Client Case Study
Empowering Abilities
Discover how this 55-year-old not-for-profit organization transformed their organizational culture and developed their leadership team with Ott Leadership’s services.
“Steve has helped us get away from the stereotypical manager approach; we now look at our employees as the greatest asset to our organization. Steve is very good at creating an environment where you as a leader can be vulnerable.”
– Jeff Ashcraft, President & CEO, Empowering Abilities
Empowering Abilities
A Growing Not-for-Profit for Special Needs Individuals
Founded in 1969, Empowering Abilities is a not-for-profit organization based in Davenport, Iowa. Empowering Abilities helps people with physical and mental disabilities to develop skills and find employment; the organization also provides individuals with these disabilities with supportive living
services and, in some cases, residential housing in group homes.
With three locations in Davenport, Empowering Abilities has several distinct programs and departments that help meet clients’ needs.
Empowering Abilities’ programs run the gamut from lifestyle enrichment to community employment to supportive living and more. The organization also partners with a variety of other service providers across the Iowa region to help provide a full array of services to people living with disabilities.
For Jeff Ashcraft, President & CEO of Empowering Abilities, a major priority was ensuring the organization’s internal culture properly supported its external activities and mission.
““I believe that culture is everything within an organization when you’re trying to operate it in a growth-oriented way,” Ashcraft explains. “Your culture has to have some cohesiveness to it.””
The Problem
Fragmented and Toxic Culture Split the Team
Upon coming into his new position as President and CEO, Ashcraft noticed several challenges within the organization that hindered Empowering Abilities’ day-to-day activities. First and foremost, the organization’s culture was fragmented across multiple departments. Each individual department had its own unique subculture, causing the organization to lack a cohesive vision for what their culture should be.
Furthermore, some members of the organization were holding onto an older, more authoritarian and transactional style of leadership and culture management that caused employees and volunteers to become disillusioned.
““People weren’t empowered to do their jobs,” Ashcraft says.
“Our human capital was looked at as a tool. The environment here was very black and white. People would get in trouble for the silliest things, like laughing too loud. The leadership was more about sending policies down in bolts of lightning than they were about providing people with the resources needed to achieve the mission. It was a very old managerial style, and it wasn’t a happy place to work in many cases.””
The Solution
Ott Leadership’s Culture Change and Leadership Development Services
Ashcraft had been looking for a solution to these challenges for several years. When his senior vice president resigned, he decided it was the right time to make a change.
“We needed someone who could come in with more than just a plug-and-play program,” Ashcraft says. “We needed someone who could understand who we are, because we’re a very complex organization. Our mission is why we roll out of bed, but at the same time, we have to make a profit to pay our bills and grow. I needed someone who could understand the distinction between non-profit and not-for-profit. I needed someone who could be honest with us, who could push us.”
Ashcraft says he decided to become an Ott Leadership client because of Steve Ott’s willingness to dive into the muck and the mire – to sit with leaders in their moments of weakness without offering judgment, and to help leaders sift through the challenging mental and emotional work of being a leader.
““Steve came in and got to know who we are as an organization,” Ashcraft explains. “It’s scary – you let someone you don’t know into your family and they see all the garbage…Steve got in there and was a great listener. He was great at dissecting things and getting to the essence of the issue.”
Ashcraft says that Ott Leadership is very effective at creating an environment where leaders can be vulnerable.”
The Result
Full Leadership Team Transformation
Ashcraft says that Ott Leadership has thoroughly transformed Empowering Abilities’ management team; the team has now moved away from the stereotypical managerial approach and into a more transformative leadership style.
“We now look at our employees as our organization’s greatest asset,” Ashcraft says.
“Steve has also helped us figure out how to work with each other as leaders. Who’s strong in different areas, and how do we tap into those strengths? In almost all cases, we’ve been able to utilize those strengths to help us improve as an organization.”
Ashcraft says one of the clearest examples of the difference in the organization’s culture before and after coming to Ott Leadership was when one of his executives retired.
“I hired a new executive almost a year ago, but I was pretty quick to realize that the chemistry just wasn’t right. I said to Steve, ‘I feel bad about this – I have to terminate this person. They’re not doing anything wrong, but it’s just not the right fit.’ Steve explained that our culture was working; our culture was opting this person out because we’ve established what we want in a leader.”
Interestingly, the executive came to this same conclusion on their own, and opted themselves out of the role.
“Steve helped me to look at this incident in a different way,” Ashcraft explains.
Empowering Abilities is now in the process of transforming its middle management team; the organization will soon be engaging with Ott Leadership again to dig Empowering Abilities’ cultural roots even deeper using the same transformational skills that have empowered its leadership team. Empowering Abilities will be building on the work Ott Leadership did on the organization’s strategic plan.
About Ott Leadership
Steve Ott launched Ott Leadership in 2018 to help leaders and managers transform their workplaces, their employees, and themselves. Ott has spent the last 12 years working in both the non-profit and private sectors designing and refining a leadership development process that helps people move from being totally lost as a leader to feeling confident and capable.
Ott Leadership’s flagship Transformational Leader program uses teaching, discussion, practical applications, and written reflections to develop leaders that have a real impact in today’s workplaces. Using transformational leadership theory, Ott helps leaders in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations shift their leadership foundation away from a transactional one and toward a model that engages employees in a healthy and motivational way.
To discover how you can transform your team into the leaders you hired them to be, contact steve@ottlead.com.
