Powerful Collaborations with Stewart Levine
Hugh Ballou: Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. Russell, here we are again. Week after week, we have amazing people. Yet today, this is a friend from years ago. I sent out an email asking people if they wanted to contribute to the magazine or be on the show. Immediately, Stewart Levine responded. How are things in Denver today, Russell?
Russell Dennis: It’s a little cloudy, a little bit cooler than it has been. But we are in the fall season. All is well otherwise. Welcome, Stewart. Thank you for coming.
Stewart Levine: My pleasure to be with you guys today. I will be landing in Denver early tomorrow morning and then driving up to Vail for some American Bar Association meetings. Interesting, because I have a new book called Becoming the Best Lawyer You Can Be: How to Maintain Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, and Mental Health. The American Bar Association, 27 authors, I curated it and edited it. I’m actually very excited about it.
Hugh: Look at that. Let’s back up. I’m sure there is people watching who want to know who this guy is anyway. Why don’t you tell them, Stewart?
Stewart: Thank you, Hugh. Here’s the short synopsis. I practiced law for about 10 years in a reasonably traditional number of contexts, starting off in the New Jersey Attorney General’s office. Then I got tired of fighting with people. And it was before the whole ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution, movement came on board. So I decided to do a little career change. I spent six years inside of AT&T as they were going through huge organizational change and transformation with major law firms as my clients, not in a legal sense, but in an account representative sense.
On a parallel track, I started divorce meditation because I wanted to use the skills I had developed as a lawyer. I learned a lot about communication, about collaboration, about conflict resolution working with couples getting divorced because no one is in worse shape than that. Over time, I moved that work over into working with organizations, teens, organizational transformational cultural change work, individual coaching. For the last 30 years, that essentially is what I have been doing.
The last 10 years, I have learned a ton of teaching programs and all the soft skills, relationship skills on behalf of the American Management Association. I have done a number of collaborations over time with various other individuals, all in the organizational space. That is the short synopsis, except I have also written a couple of best-selling books. The first one is called Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration. It was endorsed by Stephen Covey. It was named one of the best business books of 1998, second edition came out in 2008. A follow-up called The Book of Agreement: 10 Essential Elements for Getting the Results You Want. That was endorsed by a number of notable people. That’s the short answer. You and I met in the context of both being on the faculty of an organization called CEO Space. It’s a pleasure to see your face again, Hugh.
Hugh: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for stepping up when I sent out that probing email. Actually, we were standing in those groups out in the lobby, and someone was addressing the group. I whipped out my draft of my workbook, Dealing with High Performance Teams, and I said, “Would you do me a favor and review this? Tell me what it’s missing.” You sent me an email saying there was nothing about agreements in here. So I asked if I could quote your book of the 10EssentialElementsofAgreementsso I could give you attribution. I refer to those all the time. I send people to Amazon to get that book. It’s really a treasure.
We are speaking to people who are in the social benefit/for-purpose sector. They are clergy running a church or synagogue. They are executive directors running a for-purpose community-based organization. They are running a membership organization. I see a lot of conflict because people haven’t been really