Charting a Roadmap
At the American Association of University Women, a better business orientation and confidence in the strategic direction were focal points for a period of leadership that offers lasting insights into effective interim engagements.
When Michele Warholic, Esq., CAE assumed the interim CEO job at the 100,000-member, 1,200-branch American Association of University Women, the national organization’s potential for greater impact was perhaps waiting for a leader to surface it. During an interim executive leadership engagement, Warholic worked with AAUW leadership and staff to build confidence in the association’s strategic roadmap, refine operations, and soften staff silos. While the engagement took place between 2005 and 2008, it offers enduring insights into an effective interim engagement.
Hiring the Interim
Today Warholic is a Vetted Solutions client partner with deepened interim leadership experience, but in 2005 it was not her plan to serve as temporary CEO of AAUW and the AAUW Educational Foundation, based in Washington, DC. However, she had deep member volunteer leadership experience with AAUW, having been a member for many years, serving on three of the association’s corporate-entity boards and a search committee during that time. Some trying circumstances meant that AAUW needed an interim executive, and the board was confident that she was right for the role.
While subsequent research—chiefly, the ASAE Research Foundation’s 2022 study The Role of the Interim CEO: Key Insights of Association Executive Transitions—now suggests that hiring an interim from inside the organization’s industry is often not optimum, doing so in AAUW’s circumstances was ideal. Warholic brought necessary qualities: a stellar background in business, legal and human resources, and leadership; AAUW experience that gave her leadership-level perspective on the organization; and pre-earned trust and political capital to garner support for change. Plus, she was not seeking the permanent role. Initially, AAUW hired her as interim executive.
With change comes resistance, and “you won’t be successful until you address it.”
Assessing the Situation
Thirty days into the interim job, Warholic assumed a not-uncommon interim CEO role: truth teller. She reported to the board that there were opportunities for increasing operational discipline, improving goal setting, and attaining more results in programs and membership. The chief sustainability issues were stimulating relevant program development and instilling a business orientation and the financial discipline to drive the income needed to support the mission.
The board agreed, with some members expressing appreciation that she had confirmed their instincts, and asked her to address some legacy operational issues and help advance the strategic plan. Warholic accepted the challenge, extending the interim engagement to a total of 2.5 years..
Realizing Small—and Huge—Wins
Warholic quickly began to work with staff on more effective operational practices. Among other adjustments made over time, she brought in an interim chief financial officer to install leading financial-control and accounting practices, and she introduced improvements to human resources administration. Working with a trusted consultant, she collaborated with the board to advance the AAUW strategic plan.
Importantly, while working with the board and staff team to focus the organizational direction, Warholic sought small victories, some of which became big wins. A primary example was convincing the leadership of an organization that had previously partnered on a National Conference for College Women Student Leaders to try partnering on the conference again. The conference had eroded since the partner stepped away, in part because AAUW was well-positioned to raise funds but less so to attract students and provide content leaders. Re-establishing the partnership required building the trust of the partner by welcoming its team and ideas at the planning table. The result: a one-year pilot that became a big, ongoing success.
A second example of a win was the release of the first edition of a pay-equity report, The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap, and development of programming that AAUW state, regional, and local branches could provide to their members. Delivering this value also afforded a way for the AAUW national board to demonstrate impact to the branches, which were vital to membership. “The board started feeling more comfortable when it saw that the organization was accomplishing something,” says Warholic. “We had to do things that resonated with [the branches] as well as taking care of the strategic vision and business issue,” she adds.
A final, albeit more complex, example of gaining traction was merging AAUW’s 501(c)(4) organization into the successful 501(c)(3) foundation. At one point in its history, AAUW had four corporate entities, two of which had already been merged into the foundation. Engineering this latest proposed change made sense, in part because the foundation’s money was needed to support research and programming and in part because AAUW needed to operate as one. Merging the corporate entities—something interim execs are sometimes well-positioned to lead, according to the ASAE Research Foundation study—was unanimously approved by the boards and membership. Staff needed to work with greater collaboration, points out Warholic. “Now, for example, we could look at the research report as not just a written report. We could ask, how would we like to roll this out to the branches for their programming? This helped us start a culture of collaboration.”
Learning From Experience
Warholic brings insights from the AAUW experience to interim leadership even today. Among her takeways:
· Cultivate trust. Because she was a peer, she already had substantial political capital that allowed her to pursue change. However, this is rarely preordained. So interim executives have to actively cultivate trust and introduce strategic and operational enhancements as confidence is earned.
· Address resistance. With change comes resistance, and “you won’t be successful until you address it.” One way she did that at AAUW was to focus on team members who wanted change, making sure that their voices were “in the room.”
· Narrow the focus. Ask, “where can you add the most value?” she says. At AAUW a challenge she had to address was balancing the board’s urgency with realistic expectations and alignment of resources to attainable priorities.
An important corollary to Warholic’s point about focus was a decision to begin calling the AAUW strategic plan a roadmap. The roadmap metaphor “conveyed that you can have detours and adjustments, but the board still knew where the organization was headed,” she says. In the board’s choosing her successor, she notes, that was an important understanding to convey.
