Start With A Win - How Strategic Planning Creates Unity with Christine Riordan

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam introduces Christine Riordan, President of Adelphi University and RE/MAX board member. She is the 10th President of the university and the first woman to serve in the role. Christine developed a strategic plan for Adelphi University, known as Momentum. She is also an internationally recognized expert in leadership, career success, and diversity and inclusion.Christine explains the purpose behind the strategic plan—Momentum—and how every organization will benefit from developing strategic initiatives. She emphasizes how strategic plans provide efficient foundations for defining clear organization goals, aligning jobs, and providing language depth. This structure enables people to focus on a collective objective, creating consistency and direction within organizations. In an ever-changing workplace, Christine reveals that by 2030, a prediction of 375 million employees will have to transition jobs due to automation, technology, and business changes. Her book, Shift Happens: How to Adapt and Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World of Work, helps people successfully navigate through any change in personal and professional endeavors while explaining the different types of change and how it impacts how people adjust and transition. Christine provides an overview of her TED Talk, “Dare to Be Extraordinary,” which presents three key attributes of extraordinary people—passion, courage, and resilience. 1) Passion for what you do2) Courage to make hard decisions and do the right thing3) Resilience to not give up and get back up when something doesn’t go well  Links:Shift Happens: How to Adapt and Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World of Workhttps://www.shifthappensbook.com/Dare to Be Extraordinary | Dr. Christine Riordan | TEDxAdelphiUniversityhttps://youtu.be/FnUo4D-TaqcConnect with Christine:https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineriordan/https://christineriordan.com/Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. And coming to you from Denver, Colorado, home of Remax World Headquarters, it's Adam Conto, CEO with Start With A Win. It's always nice to start off with a little dancing win. That's right. I did my jogging. I did my jogging dance. It was almost like Running Man, but you're sitting there in your studio. Yeah, sitting Running Man. Yeah, so just upper body. So hey, Mark, we have a really, really great person on today. A great

friend, excellent leader, somebody who has a massive amount of impact on business, on education, and on REMAX, my home. We have Dr. Christine Reardon. How are you doing, Chris? I'm doing great, Adam. It's wonderful to be here with you this morning. Well, thank you for being here. So a little bit about Chris. She's an internationally recognized expert in leadership, career success, and diversity and inclusion. She's the 10th president of Adelphi University and the first woman to serve in this role. Congratulations. She's recognized for her groundbreaking initiatives to personalize and transform the higher education experience. And she's been on the board of directors of REMAX Holdings since 2015 and is chair of the NOMGOV committee, which is a required committee

on public companies. So we're really excited to have you here today, Chris. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much. It's wonderful to be here with you as well. All right. You are just like this really, really deep inspiration of knowledge here. So I want to kind of dive right in and get to some of these cool key points that you've been through in your career and some of the businesses you've helped, things like that. So let's just start. During your tenure as president of Adelphi,

you really laid the groundwork for the university's strategic plan, and every business is based on a strategic plan. You call yours Momentum. What's the purpose of this initiative, and what was your role in the development? Why should an organization have a strategic plan? Yeah, great question, Adam. So I think any organization, whether you're a nonprofit or a for-profit organization, should have a strategic plan. It does a couple of things. One, it lays out, I think, the vision for the organization. In my case, Momentum really laid out the vision for the university for five years. And it helped provide a roadmap. And we set out six very ambitious, broad goals. And then we executed against it

every single year. I'm proud to say that we're finishing up Momentum 1 and we're now launching Momentum 2. What I found was that the strategic plan gave everyone a language. They had words that they could use. They could identify with the goals. They could align their jobs. They could align their activities for the year, and everybody was rowing in the same direction. And by doing that, we were able to accomplish some pretty significant outcomes over a five-year period of time. And without that plan, we would not have been able to do it, because we just needed everybody to really focus on our main objectives and main goals, and to really all be working together. That's cool. I mean, there's just so much

communication and clarity that needs to come from a leadership group. And you are masterful at that. And it's really tested when we go into big challenging times. I would think everybody's like, oh, we have a strategic plan, things like that during, you know, let's use air quotes, the easy times. But, you know, we all went through this thing and, you know, we still have some, you know, impact of COVID-19, the pandemic on our strategic plan. So how did this, how did having a structured strategic plan, and obviously you have to pivot from that here and there, how did that help you during the pandemic? Yeah, you know, I mean, I think it kept us focused on what our mission really was about. And that's, you know, clearly, it's about providing a quality educational

experience for the students who come through the university. And that really was at top of mind, and also keeping our entire community safe. Those two things were really of, you know, priorities as we started planning for the pandemic. I always tell people that running a university is a little bit like being a corporate CEO because I'm a $500 million business. And on the other hand, it's also like being a mayor of a small city. So when we're looking at the impact of the pandemic, I mean, I had to shut down a small city and then I had to restart a small city. I think with the state of New York, I ended up filing 15 different restart plans that, you know, covered our residence halls because it's like a hotel. It covered our dining,

which is like a restaurant. It covered athletics, our gyms. I've got a daycare center on campus, and so it really was a pretty complex issue in terms of managing the pandemic, both shutting down and then restarting. And at the same time, we were able to really overlay the strategic plan and our goals and continue to focus on what we really needed to be paying attention to, which was the quality of those classes that people were experiencing online or how we brought them back safely to do them in person. And so the strategic plan, I think, overall, after we got past the crisis mode, we then were able to pivot back to the strategic plan. It also gave people something positive to focus on rather than just always focusing on

kind of the implications of the pandemic. So it played a couple of roles for us as we moved through the pandemic experience. Great points. Did you find that, you know, obviously a strategic plan gives leaders a roadmap to provide direction and encouragement and focus to the people that they lead. But one of the key aspects of leadership that truly must show through during a crisis period is confidence in leaders. Did you find that having a very solid strategic plan that you could work with as things change instituted a higher level of confidence in your leaders? It did. You know, we actually, interestingly enough, I'm going to backtrack a little bit and get to that question. But in January of 20, I actually put together a threat assessment team because we did have students from China that we knew were not going to be able to return. And so then I

escalated it to the highest level of threat assessment team by February. And by early March, we were shut down almost completely. And I think we managed in a crisis mode pretty much from, I would say, February, March of 2020 through probably that August. But by April, we were starting to plan our restart. And so by focusing on that through the summer, that allowed us to then safely restart in the fall of 2020. And then we kind of pivoted back. Like I said, the strategic plan provided us with that guidance. Once we knew we were past it, we handled it, we managed it. By the way, we were able to keep our positivity rate below 1%, which is just remarkable for any university to be able to do that.

We were able to then start focusing, refocusing on the strategic plan and finishing out the implementation of Momentum 1. And also, I also started the planning of Momentum 2, which gave, again, a forward look for people. We've come through this crisis. We've managed it. We've managed it extraordinarily well. We had great safety protocols in place. And now, we really want to focus on what's ahead in the future. So I think closing out Momentum 1 and closing out Momentum 2 provided another set of structure beyond crisis planning and crisis management and gave people a positive look at where we're heading and that we were in fact going to be okay. And I think for many of our leaders, it was nice for them to be able to focus on something positive. I love that. It's, I mean, first of all, thank you for your leadership. For those that don't

know you as well as I do, I mean, I get to work with you quite frequently. Your ability to communicate with people is amazing as a leader. And I know that's what you really focus on instituting in the people that you lead is how they can get across to everybody else. Really what, I mean, during COVID, there was a lot of confusion and overwhelm going on. Yes. And have this plan and have you succinctly lay it out there. And you and I discussed quite a few different strategic aspects during COVID. And it was fantastic because to sit down and for everybody listening, if you don't ever because to sit down and for everybody listening,

if you don't ever get to sit down with a leader who's able to succinctly deliver knowledge with clarity, you need to find somebody because that's a great person to bounce your ideas off of and talk to. So thank you for doing that. And you also look at this and you go, holy smokes, this was chaos. This was chaos. But I also find it interesting that you happen to be writing a book right now called Shift Happens. And you can take the F out of there for this whole past, for 2020, if you want. But it couldn't have been more perfect time for you to document some different things in the book. But can you tell us about that book and what readers can expect to learn from that? Because your books are fantastic, by the way.

And here's the title of it, Shift Happens, How to Adapt and Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World of Work. So what can we expect, Chris? Yeah, thanks so much, Adam. So I actually started the book pre-pandemic. But as you mentioned, it certainly came in useful. I used a lot of the lessons from the book with many of our team members at Adelphi. But, you know, if you just think about kind of looking forward, I'll tell you a little bit of the history of the book, and then I will

tell you what people can learn from it. If you look at just the straight demographics and some of the straight applications that are occurring, the technology changes, I think it's predicted by 2030 that 375 million people, 375 million employers will have to change their jobs and the way that they do things because of automation, technology, just the way that we've changed business, etc. And certainly we saw the entire world have to change the way that they operated this past year and a half. And so the book really was intended to help people coach themselves through a change that they might experience in their work or that they might experience in their career. Prior to going into a full-time leadership role in a university, I had been an executive coach as well.

And so I'd coached more than a thousand executives. And I always was fascinated with why some people who were in the coaching were able to successfully sail through changes and others were not. And so this book really is about how to adapt and thrive in any situation that you might find yourself in. Sometimes we proactively put ourselves in those situations and sometimes they just happen, like the pandemic. So I talk a lot about the inability to adapt traps, common pitfalls that people fall into when they're not able to move through a change successfully. And then I also look a lot at what successful people do. I mean, there are some people who successfully manage through changes

very easily and others who do not. In fact, during the pandemic, I was surprised often at who was able to adapt pretty quickly and who was not. And it fell right into a lot of the things that I talk about in this book. Some key points in there. We both saw people, you know, call it either in academia or public company business or even private company business, things like that, that experienced some seriously major challenges as leaders during COVID. I mean, this has been quite the test on business and leadership and employees. And I mean, you name it, it's been stress tested here over the past, call it 18 months. Give us an example of some place where you saw a leader

facing massive challenges. Obviously, you don't have to name them or their company, but an example of some significant challenges. And how did this leader pull themselves up by their bootstraps and help to pull their business through and find success on the other side of this challenge? Sure. Actually, the idea behind this book germinated in 2008 when we had the world economic crisis. And I think at that point in time, similar to the pandemic, I was getting a lot of calls to come in and start working with executive teams because what they had been doing in the past wasn't going to work any longer. They needed to think very differently in terms of how they managed the business and what they were going through. And I've talked about this publicly, so I'll share this example. But Sean Mankey was the CEO of Frontier Airlines. And at that time, 2008, they were looking at their operating cash flow and they were going to realize that they were going to be bankrupt in a couple of months. I mean, without any, they were going to basically run out of cash.

And so he went to all of his financial network that he had built up over the last few years. But in 2008, nobody was lending money. Nobody was doing any kind of deals. And so he realized that he was going to have to do something dramatic. So they filed for bankruptcy and that stopped all of the contracts and everything else from going forward. So, you know, I think in, as, as we see shifts happen, very big ones, we call those shocks. So the 2008 was a shock. The pandemic was a shock. When a shock occurs, you absolutely know that you have to be different. And then you start thinking about how you need to be different, how you need to

manage differently. I think everybody in all organizations through the pandemic now operate differently. A lot of what I talk about in the book is when you don't have a shock, when it's not a real obvious change, and you keep doing the things that you're doing and they don't have a shock when it's not a real obvious change and you keep doing the things that you're doing and they don't work out and how do you actually start recognizing so recognize those times when you need to be different when it's not such an obvious point where you need to be different great point uh you know so many times in business those things sneak up on people and those are what takes them out and it's unfortunate they, that change creeps in and they don't notice it quick enough. So thank you for bringing that up. Speaking of shifting, I want to shift over, throw that in a couple of times to another topic. And Adam,

by the way, I have, I have like a whole list of shift phrases. So shift just got real. I mean, you know, it's kind of, you can have a lot of fun with it if you really play around with that title. So it's got a lot of stickiness to it. I love it. Yeah. There's a lot of shifting that can happen here. This could be fun. So Chris, you presented a Ted talk. So dare to be extraordinary is what the Ted talk is. Tell us about some of its key takeaways. And I mean, first of all, what did you get? I mean, how did you feel about doing a TED talk? Those things are intense. You know, you got what, like 19 minutes or something like that, and you got to be on. So take us through this TED talk and talk a little bit about the content. And what did you hope others would learn from what you were

talking about? Yeah, TED talk, it was intense. It was intense getting prepared for it. And then once I was up there, it was a lot of fun delivering it. We were able to do it at the university. So we had a lot of friendly people in the audience. And I really enjoyed the entire process. But I have to tell you, I think I planned for that more than any other talk that I've ever given publicly. And there's a book. there's actually a book that tells you how you should plan out a TED talk. So if anybody's interested, they should look that book up. My TED talk was Dare to be Extraordinary. And some of the features in that talk actually are part of this book as well. But I really talked about three different components of, I guess, aspects, attributes of extraordinary people. And those three attributes are passion,

courage, and resilience. And, you know, when you really think about it, and people that you know, who may be extraordinary, you know, they often display an extraordinary amount of passion for whatever it is that they're doing. So, you know, part of the TED Talk was to really say, what are you passionate about? You know, why are you getting up in the morning? What makes you happy? You know, passion sometimes gets put aside as just a statement, right? But it's not. It's really you need to be enjoying what it is that you're doing.

And oftentimes, one of the shifts that people will make in their careers is when they realize that they're not passionate about their job. And that maybe it's just there to do money, you know, to bring in a paycheck, but it's they realize that they're not passionate about their job and that maybe it's just there to do money, you know, to bring in a paycheck, but it's not something that they enjoy. So, you know, when you are passionate about your job, you're passionate about your industry, it shows, you know, and I think that to start with a win, as you would say, you want to be passionate about the things that you do. The courage, I think, is you always have to have the courage to do the right thing and to make really hard decisions in work and in life. I think we just saw that with Simone Biles in the Olympics. By withdrawing, she knew that she was not able to move forward and she wanted

to make sure that her team was able to succeed and that she was also not able to, and that she was not hurt herself. And I think that took a lot of courage on her part. And we see that day in and day out when you have to make really hard decisions as leaders in companies. You may be making decisions that are not popular, but you have to make those decisions. And always making sure that you've got a moral compass. And so I do talk a lot about having the courage to make those hard choices, those hard decisions, and to always do the right thing. And then resilience, I think, is having that attitude. You know, everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has failures.

I've not met a person yet in my life that hasn't had something go wrong. And I think the resilience is just not giving up, getting back up again, having that attitude of try again tomorrow. And I think a lot about Dave Linegar with Remax. I mean, Dave's been through so many different things in terms of the corporate life. He's one of the rare founders that has stayed with a company for its entirety until he chooses to retire, which is just remarkable. And then he's also had some personal health issues that he needed to pick himself back up and then move past that and move back into his job. So I think when you think about being extraordinary, three key attributes, having passion for what

you do, having the courage to make hard decisions and do the right thing, and having the resilience to get back up again tomorrow when something doesn't go well. Passion, courage, and resilience, key words for any leader and really for anybody who wants to go out and win every day and have really a fulfilling, happy life, for crying out loud. So think about those three words. And if you haven't seen Dr. Reardon's TED Talk, Dare to be Extraordinary, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube or on the TED website. So Chris, it's been an honor and a pleasure to have you on Start With a Win today. I always take away so much great leadership wisdom when we talk. So thank you. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for the professional relationship that we have. And thank you for being on Start With A Win.

I do have one question that I wrap up every one of these with where I get to hear some amazing nuggets of wisdom from our interviews. Dr. Christine Reardon, this is called Start With A Win. So how do you start your day with a win? Well, every morning I wake up between 4 and 5 a.m. And then I read the news quickly to see what's happening in the world. And then I actually take that time to myself. It's where I spend time kind of planning out the day or the week. It's where I start thinking about complex problems that may be going on that I need to help resolve. It's a time when I really think about what else I could be doing to be better as a leader. I think a lot about what

I should be doing to help support my team and really plan out my day. It's quiet. I'll have a cup of coffee, sit with my bulldog snoring next to me and really plan out my day and my week and what else I need to be thinking about as a leader. And that's how I start each day with a win. I love that. Thank you so much. I mean, everybody needs to start with some reflection and planning and that's, you know, leaders take the time to do that. So thank you for your leadership at Delphi University, such an amazing institution. They're so lucky to have you. So, um, we appreciate you being on the show and thanks for starting with a win. Great being with you, Adam. Hey, and thank you so much for listening to start with a win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question

or tell us your start with a win story, give us a call, leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget start with when the book is coming out soon. And so you want to head over to start with win.com and pre-order your copy. You are not going to want to miss that. And there's probably might be some surprises for people who pre-order that book. So start with win.com to find out more about that. As always, you can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Watch these great videos on YouTube until next time, remember to start with a win.