Conversations on Leadership: Consensus Building with Kim Jordan
To bring forth the future we collectively envision, we’ll need leaders who break the mold. Leaders with grit and creativity. Leaders who aren’t afraid to imagine things differently than the status quo. Certainly we should look at what’s worked in the past, but more importantly, we’re asking what qualities we need to cultivate within ourselves for the work ahead.
This year I’m launching a new interview series to tap into the wisdom and expertise of the visionary, creative leaders that Mighty Arrow partners with. We’ll talk about the important leadership traits, what we learned along our journey into leadership, and how to give confidence to each other as we work on hard things together, like building back the values we believe in for our communities and our environment.
As I dig into these conversations, I am recognizing how deeply I have yearned to hear what other leaders have wrestled with, what they are preparing for, and how they came to recognize confidence within themselves along the way. Especially as I calibrate how I will show up for the movements Mighty Arrow is helping to build right now.
I can’t think of anyone better to kick this series off than Kim Jordan.
Co-founder and former executive chair of the board of New Belgium Brewing, and the co-founder and matriarch of Mighty Arrow Family Foundation. She’s known for her expertise at the intersection of business, the environment and community, and she created one of the most respected craft breweries and innovative businesses in America. Believing that a vibrant and rewarding work culture can also enhance the bottom line, her philosophy informed progressive policies at New Belgium and she created a model for what business could look like in the future. Her work with Mighty Arrow continues to multiply social and environmental impact in that vein, by asking the same question she did at New Belgium: How can we do better?
Kim led by example, implementing progressive values at New Belgium and then sharing her earned wisdom as director on boards as diverse as the Brewers Association, Colorado State University’s Board of Governors and Earthjustice, to name a small sample of her involvements. In this interview we dive into what qualities she’s learned that made her a successful leader, what motivates her entrepreneurial mindset, what role risk should play in philanthropy and much more.
Here’s our interview:
Jordana: Kim, thank you for being my first guest in this leadership series. You and I have worked together for a long time, and I thought it would be fun to share with our community some of the many leadership hats that you’ve worn throughout your career. Before we jump into that, can you tell me where you are today and how you spend your time?
Kim: I live in Northern California, very close to the coastal Redwoods in a little town that's kind of a bohemian enclave. We’re working on a land stewardship project here. There are really three pieces to my journey that brought me to where I am today. One of those was certainly New Belgium Brewing. That was the catalyst for capitalization for the other things, not to mention a lifetime of fun and experimentation. When my sons and I sold New Belgium to our coworkers through an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), we held a note from the company and ended up being the company's largest single debt holder. And then we sold the company again to a group of outside brewers from Japan.
The second piece is the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, where we've tried to be congruent with the work we did at New Belgium in terms of philanthropy and how we focused our profit dollars. And then the third one is the land stewardship project we are working on today, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. We’re working on watershed health and forest resilience and coastal grasslands and restoring those on this property. It's a small property, which is great. We can get our arms around the whole thing. I'm meeting people in this new home community and continuing to be on boards and goof around as I explore what it's like to have more free time.
Jordana: You’ve served on a number of boards over the years. Can you give me a rundown to get an idea of the breadth of your many different involvements?
Kim: In the early days, most of the boards that I was on were community boards, so they were all nonprofits or in some cases quasi-governmental agencies. I was on the Downtown Development Authority Board in Fort Collins. I was on the Colorado State University System Board. I've been on different commissions—I was on the Colorado State Supreme Court Nominations Commission, the Governor's Renewable Energy Authority. I was also on the Smithsonian’s Food History Kitchen Cabinet. Today I'm on the board of Earthjustice and the corporate board for Hog Island Oyster Company.
I just recently said yes to an opportunity here in the small town where I live to be on a small board with two other women. One of the women is the owner of an internationally known garden, and she is a recent owner and wants some help in figuring out how to make a nonprofit stand on its own two feet for the most part.
Jordana: In all those roles, including your time as CEO of New Belgium, what’s one of the biggest takeaways or lessons you’ve learned about leadership?
Kim: Learning how to really listen and build consensus is magical.
I can share the story of another board I was on that was sort of foundational for me. Before it was the Brewers Association, I was on the board of a group called the Brewers Association of America and also on the board of a group called the Association of Brewers. Those two boards were eventually joined through a two-year process that I facilitated with 15 board members from the two organizations.
These were trade association Boards. I learned a lot about governance but also about process. Something that happens on boards—especially when they're not your own board—is that you have all these people who have a sense of how they want to do things because they're subject matter experts. And you're trying to bring people together who maybe have disparate views about which direction we should go.
That's a hard thing when you're an entrepreneur, to give space for other people's ideas when you have your own. I think generally speaking, that is a really important skill to cultivate: that feeling of creating space for other people's ideas and listening to them—not being in your head about how you're going to tell them your idea.
One of the things that really helps with that was a process we used at New Belgium from early on. We used consensus on a lot of decision making. Not always, and we always felt like it was important to clarify at the beginning who was going to be making the decision. But you have this middle place where people aren't in agreement, and you stop there and ask, what could we do that would make it better for you? That ground is really rich and it's something that when you've seen it happen is almost magical or a miracle in some ways.
On the Brewers Association board, we had a guy who, at the very end of the discussion, fairly quietly would say, “well, what if we did this…?” And it was like the lightbulb went on. He just had a way, both from his own experience having been an executive in a big company but had humanity and humility. He was able to be a quiet leader and really develop consensus.
Jordana: That’s a great example. Many of our Mighty Partners are in the middle of their own coalition building and collaboration and trying to find more partners to build bigger momentum, so that process of consensus building is important to consider. As you’re headed into a board meeting, how do you prepare yourself to show up?
Kim: Since I’m now retired, when I’m part of a meeting (expect for Mighty Arrow Family Foundation) I’m an outside Board member or an invited guest. I need to continuously remind myself to listen. If there is one thing on the agenda that I hope we can come to an elegant solution on, I try to focus there. One of our core values at New Belgium was continuous improvement, which is still important to me. But it's also really important to acknowledge the improvement you've already had. As an outside board member, one can breeze into a whole life of work for all people and it's easy to forget all the work and attention that they’ve put into a plan or project. And I think it's important to acknowledge people, ask questions, acknowledge their expertise, acknowledge the high level of their work.
Jordana: I feel lucky I've been able to spend so much time in boardrooms with you, as a staff member at New Belgium when you were board chair, and now as my board chair at Mighty Arrow Family Foundation. I know along both our journeys leadership is not always glamorous and it can be lonely and full of uncertainty. What has kept motivating you to keep working on big hard things?
Kim: I think most human beings want to be productive and useful and feel like when they get up every day, they have a purpose. I mentioned continuous improvement earlier, and I think I’m always on my way into a board meeting trying to make sure I’m conscious of being positive and warm, but also honest. I have been told a number of times in my life that there's a lot of congruency between who I am and how I show up in the world. I think people were trying to be nice in framing it that way, I’ve also been told that I can be pretty forthright - maybe even blunt!
Occasionally leadership is lonely because on the other side of congruency is having to say things that are critical, sometimes even painful. One has to be able to sit with that both personally and interpersonally, allow it some time, have conversations, start with heart each time and recognize that the state of humanity is frail and has a lot of tenderness that both hurts and makes our heart swell. You have to be able to do the good part and the hard part.
Jordana: Thanks for that reflection, Kim. I also know that grit and entrepreneurship are important values to you, and they're certainly values we look for in the leaders that Mighty Arrow supports. Can you say more about what grit means to you?
Kim: The world of work is a little bit different today, both good and bad, than it was when I was a CEO. But I think there's something to be said for making sure the general milieu feels like it has a light, happy touch. I feel like we did a pretty good job of this at New Belgium. And at the same time, there are times when you have to kick ass or buckle down or say no, or not spend the money on the thing that someone thinks we really need. And that's just the reality of it. That's part of having grit, buckling down and doing the hard work. But then I think it's important on the other side of that to celebrate whatever win comes from that or whatever sense of accomplishment and excellence comes from that.
Jordana: Thinking back on New Belgium and the culture you created, did you have any idea there would become such a movement around corporate sustainability and corporate culture, and you would become a case study for other organizations around the country? If you knew that back then, would that have shifted at all how you made decisions in business?
Kim: One of our core values was to be a business role model. It was something that motivated us. But I think if it changed us, if our awareness of that changed us, it was really only for the better. Maybe there were a couple of kooky things that we would have a redo on, but one of the blessings of being a privately held company is we were able to use profits in the way that we wanted to use profits. And sometimes that was for investing in technology that had a low energy footprint or a low water footprint or chemicals or whatever the issue was. Sometimes it was in employee ownership and broadly shared equity.
I think I can say this for all of my management colleagues back then, too, but I was really motivated by doing things because I thought they were really interesting. They had maybe not been done before and they were likely to produce a level of return, if you will, that would be extraordinary. And occasionally that didn't work out. And so we scrapped whatever it was, and we tried something else because one of the things we also knew was that you have to try some things.
And if you're trying things that are kind of untested, some of them are going to fail. And if they're not failing, you're probably not very far out on that learning edge. And so we did some things that consultants would say, oh, nobody does that. You can't do that. This is not the way. I did not have an MBA, Jeff did not have an MBA, so we tried some things.
Jordana: You are starting to hit on “risk.” How do you think philanthropy should be embracing risk these days?
Kim: I think there are areas of philanthropy that say we’re going to fund things that are innovative or that are still in the experimental and learning phase. I think a lot of philanthropy is a reaction to a broken system, but not necessarily a reaction that says ‘let's try some really new things.’ And it might be good for philanthropy to collectively to wrestle with that.
It takes courage to do things differently than the status quo. That served us well at New Belgium. We made business work for our values. As humans we could then relax into our work, we could try some different marketing techniques or sustainability practices. We could have levity around the things we were testing out, but still we had a business to run. I often told my team “we can be as groovy as we want to be, but we still have to be profitable.”
You could say the same for philanthropy. If we only fund projects that fail, we’re not progressing the change we were hoping for, and we’re wasting our resources. There’s got to be a sweet spot there. It’s like the scientific method, theories need to be tested, adjusted and tested again. We need to take enough risk to look around the corner and see if this new path is possible. And at the same time, we need to give confidence to our nonprofit partners to test out these innovations. Maybe that’s where philanthropy needs to step up.
Jordana: One last question for you Kim. If you could leave one invitation, not necessarily advice, but an invitation to emerging leaders, what would that be?
Kim: My invitation would be to look inside and assess one's capability. How does leadership feel for you? Because I firmly believe that there are leaders and there are followers and both of those types are absolutely necessary. People who may be very good at seeing a project through to the end maybe aren't so good at picking their heads up and looking in the distance. Jordana, you are very good at looking in the distance and seeing a path. Seeing opportunity. And not everybody is good at that, and that's totally okay.
If you're someone who is contemplating your leadership, really looking inside, what has that felt like when you think you've been a leader? What has that been like for you physiologically? Was it enjoyable? Did you feel something close to flow? Did you feel like you were being both respected and respectful? I think it’s assessing that and then it’s a matter of refinement, being better at listening, being better at being approachable, and those kinds of things.
When you hear people describe flow, often a big component of that is the physical feeling. When I've been out in the world to do something and you’d ask, how did it go? And I'd say, I nailed that thing. Because there is that feeling when you walk away. There are lots of moments too, when it didn't go very well. Some of that's the process of discovery, when you're in the mucking around phase. It's not always pleasant. But when it's going well, it's a high, for sure.