It’s incredible fun to rejoin the board of the mental health nonprofit Helen Ross McNabb. I’m a boomerang, having served the legacy Fortwood Center several decades ago. Our boards arranged a marriage combining strengths to expand services to East Tennessee’s most vulnerable. Now I have the pleasure of spending time with Knoxville-based CEO Jerry Vagnier and his amazing team.
Helen Ross McNabb embraces challenging work helping victims of abuse, trauma and trafficking, counseling people struggling with addiction and working to stabilize the mentally ill to keep them out of the criminal justice system. Especially moving is their work supporting at-risk kids who often underperform in the school system due to family struggles, ADHD or PTSD.
What inspires me is not only the work they do but how they do it. As a student of business, leadership, culture and human performance, it’s impressive how Jerry and the team have nurtured a high-performing organizational culture within which they can best serve a crisis-oriented, often dysfunctional client population.
After committee and board meetings, I want to hijack Jerry for the afternoon to download his thinking and approach on what it takes to build, sustain and lead a healthy organization.
What I see is: