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The Net Assets podcast delves into the most pressing issues in independent school business and operations. Delivered by NBOA, the only national nonprofit membership association focused exclusively on fostering financial and operational excellence among independent PK-12 schools, each episode is based on a popular article in NBOA’s Net Assets magazine. Chief financial and operational officers alongside other leaders of school business share what inspires and challenges them as well as their approaches to problem solving and innovation. In each lively exchange, host Jeff Shields, NBOA president and CEO, teases out the human stories behind the printed story.
We had the highest level of engagement that we've had at the height of the pandemic. And why was it the highest level at a period of really high stress? It was because we were human. Checked in with people. How are you doing?
Heather:Are you okay? Can you get food? Are you safe? And that connection drove more engagement and work. And even though we were physically separated and everybody thinks we need to get back to the office to get that level of community, That's evidence that it's really about how we show up, and we showed up in that moment.
Jeff:Welcome to the NetAssets podcast, the official podcast of MBOA Business Leadership for Independent Schools. I'm your host, Jeff Shields, MBLA President and CEO. And today we're thrilled to welcome Heather McGowan, award winning industrial designer, globally recognized futurist and author of three books, The Adaptation Advantage, The Empathy Advantage, and Disrupt Together. For your information, Heather will be one of our keynote speakers at the twenty twenty six MBUA Annual Meeting taking place March at the Orlando World Center Marriott. Now this is the premier gathering for pre K through 12 independent school business leaders where we'll explore the future of education, leadership and business operational excellence.
Jeff:And if you're new to MBLA, we're the only national and increasingly international association focused exclusively on business and operations professionals in independent schools. We empower our members with knowledge, community, and tools to lead their schools with confidence and clarity. This episode of the NetAssets Podcast is provided with generous support by FACS. Heather, welcome to the net assets podcast.
Heather:Hey there. Thanks so much for having me.
Jeff:I'm thrilled you're here today. And before we dive in, I happen to know one of your trademarks is your colorful glasses. Have you decided on eyeglass color for the upcoming MBUA annual meeting? Just curious, and I'm sure our listeners would like to know.
Heather:I gotta let you know I start every dress decision. So what am I gonna wear that day? What am I gonna wear for that event by picking out a pair of glasses, I start there, and then it goes from there to the outfit. Because I have about 55 pairs of glasses in a variety of different colors. And I if I have this right, your logo or is like North Carolina.
Heather:It's like light blue and dark blue. I have some blue glasses, so I will be selecting a pair that aligns with that.
Jeff:We will look forward to that. Thank you. And let's dive in because there's so much body of work to explore with you personally, and I know we're gonna look forward to hearing more about it during our annual meeting. I'm gonna start with leadership, and you've said that strong leaders today aren't know it alls, but they're learn it alls. That resonates a lot with our audience and our membership, many of whom come from fields like finance or government or other nonprofits, and they have to quickly learn the nuances of school culture, human resources, facilities, and more.
Jeff:What advice do you have for leaders who are constantly learning new things just to keep up with the increasing demands of their roles?
Heather:Yeah. That is it used to be learned in order to work. Now I say work in order to learn. So we're gonna be spending most of our lives learning and more importantly, unlearning how we used to do things When we go into either a new environment, a new business model, a technology change, a global shock, we all have to get used to learning and unlearning. And right over your shoulder there, I know this is an audio only podcast, but you've got mister Lincoln.
Heather:And he is a wonderful example of learning not only to do new things, but learning about people, which is something I think we need to get better and better at. So we can be certain, or we could be curious. And we've really over indexed on being certain about ideas, what we think about each other, etcetera. Whereas Lincoln was just a wonderful example of being curious. When he put his cabinet together, he said, I cannot deny the country all these levels of expertise, and they represented different geographies and different political parties.
Heather:Sure. This whole team of rivals approach. But he really entered it with not that he was certain where the country needed to go, but he was curious what he could learn from other people who were very different than him. And I think that's the mindset we really need right now.
Jeff:Do you know what I really appreciate? I love language, and I love when I'm introduced to new language that helps me understand my own experience as a professional. And the idea that I'm having to unlearn things at this stage of my career is really interesting to me. It helps me frame what my experience has been and will likely continue to be because there's so much new in what I do in my role, and that's true of our members. So I really like that, and I really think that's gonna be really a key part of it.
Jeff:Part of that unlearning, if you will, is everything that's happening with artificial intelligence. Every time we turn around, there's the pressure to use it more. There's the understand it more, etcetera, etcetera. Our members are eager, I would say, to engage in AI to help them primarily streamline operations. And you talk about what can be automated versus what should be augmented by human insight.
Jeff:Now can you unpack that distinction for us, and how might it apply to an independent school business office?
Heather:Yeah. So if you look at what we automate, and by what I mean by automate is it's things we let go of. We let technology handle it for us whole cloth. When we do that, and we can look at, even though we haven't had really AI in our lives, but for the last maybe two years, we have had cell phones, smartphones, Google, and we've cognitive offloaded. I don't have to remember anything Facebook will tell me when it's somebody's birthday.
Heather:I don't know how to get me to having it again anywhere. My GPS tell me how to get there. I don't have to remember any phone numbers because I just push a button and dial. All of those things that we've offloaded, we've had a fair amount of atrophy. Can't Hear your phone numbers like you could twenty years ago.
Jeff:I have no idea.
Heather:You can't read them out. So when we talk about automate versus augment, it's not that we're not gonna automate things. We have to be very careful what we automate, because when we automate, we tend to atrophy. What we augment, we tend to enhance. Though, if you're looking at how folks use a very simple example like chat GDP today so if we did this call, and it was something that we wanted to write an article about afterwards.
Heather:If we did this call and we let, you know, Otter or some other bot record the whole call, ask it to summarize, ask it to make key parts, and ask it to write a follow-up article that we could post somewhere. We could do that, and we could get out of that some probably pretty good insights. We'd probably learn from it. But if we just copy and paste what that output was, we've missed a whole opportunity to deal with friction. Like, writing an article is dealing with friction.
Heather:Which words should I use? What things were most important? How do I summarize it? How do I connect it to other things? How do I make it relevant for independent schools?
Heather:So, like, all of those points that the human does in the process of summarizing and synthesizing can be done by AI. And but if we fully let it go to automation and we don't remain engaged, then we atrophy some of our reflection insights that dealing with friction. So I always say to folks, use it, but then read through it and say, okay. What did I miss? Write your own summary and upload that to to chat GDP perplexity cloud, any of them, and say, what am I missing?
Heather:Learn from it. Augment your intelligence. Get a window into your thinking. Don't fully automate some things that are real opportunities for you to learn.
Jeff:So what would you say to folks? Because the specter of AI is that it's gonna replace us. Right? It's gonna replace humans like association CEOs like me or keto speakers and authors like you. It sounds like you don't buy into that.
Jeff:You don't buy into that. We'll be replaced in totality.
Heather:What we do is we chase efficiency, and where can I be more profitable? And all that stuff is great. But what we realize now, especially if you look at the first two years of where AI has been used, it hasn't met a lot of the expectations. It is under delivered. But where we've used it in places where we can keep the human in the loop, and augment, and allow the human to do more as opposed to looking to replace?
Heather:I was at an event, I don't know, a few months ago with CEOs of very large corporations, and they were looking at what AI could do to their workforce. So on one side of the paper, they had twenty twenty five. These are our employees. This is what they do. And then the other side of it, the screen was twenty thirty.
Heather:These were all the things that that some version of AI could replace. And then they had this little band out at the bottom that was, like, 60 something percent they referred to as excess capacity. And I said to them, okay. Get it. One, I think the workforce you have in 2025 and 2030 are two different workforces.
Heather:You can't simply just strip things away from humans. And the other thing is, you're looking at that 60 some odd percent as profit, and that's a mistake. Mhmm. Because if you're just looking at AI replacing things humans do today, it's a failure. What it should be doing is increasing the experience, making the human more productive, making the human more happy, make the human more thriving, making the customer experience superior.
Heather:We got to lift our gaze a little higher and look a little further out on the horizon and stop looking to just make what we do today more efficient because what we do today isn't that great. And so look, it's an indication we could be doing so much better. And the idea is the customer service. We could be doing so much better. In areas of relating to each other, we could be doing so much better.
Heather:So let's strip out the routine and predictable, reduce the unproductive friction, and focus on including more productive friction that helps us learn.
Jeff:I love that. I would say our members in particular, they're business professionals. So they're accounting, finance, tax. There's rights, there's wrongs. And I would say their biggest reticence with AI is the risk of using it, of exposing per potentially their school, exposing information, not getting it right and overreliance.
Jeff:But I think many are starting to break through. What would you say to that group, though, that just wants to keep exploring and has that reticence about the risks involved, especially in a business finance operations lens?
Heather:I would say just pick some areas that you can agree on. This is a really good place to use the technology. And what is it gonna do for us? How is it gonna make us more efficient? How is it gonna make us more insightful?
Heather:How is it gonna serve our customers better? How is it gonna make the school operations work better? And pick an area that you have them do as a pilot. And then I would say to everybody across the boards, you should be using it. You should be learning from it.
Heather:It's a real opportunity for us to all upskill ourselves. Like, when I'm preparing for keynotes all the time, I've got two in the next two days, I've got three next week. I am constantly using Perplexity for research, Cloud to word things better, and it's constantly a cognitive partner for me. It's not slapping what I do. I'm not having it make slides.
Heather:I'm not having it write speeches. But I'm like, I wanna understand a way I can explain this concept better. Can you give me some suggestions from history or science or something? And then I it's a cognitive partner for me. So I would encourage people to do that.
Heather:You're missing a huge opportunity if you don't.
Jeff:You've done it again, a cognitive partner. I love that. And once I let the genie out of the bottle, I found all sorts of utility for me, my work. And I really connect with the extension of the human experience. It's helping me be better in my role, but you have to explore it.
Jeff:You have to get comfortable with it. And I guess you have to know the limitations like you pointed out and also understand the risks. Let's take a break to recognize this month's sponsor, As a longtime member of the MBUA Corporate Circle, for years FACS has supported independent school business leaders with the tools and expertise needed to run strong, sustainable operations. Fax Connected platforms help business officers reduce manual work, improve accuracy, and keep families and staff on the same page. New tools like FAX Data Insights bring key information together so leaders spot patterns sooner and plan with greater confidence.
Jeff:To learn how FAX can strengthen your school's financial operations, visit factsmgt.com. I wanna talk about some of the books you published. I'm gonna start with the adaptation advantage, which was, I believe you wrote it just before the COVID nineteen pandemic. Now just so you know, our schools literally, like many, had to pivot virtually overnight in their service to students, adjust operations, launch remote learning. They basically had to rethink everything.
Jeff:What did you learn from your work with companies and other organizations during that time?
Heather:I learned a couple things. One big thing I learned because I had interviewed the person who wrote the most well respected and well covered book on the nineteen eighteen flu. I had happened to come across what was called it's called pale white rider, because what the nineteen eighteen flu did was it ushered in the electronic era. We had a pause, and then in that pause, you get this acceleration that takes off. That's exactly what was happening in COVID, is we had a pause.
Heather:And in that pause, what you experienced is basically we leapt forward five years in digital transformation in thirty days, not because we can never have done it before, but because we had to do it. It was like forced function. Right?
Jeff:Yes.
Heather:I worked a lot at chem institutions. This instructor won't teach online. This course won't work online. Overnight, two weeks, everything was online. I can't have employees that work remote.
Heather:You can't have employees. So the biggest thing I learned was that in periods of pause, this is giving us an acceleration and transformation into work. So that was the first thing I learned. Second thing I learned is we form habits. After we continue to do something for x number of days, it becomes a habit that can be harder to break.
Heather:So if they want you to go to the gym, they tell you to go every day for, I don't know, sixty days or something like that, or some routine sixty days. Once you've had sixty days, you it's become more of a habit for you. I was counting when I was giving my talks. Okay. Take scientists say it takes, you know, psychology, sixty six days to form a habit.
Heather:We are day 563 since the clip of it. So people started working remotely, and they learned what they could do. They learned how to integrate their life and their work. They learned how to be more comfortable saying, you know what? I don't feel well today.
Heather:I'm gonna work from home. That's a wonderful thing. People used to go in the office and make everybody sick. Now we don't have to do that anymore. There's some great things
Jeff:Or go into schools and make everyone sick. Right?
Heather:Or yeah. Exactly. So we learned that. I think the other thing that we learned, and this one I think we haven't quite remembered, is we had the highest level of engagement that we've had, I think, in many years at the height of the pandemic, is according to Gallup's engagement surveys. And then we have some of the lowest levels now.
Heather:And why was it the highest level at a period of really high stress? It was because we were human. Checked in with people. How are you doing? Are you okay?
Heather:Can you get food? Are you safe? How are your kids doing? How are they adapting? I know you can't see your elderly parents right now.
Heather:And that connection drove more engagement in work. And even though we were physically separated, and everybody thinks we need to get back to the office to get that level of community, that's evidence that it's really about how we show up. And we showed up in that moment. A lot of people wanna say COVID is over. Stop talking about it.
Heather:I'm like, we learned so much from it. We should keep talking about it. We adapted superbly. We did so much better than we thought we were gonna do. We had high levels of engagement.
Heather:We had pretty good business continuity given this black swan event, and we should Sure. Quickly.
Jeff:I really like what you said about the connections and going up. I didn't know that, but you don't really appreciate something till it's taken away from you, and I think that was that craving for human connection. Yeah. And remember our social bubbles that we formed? Yep.
Jeff:So we're like, oh my gosh. You're my five people. You're my five people, and we're gonna get through this together. We can navigate together. But when it's taken away overnight, simply overnight, it's really something in it.
Jeff:And I think when it's taken away and you crave it, you really work hard to do it. And you're right. We were doing crazy things. We were having happy hours where we were all got ingredients, and we were making drinks together. It was just all sorts of things that you would never imagine doing had that not happened.
Heather:Yeah. I was in my house in Boston for one of the years of it, and we would go out on our porch at 07:00 on Fridays and bag pots and pans together, vacate our essential workers. Where's the appreciation for them now? Why have we forgotten to care about each other?
Jeff:So I have a sense because you've really made your case. I have a sense, and it was our concern as well, that we developed all these muscles during the pandemic, but then as soon let's just say, it went away, that there was gonna be a snapback. And I have to be honest with you. We have seen that. We have seen that where people are moving back into everything you just said.
Jeff:We can't have remote work for these positions. We can't teach this class online, etcetera, etcetera, even though we developed incredible muscles to manage that. Is that what you observed with organizations, or what's the breakdown of the companies and organizations you worked with during that time?
Heather:That in the more recent book I put out that came out in 2023 called The Empathy of Manage, was recognizing that the organizations that really did well in the pandemic and and since are organizations that thought about, how do I use empathy to better understand my customers, but also better understand my employees, and how to motivate them? And I was doing my book tour for that, and I was speaking to a bunch of CEOs, and they said to me, yeah, I get it. We have to understand people and feel bad with them and expect less of them. And I thought, how cynical empathy as a performance driver. If you understand your people more, you understand how to help them become self propelled, how to help them become motivated, how to help them achieve higher levels.
Heather:So the organizations that I've worked with that have done that are just flourishing. The ones who are rejecting that and saying, I don't wanna hear about your feelings. Just get back to work. I don't really care. There isn't as much demand for labor right now, so I've cut you over a barrel.
Heather:You're missing the point entirely.
Jeff:And Heather's talking about the empathy advantage, which marked a shift from disruption to human centered leadership. Can we just build on that a little bit, and can you speak to why that empathy gene, if you will, is critical to someone who is a business leader at a pre K through 12 independent school. They are finance as a background and as a profession, as an expertise, but they choose to work, and I say this a lot, they choose to work in an environment that has kindergarteners and high school seniors going off to college and faculty and staff. Why would that empathy that you speak about be such a critical leadership skill for that audience?
Heather:We've got some real interesting generational things going on, and now gen no generation is a monolith, so I don't subscribe to all that, but all boomers are like this and all Jim X are like but we have to pay attention to what a different generation's experiences were. So there's a lot of dismissal of Gen z, which you might have some Gen z just joining your workforce. Now Gen z has a larger share of the workforce than boomers, and all I hear is people complain about it. So I started making a list at one point and say, where were they in their life stages when different world events happened? Born in 09/11, so they never know what time before the war on terror.
Heather:Global financial crisis happened when they were, like, in grade school. Many of them, that's like being a depression era, baby. And then from that point on, which is all their conscious memories, social media, which is just fun house mirrors of experiences where you're seeing everything filtered in a way that seems surreal in some regards. Mass school shootings became a norm, so whether or not you had one at your school, and I hope to God you didn't, you had drills, so you felt the fragility of life. We've never had a generation that went through this much consistent drifting from one conflict to another, so they really don't know what time will that work.
Heather:The UN climate report came out when they were really young. You've spoke to a lot of Gen Zers who will say, I'm not gonna have children on the planet. It's not gonna be there, or I'll never be able to afford a home. Generational stagnation. And then a lot of their adulting years, whether it's finishing their education, or proms, graduations, going to college, all in a pandemic, you put all those things together and you understand why they're asking why for things.
Heather:If you tell them to do something, they will say, yeah, but why? They wanna understand the why behind the what. And some people find that offensive. Just do what I told you to do it. No.
Heather:They wanna understand because there might be a better way to do it. They're very entrepreneurial. They're very sort of self directed. They're most educated and diverse generation we've ever had, and they came out of those experiences. Now you got alpha, and alpha's in your school systems, but they will be part of the work short of course in another five years.
Heather:They've been growing up almost entirely on screens, so there's something called virtual autism that some of them have, which is they don't know social cues because most of their life was mitigated through screens, at least in their real developmental years, whether it be COVID or just practice that we just hand a kid a tablet when they're crying. So understanding some of those differences in communication styles, differences in interactions really takes an empathy because their experiences were very different, whether it's from a technological standpoint or a societal and cultural standpoint or generational standpoint than yours. So when you go into any environment, but particularly a school where you've got even younger generation, which I know they can we've been named yet, that comes after alpha. What are their experiences? They're gonna be the AI generation.
Heather:We haven't named them yet. Having empathy to work with people who are different than you, a culture that's different than what you're from, that runs on a different force continuum, and then having generations that part can be a workforce, but also the other part being what's coming up through your school system, having very different experience than you did, and empathy is key to connecting with them.
Jeff:I think for sure. You reminded me of a time when I remember my daughter's 19 now, but when she was a toddler, I'll never forget the first time she walked up to a TV screen and started swiping it. Yeah. Because that was intuitively what you did with screens. It was a touch screen, I think that's one example of any what's one thing attendees of the twenty twenty six MBUA annual meeting can look forward to in your keynote, which is closing our meeting, by the way?
Heather:Okay. So I don't know the exact subject yet, but what I do is the three story format because I was subscribed to Angus Fletcher's story thinking, which is prioritize the exceptional. So I'm gonna tell you, like, three random stories. Like, one of my if I do solve tomorrow's problem, I'm gonna tell you about a mop, a burrito, and some hermit crabs. If I lean through uncertainty, I'm gonna tell you about a fish, some waves, a bicycle.
Heather:They're all like these random stories, but they each encapsulate something that gets your attention and gets you to shift your perspective. And it's followed by a lot of research and data that gets you to go, wait a second. Maybe I didn't really understand that the way that I thought I did. And then those three stories come together at the end, and the most consistent thing I hear across all my talks is I didn't get it that way before. And I put it that way before.
Heather:I didn't see that opportunity before, and now I know what to do, and I feel less scared, and I feel more excited.
Jeff:That's what you did for me in this conversation. I really appreciate that. Thank you for joining us today. We're very excited to welcome you to Orlando this March. To our listeners, don't miss Heather McGowan's keynote.
Jeff:Dozens of learning and networking opportunities plus the Business Solutions Showcase at the twenty twenty six MBUA Annual Meeting, March at the Orlando World Center Marriott. Register now at mboaannualmeeting.org. And remember, MBOA is your partner in leading the business of independent schools. We're here to help you thrive in every aspect of school business operations. And thank you again to FACS for sponsoring this episode of the Net Assets podcast.
Jeff:So until next time, thanks for listening to the Net Assets Podcast.