Marc Pitman: Welcome to the Concord Leaders Podcast. I’m Marc Pitman, the CEO of the Concord Leadership Group. Today our guest is Alisa Magnotta, the CEO and President of Housing Assistance Corporation. Thank you so much for being here, Alisa.

Alisa Magnotta: Hi, Marc. I’m glad to be here. Thanks.

Marc Pitman: And thank you for accommodating with all the different — at the time of this recording, we’re all at work at home. And so we have different —

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, I was thinking I tried to stop it, but it’s not working. Like all of the internet is being overloaded in ways that it’s not used to.

Marc Pitman: So appreciate you taking some time out of your day to do this. I mean, the question we always start with is what do you love about leading and what do you enjoy about being a leader?

Alisa Magnotta: It’s such a good question. You know, I started working when I was 14 in an ice cream parlor, and I was instantly promoted to being the manager, the shift leader. So I’ve always been like an organizer and bossy person, but as I’ve evolved and matured over these years, I really love problem solving and being proactive. I like the intellectual challenge of trying to figure something out and trying to make something better, connecting people and resources. So, you know, when you’re problem-solving, you always need more money or more people or more time. And so trying to think about those resources that I can either bring to bear, or a partnership I can make in order to bring those resources to bear. I mean, bottom line, I like to get things done, and I like to have the shortest path to do it, and bring a team along with me that can have creative input and ideas, and then, you know, tread forward, build that path forward.

Marc Pitman: I’m laughing at the — just being 14 starting in an ice cream parlor and then getting promoted to shift leader. Did that seem normal to you, or did that seem like, “Wait, I don’t even know what I’m doing here”?

Alisa Magnotta: Oh no, it was so natural. I wasn’t surprised. It was kind of expected, actually. I’ve always done it that way. I’ve had to smooth out the prickly edges that come with someone who can be overly bossy or want things done their way, and expand my knowledge so that there’s actually some skill and expertise behind what I’m trying to do or get done. But I’ve evolved, and still do, even at my ripe old age of 52. So I think part of being a leader is the constant learning, and even when we call on our companies to innovate and call on our industry to innovate, we ourselves have to demonstrate that and be willing to do it.

Marc Pitman: I think that takes a lot of leaders by surprise. I’m really glad that you brought that up, because even though we know it at one level, I think we’re always looking for that “having arrived” state as a leader — “I’ve got it all under control now.”

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, it’s never under control. I call that job security. I just have to be willing to keep pushing myself and pushing people around me. But really, starting with my own impact and my own learning and keeping up with what’s happening.

Marc Pitman: That’s great. Well, if I’m not willing to do it, how am I going to expect other people to do it?

Alisa Magnotta: True. So true.

Marc Pitman: So what was a time where — maybe it’s around the prickly edges — what was a time that you tried to do something, lead something, and it just didn’t work?

Alisa Magnotta: Oh, well, you know, there’s been times where I’ve been a little ahead of the curve on things — so, an early adopter. I was the chief operating officer at a large addiction behavioral health organization, and the CEO and I had this great idea to start a telehealth campaign, create the platform, and get the devices. Because we were having a problem with our overhead in outpatient mental health — it doesn’t pay to cover the actual cost of doing the business. So we were trying to find ways to lower the overhead but keep the volume, keep the service, and keep all the clinicians productive and see more patients. So we got this very large innovation grant to do telehealth and bought all these really expensive, large-screened computers that had a secure connection to each other and to our electronic database. And I thought, “Oh my God, everyone’s just going to love this. Oh great, it’s going to save everybody time and money.” And, you know, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was a big belly flop. The clinicians hated it, the psychiatrists hated it, the patients hated it. So we had basically an empty room with a big, beautiful computer screen in it and no patients for the longest time. So there was a lot of hand-wringing of like, “Oh my God, now we’re not just losing from overhead, now we’ve made a huge investment in technology. We’ve got to figure out how to recoup that and how to get this technology to work,” because we knew then it was going to be the wave of the future. The funny thing is, today we’re trying to implement telehealth for the coronavirus. Had everyone adopted it then, we could’ve continued without a blip. Now everyone’s scrambling to do telehealth and try to be able to work from home and see patients remotely without having to have that face-to-face contact.

Marc Pitman: You were ahead of the curve.

Alisa Magnotta: We were way ahead. But we ended up having to just kind of back up and do it in smaller chunks, smaller service lines, with very specific providers. And we had to think through some of the nuances of coming in for an appointment — things we didn’t really think about until we were in the middle of it. One was, a patient coming in to see a psychiatrist or their counselor is used to that best interaction, that camaraderie that happens there. There’s a social togetherness that happens when you go in for that kind of appointment. So we had to figure out how to be extra accommodating with staff that were on site. The doctor was like 200 miles away — the psychiatrist was working from home in a secure environment, calling in for appointments, set up every 15, 20 minutes, like we do in psychiatry. And then we had someone in the waiting room who was able to help someone before and after the appointment in case there was an issue or a question or something needed to be faxed. There were a lot of details that needed to be thought through in order for the interface to work. But it ended up being really great for psychiatry — those medication check-ins. It needed to be refined for counseling, but now there are online apps for counseling, and it kind of ended up taking off after it got going. Other people were using that kind of platform and technology, but it took a while.

Marc Pitman: That is really interesting. How hard was it to back up and break it into segments? Was that frustrating, or did you just kind of go, “We’re doing that”?

Alisa Magnotta: It was a little bit embarrassing at first, because you’re rolling this new thing out, having staff meetings — “Isn’t this great?” — and then you’re like, “Wait a minute, actually they hate it.” There’s a lot more questions and problems than there are answers and solutions. So it kind of took a leveling — we were a little flat-footed on some of the nuances we hadn’t really thought through. So what we ended up doing is working with one of the clinics — we had seven clinics — we ended up working with one that had more of a mindset of innovation and was more open to it. Then some of our other clinics, where people had been there for a long time and were kind of set in their ways, we wanted to work out the kinks with the people who were like, “Hey, that’s actually kind of cool, I see how we could make this work.” And then roll it out within a more solid, definitive plan with the people who’d been there for a long time.

Marc Pitman: That is really — I don’t know why it feels so revolutionary each time it happens, but finding the people who are champions, or at least open to testing.

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah. And that’s why I like the term “beta testing” — we’re just testing this, we’re not committing to this. This isn’t our policy, it’s our practice. It’s just a test. That way we can end it too, if it’s just a test — nobody’s ego is out there.

Marc Pitman: Well, exactly.

Alisa Magnotta: So I learned from that, doing exactly what you’re saying — instead of saying, “We’re rolling this out widely and it’s a new policy or a new program,” we’re piloting it for a period of time, or for the next number of patients. So I ended up doing that in the company I’m running now, where we launched a whole new housing program. And instead of coming out definitively and saying, “This is a new program,” we’re saying, “We’re going to pilot it for a year, work out the kinks.” And I’m glad we did that, because there were kinks that had to be worked out. But now we’re going to ramp it up again in the next three to six months with even more robust services that are going to go with it.

Marc Pitman: So cool. It’s very cool to be able to think and problem-solve and then re-approach. And to create the expectation that this is a thinking, problem-solving, re-approaching thing, not a “complete” that when it doesn’t work right, it’s a big failure.

Alisa Magnotta: No, this is part of the process — getting the kinks worked out so that we can expand it even bigger.

Marc Pitman: So you’re setting the stage for that brilliantly. Well done.

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, I think that’s another one of those things — like getting out of our comfort, or my comfort level, of how we define success and failure, and kind of taking those judgment words off the table. Because so many times our colleagues expect us to either have the answers, or to know definitively, and so they’re looking for black and white, and most times things are gray, and we’re trying to figure it out in this space that’s not clear. So for me, framing it as, “It’s a pilot,” or “Give us feedback, we’re still trying to figure this out,” helps guide my colleagues on the front line to be more receptive — that it’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s that we’re innovating and we’re trying to figure it out, and they can be part of it. So finding teammates and colleagues who are willing to think like that, that’s another big challenge.

Marc Pitman: Well, I think that’s — we alluded to it at the beginning, at the time of this recording, the coronavirus is just really getting real for Americans. I think leaders are going to be required to live in that gray more and more, because we just haven’t been this way before. So I think your words are going to be really helpful — people are going to listen to it over and over. Thank you for that. I’ve got a page of notes. What would you recommend a leader do after listening to this conversation? Is there one nugget you’d leave with them, or one strategy you think they should consider doing today?

Alisa Magnotta: Well, before I answer that — going back to the coronavirus, on day four here at my company, so it started last week — we were trying to get ahead of the anticipation that we were probably going to have to be working from home at some point. We wanted to make sure that our workforce could work from home and still serve our clients, because we have people who are experiencing housing instability. We didn’t want to exacerbate their problems by shutting down or not being available. But many of our contracts are through our state agency and they’re all paper-based. There are requirements for us to see people in person and get their wet-ink signature before we can administer funding. And that creates a lot of problems when you factor in the coronavirus — it’s not like you can have a six-foot pen to get the wet ink. Very quickly, my company is 120 people, we had to quickly shift everybody over to not only an online platform, but quickly write personnel policies that dictated how people work from home, protected their information, set up private workspaces at home. And then kind of bend the rules with our funding agencies to be able to use some of these platforms, like DocuSign — there’s software out there that we could use, they just have to allow it. So we just pushed forward with the assumption that they were going to be appreciative about us serving people, and not reprimand us for not doing it the old-fashioned, pen-to-paper way. And that’s so far proving to be what’s happening. But that’s a risk — I didn’t know if they were going to say, “Nope, sorry, you can’t do it without seeing the people and getting their signature.” And I think one of the things reinforced for me in all of this is using facts and data to make my decisions, to make sure I’m keeping the integrity and intent of the contract for all sides of the equation — our company, my employees, the clients, the funder — that all those aspects are being served. Maybe not the letter of the agreement, but to the best of our abilities, considering the situation and circumstances, and doing the right thing. The right thing is to keep people housed. So if they’re going to fault us for that, that would be unreasonable. But it would be better to be faulted for trying to keep people housed, to be on mission, than being faulted for being on procedure rather than mission.

Marc Pitman: That’s good.

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, but I have colleagues who run the department who are rule followers.

Marc Pitman: Right, and that’s why they’re in that department, because they’re so good at that.

Alisa Magnotta: Exactly, that’s why she runs that department — because we always get A-pluses on our audits, we do so well. But I’m like, “Okay, this time we’re not actually going to follow the rule exactly like that, because that’s not the right thing to do for the company, for the client, or the intent of the contract. So we’re going to do this. We’re going to let them know that this is what we’re doing, but we’re going to push in a different way.”

Marc Pitman: Wow. Well, thank you for taking extra time with us today, because I think that’s really helpful for people to just be aware that we’re all going through that sort of thing in our various areas. So thank you, I appreciate that.

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. And I am, going back to the thread earlier in the conversation, picking the right people to work at the company — I think hiring is one of the, hiring for the right mindset, because we have really done a great job switching over very quickly to being able to serve our clients, keep my workforce working, and honor the integrity of our mission and our obligations, because everyone has this kind of growth mindset — “Okay, roll up the sleeves, let’s figure this out together.” I’m just really, really proud every day of the extra work people are putting in and the problem solving they’re doing at their level and within their circle of influence at the company to make us successful. It’s really super cool to see.

Marc Pitman: That’s wonderful. What a privilege to be part of. That’s great. And to lead, also. So would you say that would be something everybody could do — try to figure out what is the thing in the mission or the value that is preeminent, so that when you make a decision, you’re always there on the side of that?

Alisa Magnotta: Yeah, I think that’s right. That’s what we did — thanks for bringing me back to that. We set up the rubric, when I had my team meetings, for how we were going to make decisions. And the first thing was keeping our workforce working, serving our clients, and ensuring the integrity of the company, both financially and in our obligations. And those three things were kind of equal. So every decision we made was pushed through: “Are we serving our clients? Are we keeping people working? Are we honoring our commitments?” And it made decision-making and buy-in from everybody — not easy, because they were long, tedious meetings — but it was all rolling in the same direction. That was really important in this time of crisis, but I think it’s just good for running a company anyway — being people-focused.

Marc Pitman: Well, Alisa, thank you so much. This has been thoroughly enjoyable, and I know people are going to listen to this over and over for the inspiration. There are so many nuggets you shared — about the telehealth, overcoming that, and the prickly edges being worn off. There’s just so much in here. Thank you for that.

Alisa Magnotta: Thank you. Thanks for asking me to be on. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Marc Pitman: And this has been another episode of the Concord Leaders Podcast. Remember, you can listen to this and all the other episodes of the Concord Leaders Podcast at concordleadershipgroup.com/podcasts. Until next time, remember, especially now more than ever, healthy nonprofits and healthy organizations start with healthy leaders.