Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995 TAG: 9506130004
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When Explore Park's executive director Rupert Cutler wanted to see this spring whether his project was still "on the radar screens" of the valley's leadership, he knew exactly where to turn.
On the morning the Hotel Roanoke re-opened in April, Cutler sat down to breakfast in the Jefferson Club with many of the same people who brought the hotel back to life.
Carilion Health System President Tom Robertson and Virginia Tech President Paul Torgersen were there. So were Talfourd Kemper, chairman of the board at the Woods Rogers & Hazlegrove law firm, Valley Bank Chairman George Logan and Maid Bess Corp. President Glenn O. Thornhill Jr. First Union Bank of Virginia President Ben Jenkins couldn't make it, so he sent a substitute. Appalachian Power Co. President Joseph Vipperman also was invited, but had a schedule conflict.
Why these people?
"When I talk to people like George Cartledge and T.A. Carter and Stan Lanford [longtime Explore contributors] about who to go to begin to get advice and counsel, these are the names that always came up," Cutler says. "We tried to find the nucleus, the core group, that could make it happen for us."
If he found it, then Cutler accomplished one significant feat - figuring out who in the Roanoke Valley can make things happen. That's not as easy as it once was.
The past decade has ushered in a changing of the guard among the valley's leadership class.
Gone are some of the hometown headquarters companies whose top executives once were looked to for money and leadership whenever a community project came along - Norfolk Southern and Dominion Bank, to name the most notable.
Gone are some of the elderly but wealthy benefactors who initiated and sustained other projects, from Explore to Center in the Square to the symphony - Roanoke Electric Steel founder John Hancock, developer Horace Fralin, heiress Marion Via.
Gone, too, are some of the younger leaders who were making a difference in the community - former City Manager and original Explore Director Bern Ewert and banker Doug Cruickshanks, to name just two whose careers took them out of town.
The changes have come and gone so fast that sometimes people mutter about a "leadership vacuum." Even if there isn't one, the subject of community leadership is still critical as the region attempts to re-structure its economy to attract high-wage jobs. The New Century Council, the group that's spent the past two years drawing up an economic "vision" for the region stretching from the Alleghany Highlands to the New River Valley, has devoted no fewer than four committees to researching "leadership" - and figuring out how we can develop more of it.
The real issue, though, may not be the number of leaders the region can cite, but the nature of that leadership. It's changing, too.
A leadership vacuum? "I get testy when people talk about that," says Robertson, the person most often cited as the leader in the valley's business community. "I don't think there's a leadership vacuum; it's just not the same leadership style people are accustomed to."
And that may be the biggest change of all.
Explore is as good a place as any to see just how the valley's leadership has changed. When the living-history park was conceived in 1985, Explore's organizers constituted a who's who of the Roanoke Valley's "old guard" leadership: The industrialist Hancock. Grand Piano Chairman George Cartledge Sr. Developer T.A. Carter.
These were men with enough money to underwrite the project's start-up on their own - each kicked in $90,000 that first year - and enough clout to persuade others to join them. Because of their wealth and influence, Explore instantly became a front-burner issue in the valley.
The proposed scale of the original project may have struck Roanokers as out of character for the community, but its genesis certainly was not. From the 1950s forward, Hancock and the other business leaders who shared his orbit were often at the forefront of the valley's most important civic enterprises.
These men shared one distinguishing characteristic - for the most part, they were entrepreneurs who started their own companies and made their own fortunes. "Those guys had a mighty big stick," says Logan, the Valley Bank chairman. "A huge stick."
The community leaders now taking charge typically don't own their own companies, they're essentially hired hands who answer to out-of-town shareholders and boards of directors - or may be only middle managers for companies headquartered elsewhere. And while they may be well-to-do, they don't possess the personal wealth that their predecessors did. The most notable of them doesn't even run a company in the traditional sense; the valley's biggest employer, Carilion Health System, is a nonprofit organization. (There's still one big similarity, though; the most prominent leaders continue to be white males from the business community.)
In years past, there was a clearly identifiable corporate leader - first, the railroad; later, Dominion Bank - or a clearly identifiable individual leader, be it the CEO of one of those companies, or a wealthy patron such as a Hancock. That's no longer the case.
"I don't think we have a dominant leader," Robertson says. "I think that's a healthy situation."
It's healthy, he says, not because there are fewer leaders, but because there are more, at least the way he measures leadership. "We've got more people than 10 years ago who understand what's happening in the region and can coalesce around a position," he says. They're just not as high-profile - or as wealthy - as the ones they're replacing.
So what does it mean when those older leaders are no longer around - and the next generation of community leaders doesn't command the same financial resources?
For starters, some people worry that it will be harder to make good things happen. Mark Lawrence, a Roanoke-based lobbyist for Apco, co-chaired one of the New Century Council's leadership committees. He puts the problem this way: "Can someone who wants to make the community better walk into somebody else's office and say we've got this project, can you support it in a major way?"
But that's where the changing nature of leadership comes more clearly into play. Writing checks may not be nearly as important as the ability to persuade others to do so.
"If I got an idea that I thought was good for the community, instead of going to four or five people, there are 25 or 30 people that I'd turn to," says Logan, the Valley Bank chairman. who now heads Center in the Square's governing board. "Those 25 or 30 may not have the deep pockets that Jack Hancock did or Norfolk Southern did, but the aggregate is the same."
That may make it more time-consuming to pull off a community project. But involving more people may ultimately be better for the project, Logan says. "The outcome is more assured of acceptance, because it's not seen as a deal cut in the backroom."
Talk to experts on community leadership around the country, or even the New Century Council groups that have zeroed in on leadership in the Roanoke region, and that's a point they hammer home: For community leadership to be effective, it must reflect a broad consensus in the community.
That's why, they say, the transition from an old guard of high-profile business titans to a new guard of lower-profile middle managers doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, it can help open up the dynamics of community consensus-building.
Logan cites his fellow organizers of Valley Bank, which sprang up to fill a void in community banking left by the demise of Dominion Bank. "Of the 12 Valley Bank organizers, three I'd never met before and two I hardly knew," Logan says. Two of those founders are women and one is black. "And not everybody lives in 24014," the zip code that serves affluent South Roanoke and Hunting Hills.
"I don't think that would have been the case 20 years ago," Logan says. "If we'd done it then, it would have been a group of white males, who would have sat around somebody's kitchen table and formed it themselves. This procedure was completely different," with the Valley Bank organizers intentionally casting a wider net in the community.
A more vivid benchmark of the changing nature of leadership in the Roanoke region may be the way it has responded to its economic crises: When the American Viscose rayon plant shut down in the late 1950s, a dozen or so people met to figure out what to do. But in the aftermath of Dominion's acquisition and the other changes washing over the region's economy in the 1990s, the New Century Council rallied almost 1,000 people to take part in its "visioning" sessions.
Lawrence, the Apco lobbyist and New Century Council leadership committee co-chairman, says he's not surprised. "When we lost Dominion and with the migration of some of the key railroad people out of Roanoke, I think that was the wake-up call. It was cold water splashed in the faces of folks that we need to chart our own destiny, so to speak, because you couldn't sit back and wait for the inner circle to tell us what to do."
A broader base of community leadership requires a different type of community leader, say two experts on the subject.
"They don't look like a traditional leader," says Carl Larson, a University of Denver communications professor who worked with the National Civic League - the group that makes the All-America City awards - in writing a book on community leadership. "They don't have the same qualities. They don't lead from a position of authority or expertise. They're more into process" - because for a broad community consensus to emerge, "there must be a credible, open process."
Instead of outlining their own agenda and rallying others to follow, today's community leaders are more likely to be found moderating a community "conversation" on the subject and adopting the agenda that emerges as their own, Larson says. In short, he contends, successful community leaders today are more like the "facilitators" some corporations hire to run team meetings in "total quality management" sessions.
"It can't be despotic leadership, like the grand old men who you find so often in these communities, who decided something for everybody," agrees Bill McCoy, who heads an urban policy institute at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
If that's the new model of community leadership, Robertson clearly seems to fit the bill. "Tom Robertson is a forceful effective leader," says Warner Dalhouse, First Union Bank of Virginia chairman. "He certainly is one of the top leaders in the community. But he does a lot of what he does through force of personality and persuasion. Because he's the leader of a nonprofit hospital, he doesn't have access to deep pockets."
But as head of the Renew Roanoke fund-raising drive, Robertson helped raise $7 million to bring the Hotel Roanoke back to life. Robertson also is a big proponent of "collaborative" efforts. He was so taken by the corporate "visioning" process undertaken at Carilion that he suggested the entire community conduct one of its own - setting in motion the formation of the New Century Council.
If this is the Roanoke Valley's new leadership, its structure hasn't completely gelled yet. Hancock and his friends met every Monday afternoon for cocktails to hash out what ought to be done in the community.
"We don't have a group that meets like they used to on a regular basis," Robertson says. "It's not as structured as it once was."
"I don't think there is one or two or three people to go to," Logan says, or even one or two or three groups of people to go to. "I think there's a colloquy going on, among dozens and dozens of people."
That may make for a more open process of civic decision-making, but some still worry that such disparate "leaders" won't be very effective on their own. With that in mind, Dalhouse in the late 1980s established the Roanoke Valley Business Council, a group of the valley's biggest employers, to serve as a focal point for the business community. Robertson used the council as the vehicle to launch the New Century Council. Under Atlantic Mutual Cos. Senior Vice President Jim Arend, the business council has taken a more muscular role, helping find a new route for Interstate 73 through the Roanoke Valley, co-sponsoring a study of which government services could be provided on a regional basis, warning that Gov. George Allen's proposed budget would have hurt higher education.
Might this once-shadowy group evolve into the new "power center" of the valley's business community? Arend thinks so. "I think you'll see that organization as group take a more active role in issues," he predicts. "I think there is a void that needs to be filled."
That void may be bigger than just the Roanoke Valley, though.
At the same time the Roanoke Valley's leadership is changing, there's a recognition that Roanoke's economic region really runs from Pulaski to Covington - and that such regional "city-states" are becoming the key economic units in a global economy.
But the New Century Council has found that while there may be plenty of local leaders within the communities that make up the region, there's a scarcity of regional leaders who can make things happen on a regional basis.
"We have local and special-interest leadership," says Bob Denton, the head of Virginia Tech's communication studies department who co-chaired one of the council's leadership committees. "We don't have regional leadership."
One reason, says Don Lacy, a local government specialist at Virginia Tech who co-chaired another of the council's leadership panels, is that the communities within the region have never needed to think of themselves as a region. Indeed, some communities have resisted efforts to identify with their nearest neighbors. "The region we're trying to bring together into a single community has never been close together," Lacy says. Denton is even more pessimistic: "There is no commonality of vision and an absolute lack of trust."
This isn't unusual, either, says McCoy, who heads the Charlotte urban policy institute. That's another reason, he says, regions don't need traditional leaders so much as they need "moderators" or "facilitators" who are perceived as neutral in the local turf fights that inevitably erupt in region-building efforts.
Often, he says, that means these leaders must come from a "neutral" organization not identified with any particular business or locality. "Sometimes it's a Chamber of Commerce, sometimes it's a United Way, sometimes it can be an organization like that New Century Council, a new thing that has sprouted up," McCoy says. Or sometimes it's a university.
When Winston-Salem, N.C. lost the RJR-Nabisco headquarters and the Piedmont Airlines headquarters in the 1980s, it went through much of the same soul-searching that Roanoke is now going through. "The closings and layoffs nearly ruined the city's economic base," Wake Forest University spokesman Brian Eckert says. There, Wake Forest President Thomas Hearn led the efforts to put together a regional marketing group and push for a more diversified economy.
In the Roanoke region, Virginia Tech is often looked to for much the same leadership. Under Jim McComas' presidency, Tech took ownership of the Hotel Roanoke, adopted the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center, co-sponsored the New Century Council and generally emerged as a regional leader. But because of recent cuts in higher education funding, "Paul Torgersen doesn't have that luxury," Tech spokesman Larry Hincker cautions. "These are some pretty tough times for higher education."
Torgersen makes it clear his priorities are different from his predecessor's. "I think Tech is better served if I speak to Rotaries around the state and talk to legislators and the Allen administration," he says. "I do a lot more traveling."
Translation: Tech can help, but the region shouldn't look to it too much. "If we're going to be involved, most of our attention will be involved with the Hotel Roanoke," Torgersen says.
What's really needed, Lacy and others say, is some kind of formal structure to bring together local leaders from throughout the region. "We simply don't have people who occasionally bring them together in a 'kitchen cabinet,'" Lacy says.
One idea percolating up through the New Century Council's deliberations is that it become the region's leadership group, assuming some sort of formal structure after it releases its recommendations next month.
In all this discussion about leadership, there's one thing missing: What about the people we elect to be our leaders?
Many leadership experts dismiss elected officials out of hand. When it comes to regional leadership, "the politicians aren't going to do that," says McCoy. By definition, he says, politicians are too tied to the specific districts that elected them to exert much regional leadership. And their time frames are too short-sighted - often looking no further than the next election, he says. If a community wants leaders, especially leaders to re-jigger the underpinnings of the local economy in a long-term way, he says, "they have to be business people or nonprofit people."
Lacy, the Virginia Tech local government specialist, says that general diagnosis applies to the Roanoke region as well. "The political leaders are not tied into a common vision," he says. "I don't think a large number of political leaders have bought into the New Century Council process."
Not surprisingly, politicians don't like the idea that they're being dismissed as leaders, on economic issues or any others.
Roanoke Mayor David Bowers cites his efforts in organizing a statewide movement to look at the economic problems of Virginia's cities; if cities fail, then regions fail, he contends.
Del. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, points out that he was the first to raise the issue of routing I-73 through the region; now I-73 is almost an article of faith among valley business leaders.
Griffith suggests elected officials sometimes don't get the credit they deserve because they aren't heard speaking enough about economic strategy. "My campaign manager once said if it takes more than 30 seconds to explain, it shouldn't be in the campaign." But give Griffith an opening, and he'll unwind an extended monologue about why the region should pursue distribution and transportation jobs instead of sexier high-tech jobs.
A look at major projects within the region, even such seemingly nongovernmental ones as wiring the Blacksburg Electronic Village to securing a hockey team for Roanoke, shows that some politicians are indeed involved in some projects, although they're not typically the initiators.
In the end, what really defines leadership is whether those leaders have followers, and on that score the jury may still be out on the valley's new generation of leadership. It's still out on some other fronts, too.
Logan frets that the region may rely too much on what he calls "management by committee." He thinks aspiring leaders need to be more forceful in "taking a position on something and seeing if it works on other people." Meanwhile, New Century Council Director Bev Fitzpatrick Jr. worries that some people who ought to be taking a leading role in the community aren't. "There is a need now for people to come forward who haven't cared before," he says. Griffith is more sanguine. "The people will step forward," he says, although he cautions that the generational turnover "may take 10 years."
by CNB