Alyssa Gallagher is a master practitioner for The Wiseman Group and the head of BTS Spark, North America, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting the development of leaders in education and the nonprofit sector. She has worked with a wide spectrum of leaders, ranging from early career leaders in schools to seasoned executives in Fortune 500 companies. Alyssa enjoys working with leaders to design strategies that leverage the capability, creativity, and intelligence of everyone on their team.
First off, please tell us a little bit about yourself, and did you ever go to camp?
Yes, I did. I grew up a Southern Californian, but every summer I was able to go up into the mountains to summer camp. And I was a camp counselor once upon a time. I enjoyed those experiences, and now, as a parent, I love for my kids to have those experiences too.
I actually come from the world of K-12 education. I started working as a teacher, and I loved working with kids. Then I moved into administration, and I was a principal. I always wanted to create environments and learning experiences that were really meaningful for students.
It’s funny looking back. I never set out to progress into leadership, but I ended up there through wanting to have a bigger impact. I spent 20 years in the public school system working as everything from kindergarten teacher to assistant superintendent of schools. As an assistant superintendent of schools, I was charged with creating learning experiences across multiple schools and no longer just elementary and junior high. I was always looking to improve my leadership abilities and would read books. So more than a decade ago I stumbled upon Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers. It really struck me because it was all about how you get the best out of people — as a leader, how you leverage creativity and insight capability from other people. The book stopped me in my tracks, because usually when you read leadership books they’re all about being aspirational, and, yes, Multipliers is very aspirational, but it also does a phenomenal job of highlighting with the very best of intentions how we as leaders also can unintentionally shut down intelligence. I was a well-intentioned leader. I was trying to do right by my principals, my teachers, my students — and yet, for the first time, it was like a light was shining on all of the ways that I was shutting down their intelligence.
So I dug into who Liz was an author, and I reached out to her. I said to her, “I need you to come work with my principals.” This developed not only a friendship, but a work relationship where I realized that I actually really enjoyed learning and development, working with adults, and getting them to really think and reflect.
The through line of my career is teacher. It’s just that who I teach has changed a little bit.
Explain a little bit more about what, or who, a multiplier is.
Multipliers is a leadership framework; it’s a way of thinking about our behaviors as leaders. And multipliers are those leaders who are able to get the very best from people on their team. They expect the best, and people want to give multipliers the best. They know how to tap into intelligence, creativity, and capabilities, and as a result of the way they treat and inspire people, they get more from them.
Is there a flip side to that?
Yes, on the flip side, diminishers are those leaders who unintentionally squash the intelligence of people around them. They can still be well-intentioned, but they don’t create an environment that brings out the best in people.
What is the fundamental difference in a multiplier style of leadership?
Whatever position we find ourselves in as a leader, it’s about looking around and noticing how our behaviors impact others. And that’s a little bit of a flip, because a lot of times what gets us to our leadership position is not the same behavior that we need to exhibit to get the best out of others.
It’s no longer me, me, me. I think that’s one of the biggest shifts that multipliers make — understanding how their behaviors impact other people and changing their behaviors to impact people more positively. And what I love — and why I think it’s so applicable — is that these multiplier behaviors trickle down into every organization. Multiplier behaviors are really about bringing out the best in all people. As a parent — I have two boys, one in junior high and one in high school — I can leverage those multiplier behaviors to bring out the best in my kids. Teachers can leverage the same behaviors to bring out the best in their students. Camp counselors can leverage them to bring out the best in campers. All of us are leaders in some context and can positively influence others.
I read a blog that you wrote entitled “Multipliers and Diminishers: Five Ways to Bring Out the Best in Your Students,” and campers are really students learning experientially in the outdoors, so it definitely translates. But one of the points you mentioned was “Give the pen back.” What did you mean by that?
Give the pen back is a great strategy. In leadership positions, when we see somebody struggling, we often have a natural instinct to jump in and help, and we end up rescuing or taking over. We want to make sure that they still own whatever it is that they’re working through. Figuratively or literally, you can actually take the pen and show a student the next step in the math problem, but, ultimately, you want to hand the pen back. It’s their homework. It’s their problem to solve. You want to empower people. Give them a strategy, and then let them solve their own problem.
Too often, especially when it comes to children, we underestimate their ability to solve their own problems. If we take the pen to help and don’t give it back, then what ends up happening is we unintentionally communicate, “I don’t actually think you’re capable of solving this problem, so I’m just going to do it,” rather than saying, “I see you’re struggling. Let me help you a little bit. Now you run with it.”
As leaders, we communicate a lot of unintended messages, both positive and negative. The best way to really empower others when we see them struggling is to provide a little bit of support, but make sure the ownership stays with whoever it is that we’re helping.
Can you explain how shifting from answers to questions helps in the education process both in school and in camp?
We actually consider asking questions to be a foundational skill of all multipliers. It’s a skill that all multipliers possess and work to get better at. And it makes sense if you think about it. If you want to extract intelligence from other people, one of the best tools at your disposal is simply to ask questions — ask more and better questions.
If you find yourself in a position of constantly telling people what to do, you may not be giving them credit for what they already know. As leaders, if we can start from a place of curiosity and find out what people already know, then we don’t actually have to spend all our time telling people what to do. That’s true at all levels of leadership. These strategies work whether you’re working with a group of kindergarten students, campers, or with the C-suite executives of a very large company.
What I love about each of these behaviors — handing the pen back and asking more and better questions — is they are small, subtle shifts we can make. We’re not asking leaders to go out and completely change who they are. We’re asking them to think about small behavior shifts that we can all make to leverage more intelligence from people. And they’re shifts that you can start today. You can practice tomorrow. You don’t need anything fancy to put these into action.
If you could offer camp leaders just one bit of advice about how to bring out the best in their seasonal staff, what would it be?
My advice to get the best out of your staff would be to find ways to shine the spotlight on their native genius. Everybody who signs up to be a counselor or work at a camp is there for a reason. They have a passion and a love for it, or they wouldn’t be there. So try to find what it is that makes them shine, and if you’re able to spotlight that, it magnifies everyone’s native genius and talents and brings out the best in people very quickly.
Interview conducted by Marcia Ellett, MPW, editor in chief of Camping Magazine.
