Focus on Purpose & Mission with Mick Fleming

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Brandon Burton 0:00
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I’m excited about this week’s guest. Our guest for today is Mick Fleming. In addition to serving as the CEO for the primary National Association for Chamber of Commerce professionals for 16 years, Mick has provided strategic planning, consulting support, and direct motivation to hundreds of chambers and associations of all sizes. He retired from ACCE at the end of 2017 and launched chamber counselor LLC. In addition to his Cornell University degree, Mick is a graduate of Duke University’s credit bearing Leadership Program, as well as the Aspen Institute’s immersion program for C level leaders. He was a 15 year member of the US chambers committee of 100 and the Council of State Chambers in 2018. Chamber led chamber legend Frank Ryle presented Mick with the pillar of chamber Professional Award. During eight years of service as Vice Chairman of the world chambers Federation, he worked on collaborative projects with chambers in the world’s largest cities and nations. Throughout his tenure Mick championed initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion in the chamber and business worlds. His writings include making your chamber make a difference. And the horizons initiative, which we’ve referenced often, as well as a key section of the retooling for growth book, as well as numerous white papers and curriculum development. Mick and his wife, Barbara, who are both natives of buffalo have resided in Northern Virginia for 22 years now,

Mick, as I mentioned, I’m I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber tap podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and friends out there listening and share something interesting about yourself that maybe we haven’t heard before.

Mick Fleming 2:55
Well, I have I don’t have a resume, I have a twisted past. That’s what I have. So I’ll tell you what I can I appreciate the invitation. I’ve known about the chat for a long time and love some of the stuff that you have some of it’s very practical. I mean, you know, finance stuff, and, you know, governance stuff. And so I think those things are extremely valuable, because a lot of people like I did back into the careers of chamber work. Almost everybody in the business has done something else first. And so I think it’s really great to have those basics. And, you know, there are people who can scare you to death with their talks about compliance and so forth. But just to have a, you know, a peer talk about these things, I think is really is really more valuable. So what can I tell you about something interesting about my past? I was in Jackson college. And so I and Cornell is a huge institution in New York state. So having gone there, I got a lot of help. People always talk about that left your first job and your second job and that, you know, so many people don’t have that kind of help. And I did. And then of course, I had proved that I was worth it for the next. Whatever tenure I stayed. I had some other weird things on the side. I I never ran a chamber until 2019 where I ran one for a summer as an interim CEO. From my chamber, my community said in 2019 That was 2019 Okay, it was it was a great awakening because I find out I found out why none of you sleep at night. And the chamber was having difficulties. And I’ll bring up something else later about the necessity of keeping the board and engaged in the in the purpose stuff. But anyway, I had a, I’ve had a great run. And I started off as a teacher and coach and moved on from there to other things got my first association job. I don’t know, I think in like 1980, or something like that. Okay, 82. And that was at the Business Council of New York State, which is a combination of the manufacturers and the chamber and economic developers across the country, across the state. And so that’s what I did to get into this business. I actually got in because they entered this. Somebody entered me for this distinguished business advocate thing when I was working in a publishing shop, okay. And so I was one of the winners. That was the Business Council and I used that, to get acquainted with them. They had a magazine, I was a publisher, and it all worked from there. And three different jobs. Their first one was publishing. Second one was general marketing communications. And the last one was public policy where I learned how to come up with new euphemisms for lobbying. Right, right. Yeah, Director of Government Relations. Yeah. All those kinds of words, instead of telling your mother you’re a lobbyist.

Brandon Burton 6:52
That’s right. Now, that’s a great perspective. So normally, I have people tell about, you know, their chamber size perspective, you know, scope of work, budget, that sort of thing, but it’s a treat to have you on because I always get a little bit worried when I see people like yourself, you come to the towards the end of your chamber career and you don’t get ready to retire. And I think Darren I missed having Mick on the podcast. And then as luck would have it, our paths cross and glad that we’re able to get you on today because I know you you bring a great amount of knowledge and experience as well. After leading ACC as well. So our our topic for discussion today is going to be around the importance of chambers focusing on their purpose and mission. And we’ll dive into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Alright, Mick we’re back. So I mentioned before the break that we will focus our discussion today around focus the importance for chambers to focus on their mission and purpose. You’ve had experience working with chambers, not only throughout the United States, but throughout the world. And I’m sure you’ve seen maybe some of these, some of the mission creep that comes in and just share with us maybe some of those experiences that have kind of been red flags. It’s like, oh, this is not your lane to get into. And, and you know, it’s come back to where you should be focused at?

Mick Fleming 11:05
Well, I think it’s good to raise this sometime last, we’ll do it here. I produced a speech and a presentation and booklet on it was called The Seven Deadly Sins. And what if you could know now what you’ll know, then? And so I came up with these. I actually, a guy from South Carolina was the one who came, Chavez said, Mick, you know, all these stories, you talk to all these people on the way out of their jobs? Could you tell what, what did they tell you. So that’s I came up with this. And the number one thing that I came up with in terms of the seven sins was almost universally across everybody I talked to was less lack of focus. And they just get hold too wide. And their resources run too thin. When that starts to happen, and they also get more disorganized, they don’t know which things are priority. So I really try to concentrate on that when I can talk to boards of directors, especially when I did those. And I still do some outreach and and do you know, day to day long sessions, about 90% of the time, they work great. And about 10% of the time, the exec doesn’t last very long after the session. I’m not harsh, it’s just, you know, when sometimes it’s just somebody finds out what they didn’t know, board or whatever. So that that context thing is really important. So when I talk about purpose, I always talk about purpose first, and, and, and mission second. So as you move into this thing, to try to write strategic disadvantages and marketing.

Brandon Burton 13:05
So I was asked maybe before diving into the first and second purpose and mission, how do you see them being different? You know, some people might hear purpose and mission and think, yeah, we’ve got a mission statement. And that’s our purpose. And it just blends together. So how do you differentiate that purpose and mission, then we can get in a little deeper

Mick Fleming 13:25
using Disney did a great job Disney Institute on that very question. And they brought in people that they really know about these things, three, including the guy from Hewlett Packard, and all these things, actually Packard himself. So here’s the thing, they the big thing about purpose is that there’s a very good chance that that purpose should last for 100 years. And a mission is who you represent, and what you’re going to do for them. And so you can almost think of two different stairways leading up to the Why did a purpose. One is this overall expectations and and what do we want to be? And what are our principles? And what’s the community about? How can we help the community while helping the members? That’s the that’s the big purpose statement. And then the other one is, you know, well, how do we help these people? The business people themselves as opposed to, you know, changing the world. How do we get to a why for that work? And if you put those two together at the end, you got to why and for both, both areas. The one actually for the work is easy. You’re, but you have to take it as stairways stair steps. You start off with something, let’s say, like, example might be, you know, we convene business and community and you take the next step and that the why for that is one voice is better than 30,000 voices or 50 voices. So we’ll have more strength than you have to get away from that. Well, what are we trying to do with that influence? And then you keep moving up that chain until you get to really the epitome, which is, you know, why do we even bother with all this stuff? And so I think that’s the way on purpose. It’s much it’s grander, it’s something that will last. It’s not subject to the whims of the next strategic planning group, or the next

Brandon Burton 15:53
CEO. Right, that purpose should help drive those strategic planning sessions. Right. Understanding that purpose. And you see a lot of chambers have mission statements, but you don’t see a whole lot. They have purpose statements, right? Yes,

Mick Fleming 16:08
some of the mission ones are good enough that they make. Yeah, it’s aspirational in that way. The other problem, I think with it is that it’s I shouldn’t say, Brian, look at the opportunity related to this is that you got to figure out what you’re selling. And for many people in the chamber world, everything that nothing in the mission is ever mentioned on a sales call. What’s mentioned in a sales call is you get to do this, you get by that you get to be a sponsor for this, we will take you on a trip to capitol, it’s all services. And the mission is, is not to have a great golf tournament. So and the mission, the mission doesn’t even have to have a magazine unless there’s a purpose for the magazine. So if you don’t have that, then and your staff isn’t trained, and you aren’t, aren’t focusing on those things that are bigger and more meaningful, it’ll be very hard to get big contributions, I’ll call it. Revenue above the rate card. Yeah, whatever your rate sheet is, anybody above that? Is somebody who’s either getting something from the organization specifically, like help with some transportation problem or something. And then the other thing is they’ll have they get to ask, you know, those people get asked for lots of stuff and sponsorship and stuff. And they mostly though it’s kind of a contribution, even a sponsorship, they there’s no way to measure how much value that is to the company. So those are the things that I think that’s why the mission and purpose are so important is that once in a while you got to sit across especially from big, a potentially big map or, or big sponsor, and talk about the things in those two stairways. Right.

Brandon Burton 18:14
So and I can see where somebody in the community may come to the chamber and say the chamber needs to head up this initiative. Because what we believe the chamber is well connected, you can make this happen. And so they want to dump it on the chamber. And in some instances, maybe that aligns with the purpose of what the chamber is trying to accomplish. But it doesn’t align with the mission. Right? Right. So to be able to be clear on where that fits, and if it really, if it fits both criteria, first, your purpose and then your mission. But then being well enough, connected throughout the community that you can say maybe this isn’t meant for the chamber to do but this organization can help and we’ll support it. However, we can

Mick Fleming 18:59
just have to watch out a little bit if you inherit some of those things, right. One of the things that I tell new execs or, or people who want to move into the business is to are getting CEO interview. You have to find out how, you know, unrestricted, the unrestricted. On your finances, how unrestricted is it. My best example is up in Seattle, and they had this one program, I think it was a homeless program. And they got this money to see see to get it going. And it was this expectation that the chamber would be doing this and they didn’t have the money. They didn’t know why they were doing it. So that can be a new exec comes in and says Where am I going to come up with that $100,000 a year. So I think those things so you got to be a little careful though. There was another place down in Baton Rouge where the new CEO said I’m not going to, we’re not going to do this Christmas parade, what does that have to do with the chamber. And so he says, We’re not going to do that. And the next day, the front page of chamber kills Santa Claus. You got to watch out, you got to sometimes some of the best things to do though is to farm it out, maybe to an aspirational organization, not just one that’s through one of your big hot shots. But, you know, an organization, maybe the Community Foundation, or sometimes it can even be youth, young people.

Brandon Burton 20:38
So we laugh about that the Chamber killing Santa Claus, but really, it’s it is an opportunity to tell the community what it is the chamber does, they’re not about the parties and pageants and parades, but you’re about meaningful work, that’s going to move the needle. So I can see where it may have a negative context and spin to it.

Mick Fleming 21:00
Jim Collins who I like wrote, Good to Great, here’s the draw these three circles come together in Venn diagram. And he says, You’re, you’re good at it. You like it, and somebody will pay you for it. And the nonprofit world, it’s down your mission, you’re the best your only provider, and you have a business model. And so those are the things people have to think about, I should spend at least some of their time in the center of that those circles. Yeah. I like to talk for a minute if I could about this. thing, I learned a couple of things. One is a policy imperative. Now, we’re chambers, there might have been a time when it was that you didn’t have to talk about the issues, and you could just get people’s butts in the seats. But I think especially for meaningful investors that want to make the community better and the business community better. I think there’s some things that have to be done on policy, not necessarily politics, I realized that it’s an overflow of lots of times, but policy work can be written in a way that doesn’t insult and it allows the chamber to be the sane middle. Some people think that’s an impossibility now, because everything’s so fractured. But I still think the same same little is the place that chambers can play in policy work without getting their heads cut off. And if they don’t lay there, somebody’s gonna say, Well, you don’t stand for anything that. So I think it’s important.

Brandon Burton 22:44
Yeah, I think if you keep that focus on what’s pro business, what’s good for the businesses in your community, it’s hard to even get into the political side of it, if all you’re doing is focusing on the business aspect and the impact of businesses. And that’s your that’s what you’re standing for.

Mick Fleming 23:01
Right. The only thing I wanted to mention was the textual leadership role. In the Duke thing that I went through, there was six domains of leadership. And in talking about the future, for chambers, the biggest thing that changed out of my life after going through that was one of the six paradigms of leadership. It’s called contextual leadership. And that’s, I didn’t know that until I went through that I didn’t know it. I’m 35 employees, I didn’t know they didn’t know what was going on. And of my 30 board members, I didn’t know they didn’t know. And getting transparent about as much as you can, that doesn’t involve you know, hurting somebody or HR or something. But being transparent, just made my life so much easier, and being taking time to explain our purpose. And our, our mission meant so much. And my life got so much easier. I mean, I was in a position where I was they were so out of touch. I was so out of touch. And I would give them the same assignment to two different people. Yeah, I, you know, they did not they didn’t object. So, it got some of that is because of lack of focus. Yeah, it was I was doing things that were, you know, offline, I do some things that we would just staff would be sent to do things that were not necessarily get on the mission. Yeah, I don’t want to I don’t want to cut off the hobbyist thing that you guys have to do programming to make some money. I would say though, that if you include staff time, it doesn’t make much money. So they program you run should have value above money, because it’s really not a huge margin that you have from any of the events you run except possible your maybe two biggest community wide events. You know, the awards dinner or whatever you call it, usually make some money is probably one of the thing that makes some real money. But the smaller grouping things and the committee running and all those kinds of things are usually they have to have a value that is there’s a real binding thing for the members. Right. And that’s that matters. But yeah.

Brandon Burton 25:39
So I wanted to circle back he had mentioned at the beginning talking about board engagement. So it Do you want to circle back to that at this point about keeping the board engaged when it comes to purpose and mission?

Mick Fleming 25:54
Well, I think an awful lot of people on boards think that their contribution to the chamber or their contribution to the community, is to have their name on the list of directors. They think that’s the thing. And they don’t think that they don’t necessarily think they’ve got other work to do. And I understand that. I tell people that if I had a large company CEO on my board, I would much rather have them make three phone calls a year, then show up every month or every other month for a board meeting, right? One, we got to economic development or economic loss issue to work on. Second one, we got an issue in politics, we got to work. And third, we got a mission with a member we’re going to lose, I would rather have that than have them show up everywhere, anywhere. So the board that matters is there’s this activist group, I call it the after school group or the detention group. And they’re the ones who actually care about which way you go. Which way, it’s not necessarily the Executive Committee. It could be somebody in any level, and you get a handful of those people. And you can probably manage the organization. Other than the representative stuff, you have to have some boards that those five people are whatever number you pick, they don’t have to be elitist. They just have to be with you and shaping you and you shape them. And I think that’s the critical part and part of the board, then they also can say yes, when you do a strategic planning change, and you’re no longer going to do the Christmas parade and you’re going to instead take a trip to Capitol. That’s something that they can help you with that gets talked about. And I don’t get blindsided and the board doesn’t get blindsided with those that insulation that you have from some people who get you on. Another thing, I think, is that it’s very important to figure out your terms of service. And what terms mean, and how far out to stretch the board group and you know, as your seventh chair elect already decided. Elect elect elect. And one of the reasons for that is that when you name somebody, a future leader or chair elect, you’re going to be doing work for to train for two execs, for for two CEOs. So you’ve got to watch out. The only thing I think that chambers lose focus on is they do things not just that are off mission, but they do things that they just don’t know how to say no to because the board asked somebody on the board asked for it. Right. You know, I’m on the heart fund, I think you guys could really help out if you came up with volunteers and did the blah, blah, blah. And how do you say no, how do you say no to the hospital? How do you say no to the school? And so carving out your niche, and each of those things is, is the only way to keep the peace? Probably unless you can use your five specialists?

Brandon Burton 29:20
Yeah, well, I think it goes back to just being familiar yourself with what your purpose and mission is. Because, again, going back to so many chambers have a mission statement, but they let that mission creep come in. And then when you’re in a board meeting, and the school district says hey, I think that you guys need to get volunteers together for this and put together a whole new program. If you don’t have that mission and purpose on the front of your mind, then it’s very easy to just kind of go along with it. Instead of saying, yeah, we’ve got more important work to do, but maybe we can put you in contact with people that that can run with this.

Mick Fleming 29:56
Now the most important program we ran in that summer that I worked in The Chamber of business is they had a great thing with the school that fit perfectly into the mission. That was an ethics day. Or even maybe two days for seniors in high school, okay. And the presenters and sponsors were all people who gave a crap about that, you know, accountants and lawyers and, and ministers. And I mean, it was, it was wonderful program. All you had to do is say we’re doing it and money would come in. Yeah, I’m not saying that’s what everybody should do. But see, find those ones where there’s a obvious audience and interest, for

Brandon Burton 30:41
sure. So covered a lot of a lot of great stuff. In our conversation today, I wanted to see if there is maybe one tip or action item that you would share for a chamber who’s wanting to take their chamber up to the next level, what would you offer them?

Mick Fleming 31:00
Well, I just got back a couple of weeks ago from the winter Institute. I talked about future chambers and associations. And I’ll tell you the thing that as I worked on that script in that show, the thing that came to mind most is that change, change, change, change, change is hard to work with. And if you have credit, imagine the things that you couldn’t imagine the things that people might think today that was going on 10 years ago, or five years ago. So you’ve been through, by the way, congratulations to everybody in the chamber row for getting through the pandemic. I mean, I don’t know how you did it. I didn’t retire because of the pandemic. But I’m really glad I wasn’t.

Brandon Burton 31:46
Well, they had this really good reason initiative, Dilip to so

Mick Fleming 31:50
very engineering and did a great job. Here that including getting all of you some PPP money. Okay, so here’s my tip, the Navy SEALs used to go into attack, and they think they had everything planned, and have all these weapons on how many boats we’re gonna need all that kind of stuff and to get to the beach, and somebody’s playing beach soccer. And they can’t even come through without, you know, collateral damage. Or some, you know, warlord died and they’re having to park a parade down the middle of town. They can’t. So they finally figured out that we’re going to have to do is to make themselves ready to handle whatever comes next. But the whole strategy should be how do I make it. So I’ll be able to handle whatever comes next. That means I gotta look at personnel, I got all the resources, all this kind of stuff, you’re gonna be realistic, I don’t think you have to say, we’re going to know everything about everything. Just you know, people can project a little bit for you and help you find those issues where

your strategy is, are we going to be ready. We don’t know if it’s going to be a flood

virus, a war that got a slump. The loss of our CEO, it could be all of those things. One that you don’t have to worry about. It’s like a scandal with your Chairman, Chairman of the Board, you can do about that. You don’t want to plan for it unless you want to do a program for dealing with the press. So I think that that’s the best thing I can say is you don’t know what’s changed. It’s common. strategy isn’t like all these to do list. It’s, How are we going to be ready,

Brandon Burton 33:36
be ready for the unexpected? expected to come? It’s gonna come. So I’m excited at this next question, I have to ask you. Every one I have on the show, I like asking them how they see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward. A lot of times the answers reference the horizon initiative. So I’m excited to hear you know, at this point here in 2023. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Mick Fleming 34:11
I wish it wouldn’t have been so correct. Raising my prediction. I mean, you know, the importance of international dealing with your organization. Can anybody see that not being continuing to grow, that your community, your employers? So that’s the kind of thing I think. And that strategy of being ready for whatever comes next is, think about that. You can think about your own issues. If you already have some say what’s gonna happen with that interstate that somebody’s directing our way or that major shipping change that we’re going to have warships in our report or whatever it is. And think that through if there’s if there’s the likelihood of some kind of military issue is, you know, the Mountain Group in Northern New York and Watertown, are they likely to be called in? Let’s see about that. I think that’s the prep thing you can think about. I also think that the be I was really surprised, honestly, that the last two comments, one economic and one personal crisis didn’t lead to more consolidation. Right. You know, the 2009 thing, I thought everybody was going to be scrambling to just, you know, collect whatever they can collect, and, and hook up with anybody that could hook up. And this time, I thought there’d be more regional linkage, or just expanding? I don’t see the themes. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I don’t see that happening a lot in the US, you know, the whole all of Great Britain has 22 chamber. Really? Yeah. And, you know, we have, we have one, sometimes we have, you know, one is the county chamber with this name, and the other one is the city chamber with that name, right. I think some of that is going to have to be looked at, not just the volume, but of chambers. But you know, there’s divisions of labor that can happen all over the place. And, you know, saying that you’re, you know, arm and arm with the Economic Development Group, even though they get all the glory. That’s not a bad thing to get hooked up to, if there’s a publisher in town, and they’re doing these things that are about, you know, health day, and they all run these business publications, especially run all these special things for accountants and everybody. So I think finding partners is going to be a big deal, whether it’s formalized, or in formalized, I think that it’s going to be necessary. I think programming is going to have to grow up to a level where it’s better than not necessarily better, because in person is always better. But at least as good as or almost as good as the best you can get on the web.

Brandon Burton 37:31
Right. Now, I appreciate that, that insight and thought that you’ve given to that to the continued look forward to the future of chambers. But Mick as we wrap up here, today, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information, anyone that’s, you know, wondering where you’re at, or how to get in contact with you what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect?

Mick Fleming 37:53
Okay. I think the easiest way to get me as email and that’s mick@mickfleming.com, pretty hard to forget. Let me as one eminent and my phone numbers not off limits. So if somebody wants to talk to me about a specific topic or want to invite me to town, the numbers 703-216-5525. And if I’m not the person that fits best with what you might need, I know somebody who is so we can help with that. I do like to still go. I’d said I did the institute thing this year, I still like to go out and work with individual chambers. Once 2020 came, I had two great years of retired business 18 and 19. It was great. March 12 2020, the government announced all the shutdowns March 13 My three clients for the summer went away. So I kind of said, you know, I’m not gonna try to push the wagon up the hill, I’m gonna just take what comes in instead of marketing. Yeah. So that I, you know, I still like to do it. I’m not expensive. And also, most things are pretty short. Yeah, it’s like a day and a half and you get rid of me some of the other accounts, consultants, you know, they, they want to lifetime contracts, right. So I’m, I’m quick, I can do it. Topically or I can do it. The overall stuff like we talked about today.

Brandon Burton 39:42
That’s great. And I’ll get that in our show notes as well for this episode. And maybe just a side note, make is part of the chamber chat champions Facebook group as well, where we post each episode in and allow for some conversation around the topics of each podcast episode. So that may be another way where you can find Mick online. So, Mick, thank you for setting aside time with us today. Like I said, I’ve been looking forward to having you on the podcast. I’m glad it worked out. And thank you for the great information, valuable information that you deliver today. I really appreciate it.

Mick Fleming 40:18
Well, Brandon was great to be asked. Thank you for doing this.

Brandon Burton 40:21
Oh, you’re welcome.

Mick Fleming 40:23
This is not something that an individual will take on very often for an entire industry. And you’ve got both some guts and some brains to do it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 40:35
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Have you ever thought about creating a podcast for your chamber? We always hear about how chambers need to be storytellers. What better way is there to tell the stories of your members and the work of your chamber than through a podcast?

Your audience is waiting to hear from you as a convener of leaders and influencers champion for business and catalyst for change within your community.

I just launched a Chamber Podcast Course with the goal to get your very own podcast started within 30 days. Visit chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot. To learn more and to enroll in the chamber podcast course today.