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Leadership in Focus: Nick Nissley

By Elisa Birnbaum
July 7, 2008

This month in our Leadership in Focus series we feature Nick Nissley, executive director of leadership development at the Banff Centre in Alberta. Before settling in the Rockies two years ago, Nick held senior leadership roles in the mining industry, as well as the education and healthcare sectors in the United States. But the position he seems most proud of was as executive at his alma mater, the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, an opportunity that allowed him to give back to a place that has given him so much.

CharityVillage: With your past and current experience you have a good pulse on leadership in this country. Do you think the nonprofit sector is doing enough to foster and develop leaders? If not, what could they be doing differently?

Nick Nissley: The key thing that comes to mind, with regard to what we could be doing differently, is partnerships. What I mean by that is nonprofit organizations and associations working with government and for-profit organizations. For example, this past year the centre received a seven-figure donation from EnCana - one of the country's biggest oil and gas companies. They wanted to create a partnership to help further community leadership, nonprofit, and government leaders within Alberta, their operating area. The nutshell of the program is they will choose 15 of Alberta’s top nonprofit leaders each year who will come to the centre for a year-long program with a hallmark of problem-based learning. They will then work on a real problem or challenge they have in their respective nonprofit organization.

At the end of the year, their successors will come to the Banff Centre’s public programs and will have an opportunity to receive a scholarship from EnCana so that we will not only build the individual capacity of the nonprofit leaders, but will hopefully build the bench strength in terms of those successor candidates as well. It’s a wonderful example of how a for-profit company like EnCana is stepping up and partnering with an institution like the Banff Centre that can deliver the development. They’re going to be doing that for five years so that, at the end of the term, we will have taken 75 of this province’s premier nonprofit leaders and made them even better.

Another example can be found in the Alberta Child & Family Services, who came to us saying they wanted to create leadership programming for all their leaders. So we put together a year-long program of problem-based learning. Twenty of the province's best social service leaders have been through it, and last year they had their culminating experience when they reported to the ministry what they accomplished. Often we get hung up on the notion that leadership programs are about putting people in seats. And we usually measure their effectiveness by saying, “ten people attended this program,” when we know that that means absolutely nothing. But in this situation, we were able to hear what these leaders had done to make children and families' lives better in Alberta. So I think it’s partnerships that we need more of to help support the nonprofit sector.

CV: Can you speak generally about the centre’s leadership programs and its mission?

NN: I take you back 11,000 years. There’s an incredible power of place in Banff. In fact, the anthropologists say it’s been about 11,000 years since the aboriginal people have been coming into the valley. Interestingly, those aboriginals didn’t settle in the valley; they would come here to exchange, meet, interface, have ceremonies, but wouldn’t stay here because they felt it was too spiritually overpowering. I mention all this because there’s an 11,000-year-tradition of people coming to Banff.

The centre is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and Alberta is 103 years old. So for three-quarters of the time that the province of Alberta has been around, the centre has been too. And, of those 75 years, we have been conducting leadership development for 53 of them. So it makes us one of the country’s oldest providers of leadership programming. And of the 53 years, we’ve been providing aboriginal leadership programming for 35 years. So that makes us the country’s oldest provider of aboriginal leadership programming.

One of the key things that differentiates our program is the power of place and the use of arts and nature-inspired programming. We even have people called ecologists who help us understand what we, as leaders, may understand from nature. Things like forest fire dynamics and roots systems and what they may teach us about leadership. And, of course, our mission is to service Canada’s premier leadership development retreat centre.

CV: In line with the centre’s tagline of inspiring creativity, what do you feel is the relationship between leadership and creativity? How can leaders inject more creativity into their work?

NN: That bridge between leadership and creativity is what we’re all about. And we like to use the language of human resourcefulness. I formally worked in the mining, healthcare and education sectors in HR executive roles and I’m a bit cynical of HR as it’s typically seen in organizations, even the whole idea of human resource management - assuming people in organizations want to be managed as if we’re human assets. Instead, we talk about human resourcefulness, and we define that as being able to achieve more than what was previously imagined.

It’s a capacity you want to develop in leaders; that capacity to achieve more than what was previously imagined. Whether you work in nonprofit or for-profit, whether in marketing or engineering, whether in operations or human resources, we all have the same common challenge every day: we bump into walls and we need to figure out how to get around them, over them, under them, etc. We have to be able to do things we didn’t previously imagine. Often people will say, “Creativity? I don’t need to do that, I’m a retailer.” And I say it’s just the opposite. Creativity is probably the most practical thing that organizations or leaders need to be concerned with. Because if you frame it as human resourcefulness, that’s what we as leaders are paid to do - to achieve more than what was previously imagined.

If you take it one step further, wouldn’t organizations be in a much better place if they had HR departments that weren’t HR management departments, but were departments of human resourcefulness, and sought to develop that capacity in the people versus managing the administrivia?

CV: Do you think a leader in the nonprofit sector faces challenges that differ from those faced in other sectors?

NN: Having worked in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors and currently serving on a number of nonprofit boards, what I always see as the difference is that the for-profit world is focused on making a profit, whereas the nonprofit world is focused on making a difference. It’s about being much more values-grounded and vision/mission-inspired. Those are the key differentiators.

Both have challenges, they are just different. There are things in the for-profit world that a nonprprofit person would not even want to touch and vice versa. But if there is any kind of tipping of the scale, I’m reminded of Mr. Milton Hershey (founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company and Milton Hershey School) who had a saying above his desk: “Business is human service.” He understood how important the people-side of the business was. I think in the nonprofit world we’re probably a little bit more inclined to have a much stronger appreciation for the human element of the business. So, it’s not as much about the physical capital or marketing like in a large for-profit company; it’s the people side that sustains the nonprofit.

CV: Are there specific traits that make great leaders?

NN: When I think about leadership, I also think about “followership”. And I think of leadership as being that ability to really create, inspire, and sustain “followership”. The other thing that comes to mind is from my background with Milton Hershey. I think of myself as a “possibilitarian”. I love the word; it’s a person who always sees the glass as half full versus half empty, someone who recognizes people’s strengths, builds on those strengths, and always looks for opportunity and possibility. That’s what leaders do; they are brokers of hope in organizations.

CV: In your opinion, what are the main challenges the nonprofit sector faces today?

NN: The key challenge is to not become corporatized. I think there are a lot of good-intentioned nonprofit board members, but, too often, they come with only experience in the for-profit world and they tend to believe that that’s the way the world operates. They don’t always appreciate the uniqueness of a nonprofit organization and those organizations tend to blindly accept the board direction, becoming corporatized. They may then not be as directed by their values or mission. They may become more business-focused at the expense of the making-a-difference focus. So, to me, that’s always a concern - making sure that any nonprofit board I’m on takes the best of the corporate world but doesn’t become a corporate organization. It remains true to its identity as a nonprofit.

CV: Who are your leadership mentors?

NN: When I was at the Hershey School, I worked for the president, John O’Brien, also an alumnus. He was one of the best leaders I’ve ever worked for and I fondly recall that in my role as vice president of workforce and organization effectiveness, he once told me, “If someone comes to you and tells you they have a problem, your job is not to find an answer; your job is to find a solution. If it's not illegal, unethical or against our mission, you need to help them find a solution.” Too often, HR becomes the policemen of organizations, giving yes or no answers based on reciting policy as if it’s scripture. But he helped remind me that the person who comes with a problem doesn’t need a yes or no. They want to know how to make it work. Again, it’s about “possibilitarianism” - what is possible, how you help people in organizations get done what they need to get done.

CV: What practical advice on leadership would you offer others?

NN: First, show up. It sounds simple and trite, but too many leaders aren’t present. They’re either in their office or protected by others in the organization, as opposed to being out on the floor with people or in the field. And when situations get tough, they delegate it to someone else and have that person serve as their proxy versus being there. Second, I think of a quote from Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” I’m very sceptical of learned people, those who know it all. I try to surround myself with learners, people who are curious and willing to say, “I don’t know but I want to find out.” As leaders, we need to embrace that notion of continually being learners ourselves, and surrounding ourselves with curious people.

CV: What books or resources about leadership would you recommend?

NN: Because of the nature of the work we do and what we believe here at the centre, we tend to look to things like poetry and novels and the classics, not just leadership books. So I would always encourage people to read literature broadly because there’s a lot of leadership lessons in those books.

On a second level, I would recommend Geoff Powter’s, Strange and Dangerous Dreams. He looked at ten explorers throughout history and how, when they do great things and achieve dreams, we call them heroes, but when they fail, we call them wackos. He was curious about what makes that difference, why we celebrate the heroes when they achieve, and shame them as failures and crazies when they don’t. The book provides a lot of great lessons in leadership.

Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance journalist, producer and communications consultant living in Toronto. She is also president of Elle Communications and can be reached at: info@ellecommunications.ca.

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