Engaging More To Hire Less: Interview with Darrow Zeidenstein

A Gallup study found that organizations that make employee engagement central to their business strategy realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and 59% less turnover. This survey also indicated that nationwide engagement hovers at 34%, meaning most working Americans are not engaged at work.?This leads me to ask:?What if all development operations could improve their employee engagement by 10% or more??Would we still have chronic talent shortages in our industry??Would we still have the rapid employee turnover crisis that leads to rapidly escalating employee costs and decreased productivity?

To address this hypothetical, I asked Darrow Zeidenstein, SVP and Chief Development Officer, to share his experiences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.?MD Anderson is routinely ranked as the nation’s number-one cancer hospital in Houston, Texas.

At what point in your career did you recognize how vital leadership development was to the success of your organization??

All reflective leaders understand at some intuitive level that leadership development is essential for an organization’s well-being.?However, the importance of having good leaders in the development operation hit home when I was working on a study forecasting the opportunity cost of high staff turnover published as a chapter in Effective Measures: The Return on Investment in Talent Management (CASE 2012).?In this chapter, I modeled how a 1% increase over the base turnover rate at Rice University resulted, on average, in a $2.3 million loss in philanthropic revenue.?So, what is the best way to avoid this opportunity cost??Leadership training of a development team’s leaders and managers is the most cost-effective way to avoid steep opportunity costs and have a fun and productive workplace.?Many academic studies analyze the factors for employee turnover, and bad managers and toxic workplaces are always at the top of the ‘push factors’ driving away the best employees.?This is fixable.?

Could you describe MD Anderson's leadership development program?

We are fortunate at MD Anderson to have an award-winning leadership institute that requires leaders to go through a range of assessments, training programs, 360 reviews, and the like—practices that can be found in many workplaces nowadays.?MD Anderson’s ‘secret sauce’ rests on two fundamental pillars that are firmly adhered to from top to bottom in the organization.?The first is the notion that good leaders and managers must know how to manage one’s self before they can effectively manage others.?The second pillar is that approximately 40% of a leader’s performance evaluation focuses on leadership capabilities and behavior—even the most talented “jerk” will not survive in MD Anderson’s administrative culture. With these two pillars in place, teams can enjoy a high level of psychological safety, a bedrock attribute for all high-performing teams.?I would highly recommend reading this 2016 New York Times article that reports on Google’s landmark study to understand why some teams thrive and others fail.?

What have been some tangible benefits of the commitment to leadership development?

MD Anderson is a very metrics-driven organization. I can point to a few indicators that have moved positively since the implementation of leadership and team development principles in 2019.?First, fundraising performance is dramatically up while frontline FTE has remained essentially flat:?we have grown approximately at a 33% CAGR since our baseline year—although I hasten to add that we also started the silent phase of our campaign.?Still, this level of growth during the pandemic and our limited ability to meet our immuno-compromised patients in person speaks to high levels of grit and ingenuity stemming from high levels of employee engagement.??

Second, our employee engagement scores have climbed dramatically, as seen in the following table:

Finally, I would point to the increasing depth and talent of our candidate pools for positions in our organization.?While it’s difficult to quantify the increase in a candidate pool’s quality, I would note that managers, HR recruiters, and our internal talent management team have noticed a clear uptick in the number and quality of applicants.?This leads me to the point I made above: good leadership not only creates a better culture and reduces staff turnover but also enhances the employer brand that attracts better, more highly talented applicants.?

What do you recommend other non-profit leaders do to increase employee engagement and productivity over time??

Leaders in development or advancement organizations have to walk the walk.?Here is a useful mnemonic devised by our Leadership Institute at MD Anderson—LEAD: Learners, Emotionally Intelligent, Accountable, and Developing and Serving Others.?Simply put, leaders who cannot LEAD cannot lead.?

Second, leaders must commit to the long-term vision of sustained and resilient organizational excellence by incorporating performance metrics beyond dollars raised. A few metrics worth considering are 1) employee engagement metrics like those in the table above as calculated through a neutral, third-party resource, such as Gallup ; 2) rate of voluntary turnover, especially among those considered ‘high-fliers’; and 3) Leaders’ commitments to leader-development efforts, such as a 360-degree assessment and follow-up work, or executive coaching, or focused exercise on building one’s EQ.

To save the best news for last:??developing leaders to build organizational capacity and productivity does not rely on genetics or luck, only a commitment to creating opportunities and the values that guide appropriate behavior throughout the organization.???

Darrow, thank you for your wisdom and insights.

In closing, the advancement profession has spent the last decade or more building productivity tools through data analytics/ AI tools. Companies like EverTrue/ Thankview, Graduway, WealthEngine, and many others have offered ways to increase the personalization and productivity of our teams. However, it is long overdue that our profession begins paying closer attention to how our programs are managed and led. If Gallup is correct that your staff only brings 30% of their capacity to work each day, imagine what might be possible if leaders and organizations inspired a much greater commitment. MD Anderson offers a terrific example of what might be possible. No software can provide the same impact. Please send along what you are doing in this space.