Choose Your Battles

In her memoir My Life in Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011), pp. 73-75, Frances Hesselbein describes her first leadership challenge as newly named CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA….

Choose Your Battles

I had just arrived in New York when we were confronted with a delicate issue that could easily have distracted us from the important work of transforming the organization. The Boy Scouts of America, who already had been recruiting fourteen-year-old girls to become members of the Explorer Boy Scout troops, were running advertisements referring to “Scouting USA,” with no mention of the name Boy Scouts. It became very confusing to the public. We had calls from people who had contributed to what they thought were the Girl Scouts, and the thank you was coming from the Boy Scouts of America.
    So the Girl Scout chairman of the board (president) and I made an appointment to talk with my counterpart with the Boy Scouts and their legal counsel. We presented our case in their lawyer’s office, and the response was negative. “There could be no misunderstanding on the part of the public…” and so on and so on. We met with a total rejection of our concern.
    We decided to choose our battles and not to waste precious time battling someone else’s slogan. We chose to invest in the future of girls and young women. We passionately believed that there had to be an organization in our society designed to meet the very special needs of girls growing up in turbulent times. (It would be five years later in 1981 that we would meet Peter Drucker, who would tell board and staff the first time he met with us, “You do not see yourselves life size. You do not appreciate the significance of the work you do, for we live in a society that pretends to care about its children and it does not, and for a little while you give a girl a chance to be a girl in a society that forces her to grow up all too soon.”) We would ignore the Boy Scout issue, focus on our own future, the future of the millions of girls growing up in a period of massive change.
    We concentrated on building a great organization, a movement designed to meet the very special needs of girls growing up today, reaching out to all girls, of all races and ethnic groups. We poured our energy into developing a highly contemporary program, providing the best learning opportunities for all of our adults, and building our own national conference center, activities that reflected the significance of the largest organization for girls and women in the world. We succeeded.