Kootenay Insights :: Tanya Laing Gahr A focus on Kootenay Communities…
A leader’s leader
Garry Merkel knows how to take charge —Photo by Kris Lindblad
Garry Merkel is the quintessential leader. He chairs or co-chairs several organizations, including the Columbia Basin Trust, the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation, the Ministry of Forests and Range Practices Advisory Council and many more. I contacted Garry to ask for a few thoughts on leadership and how to develop strong leadership skills, but what was meant to be a brief interview turned into an hour-long conversation that I found profound and instructive. Take the time to read the entire interview. I hope you’ll find some nuggets of wisdom as well. h3. Q: I was impressed with your bio and all the different associations and disparate groups that you’ve been involved with. A: Oh yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. The (Columbia Basin) Trust—I chair the board there and we built that from scratch—basin residents and a few other key people. I chair an aboriginal housing committee for British Columbia. I chair a board for a development corporation up north where I actually come from in the beginning. It’s a fairly big corporation; last year we employed 500 local people. I’m involved with an aboriginal college over in Nicola Valley—built it almost from scratch: the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (NVIT) in Merritt. h3. Q: This is why I wanted to talk with you. You’re not only involved with so many organizations; you take a leadership role in a fair few of them. A: Most of them. h3. Q: I wanted to get some ideas from you about what qualities you think a leader should have, and how do they go about developing those qualities. A: I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve talked about it quite a few times. It’s really hard to explain to people that the first barrier that people have to get over is the fact that they can actually be this. You can say to people a zillion times that you can be whatever you want in this life but for people to internalize this and to understand it and to do whatever you want in life—it’s a huge thing. A lot of people don’t understand that you can pretty much do anything you want to in this life. Everything in this world was built by somebody (and) I’ve known a zillion people in this life who have built amazing things. The Nicola Valley Institute of Technology in Merritt: (The first chair) was a logger. He never finished grade school. He built that college—and it is a college now. We probably graduate 200 aboriginal students a year in all fields. We’ve got two campuses. We’re pretty much known all over North America, if not all over the world, for the kind of quality of product we put out. And that’s started by a guy, Gordon Antoine, who started many things from nothing. So it’s not about going to school. It’s not about an education—although that stuff helps a lot—it really is about developing yourself as a person first. That’s my view. And staying deeply grounded in whatever it is that you’re working on. It really starts with you as an individual, and you developing your own personal mental framework and your attitude. Now some people are born with this or some people learned it from a very young age because they grew up with leaders. So being a leader is just second nature for them. Wayne Gretzky: I always say that Wayne Gretzky was born an athlete. Or Sidney Crosby. They were born with the making of an athlete. But you look at someone like Gretzky—he was a skinny little wimp. He could have turned out to be nothing if he didn’t work at it. He could have been nothing, but he turned into what he turned into and that was partly because he had natural talent and ability but it was also a huge amount of work. He worked on his physical and mental framework. If you’re not going to be an athlete, you still have to work on your mental framework and develop an attitude and an orientation towards the world that allows you to understand that you can do things—anything—and not be afraid to do it. Along with that, there’s a whole range of other personal skills that you really need. Being a leader is not being a boss (but) somebody has to make a decision at some point in time . . . You’re not there to boss people; they’re willing to listen to you. I read this book once by Max DePree—Leadership Is an Art—and I like the way he says it. The leader’s first job is to form a covenant amongst people on where they want to go, which means talking to everybody and understanding their views and understanding what they’re thinking. (It’s) understanding all of that stuff, and then building a mental picture and a path so that everybody goes, ‘Right on. We really like that. We want to be part of that. We want to make that happen.’ Once you’ve got that and you’ve got people mobilized, then your next job is to support the hell out of them and get them there. You become a servant, basically. I really like that analogy because I think it makes huge sense. Part of your first job is building a cause and a commitment to a cause and then your next job is being a servant and making decisions when decisions have to be made. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to make a decision, and if you do it right, it works. If you don’t do it right, then what you end up doing is carrying it. That’s why I can do as many things as I do, because I don’t carry really a lot. I support a lot of people—good people—to do things. h3. Q: That’s really inspirational. A: It’s pretty easy to do when you can work like that. For me, the Trust is an absolutely amazing, amazing thing in our area. And I try to personally carry the heart and soul and help people to make it and understand how to get there. But they help me just as much as I help them. It’s like being a teacher. When you’re a teacher, you learn way more than the students you’re teaching. h3. Q: Are you saying that a leader is different from a manager? A leader is someone who facilitates their team’s growth more than manages them? A leader teaches them? Empowers them? A: Yes. A leader is not a manager. That’s a mistake to say that. A leader could be a manager. A leader could be an observer. A leader can be anything. Being a leader and being a manager are not exclusive but also not requirements of each other. Many leaders I know are not great managers. Being a leader is a separate skill than being a manager. If you have both leadership and management skills, that’s even better. It’s hugely better, because then what you can do is work with people. When you’re the leader, your big job is really to try to see as far into the future as possible and really build a clear picture of that and then explain it back to people, based on what they say. And when they get it, try to bring it back to today. To me, that’s an important skill as well; we can say that’s a great picture, but how do we get there? What’s our strategy for getting there? What’s our general course of direction or path? So people can see both the picture and the way to get there. A lot of people have a lot of ideas of where to go but how to get there from here is a really difficult thing to understand for many, many people. And if you’re a manager, then you will also have skills like critical path analysis and strategic planning and all of those other organizational skills that are really valuable. And not only doing it in very general terms, but also doing it in very specific terms and laying out plans and accountability frameworks and all the rest of that kind of stuff that really helps you to be disciplined about how to get there. Not just sort of general but disciplined. h3. Q: Do you think, then, a key element of being a leader is being someone who has a strong vision? Being a visionary? A: I think so. But it’s not just being a visionary. My cousin says, ‘There’s a fine line between a vision and a hallucination.’ That’s really, really true. It is possible to envision any kind of future possibility but some of them are so stupid compared to where you’re at. I am always a little surprised, a little taken aback, by how few people have real, deep clarity about what’s important and what’s not important and about that path. For me, I always make the assumption that people just get it. But I’m always reminding myself that no, very few people actually do get it, because very few people actually work on this skill of building visions of possibilities and really making them concrete and pragmatic too. Anything is possible. The U.N. (United Nations) probably came from one person who had an idea in the beginning. The entire Canadian government—in fact, the idea of Canada—came from one idea in the beginning. Do you see what I’m saying? Everything comes from one idea—and the strength of that idea and the number of people who are committed to that idea. One of the beauties of being a leader—and I use the Trust for this one a lot—is that when you get this concept or idea, you’re never quite sure how you’re going to get there. I work on some really fundamental grounding principles: how do we act; how do we behave; how do we treat each other as we go through this and what guides our decisions—guiding principles, values, those sort of grounding, foundational elements. You carry those in your heart all the time because you don’t know quite what you’re going to do. And you don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like when you get there. It’s a bit organic. When you’re in business, you need to be a little bit more specific but I can tell you that I don’t think Bill Gates ever thought that Microsoft was going to be what Microsoft is. Or Steve Jobs didn’t think Apple was going to be what Apple is. It just was a really good idea that they thought, ‘Man, this is awesome. Let’s start working toward this.’ And they got a bunch of people to work with them and it started to grow into this thing and they just kept having a vision of where it could go and it just kept going. And that’s just the way it is. Many times, these turn out to be way bigger than what you think they are. For me, I try to pick the next thing that I think is going to be the best thing to do (and) that engages people where they’re at. It doesn’t take them too far ahead of where they’re at because otherwise you end up with too much confusion. Take them to the next sort of place. And then we all work together to get there. Once we get wherever it is, we start to get a sense of accomplishment and momentum and possibles. And we just keeping doing that over and over and we learn something from that and we adjust our course. But we always have this sense of where we’re going to end up. I think, for me, the Trust is just a really good example. We had a sense of what was possible but where it’s ended up is absolutely phenomenal in many, many respects. I have learned so much from this path, and just the path of sticking to the roots, the values and the principles—and the people. h3. Q: And that goes back to being grounded. A: Deeply grounded. You have to be grounded, completely. And the other part of it is, you kind of learn to be a bit diplomatic but diplomacy has never been one of my strongest suits. (Laughs) I can tell you that. h3. Q: Mine either. (Laughs) And I always admire people who are diplomatic—and then I fly off the handle. So it’s obviously a skill you have to learn. So how do you go about that? A: You have to really build and internalize that winning a war doesn’t mean winning every battle. And I say internalize it, because it is so tempting to win because we get so pissed at people. But sometimes it’s smart to let people win because they need to feel a sense of accomplishment too. Some people work in the model where it’s all about winning and losing and you may not have time to spend with them, to elevate them beyond that understanding. So what do you do? You help them feel like they’re winning. You help them get what they need out of it. Being a leader is not about getting what you want; it’s about really helping everybody else get what they want, and in a direction that you all want to go. So, you’re right. A leader is a facilitator. That doesn’t mean that you’re not entitled to have an opinion. You, like everybody else, will have an opinion. That’s the way it is. But you certainly don’t want to get too stuck on yourself—that’s for sure. That’s a really dangerous place. When I first started working with communities, my view was that I had really good ideas and that we needed to go this way, and that was that. I think one of the hazards of our school system, unfortunately—a common mistake in many of our higher learning institutions—is that many students are taught that they’re the centre of the world and the subject area. You go into a professor’s class and they teach you that this is the most important thing in the world. Everything else revolves around this. And it’s hard for students to sometimes break that. And I got a lot of that in my training. So I carried that a lot with me and I remember the first time I ever learned that I didn’t know all that much. It was quite humbling. Very humbling. It was an old fellow that told me once—and his community had been devastated and I was just trying to tell him, well just do this and this and this. And he said to me, ‘You know, you’re a really smart person, but you know what? You don’t know that much.’ It took a long time to unlearn, but I think you get to a place where you really understand—more and more and more—that you don’t know a lot. But you do know certain things that are true about humanity. Like Martin Luther King: I have a dream. You know about dreams, right? You just know that dream is right and your heart and soul and every fibre of your being tells you that dream is right. That doesn’t mean you won’t listen to people. That doesn’t mean that you don’t know that the odd thing here and there might slip a bit. There are certain things that I will not slip and stick to doggedly and I am absolutely dogmatic about it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t listen either. I’ll use Martin Luther King as an example again. If he was absolutely dogmatic about the injustice of what was happening to the black people of the States at the time, he never would have become the kind of person he is to see the humanity. You have to get past the dogma to see all of the perspectives so that you can become that (embodiment) of the kind of global view of humanity that is above all of the little pieces together. That’s the place you have to get there. h3. Q: So is another quality of a leader somebody who can see nuances and subtleties? Someone who isn’t just living in the world of black and white and sees different perspectives? A: Yes, and to look at them and see them from the perspective that there really is, in the world, no such thing as right or wrong. The world is what it is. Having said that, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a value judgment. But as a leader, you have to be able to look at things—disgusting as they might be on a moral basis to you—you have to be able to look at them and say why did that happen? What was going on? What shaped that? And what was the path that people were following to get there? And you have to be able to get there with everybody. You might have to empathize with someone whose action totally disgusts you. But you might empathize with it and stay in a place where you can say, I understand that now. I understand what I might be able to do to shape this and change it and move it somewhere. But I don’t have to agree with it and I can publicly say that I don’t agree with that. What I find, in my opinion, is the leaders that create solutions that don’t last are the kind of leaders that have an idea of ‘That’s wrong, and we’re going to fix it like this—period.’ And that’s it. So what they do is they react from their own personal, small-world view—moral and ethical framework—to react to something in a way that is, in many cases, equally as unbalanced as the thing that they are trying to deal with. So what they do is they don’t really push it to a resolution; they just swing the pendulum. And then it swings back and forth and maybe over time it will get to the middle. My experience is that it tends to polarize and cause a lot of grief to a lot of people, taking that kind of tack. Anything that comes from those feelings of high morality or anger or guilt or blame or all of those kinds of things, tend to push things to another imbalance that needs to be fixed. So the idea is to try to see all of these things and try to figure out a path that works and try to convert all of these things to converge to a higher level of being. To help people enliven or elevate. That takes longer, but it’s the kind of work that I personally, working in community development, ask. What do you use as a measure of success? Yeah, we built an institution. Big deal. Institutions are as fragile as glass balls on the Christmas tree. If the branch breaks, they fall and break. So you build things, but you build the foundational aspects. The changes in thinking. The attitudes. The skills that are required to do the planning. The ability to vision and realize visions. And as you build those sort of fundamental things with people and working with people and help them do that, what happens is that after a while, they start to take control of it. And a really good measure for me of success is how much have you helped whoever you’re working with to envision and build their own futures. If you do it right, they won’t even remember you were there. They’ll be living in a new reality. A few key people will remember, but those people grow out of it too. These people are living in a whole new world where they can build their own frame and make it happen and reshape that frame and make it happen. And that’s huge. That’s huge. Anyway, those are just a couple of random thoughts. h3. Q: And they’re great thoughts. Can you name a couple of leaders who have inspired you? A: Martin Luther King, absolutely. Lee Iacocca—I like him. I think he was a good leader. Gordon Antoine, the person who built NVIT. (Past chief of the St. Mary’s Indian Band) Sophie Pierre. I really like Sophie as a leader. She’s a really good, compassionate human being, but she stays really well grounded and is diplomatic and respectful. Mike Harcourt. I really like Mike. I’ve got a lot of time for Mike. I like him as a leader. I still work with him on a few things now and again. h3. Q: What about resources? Where do you look for inspiration? A: Think and Grow Rich by a fellow named Napolean Hill. It talked to you about what are the essential elements of success and how do you create them in yourself. I think that was an excellent book. Some people think I’m a capitalist pig or something, but I’m going, you know what? Rich doesn’t mean money. Success doesn’t mean money. Success means doing what you want to do and not being afraid to do that. Realizing what you need to do. If you decide that, yeah, I’ve got to stop here and I’ve got to make some money, then that’s what you’ll do, if you have time. h3. Q: Any last thoughts on leadership? A: I think these kinds of skills and this kind of thinking are essential for us as a society to develop and to have at a fairly large scale. The beauty is, if you develop them properly, it doesn’t become about you; it becomes about the collective. And it becomes a higher level thing. So one of the things I’m hoping we can do . . . is to foster this thing in the Basin at large. We have a ton of people who have these kinds of skills but if we can foster it on a larger scale, then that means we’re all able to come to the job and we’re all able to participate. And we can build. We have resources now and we have a tool—one of us—who can help us all to get there. We all want to get there but we’re busy, but it turns out we have this organization who can do this for us, and I’m excited about that. I’m excited about making it happen in lots of places.
Senior writer Tanya Laing Gahr has been writing for Kootenay Business magazine since 2006, and through the hundreds of stories she has written for the magazine and website, she has gained a deeper understanding of the unique and diverse nature of businesses in the region.
More than that, however, she has gained a sense of how the individual communities drive the businesses, helping chart the direction they go. Each district, town and city has a particular outlook and personality, and each take on challenges that continue to define who they are in the region and in the world.
Join Tanya as she explores the initiatives, movements, projects and developments that help shape Kootenay communities, the businesses in the region and the people who live here.
Email Tanya if you have a business story idea.
