Birmingham Memories
I’m traveling to Birmingham, AL this week to give a talk on strategic leadership, but the upcoming trip has me thinking of the past. My last trip to Birmingham was for my grandfather’s funeral. He was the first Charles Moore and had moved there in his twilight years.
My previous visit to see him in Birmingham was over Thanksgiving in 2008. My main goal was to ask him to tell me more about the family history.
Two stories stand out. The first was that my great-grandfather, William, was a postal service worker in Selma, AL. He almost literally had a “black job” because the task of doing the final mile delivery from the main post office to the black neighborhoods was unattractive for the white postmen. That is, until the Great Depression. Once the economy took a turn, all jobs were attractive, and they wanted William’s.
This is where the story gets sketchy. My grandfather was either too young to know the details or intentionally declined to share them with me, but the circumstances of the other postal workers reclaiming William’s job were such that he had to flee town immediately, leaving his family behind. Whatever went down, justice would not have come via legal arbitration.
My grandfather also shared that my grandmother’s family experienced the same situation. The Scotts lived on the outskirts of Birmingham in a town called Bessemer. My memory of Bessemer from a family reunion is of a small church in a green expanse. If you went ’round back, you’d see a modest cemetery with few marked graves. That was the family cemetery. If you’ve ever visited a small black church in the South, it probably looks exactly like that.
My grandmother’s father, Julius, was a boxer. One evening, he won a match against a white opponent so convincingly that his opponent died from his injuries—another situation that the legal system would not have settled. Their whole family left town that evening and settled in Michigan. My grandmother Bernice was just a baby.
(My grandfather eventually moved to Michigan after college and serving in WWII—shout out to the Veterans on this holiday—and my grandparents met there.)
Beyond my travel to Alabama this week, those stories were on my mind for another reason. They’re examples of what can happen when you combine a sense that some groups of people don’t belong with an executive branch that is selective about which laws to follow, a legislative branch with the power to write democracy-eroding laws, and a judiciary that provides them cover to make whatever decisions they want. Dark stuff, but in my more pessimistic reflections about the election last week, my mind went to the fact that it took decades to unwind those post-Reconstruction structures. Last week, I wrote, “We may all wake up on Wednesday or Thursday in proper freak-out mode.” Well, at times this week, I’ve been freaking out!
The day after the election, I facilitated a previously scheduled discussion with a group of leaders. I asked them, “What does good leadership look like today and over the next week?”
The first point the group highlighted was that these “extraordinary” events happen frequently. If you think of all of the national events that have caused us to say, “I need to check on my team” or “I need to make sure they feel this is a safe space,” you’d probably get to a list of half a dozen or more over the last five years. I’m reminded of what Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten wrote in The Prepared Leader: “Crises are not one-off events. They happen time and time again. Just as one crisis starts to resolve, another is already taking shape.”
The group then discussed how each of those extraordinary events happened within the context of whatever team culture they had already built—how much psychological safety there was, how equipped people were to have brave conversations, and how much they trusted their leaders. The implication is that the time to worry about building a culture that can handle tough events is now.
Moreover, the group discussed the importance of leaders being able to make meaning for their teams—both about where the business is and what the national moment is.
Speaking to the latter is difficult, of course, because diverse teams mean that people may have differing views about what the national moment is. Is this a cause for celebration or mourning? Is this a blip or the start of a generational struggle? Our discussion highlighted that a common leadership reaction to that uncertainty is to maintain a middle-of-the-road stance. “I’m going to avoid sharing my opinion because it might alienate people.”
That approach may sound reasonable, but it also risks people believing the leader is an uncaring corporate robot who doesn’t get what people are going through. The mediating factor, however, is how much trust people have in their leaders. If they understand the leader’s values, they are much more likely to give grace when the leader cannot speak openly. The conclusion from our conversation is that they needed an always-on investment in building trust
Finally, we discussed that the extent to which team members were surprised or shocked by the election outcomes was partly driven by whether they had imagined the outcome was possible. And with surprise, people need more time to process the emotions of change before being able to take action.
This was also connected to how we discussed the ongoing leadership imperative. If the team leader is the only one who can see change coming, their teams are less agile. Part of outstanding leadership is to help people on our teams anticipate what’s possible. So, while we may not know what the next administration and next Congress will bring, we can start to help our team members prepare themselves for change. That might sound like, “We need to double our listening sessions with partners over the next six months so we can adjust to their needs and market changes.” Or, “Think of this annual budget as just the plan for the first three months of the year. We’ll do a deeper examination each quarter than we’ve done in the past.”