued to work with my firm as a headhunter, a recruiter of quality lawyers, many of whom I trained, many of whom, you know, had gone out and become successful on their own. But time was right in their careers to come back into a mothership. And even though I wasn't there, it happened two weeks ago. A buddy of mine said, you're never going to guess what happened. You were recruiting me 20 years ago to come to your firm and we're starting on December 1st. It's just I look what I've been doing in my life, right? I've been doing politics and the law and public service, okay. Those areas are filled with the opportunity to better your own career and others careers through relationship building. And, and it's, I don't want to say it's easy because it does take some time, does take some work. I feel, you know, I, I wear a little hair shirt about guilt about not getting back to people. I was going through some old photographs. Here's a picture in my, my, my, my parents basement recreation room which is a party day through for my graduation from law school. I just, I stumbled upon it, I'm sending it out to all of the single picture to all of the people in that photograph just because I want to continue the relationship and it comes naturally to me.

So I'm going to close this one out with something that Don just hit upon. I have become enamored with a Harvard study on aging. It is almost 100 years old. It started in Southie, Boston Southie, in the late 20s, early 30s. And they have now had so many different directors. Otherwise. Some, you know, these things that happen in colleges, they're there for the life of the person who started it and ran it. And then it goes away, right? This is still going. And what they have concluded. And Don, for those of you that are moving on in your careers, or even some of you that may have moved on and retired from a career, Don has alluded to the finding from this 190something year old study and it's the following. When you retire and the relationships you had at work are now done and how many people have told us don't they used to know all these people and I was very involved and now I don't ever hear from them again. What the study demonstrated and the finding is very powerful. If you lose relationships in another field, make new ones. It is the relationship that enables the aging to happen in a reasonable and long way. Because they say the folks that sustain relationships and build new ones, they stay with it. So those of you that are listening, I know you know this is under the rubric of conversational leadership. Always remember that the conversation is the relationship. If you choose not to be in conversation with someone and now he is in conversation with people from just one or two years ago that he's going to send that picture out to, this has, this is a very powerful connection and ability to lead is to sustain those relationships. Having great, effective everyday leadership conversations. So Don, I'd like you to give some advice to anyone listening that is either aspiring, maybe they're in the seat right now. If there was one thing that you would say after, oh, and my God, have you had a wonderful, wonderful career. There's one thing you would like them to take away from this conversation. What would that be?

Hmm. Well, this, this may sound trite, but try, try to make every day fun. Not, you know, they name it work because it, it's work. But first try to find something that you are doing or your career which doesn't make you mad every day that doesn't hurt your soul. And every day try to do something that's happy and in your work and, and try to, to be aware of whether others are happy. Because the cancer of dissatisfaction can casticize in your organization so fast. I love it. You really need to be happy and let your other, let your people be happy too.

The cancer of dissatisfaction. What a brilliant phrase that is. And finding that space, you know, everybody that is watching this, the pandemic unfold and people are leaving. There's a big exit from work and they're all oh, it's the pandemic. Oh, it's their this or it's their family or it's something like that. Rarely, it's usually the boss. The literature is pretty clear. I don't run away from the job. I kind of love my job. I like what I do. I like to people I'm around. Why are you leaving? I can't stand my boss. And if that's not giving you joy, Don's point, make some decisions. Don, this has been magnificent. I am so grateful to you for taking time to hang out with me and share what I believe is incredibly powerful wisdom that has come to you over the years of work work that you've done. And thank you for your service in so many levels. And those of you that are listening, if you want to hear more from us, please feel free to contact us. This is JLC Media. You can find us@gojlc.com this podcast will appear on the website in a couple of weeks and it will drop probably a week or two weeks from this coming next Friday. And those of you that are listening to us regularly, I think you're in for a a treat on this one. You're going to just love it and I can't wait to get your feedback. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us, Don. So grateful to you for spending time with me. Adios team. Take care. Thank you very much.

Sincerest thanks for listening to this episode of the Everyday Leadership Conversations podcast. The Jorgensen Learning center offers a variety of programs for individuals and organizations to enhance their communication and leadership leadership skills. To find out more about programs and upcoming webinars, check out our events page@gojlc.com.