From Microsoft to Gates Foundation to Local Charity: The Evolution of a Leader

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

Patty Stonesifer has held leadership roles at Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and now at Martha’s Table, a social-service organization in Washington. We asked her to share what she’s learned about managing and leading:

What are some of the biggest differences between managing in a corporate setting versus the nonprofit sector?

Jim Collins [author of the management book Good to Great] talks about the opportunity to be an authoritative or even autocratic leader in business because the person at the top can make the decisions that the rank and file then execute. But in the nonprofit sector, we don’t have that choice. We have to be legislative leaders. We have to bring a lot of people along.

I learned that very slowly at Gates. We used to use the quote, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Being in a hurry to make change and having a large checkbook, sometimes what we meant was, “If you want to go far, get on board.”

Well, here [at Martha’s Table] we don’t have that opportunity. The work that we do by nature requires buy-in at a level I never knew when I was at Microsoft, I didn’t understand when I was at Gates, and I’m still learning.

There are so many more people who are not getting paid who are volunteers to the mission. And that requires a different kind of salesmanship and a different kind of selfless leadership.

Do you think about your role in creating social change differently at a community-focused organization than you did at Gates?

The challenge at Gates was to tie our work to the real world. There’s one great story in the philanthropic world about somebody coming up with a better bean. It grew faster, and you could get longer crops and more beans. But it took six hours to cook it, so nobody would plant it.

At Gates there was the need to think really big and broad but to realize that it has to translate to the home.

At Martha’s Table, it’s just the opposite.

We are so embedded in the real world that our challenge is to stop a minute, pull back, and think big. You’ve got to tie what’s going on with Johnny’s education today with the bigger questions of what we should be advocating for.

At Gates, they’d be out here thinking, What do you need to change in the education landscape? At the end of the day, they needed to tie it to what Johnny was learning or not learning.

How do you challenge conventional thinking to make existing programs more effective?

Even if you’ve got a long legacy of “We’ve always done it this way,” it very, very much helps to take out a blank sheet of paper every once in a while and say, “OK, let’s say we haven’t been fighting malaria for X hundreds of years. What would we do today?”

I think the same is true about hunger in an urban setting.

Sometimes you’ve gotta hit the reset button, and sometimes that’s what new leaders are able to do. You walk into an organization that’s been addressing hunger and addressing education needs for a very long time and look at it this way [she turns a sheet of paper 90 degrees] instead of at the small changes on the margin.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.