Wendy Weissman - Leading the Way with Friends of the Children

Friends of the Children has been transforming the lives of Portland’s most vulnerable children for more than two decades through a truly revolutionary long-term, intensive mentoring program. Wendy Weissman, inspired by the organization's success, signed on to work at FOTC as an Encore Fellow during October 2011 – October 2012.Paul Speer, the first director of the SVP Portland Encore Fellows Program, introduced Terri Sorensen, President of Friends of the Children, to the program and encouraged FOTC to participate. “I thought it sounded fantastic, to have highly skilled, recently retired folks come in and help us,” Sorensen said. “The skills they had were things that were missing here or things we didn’t have enough staff to do.”

“Encore fellows being older and later in their career, gives them a head start,” Sorensen said. “People respected and were eager to learn from Wendy.”

Professionally trained and paid mentors, called Friends, make a twelve and a half year commitment to each child served by FOTC, selecting them in kindergarten and guiding them through high school graduation.

Staff invited Wendy to meetings right away and she became a regular participant and contributor. The program team, which manages, plans and delivers program services, also promptly invited her to join them.

Wendy’s initial project work included supervisory, management and leadership skills training at FOTC.  She later expanded on that charter to help the organization think more rigorously about process and program improvements, i.e., how they use their internal data and evaluate the success of new ideas.  “While FOTC was already a very outcome-based organization, corporate America is also good at taking out waste, cost, and inefficiencies,” Wendy said. “The organization was keen to learn about and apply some of those practices that are common in corporate America.”

Wendy also offered training and perspective in how organizations of any size successfully manage change, enabling them to be more deliberate as they grow and evolve.

In one case she partnered with Jack Vollert, an FOTC Team Leader, to apply change management principles to their Adolescent Program.

“The bumps being experienced with the introduction of the Adolescent Program mirrored bumps which can emerge during the teen years, so we could apply learning in a lot of ways,” Wendy suggested.

Wendy also helped FOTC get more rigorous in its leadership development. “One of the needs we had was to go deeper with organizational human resources,” Sorensen said. “We did annual performance reviews and provided coaching, but what we were lacking was a leadership development program. We really wanted to do that with our whole leadership team.”

Wendy recognized the emerging need to implement a succession planning and leadership development process, as FOTC’s Portland chapter was deeply involved in changes going on at the national level. Work contents, organizational structure and a new shared services model was on the horizon during Wendy’s Fellowship, with impact for FOTC’s Executive Director, and its leaders in HR, Finance and Development.

Under Wendy’s tutelage with FOTC’s 20-member management staff, the organization developed a leadership development process with an emphasis on in-place “stretch assignments.” These strengthen leadership skills so people could grow their talents and responsibilities within their current roles, contribute more broadly and be ready to step up as openings occur.  “FOTC puts a huge amount of energy and mindshare into investing in our short people (high risk kids),” Wendy said. “But we weren’t investing in the tall people (the staff) in quite the same way.”

Sorensen is fulsome in her praise of Wendy’s contributions in leadership and succession planning. It helped FOTC do things much quicker than it could have on its own, Sorensen said, because Wendy had the knowledge and skills to present a framework and taught FOTC how to incorporate the product into it’s system so it wasn’t a one-time deal.

“Wendy made us really find out what our people are dreaming about, what they’d like to be doing in their career, and then figure out a match with our strategic plan,” Sorensen said. “It makes people happier and it moves the organization forward. This has gotten down to nearly all the workers in the organization now. It’s really been transformative for us.”

Sorensen also praised Wendy as an executive coach. “If I needed someone to bounce something off of, I would use Wendy,” Sorensen said. “That was really nice. The Encore Program is a valuable resource for non-profits, avoiding the need for them to go through a time-consuming and potentially expensive process of finding an experienced person who would be a good fit, Sorensen said.

Wendy believes she made a positive difference at Friends of the Children and praises the Encore Fellowship Program for allowing her to share her professional skills in a meaningful way. “The gifts we received in our corporate careers can keep giving, long after we’ve left corporate America,” she said “We can apply them in our communities for big payoffs, really big payoffs. I didn’t fully appreciate that before I became an Encore Fellow.”