
The Profiles in Leadership series features conversations with organizational leadership experts to discuss important lessons they have learned and what “Hiring for Good” means to them. This series helps us better understand how leadership drives positive transformations and growth for people, organizations, and the world around us.
This episode features a conversation with Bryan Williams, Dogs for Better Lives (DBL) fourth President and CEO in August 2018. Upon arrival at Dogs for Better Lives, Bryan worked with the Board to create Vision 2020, a long-range strategy for organizational growth that included opening new geographic locations. Since the approval of the strategic plan, DBL has opened a facility in Falmouth, MA, and launched its Shelter to Service program in Dallas and Atlanta. The organization expanded its breeding program, currently has more dogs in its pipeline, and is placing more dogs than ever before. Dogs for Better Lives has nearly doubled its staff with employees in eleven states.
Bryan’s Contact Information: Bryan@dogsforbetterlives.org | 541-423‐8321 | www.dogsforbetterlives.org | https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-w-5ab36410a/
Suzanne’s Contact Information: Suzanne@AcumenESearch.com | 503-679-6008 | www.AcumenExecutiveSearch.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannehanifin/
Recording at: https://youtu.be/jvitmpouQzk
Profiles in Leadership Transcript
Suzanne Hanifin: Well, welcome! I’m Suzanne Hanifin with Acumen Executive Search, and I am so excited today to have Bryan Williams, Executive Director of Dogs for Better Lives, here with me for our Hiring for Good podcast. As you know, Hiring for Good podcast is all about leadership, and really, it’s about the best practices of leadership. And as we are growing with our podcast, people are reaching out to us, and I wanted to say thank you to CarrieJo, who is a volunteer for Dogs for Better Lives, and recommended us talking with Bryan. Welcome, Bryan!
Bryan Williams: Thank you for having me! Excited to be here.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah, and I kind of messed up on “Dogs for Better Lives” in the introduction.
Bryan Williams: It happens.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah.Well, and all of your contact information and the links will all be at the end of this podcast. But you’ve spent your entire career—the last like, probably well your entire career—in nonprofits.
Bryan Williams: Yes
Suzanne Hanifin: Can you talk about your journey and what led you to where you are today?
Bryan Williams:
Yeah, so I’ll go pretty far back. My career is now reaching about 20 years in the nonprofit space, but I actually I played baseball. I grew up playing baseball, played in college, and was actually drafted by the Anaheim Angels. So my life plan was baseball, and that was it. And so when that part of my life ended many years ago, there wasn’t really much of a Plan B of where I would go next. So, it was never this, “Yeah, I want to go into the nonprofit space, this is what I want my career to be.” I kind of stumbled into a position and didn’t quite know what I was getting into in the nonprofit space, and I grew to love it very quickly. Knowing that my background, my expertise, my skill set—whatever I could bring to a position—could be used to help people, and that became a really great feeling for me.
And then, so quickly in my nonprofit tenure, I knew I wanted to be a CEO or Executive Director. I wanted to move into a leadership role because I felt that could really be the best use of my education and skill set. So, I have an MBA, background in business administration—that’s my education side of things.
And, you know, we talked a little bit in the beginning about those formative life experiences. And I think all of us have worked for incredible mentors and bosses, great leaders, and we’ve sometimes we’ve worked for not-so-great leaders. And so, in my career, one of the things that I was able to latch onto is that, is is recognizing that, recognizing those great leaders that I wanted to to be around and wanted to help mentor me and help grow my career. And so, and so, that’s what I did. And so, very quickly, I had aspirations to move up, move up the line and gain an experience and was able to do that. Originally was in the animal welfare industry and then moved into assistance dog work. Which I which I’m CEO now of Dogs for Better Lives, where we train and place dogs with individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. We place dogs with children on the autism spectrum, and then what we call “facility dogs” that are placed with professionals. So it’s incredibly rewarding work and going through the formative experience of what is great leadership. And we talked a little bit about people come to work for the mission but how you positively channel that and so my experience of working with what is what is great leadership has helped me kind of move into to a role where I I think I bring some strong assets to to this…role. And I’m able to just mimic what I was taught as I came up and and and gained my experience. And so that’s that’s what I try to to bring to Dogs for Better Lives every single day is is just how do I be the best leader I can be and how and and what that means to me is the succ success of others and building other people up and help them achieve what they want want to accomplish in their personal and professional goals. So that’s a little bit about me.
Suzanne Hanifin: No, I love it and I actually wrote down, jotted down a couple of questions. So, you were a pro athlete before entering the nonprofit world. I’m a big believer—and maybe because I played sports all growing up, and my kids play sports—that there are so many lessons that is transferable into life. What are some of those key lessons that you hold on to? What are some of those key lessons that you hold on to? I mean, I think the obvious is team, because, you know, you’re on a team and it’s not just you. But what are some of those really key learnings?
Bryan Williams: I…biggest one is failure. Right? You don’t win every game. And then learning that every failure is just a learning experience, ok. What could I have done a little bit better and maybe the outcome would have been different. And also, what is in my control and what is out of my control? And so, in in you know, a strong leader in leadership roles, you have to really coach your team on “hey you may have everything within your power to make something successful, and it just wasn’t because of X, Y, and Z.. And we want to focus on the things we control to make things successful, but sometimes they just don’t. And we learn from it and we move on. We don’t harp on that failure or make it hold us back and reduce our willingness to take risks. I think, you know, growing up in sports that just, it’s constant failure. And you deal with it and you move on. And I think that’s one thing that I bring to my work is helping people to get over failure so you can take the next great risk that will push the organization forward. And some people are very risk averse. I’m very pro-risk and okay with failure.
And then you kind of touch a little bit on that team aspect of it and what kind of I learned especially in my career and relate to that is every member of the team is different, and we move at different paces. And so, risk for me is something I’m very comfortable with. Others are not. But you you got to pull them along or push them along at their own pace. So, I think teamwork is huge, but also just that just failing is fine. We’re going to fail. It’s ok.
Suzanne Hanifin: Absolutely! We talk about that a lot at Acumen—that if things go smooth, you don’t learn a lot. You learn from your scraped knees when you fall down, and then you have to get back up. Which again, kind of goes into as a leader we bring these core values that are so important to us and we try to operationalize those core values into the organization. So what are some of your core values, and how have you been able to operationalize those?
Bryan Williams: Yeah. And again, I think that’s one of the things you learn just by being in a leadership role is not only understanding the importance of values but how do you create those values and then operationalize them. And so you know, being in multiple roles, other organizations, you you learn a little bit each time and so when I started at Dogs for Better Lives, we went through that exercise because values need to be from the ground up, not top-down, if you want them to be lived as true values. I think a lot of…and that takes time and effort, right. And so I think some leaders will say, “Well these are our values, let’s live them,” and not willing to really sit down with your team and go through that very long process of what are..talk to me about, you know, simple question. “Why do you come for Dogs for Better Lives. What is that answer?” And you know people will say the mission but it’s other and so our central value is about working as a team to overcome the incredible challenge of training and placing assistance dogs and growing as an organization. So, we’re on a growth path. We’ve been on a growth path for the last six years. And so, understanding that we’re trying to do things that have not been done before for this organization. And so you’re going to have challenges and and failures. But if we just stick together and works as a team, and and the values kind of indicate how we work as a team, that that everything will be fine. And that focus will remain there.
So, we went through that long process of developing our core values and we we had a list of about 20 and then we went through, and everybody voted on values. And so, you know, your personal values and your organization’s values have to be in alignment. But what I found very interesting is if my p…if I have my top three person values and we have 6, there’s one that is in our values about being eco-friendly and being about a green organization. In a leadership role, I wouldn’t have raised my hand and said, “this is so important to me” but being part of the team and saying, “These values are our values,” so I have to live this value has led me to adopted it into my personal and professional life, and it’s led to really great things for the organization.
And so, how you really operation operationalize it, in my opinion, is is going through that process of letting the team select what are those core values. And then, you know, it’s not a piece of paper you put on the shelf. And so, we do various things like we have annual values awards. We have a a monthly all-staff and we highlight one of our values. So, we let people go around and say who’s a colleague that you’ve really seen live this value the past month. Then we have something called Bonus, and so you can award points to other..your colleagues and peers but you have to highlight the value that you’re highlighting of why you’re giving this person this recognition and this award. And so, there’s various ways you can do it. But you have to be proactive. You have to put it at the forefront and you and have to constantly work on it because it’s not something you can just put in place, check the box and say “okay, now we can move on”.
Suzanne Hanifin: Well and and that’s a challenge in of itself. But you’ve as you mentioned, you’re also growing and expanding, and it started pre-COVID. You survived COVID and now this growth after COVID. And that’s a hard balance. So how have you rebranded, you know, dealt with providing your services during a time when 90% of people were locked down? And then to expand into new new territories.
Bryan Williams: Yeah yeah. And that there’sso many challenges that you don’t think of when you’re going through this this process. And luckily, you know, had that experience, have gone through downturns before in the industry itself, and that’s why experience can be so valuable. Kind of live through exiting those financial economic downturns for this country of the organizations that pushed through and continued to grow, rebounded so much. During COVID, we focused on growth when others weren’t, and that helped us rebound quickly than the ones that were conservative and laid off staff and shrunk their services. So, as we entered COVID and you know I work with a board. I have a board that is my boss. I said “Listen. I’ve lived through this before. We’ll power through. We’ll be fine. But if we focus on growth now when others are not, we will rebound much more quickly”. That’s exactly what has happened and so we’ve been able to to push through. We’ve doubled our staff since COVIE. We’re in 11 different states. We now have four different locations where we’re operating versus one. And so, we’re placing more dogs than we ever had in our history.
So, things are going well and then you create these new challenges, right. Remote staff. How are they, how do you, how do you help them to live our values. How do you help them feel a part of the team when they’re in some cases out on an island working by themselves. And so, those again are really tough things that there are no easy answer to other than just putting the effort in and and finding new ways to connect your team and new technologies to help with that as well. But it’s a constant challenge of of leadership and, you know, and and what is…what’s the definition of of leadership is is keeping those great people around you. And you know, great people leave bad bosses. So, you don’t want to see that happen and you want to keep those core key people together.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, there is and there there has been no playbook of of dealing with with these changing times. What are some of the actual things that you guys did to keep those values alive.
Bryan Williams: Yeah, there is no playbook, I think. And, you know, going back to just values are so key and you know, a couple of our values are you know, active listening and how we communicate. And then challenging the status quo. And so, when you’re live and you’re just constantly pushing and understanding and and if we all sit down together, there’s no playbook. We’re figuring this out as we go along. And so, we’re gonna stumble. We’re going to fall. We’re going to make missteps. And I’ve made tons of mistakes. And I think the important thing is to come out and be like I screwed this up. I had this plan. It didn’t work or I didn’t communicate with you well. Whatever happened. And if you’re just honest and open and say “hey I screwed up. We’ll do better next time.” I think you get…you’re able to maintain that that trust especially in growth when you know communication is always such a huge challenge but when you’re growing it’s doubly so. Because not, you know, especially as a non..small nonprofit or small organization. It’s a a mom-and-pop shop. And everybody knows what’s everybody’s doing and everything that’s happening with the organization and as you grow and scale and become a truly National organization, people don’t always know what’s going on on. And there you got to build that trust to say “Hey leadership’s making good decisions. We’ll communicate the best we can. But you may not know everything that’s happening” and that’s okay.
Suzanne Hanifin: Okay, absolutely! So, you mentioned briefly about this growth and expansion, which is really hard to build your team and keep growing. Because I think people come and are attracted to nonprofits because of that mission. But you mentioned that if there’s not this alignment, it’s a misfit. So, what are some of the actual steps and takeaways that you’ve learned in building this team?
Bryan: Yeah, so people come for the mission, right? And especially dogs and animals—we’re all super passionate. And we say, you know, during the hiring process, “That’s great, you have to have a passion for the mission to be here.” But that passion for the mission doesn’t always translate to living our values. And so, one of the things that takes a lot of time, but we do it with every new staff person, is I lead an orientation for the new staff. We go through our why, our mission, and our values. And what I talk about, and I have this diagram that I go through, is all three of those things have to be working in tandem and in alignment, or none of it works. So, if you’re passionate about the mission and what we do, but you’re a jerk, and you’re a poor communicator and you yell at your team, well, you’re passionate about the mission, but you’re not living our values. And so, you don’t get to be a part of this, and we’re going to move on from you. There’s a certain level of respect that we expect from everybody that’s a part of the organization. And so, going through that orientation and really explaining that and this is a terrible example, but this is what I say: if I saw you kick a dog, you’re immediately fired, right? Like, there’s no, like, that’s nobody would be surprised or shocked. But I say, if you treat someone poorly, or you do not live our values, it’s the same thing. You’re gone. You’re just not—we don’t have time to teach you how to live these values. It’s like being a parent. I’m trying to teach my children certain things and how to be a good person. Well, I don’t, as CEO, I don’t have time to teach you how to be a good person if you’re not one already. I’m moving on from you, and that’s okay. You need to go somewhere else and find something that’s a better fit for you. And so, we make those decisions very quickly when it comes to values. I can train you a skill set. I can train you to be a fundraiser. Our program team can train you to train dogs. But I can’t train you to live values. And so, you just have to make those decisions quickly, because when you don’t, the other great members of your team see that this isn’t—you’re not living your values if you’re excusing this behavior because for whatever reason. And so, we just make those decisions quickly so that we can keep those great people that we want around on the team. Otherwise, you’ll lose them to other organizations.
Suzanne Hanifin: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And so, you know, let’s talk about a little bit of where you’re going next. What’s your growth? I mean, you’re in 11 states. You’ve grown tremendously from just Oregon. Bigger. What does the next five years look like?
Bryan Williams: I say—I tell everybody this, right? So, an overnight success takes 10 years right. So, if you think of our 10-year journey, we’re about year six. I’m telling every all the team the next five years are going to be a lot of fun. Because just our growth trajectory on sourcing dogs, how we get dogs, how we train dogs, we’re going to just grow exponentially over the next few years. Because we’ve taken the last six years and laid the foundation for that. And so, we opened our facility now in Massachusetts. We have operations with a partnership in Dallas, and next, we’re moving to Atlanta. And so, we have this, you know, we call it the Vision 2020, which is really a 20-plus year vision for growth. And I tell everybody it’s not a straight line, right? It’s a zigzag. And so, you have to be willing to, depending on what opportunities come to the organization is what opportunities that we’ll take advantage of them. So, for example, we—you know, Dallas was in the long-range plan. Atlanta was in the long-range plan, but years from now, these opportunities came up, and we were able to take advantage of them to move into that market. So, we’ll continue to look for markets to expand into, but we’ll do it at a bit of a more controlled pace, because really, the foundation for where we need to be—we place dogs in a client’s home, which is unique for the industry. So, we we’ve take the dog to you. Well, if you’re doing that all from Southern Oregon, it’s incredibly inefficient. But when you look at we’re now really Central Southeast, East Coast. So now geographically, we’re able to serve our clients more effectively. And so, we’ll be very selective in how we choose our next locations. Because we’re in in a pretty good shape to serve clients. Our dog numbers is that impediment for growth that we now have overcome. So, we’re just going to see really a skyrocketing in the number of dogs that we’re able to place with clients over the next four to five years.
Suzanne Hanifin: Well, and that’s an interesting thing that you brought up because during COVID, everybody got a dog. There were no pound dogs. So. And I know the model before was to go to the Humane Society or any shelter and find those dogs that are trainable and kind. How did you solve that problem?
Bryan Williams: Yeah, completely changed everything, right? So COVID hit—we were still in growth mode, and all the shelters on the West Coast were empty. And so, you get to a point where, you know, COVID was terrible, but it allowed us to hit the reset say, “This is not working. What do we..we have to just completely change it.” We completely changed everything we do. So, we no longer drive up and down the West Coast to search for dogs. So, we now have staff in Dallas, Texas with an organization called Operation Kindness. So, when a dog comes into the animal welfare facility, our staff are there at intake to assess the dog. So, we get the selection of any dogs coming in. The second thing we did is, you you did have this demand for dogs that ebbed and flowed with COVID because now people are surrendering pets too. And so, we had this group of people that maybe wanted a dog for a temporary time period. So, we developed this foster network. So now we assess the dogs immediately upon intake. We’ll do the same thing in Atlanta, where we’re just now launching. Then they go into foster homes, and we train the dog out of the foster home and then place them with the client. So, the dogs from our shelter operations are never, quote, “re-entering a kennel.” If their career changes or they don’t work out, we adopt them directly from the foster home. So, for 40-plus years, we were doing our operations one way, and then COVID hit, and we changed everything. And so, you talk about those values, and for some staff, it’s like, “Whoa, what are you doing? You’re just going to completely change the model?” And we say, “Yeah, because our why, our mission, and our values are the central thing that keep us together. So, we can completely change what we do. Those things are the unchangeables. And so, I talked a little bit about staff maybe resistant to change. When you have those central core items in place and you can point back to it, there’s some more comfort, like we can change how we train our dogs. Because our why, our mission, and our values will not change, and it gives them something, that foundation, to hold on to.”
Suzanne Hanifin: Oh my gosh, I love this. No, and you can tell just by the sound of your voice, you know, you love what you do, and it is infectious. I’m like, “Wow, I’ve got to learn more and get more involved!” But looking back, you know, again, you said you were going to be a pro baseball player. This is it. So, what advice now that we all mature, what advice advice would you offer your 20-year-old self, or 18-year-old self, or 16-year-old self that you think, “Boy, I wish I would have known that?”
Bryan Williams: Take advantage of every opportunity. Say yes to every single opportunity. And, you know, I’m very lucky now. I work with—I’ve been working with boards of directors for almost 20 years. So, I get to be surrounded by people who are very high-level that do nothing related to my industry, right? So,I..there’s marketing people, there’s business people, there’s CEOs, there’s doctors, there’s all these people. And I’m lucky enough to have conversations with them and pick their brains and learn, “What’s your job like? What do you do? Tell me about your day-to-day. What are some life lessons you would tell your 20-year-old self?” So, if I was looking back at that, just any opportunity you can to learn and experience things, do it. And the second thing is, yeah, look for great bosses to work for because there’s so much you learn. And I’ve been so fortunate that I happened to work for some really incredible bosses that mentored me and gave me some insight to that. But if you work for a great boss for a year, you learn more than if you worked for a terrible boss for 10 years. So just find the organization or maybe the industry doesn’t even matter as much as latch onto those great bosses, learn as much as you can, and then move to the next opportunity. Because you just—you just learn being around great people. You just learn so quickly.
Suzanne Hanifin: Oh, absolutely. Well, and this is the perfect segue. We always finish up our podcast by asking, you know, this is called “Hiring for Good,” so what does “Hiring for Good” mean for you?
Bryan Williams: That’s a great question. So funny, so yesterday, I was actually conducting some interviews for a position I typically would have no say, you know? Someone else would be there making that hire decision, but they had some really great candidates, and I said, “Will you just interview, meet with them for a little bit, and give us, give us your insight?” And it was it was a fun activity because I don’t do that much anymore—getting back into that. And there was just one candidate that, you know, I was speaking to this person and was like, “This is a culture fit. This is the values fit.” And there’s just little things that people do that can give you an insight into how they’ll interact and be a part of this team. And I think the more experience you have doing that, you understand that skill set almost doesn’t matter. It’s who are you as a person, what values do you bring, and how will you interact with the team? It was as simple as just really listening and absorbing the question, giving it thought, and then answering. Right? And you could tell that this person really wanted to communicate well on on what they were trying to say and so hiring for good is just really focused way more on the values and the culture fit than the skill set. And so when we luckily and I say good leadership is your leadership team leaves you and goes becomes a CEO themselves right. And my leadership team won’t leave and it’s I’m lucky for it. They’re great people but when we bring on a new person on the leadership team we have an entire section on values and we have all ask all of them the same exact questions to see how they would fit. And so hiring for good we spend so much our of our lives at work just surround yourself with great people. If they’re great, they’ll learn, they’ll figure the job out. But just you know surround yourself with with people you want to be around and and the rest will figure itself out.
Suzanne Hanifin: You are speaking my love language. For sure. Well Brian I tell you I am so inspired by you. Everyone please check out Dogs for Better Lives. It is an amazing organization, and I cannot thank you enough for joining us today.
Bryan Williams: It’s a lot of fun. Thanks for thanks for having me.
Suzanne Hanifin: Awesome. Take care.