Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
In the five years since Upsize Minnesota visited with Irina and Richard Fursman much has changed.
COVID-19 wiped out a significant amount of the pro bono work the facilitation training company had been doing internationally, though that will soon be re-emerging virtually – perhaps a stronger and more efficient way of providing that business than doing so in-person anyway.
“I don’t think we’ll go back to in-person as much as we used to,” says Irina Fursman, co-founder and CEO. “This will allow us to engage the international community even more effectively than before.”
The slowdown of 2020 also allowed Fursman to finish her doctorate. As such, she’s developing her own methodology and preparing to launch a new leadership development program based on her research.
It’ll be an extension of what HueLife has been doing. HueLife’s clients come from the public, private and civic sectors. Clients include the Osseo Area School System, the University of Minnesota, the International Finance Corp. and the city of Bloomington, all organizations that often work with similar organizations where there is less of a hierarchy and more of a consortium of leadership that must figure out how to work together to solve challenges, she says.
Fursman says what fascinated her was how some people and organizations have a good sense for figuring out how to work together in those situations, but training in that area is still lacking.
“We still don’t know how to prepare a new generation of leaders to be that way,” she says.
Previously, 90% of the company’s training program consisted of facilitation skills, training a specific methodology across a spectrum of positions. That work has largely been based around the work of the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago and they will still be important going forward.
“This research provided skills and tools and methods are still important and we will continue to develop workshops to help people deliver these skills,” Fursman says. “What I thought was missing and where I see the biggest need now is just the mindset, the internal piece with individuals themselves being the tools. So, when you think of a leader who is trying to convene multiple stakeholders, it’s great to know how, but my biggest insight is the way they view themselves and others in that process.”
Over the past few years, HueLife has been building internal capacity, as well, training leaders to be able to convene in ways that help people identify actions and strategies around the issues that they are trying to solve.
Going forward, HueLife also is working with several other organizations in city and county government, academia and the nonprofit sector to create the Twin Cities Metro Area Innovation League. The purpose is to develop cross-cultural collaboration for just public service delivery. The initial focus is on the future of policing.
“This group has been focusing on what does it mean to transform policing without necessarily going radical, one way or another,” Fursman says. “What does the future of policing look like?”
As the participants collaborate, she says, early results indicate it’s less about police and more about trust between populations that have been historically not included in designing how policing happens.
“That’s a project in development that is happening right now,” she says.
Irina and Richard Fursman started the company in 2008. They met via Match.com and, when she arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine in 2002, she didn’t know English. They started the company after working through their own power imbalance in the early days of their relationship.
“The power I had was enormous,” Richard told Upsize in 2016. “I had the citizenship, the language, the economics. I had a lot of power, whereas the best way to make any relationship work is shared power and shared accountability.”
They aimed to use their own experiences to help other companies work through power and communication differences and to help them understand what kinds of motivation and leadership methods work for different people.
Now, as Irina Fursman takes her doctorate and institutes her own research into the company’s curriculum, Richard is retiring from active management to research and write a book on historical perspectives of the collapse of the Soviet Union and perceptions of that event in the U.S.
And Irina is trying to continue growing the company, often putting HueLife’s theories into practice herself. She advises companies to communicate clearly with employees what you are trying to do, but even more importantly why you are doing them.
“Working with young people, they really want to understand the why and be connected to the purpose,” she says. “Be clear and intentional about building your team around that shared purpose.”
She also says it’s important to create a system where anyone in the organization can take on an initiative and lead it. “That means establishing within your small team processes or norms in which leadership can be enacted by anyone on the team,” she says. “They will be the ones buying into whatever they come up with and growing your business with ideas the owner might not even have.”
