Carol:
Hello, hello and welcome to the People Forward Leadership Podcast. I am so excited to have a lifelong transit leader with us today. Dottie Watkins is an Austin native who began her career as a part-time bus operator while studying at UT Austin, later earning her MBA from St. Edward's. She rose from bus operations and maintenance to COO to deputy CEO, and in 2023 became president and CEO of CapMetro and she is one of the growing number of female CEOs in transit who are blazing a trail in this industry. Dottie is known for keeping service, moving through staffing headwinds while staying fiercely committed to frontline teams. She's also recently been honored by COMTO as one of the women who move the nation. Her blend of operational rigor and people centered leadership made her the perfect guest for our People Forward conversation, and I am so excited to have you on the show. So, welcome, Dottie.
Dottie:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to the chat.
Carol:
Yeah. Awesome. So, in our People Forward work, we love to start with the leader's origin story because it often explains what guides their leadership style and thinking around how they lead. So, growing up in Austin with a dad in CapMetro maintenance, what's a moment from childhood that still shapes how you lead today?
Dottie:
So, I used public transit from a very young age. I'm a child of the '80s. I was one of your, myself and my siblings were textbook latchkey kids. We had two working parents. We went to school, we'd come home, we'd be home for about an hour and a half or so before an adult showed up. I thought it was a wonderful way to live, quite frankly. I learned a lot of independence, but we rode the city bus home from school and so we rode the bus home from school. I rode the bus home from school from second grade through sixth grade from my elementary school. And it just gave us this real sense of independence and I loved doing anything that my older brother and sister did. And so, I got to do that with the big kids. And then as I got older even, I think my defining moment that I would share is when I was in junior high and I wanted to go to the mall. I wanted to go hang out with my friends at the mall because that's how old I am. We used to hang out in the mall. Malls used to exist-
Carol:
Oh, yes.
Dottie:
Indoor places with shops that don't always exist.
Carol:
I remember those days
Dottie:
I wanted to go hang out at the mall with my friends. And my dad said, "Sure," and he handed me 50 cents. At that time, the child bus fare was a quarter and he is like, "Here you go. Here's 50 cents. You know where the bus stop is. It's the same bus that you ride to school. Stay on for a few more stops. It'll drop you at the mall." And I was like, "Okay," and I did it and I rode the bus to the mall. I was late coming home because I missed my bus and I got in trouble for being late coming home, but I learned that lesson. But it was just this amazing independence. At a relatively young age, I was able to navigate my city. I knew how to ride the bus, and I just thought that was really cool.
So, when I got the opportunity as an adult to work in public transportation, I already knew in my gut how empowering public transit can be. And so, I feel like that sticks with me today. Because I know that there's a kid out there, they're probably not going to the mall today because it's 2025, but there's a kid out there that wants to go downtown to the music show or to do something interesting and they're able to do it because they can hop on a bus and that is really, knowing that that is out there is really cool.
Carol:
That's really cool. And I remember that, I was the same way. I grew up in, I went to high school in the early '80s and rode the bus everywhere and it was a sense of independence. The sky, the world was your oyster, if you will. The sky was the limit because you can go anywhere, anytime. I love that, that level of independence. And that what you said about feeling empowered as you rode transit. How has that informed as you rose through the ranks and leadership in transit? How has that experience informed the way that you are leading your people and helping them see the overwhelming value and benefit of what they're doing for the community?
Dottie:
Yeah, I think it really is about understanding how our customers experience our service. CapMetro's mission. I love our mission statement. I had not always loved our mission statement, but a number of years ago we updated it and our mission is to enhance, empower, and serve our region and its communities through the provision of high-quality public transit service. But those three words enhance, empower, and serve. That is what public transit does. We are here to help people live their best lives. And we know that for all of the headaches that we go through for the traffic, for the disruptive customers, for the financial issues that we face, for all of the things that what we are doing is actually helping people live their best lives and helping them be more productive and active members of our world. Right? And so, knowing that that is what's out there and reminding ourselves of that.
And when I talk to our frontline employees, that's why they keep coming up to work. When you talk to a bus operator who's been driving forever, they appreciate the service that they provide. And often, when we hear complaints from our frontline staff, it's on behalf of their customers. They'll say, "That bus stop is too far away. There's an older woman who gets on my bus every day," and they tell us the customer's story and advocate because that's what gets them out of bed every day. It's not the easiest job in the world, but I think so many of them do it and come back and do it again the next day because it feels good because they know that not only are they making a living and putting food on the table for their families, but they're doing something that feels good and putting something good out into the world.
And so, I think knowing that instinctually, knowing that customer experience is so important to people really does influence how I think about the work that we do because it's the whole reason we exist. The whole reason we exist as a transit authority is to help people live their best lives, to enhance our community, to empower people, to get to school, to get to work, to get to church, to just go out at night and have a good time, to see their family, to just live their best life. And so, how can we help do that one more time today than we did it yesterday? Right? That's always the goal.
Carol:
I love it. Such an incredible perspective. So, in our work, we help agencies turn great operators into great supervisors and great supervisors into great executives and leaders on purpose, not by accident, by really making sure that we're preserving those frontline negotiables or non-negotiables. You started behind the wheel. So, what non negotiables from your operator days still shape how you lead and how you expect your executives to show up for your frontline teams?
Dottie:
I think first and foremost, it's remembering that our frontline teams, I mean literally are doing the work of our authority and that we shouldn't be asking them to do something that we wouldn't be comfortable doing. We need to really put ourselves in their shoes and try and make sure that the decisions that we're making about how we want to deliver service, what service we deliver, that we really aren't asking them to do something we wouldn't do. And I think one of the things that has served me well is I spent a very tiny little bit of time early in my career behind the wheel of a bus. I was a mediocre bus driver at best. I am way better as a transit leader than I would have been if I had engaged in a 30-year career driving the bus. But I understand what it takes to get through the day as an operator. And it's not simple. You have to really show up and you have to really care about the work.
And so, we owe it to them to support the work that they do because if we can't support them, they can't support our customers. And again, that's our whole reason for being. So, I think first and foremost is really putting yourself in the shoes of those frontline employees and making sure that you're not asking them to do something that you wouldn't feel comfortable doing yourself. I think the other half of that is that you always have to listen to them. And that can be hard because, I mean, there are always things, there's always going to be a time when we make a decision and we say the policy is going to be X, and we know that 3% of the time that's not going to work, but 97% of the time it is going to work. So that's the policy that we land on.
And it's hard when you have to then confront one of those times when it's not going to work and say, we get it. We get why that didn't work that time, but here's why. It still has to be the policy, but we owe it to our frontline workers to listen to them and to be thoughtful about how they're experiencing things. And I think that feedback loop is hard, especially with our bus operators. They are such a migrant job. They are out in the world. They are not easily accessible to us. They show up, they get their bus and they go. Most of our senior and best employees spend at most 30 minutes a day on our property. They spend most of their time out in the world driving the bus. Right?
Carol:
Mm-hmm.
Dottie:
So, it's not easy to gather them all together and have a listening session. Having different ways for them to know that you care means you have to do a little bit more work because when they get off work at 1:00 AM and they have a concern to share, who is available to hear it from them? Is it a suggestion form or an email? And then, are they going to get a response to that? You have to take that feedback seriously. And I think that is one of the other non-negotiables is that we have to really be committed to listening and to our frontline employees and to our customers. I mean, I really do feel like you can't say that you're an organization that is committed to your customer if you're not committed to the people who serve that customer.
Carol:
Yeah.
Dottie:
And it really stems from that, and I think that is the piece that you have to really center the work we do in the experience of the people using our service and that is so directly impacted by those frontline workers who are delivering that service for us that you can't divorce those two. They really do go hand in hand.
Carol:
I love that. That's such a great statement that if you're committed to the customer, you have to be committed to the people who serve those customers.
Dottie:
Absolutely.
Carol:
So, I'm curious even from your own experience, because as you said, the feedback loop is really challenging because it's a micro population, but often in your own example, I see a lot of people who move up the chain of leadership starting on the ground and then elevating into leadership. And so, that whole being committed to the people, how did even you transition from yes, the customer is the priority, but then you have to also take care of the people like you said, who are delivering. So, how do you shift your mindset from being that great deliverer and customer focus to starting to think about how do I develop and make the best people who are also going to take care of the people who are taking care of the customers?
Dottie:
Yeah. It really is making sure that you can see that line, that through line all the way through. Because ultimately isn't it all about customer service? I mean, when you think about customer service, that's really just about treating other people who you are responsible for giving them something and treating them well and having them feel valued. I mean, leadership is ultimately customer service. I believe in the concept of servant leadership and really being recognizing that your job as a leader is not to just give edicts from on high, but to really make sure that the teams have what they need to be successful.
And so, it is about that providing a service and making sure that you've moved roadblocks out of the way or that when the big political question pops up and you have to decide what's the organization going to do with it, that you're being thoughtful about how that's going to impact the work of the people doing the work. All of it, I mean it's all customer service if you think about it. And so really helping see that piece.
One of my very first jobs after when I went from driving to supervising, I was a part-time driver and they could only afford a part-time supervisor. They didn't have budget for full-time supervisors. That's what moved me into supervision because I had to be part-time. I was still a full-time student, but I was the complaint girl. They had a fancier title for it. I was quality assurance supervisor, but I was the complaint girl. I had to call all the customers back. I had to document our answers to the complaints and then I had to go present the complaints to the bus drivers and I was in my 20s and most of these people were much older than me, most of them were men. Most of them were a little scary sometimes. They were out there in the world kind of people.
And I had to figure out how to help them realize that they weren't giving good customer service. And that was very early on. I was like, "Oh, well, I'm going to have to figure out how to help them see themselves differently." And that was an interesting, if I'm going to make sure we're giving good customer service, then this operator who is convinced he is right, he is right and that customer is wrong and they need to do what he said. I need to help him think about the world in a slightly different way. And so, I think I very early on had to learn how to work with our frontline employees to become better. I did that job and then I did training, very similar kind of how do I help you do the thing we want to get out there in the world?
So, I think those experiences helped inform that need to support. My bachelor's degree is in social work. I want to support people, that is naturally who I am. And so, just recognizing do we have the right systems in place to support people works, whether you're the CEO of a transit authority or a social worker trying to help somebody manage doing case management for a troubled individual. So, I think it's very much that same kind of thinking.
Carol:
That's such a great compliment and analogy. I really like what you said around leadership is really customer service. And if you're listening and thinking about the needs of the people that you are ultimately working for your customers, but if you think about that for the teams and the other leaders and the people in-house who are supplying that service that you have a much better workforce. You talked about listening and having that feedback and things of that nature and really thinking about what do they need and providing that. I could see why that makes such a big difference. I love that background and that perspective. I think that's really powerful.
Representation changes when teams think it's possible and we see it boost confidence up and down the pipeline. When you received COMTO'S Women Who Move the Nation, what did that mean to you and what unseen work or person did you think of first?
Dottie:
I was floored when I saw that email. I have been in the transit industry long enough that I've been to a handful of those recognition breakfasts when I had the privilege of being at that conference and knew of many of the women who had received that award previously and felt how is it possible that I'm being put in the same basket with these women that I had seen as being just amazing women. Folks like Nuria, the former FTA administrator as well as her deputy, Veronica, had also previously received the award. Locally, a local architect and long-time transit advocate who chairs our light rail provider, our builder. She chairs their board. She had received that award previously. And so immediately, I started thinking about all of these amazing women that I knew had received that award and felt aghast that somebody would put me in such company.
I mean, it was just such an honor to really be like, wow, maybe I've done something right to be held with such a wonderful group of women. And so, it was very meaningful to me. I've had a lot of amazing supporters and mentors throughout my career, but the one that I thought of probably first was actually our former chief operating officer, Elaine Timbes. She had been our COO for a good long time. When I was Vice President of Bus Operations, she was my boss. And she really helped me grow as a leader, helped me grow from being just an amazing doer to being a good leader. And she is just one of those folks that will, if she sees the promise in you and your willingness to work for it, she will pour into you as much as you're willing to take.
And so, I worked for her for the better part of a decade, and so she had plenty of opportunity to help shape me along the way, but there was just so much about her leadership that made me feel like, "Okay, this award isn't just recognizing me, but recognizing all of the people who helped me get to this place and this wonderful place that I get to show up to today." When I accepted that honor, I dedicated it to the folks that work at CapMetro because I can only be me and I can only do what I do because we have this amazing group of people who are out here serving our community every day. And I know that I am merely the person tasked with leading this organization today.
This organization is way bigger than me, but I am grateful for the opportunity and the privilege to get to lead this amazing group of people in my hometown because that's the other part that makes it really special. Austin is a wonderful place and a couple million people agree because they've all moved here and everybody wants to live here. It's a great place to live, but it's home for me. I grew up here. And so, to be able to not only do this work that I find meaningful in an organization that I care about, but in my hometown is just a privilege beyond privilege. And I'm so grateful to get to do that and show up and do it every day.
Carol:
That's so awesome. Who knew that little girl with the quarter taking the bus to the mall will then be recognized?
Dottie:
I know. I'll tell you who knew, who knew was my dad. So, one of my other favorite mentor stories. So, I started driving because my dad encouraged me to apply for the job. My dad worked at that time for the UT Shuttle System. He was the Director of Maintenance in that garage. And he heard they were trying to hire part-time employees. They wanted real part-time people who weren't going to be mad that they couldn't work full time. He came home and made the comment. He said, "I told them I still have one of those living in my house." Because I was still living at home, going to school, and he talked me to getting the job. And early on, I remember saying to him, "This is such a great opportunity because I'll have this professional license and this transferable skill." Remember I was studying social work at that time, so there was no real promise that I was going to be employable, right?
Carol:
Yeah, right.
Dottie:
"Who knew what was going to happen, that I'll have this transferable skill? I'll always able to get a job that is so great. I'm so glad I'm doing this." And he just immediately without missing a beat, said, "Oh girl, you'll run the place one day. I'm not worried about that."
Carol:
Wow.
Dottie:
But those words stuck with me and I didn't believe it. Then I was studying to be a social worker. I was not going to be in transit for my whole career, but those words stuck with me. And over the years as opportunities arose, and it was time to throw my hat in the ring, I'd be like, "Well, dad said I'd run the place one day, so maybe he was right." And lo and behold, he was. And I think even he probably at that time wasn't thinking, "Run the place, run the place." But all along the way, I had that support and I had that in my head and that had been in my head since I was literally still a teenager. And so, having those supporters is what has allowed me to do what I do.
Carol:
Oh, yeah. That says so much about your father considering he was in a very male dominated field to then say to not only say that to you, but just throw you into it and let you know that there was a possibility of growth and success with it. So, I think that's incredible. This is a lot about your dad.
Dottie:
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Carol:
Yeah. Great support there. And I think it's important when you have those mentors and those people who are cheering you on and let you see what's possible for things that may feel impossible. And I know as an example, psychological safety is a foundational of the work that our people forward framework and we look for that speak up and the near miss reporting and fast leader response and the ability for people to feel that they can step into what could feel impossible or even challenge or push the envelope into what could be possible. I'm curious, what are two practices at CapMetro do your leaders take to make sure that everyone from managers, to operators to mechanics are able to raise issues before they become incidents so that they can have those channels of opportunity of trust to ensure that they're able to get things done and not miss opportunities or miss things?
Dottie:
Yeah, I think it all comes back to that feedback loop we were talking about earlier and that I think we owe our workers that feedback loop. First and foremost, especially when it comes to things of safety or security or psychological safety, there has to be the no fault reporting system that's like table stakes. You have to have, "Hey, tell me what's wrong, and I promise you're not going to get in trouble for telling me that something's broken, right? I need to know it's broken. I can't fix it if I don't know it's broken." Now, if you know something's broken and you hide that, then that's a whole different conversation. So, you have to always have that be the expectation that we want to hear these things, we want know about these things.
And so, we have all the mechanisms that I think a lot of transit agencies have at this point where we allow for anonymous reporting if you don't feel comfortable, but really trying to always make sure that people know that we care. And that comes from just having that feedback loop where people can chat with you, they can tell you they've got a question and you either can help them with an answer right then or you will get them an answer. And making yourself available for that, making sure that everybody knows that it's important that we have that amount of information sharing. We actually just last week had a series of, we call them town halls, but they're more like open house because you can't get, your bus operators don't all show up at the same time and you don't get to do a big town hall meeting.
And so, we do an open house and every time we come with a booklet full of the information that, "Hey, this is what we heard the last time we were here and what we did with that information." And also, here's some other fun announcements and things." And we try and make it fun and cute and we put pictures of them in it. Everybody likes to see pictures of themselves, but to really make sure that they know that what you say to us, we are listening to and we are doing something with. I am probably overly connected largely because I've been at CapMetro for 30 years and I've risen through the ranks, but there are a whole bunch of bus operators who have my phone number and will text me-
Carol:
Wow.
Dottie:
That will reach out to me on Facebook that I've just known forever. And they'll be like, "Hey, I know you're a busy lady, but..." And I always try to be extremely honest with them and say, "Okay, here's who I'm going to tell about your problem, the ones that I cannot jump in and solve your problem." But just making sure people know that we do care. And I do think that as I have the benefit of having been here long enough that many of these people I've known for 30 years, but that I care enough to make sure that their complaints are heard is felt by the frontline teams and by all of the people who manage them in between me and them.
Everyone knows that Dottie cares about frontline teams, that the leadership cares, that we're caring about the frontline teams, that if somebody has, it's maybe even worse if somebody comes to me and they say, "I tried to talk to so-and-so and so and so and so, so, but nobody would listen to me." Right? That's going to actually make me even more upset than if they're just coming straight to me. And I'll be like, "Okay, well let me direct you to where somebody who can do something with that information."
And so, I do think having that feedback loop and that open and honest communication is critical. And that's something that really we try and focus on. We're working on, we're currently piloting an app so that we can do that information sharing that we're doing with paper right now through our open house every so often, much more frequently so that we can have that kind of easier interaction. There's still not a super simple way for us to exchange. I get text messages from so many bus operators because I think that's the easiest way for them to communicate.
Carol:
Yeah, yeah.
Dottie:
So, now that we all have these things in our hands, how can we make it easy for them to communicate more broadly with us, right? And so, I'm really trying to lean in on technology where that's concerned as well.
Carol:
Yeah, that's great. I mean, wow, if they think they can text you and you have that open channel of communication, then people must feel very comfortable.
Dottie:
There are a few of them, I will admit I would not, I'm like, who will reach out to me and I always just send those straight to somebody else. And then the next time I see them, I'm like, "Did you ever get the answer to your question?" And they know that I'm going to send it straight to somebody else to let somebody else deal with it, but until we can give them a better mechanism to get straight to that person, I'm happy to be that conduit. To me, it's most important that they know we care.
Carol:
Yeah. And it's most important that you get the information that you need because then like you said, if you don't know, that's the problem. Knowing helps you come up with the solution, which is great.
Dottie:
Yeah.
Carol:
So, I hear from your own background and experience, your level of self-awareness, from your experience, from your training and social work and school really helps to build a strong leader awareness for yourself. But how are you helping to coach your leaders and build that self-awareness within them to be really good people leaders, to learn and adapt their own styles to the people that they lead both internally and any external constituents that they have to work with as well?
Dottie:
That's something that we talk a lot about. We have what we call them core capabilities, but it's within our performance management systems. We look at, there's two pieces of it. There's what work you've got done, and obviously we all have jobs to do. We have work to get done, right?
Carol:
Yeah.
Dottie:
You have to do the work and you're going to get rated based on how well you did the work, but then there's also how you got the work done. And so, those core capabilities are about how did you get the work done? Did you communicate well with others? Are you working collaboratively? Are you being respectful and thoughtful? All of the more touchy feeling, but that's just as important. If you get the thing done every time, but you leave a firestorm behind you-
Carol:
Yes.
Dottie:
That's not helpful. Honestly, you have to get some work done. And on the other hand, if everybody loves you but you accomplish nothing, that's also no good. You have to find that balance between how do you get things done, but you do it in a way that is supportive. And we actually, within our system, we have core capabilities that everybody has to achieve, but then we have a next level, additional set for people managers. So, if you supervise anybody, then we need you to not just treat people well, but also lead and have business acumen and be doing those leadership tasks that are in addition to workers who don't necessarily have those responsibilities. And so, I think just making sure that we are always talking about both the work that needs to be done, but how we expect to accomplish it, I think is really important.
Carol:
Yeah. I think the critical thing that I heard you say was it's not just the what it's and the how. And to me, the operative word in that is and, right?
Dottie:
Yes.
Carol:
It's not what or how, it's what and how. And understanding that how is just as valuable as the what is a critical part of leadership. And honestly, in the work that I've done, don't see this as often as I would like to see, which is that second level that you talked about in terms of what does it mean to be a leader.
Dottie:
Yeah.
Carol:
Because it's an additional skill set really is it's a job within a job, if you will. And understanding what it means to lead is just as critical as the responsibilities and the things that you do within the leadership role. And that's very exciting, that part of your people management work that you're doing for leaders is elevating that other conversation of what does it mean to lead.
Dottie:
Absolutely. And that's going to change at every level of leadership. And one of the things, and maybe I gained some of this perspective having come from being a doer into being a leader, is that we largely get promoted into jobs because we were really good at the last job, not necessarily because we're innately qualified to be really good at the next level job. Right?
Carol:
Yes.
Dottie:
And so, there's something to learn every step of the way. When I mentioned earlier my former boss and mentor, one of the biggest things that she helped me see was when I was trying to do the work and I needed to stop doing the work and lead the people to do the work.
Carol:
Yes.
Dottie:
Because sometimes it's easier to be like, "Okay, fine. I'll just stay up late and make that spreadsheet and it will be right and it will be proper and we'll get it turned in and no one will be the wiser." But then all I've done is made myself a single point of failure where that's concerned. And so, making sure that we're saying, "Okay, sometimes you do got to just show up and get the thing done." But then you got to take a deep breath and go, "Okay, that was your work to do and I had to jump in and fix it. It was a mess and we didn't have the time, but this is yours to do. How can I help you be ready to take this the next time?" And it's the teach a man to fish kind of thing. Let's make sure you are ready to do the thing so that I can go focus and think on something else.
But that kind of development is something that is, it never stops. I'm still learning. I'm still learning what it takes to be a leader. What am I supposed to be thinking about this week, next week, next year? Am I thinking about the right things? And I think if we can really approach, if we truly do lean in and say we always want to be learning, then I think there's hope for us.
Carol:
Oh, absolutely. And you've raised a key point is that it impedes succession planning. How are you building sustainability within the organization if you're doing everything and you're not allowing for that next generation or those people underneath you to learn and grow and get ready for when this time for them to step into higher levels of leadership if you're hoarding things for yourself and not really doing what a leader should be doing, which is developing other leaders.
Dottie:
Yeah.
Carol:
Yeah. No, I love that. In a union environment, co-design beats command and control every time. We know that. When do agency leaders often, what do they often get wrong about working with unions and what's one practice that has helped you and your labor groups really solve hard problems together?
Dottie:
I think that we are adversaries is what they get wrong. We are not adversaries. I have a job to do. I have a responsibility to manage this thing, to deliver this service. They have a job to do. They have taken on the responsibility often with little to no training. They've jumped in, you talk about jumping in and have I had the proper development support to be at this level, but they've taken on the responsibility of representing a group of their peers and making sure that their interests are considered. We are not adversaries. We are trying to do the same thing. Now, the moment you're not trying to deliver good service, then you're no longer on team. We're here, this is what we're here to do. And so as long as we can stop and say, "Okay, what are we here to do? How can we figure this out? I need to understand what you love or hate about this solution so that I can help figure out what the right answer is."
But I see all too often, and I've seen it my whole career, it's less now than it probably was 20 years ago, but there is still this real management versus union energy. And that especially in public transit doesn't make any sense to me because we're not here to make a profit. It's different in a private sector world where it's all about the big wigs and their profit sharing versus the working man. There's no money in public transit. We are not here to make a profit. We are here to deliver a service. We are here to do a thing and we all need to figure out how we get that done and we have to do it together. We are very fortunate in Austin, we have a great relationship with our local union. Our local union leadership is very willing to work with us collaboratively. That has not been the case my whole career.
We definitely have had seasons where we were at odds, but even then, our job was to deliver the service and their job was to represent the employees. And we just had to keep focused on that. We can disagree and argue about things and how we should do it and what works best, but the whole point of us being here is to deliver the service. And without any service, none of us have a paycheck. If all of a sudden, the willingness to have public transportation in Austin, Texas disappeared, there would be no taxpayer money to pay any of us. So, we all have to work and protect this thing that we do if we want to protect our own livelihoods and that this isn't about being adversarial, that doesn't mean we're going to always agree.
Carol:
Yeah.
Dottie:
And there are plenty of times that we don't agree. But I find though that if you can find those places where there is agreement, then you can build on that. And so, I really push hard against that framing of management and unions as adversarial, honestly. And maybe it's because I've grown up in an industry that has unions and I've always worked in this environment, and so I don't really understand. I don't have lived experience the other way. I'll put it there. But I don't know that I would want to supervise a group of a thousand employees without some centralized representing. How am I going to know what the employees think if they can't elect representatives to tell me what they all think, right?
Carol:
Right.
Dottie:
It actually makes the job of managing this large group of people who do the same work simpler when they can select representatives and you can say, "Well, great, then this is what we're working on. We're going to work through these issues." And people say, "Well, but I didn't like that." Say, "Well, then you need to go talk to your union because they're the ones that told us." Right? And it simplifies because you do have that unified voice and it makes it a lot easier when you have, you're forced in this environment to have rule books and structures and progressive discipline and the structured management processes that frankly make supervising and managing a large group of employees possible. And I think if we didn't have that, that it's a forcing function that I think can be healthy for us.
Carol:
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think what I'm hearing you saying is that it is the mindset and the narrative that you're going into the relationship with. If you think of it as adversarial, that's going to be problematic. And I can completely agree with that. I started my career as a labor attorney. And one of the things that I often found with sometimes my colleagues, like the narrative was that management is bad and therefore we have to go in with the attack. And my philosophy was that no, we're partners and we go in looking for the best solution to be able to ultimately get the work done and that everyone is successful in this process. And it's when I made the transition from a labor attorney to actually working inside management, people were like, "How could you do that?"
And I'm like, "Because I don't see it, to your point as adversarial. That it really is a partnership and it didn't matter really which side it was about what's the collective good and the ultimate goal that you're both achieving." So, I totally agree that if you have a narrative in your mind or a perspective that is us versus them, that's going to be a very different relationship than if it's we're partnering and we're journeying on this road together. And like you said, we don't agree all the time, but we're moving in the same direction together.
Dottie:
Yeah. I love that that has been your path. I have often felt like, "Oh man, if I could just go to work for the union..." There have been times when I'm like, "You are not fighting with me well. You could fight me so much better. Your argument would be so much, like, I can make a better argument for why I should not. Let me help you be better at arguing for what you are arguing for." And so, I love that you've gotten the chance to do that, to really see both sides of that and argue for the right things from both sides. I'm a firm believer that if you're doing the right thing, it doesn't matter what your perspective is, you'll find a good justification for it. And if you're not able to find that middle ground, then maybe you haven't quite landed on the right thing.
Carol:
Yes, yes. I would totally agree with that. Yeah, for sure. So big shifts test culture. So, when you're going through big changes and things of that nature, and we help to coach leaders to protect, as we talked about the psychological safety internally while staying radically transparent externally. So, when the spotlight is at its brightest, how do you keep your team grounded and what does good look like for internal communication, decision rights and recovery when things are going sideways?
Dottie:
Yeah. I think it's because I have an operations background, I'm great in a crisis.
Carol:
Okay.
Dottie:
The storm's coming, everything's going to be a mess. It's like, "All right, let's do this." I do think when things start to go sideways that you can take that as an opportunity to really refocus on what's most important and make sure that you're talking about what's most important. And I'll use as the most probably overused crisis example of our lifetime, the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hits and literally overnight our city shut down. We actually, so here in Austin, every spring we have what we call spring festival season, but largely it's because South by Southwest, which is a music and technology and all things amazing is in Austin every spring. And we were two weeks out from South by Southwest. It happens every March.
And it became clear that it was a bad idea for people from all over the world to offline. We don't really know what's going on, but we figured out enough that this is probably a really bad idea. And so, our local leaders declared an emergency and forced to the cancellation of the festival and said, "We have to say this isn't happening." And that was the moment for Austin that was like, "Okay, this is real. This was just news until you told me South by Southwest, it's not happening." And oh my God, it's not happening. Something is going on. And very quickly it became clear that we needed to think completely differently about things. And in that time, it is all such a fuzzy blur at this point. It was like crisis upon crisis upon crisis. The number one thing that we were focused on was we knew there were still people who needed service. There were still essential workers. There were still people who had no other work to live life.
Carol:
Yeah. That's true.
Dottie:
And so, we knew we still had to provide some service, but rightfully so, our frontline teams were literally scared for their lives. We didn't know what caused this thing. But the example I use a lot in May of 2020, when I was still leaving my mail in the garage for 24 hours to make sure that anything that had touched my, because we didn't know yet that it was an airborne. We didn't have the science yet to even know this is airborne, here's how it transmits, here's what it is. We were still figuring out what it was. Our transit system was carrying 35,000 people a day, which was a fraction of the nearly 100,000 that had been carrying the month before. But still, that's a lot of trips.
Carol:
That's a lot. Yeah.
Dottie:
That's a lot of essential workers. That's a lot of low-income folks have no other ways to take care of their families. That's a lot of people needing to get to the doctor and medical appointments during this really scary time. And so, it was important that we do something to protect the service, but that also along the way, we take care of the people. And so, one of my proudest accomplishments, and I will retire, I am certain, with one of my proudest accomplishments being that we survived the COVID-19 pandemic without a single layoff, largely because-
Carol:
Wow.
Dottie:
We said going into it, we don't know when, but this too will pass. And we thought it would pass in a few months.
Carol:
Yeah. I think most of us did.
Dottie:
But we knew this would pass. And when it, we did come out the other side, we were going to need workers more than ever. And so, we said, "We're not going to lay people off." Now, not surprisingly, many of our very tenured folks decided that was the perfect time to retire and they were out. And I don't blame any of them for making that choice at that time, but we were committed to making sure that people who needed to come to work or wanted to come to work or any combination of those two had work to do. Our paratransit, our demand response team that typically is serving people with disabilities, that ridership, obviously those were people who were now not leaving their house.
We spent the better part of two years delivering food for the food bank because we had these people, they had an urgent, they had a need to get food to this many of the same people that we had been transporting to and from the grocery store because the only way they could get groceries was if they used our service. Now, it was scary for them to even go to the grocery store. And so instead, we partnered with the nonprofits and we just brought them a box of food.
What a better answer than they can't get out of the house right now. And so, just thinking outside the box, because that allowed these nonprofits to get food to vulnerable populations that allowed us to continue to contribute positively to those populations to keep our workers busy and with meaningful work, not just they showed up and earned a paycheck, but they were actually doing something useful.
And it just gave us this real opportunity to lean in and say, what does our community need from us right now? And how can we best serve with the resources that we have available? And so really, in that crisis moment, figuring out what is most important to you and then just forgetting about everything else for a hot minute. You can't forget about everything else for too long. Eventually you have to come back around and go, "Okay, great. Now how are we going to keep the lights on? How are we going to pay the bills? What can we stop doing so that we have the money to continue to do all of this while sales tax recovers and all the things?"
But really, just taking a deep breath and saying, "Well, what's first, what's most important?" And once we get that covered, what's next most important? And just continuing to prioritize in that way. In some ways, a crisis is a little simpler. It is easier to tell somebody, "I'm not worried about any of you or anything right now because I'm in a crisis." That's a whole lot easier than when you're not in a crisis and you need to tell somebody that you're worried about their thing.
Carol:
Right. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Dottie:
Yeah. So, it always comes in, isn't all of leadership all about prioritizing and putting your energy where the priority is the highest? Where can you do the most good today? And I think just about taking a deep breath and refocusing on that.
Carol:
Yeah, I love that you started though with reinforcing what's most important, right? Because sometimes people panic obviously in their crisis and then start focusing on what they can't do or what they can't change, or we've always done it this way, or they start in the box and then it's stuck in the box because they're not thinking about, well, what's most important, which takes us out of the box and didn't allow us to think of other things to do that may be new or innovative or creative and really allows for that. And so, those types of crisis situations does allow for that. And what's great, I think when you can do that in a crisis when you're at times of peace, you can use that as an example to say, remember when we got creative here, it shows we have the capability to be creative in something else that may not even be a crisis situation.
Dottie:
Absolutely.
Carol:
So, I love that focusing first and reinforcing what's most important to do that. I'm curious for people who are new into leadership, new into that executive level, moving up, what would you say are the two to three things that capabilities that you think every leader should think about or lean into that would help them be successful as a new leader?
Dottie:
I think first and foremost, I love the advice, "If you show up, you go up." First and foremost, you got to just keep showing up. You got to show up every day and you get kicked in the teeth. You got to go home, clean yourself up and show up again. And so, that means showing up is not just being physically present. It means actually showing up with your best self, with your sharpest brain, doing your best. And so, first and foremost, you have to always be in that space. But then also, it's okay to not know the answer to everything. And sometimes saying, "I don't understand why that's important to you. I don't understand what you're talking about. Can you help me understand?" And being willing to admit your own lack of knowledge on something can really open up a conversation with folks.
And so, it's so easy for me at this point in my career to give that advice. I remember how hard it was to have to admit to somebody that I didn't know what I was talking about. And how early, early I came up through operations, but it came from the transportation side of the business, and vehicle maintenance is my dad's talent, not mine. I couldn't fix one of these buses. And I remember at one point, we were talking about how the differentials kept failing and all the things, and I was like, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." I was taking notes. At the end of the meeting, I pulled my maintenance guy aside and I'm like, "What's that do? I know I should know this. It's an internal combustion. What's this thing do?" And so, he drew me a picture and it took him 30 minutes to break it down. I was like, "Okay, thank you." Because I didn't understand the whole conversation. I didn't know what that thing did.
But being willing to say, "Okay, I don't understand that. And I feel like it would help me understand what we were talking about if I had some base understanding here." And knowing that, that required two things. The humility to admit to somebody that I didn't know what the heck was going on, but also the confidence to know that I am smart enough to figure it out. I don't have to ever be able to fix an engine, but I'm smart enough to understand enough about what it takes to make the engine work, to be able to help lead the discussions about the maintenance process and how we're going to do it. I'm never going to be the one that actually does the wrench turning, but I know that I'm smart enough to, "If you can't explain it to me, then you probably don't understand it well enough yet either. Let's dig into it together and so we both feel like we understand it well enough.
And it's that confidence and humility at the same time that I think really allows people to dig in on something new. You don't have to be able to do a thing to be able to lead it, but you do have to have that humility to be able to ask questions and understand enough to make sure that the leadership decisions that you're making are the right decisions for the business and that the people that you have in the roles of doing are the right people to be in those roles. You've got experts to do the experting, but you have to have that combination of humility and confidence at the same time. And I think if you can bring that with you and you just keep showing up every day, you'll power your way through it one way or another.
Carol:
That's gold. That is so awesome. Because I think so many people get stuck with this idea that, "Oh, I don't know enough and I have to know everything before I can actually step into a leader." And I love what you said that you don't have to know a thing to lead the thing and that you have to have the humility to admit what you don't know and the confidence to know that you can figure it out. I think that is so amazing because it's not your job to know. I mean, you're not doing every function in the organization. You shouldn't know every function, but you should be smart enough to hire the right people who know how to do those functions and do organization.
Dottie:
And you'll earn trust with the people who are expert at the thing. When you readily admit, "I'm not an expert on this, you're the expert on this, but I need you to help me understand why it's important." And then they appreciate and are valued. They know that you appreciate their expertise and they feel more valued. Now, they're more invested in you understanding it so that together you can solve the problem. It builds trust by being able to be a little vulnerable and say, "Yeah, I don't get how that works. Somebody's going to need to draw a picture of an engine on the whiteboard for me. I don't get how that works."
Carol:
Yeah.
Dottie:
And then you'll get it and you'll be like, "Okay, great." Now I can be part of the conversation. And so, I think that it is hard to do, and it definitely comes with experience. We start out thinking, "I can't let them know. I don't know. I can't let them know. I don't know." And absolutely, the more junior you are on a team, the less likely you are to feel comfortable saying, "I don't really know. I don't really know." But even the most junior person on a team, if they come up and say, "We were talking about this thing and I don't, I'd like to learn more about that because I don't really understand it." I'm putting two gold stars next to that person's name because they just acknowledge that there are things in the world they need to learn. And that's a person that's likely to go further than somebody who thinks they already know it, or at least feels like they have to portray that they already know it.
Carol:
Yeah. And I think it goes back to what you said it is the transition from going from the doer and being that subject matter expert. So, thinking that, "Well, I have to be the expert and know everything," to leading, which actually is a different level of expertise. The expertise is in the doing. The expertise is in the question asking and the vulnerability and humility. One of the key foundational principles of our people leadership framework is leader awareness. And it talks about self-awareness, humility, vulnerability, knowing what you know and leaning into that and knowing what you don't and being okay with that so that you can really be able to then lead from a different place than being that expert or that know or that doer, which I think is amazing. I think what you shared is just spot on.
Dottie:
Thank you.
Carol:
Thank you. And I'm sure that's why you're successful. So, Dottie, I want to thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you for pulling back the curtain on how you're pairing operational excellence with a truly people first culture at CapMetro. And for leaders listening, remember when you invest in psychological safety, clear decision making and leader awareness that you just don't hit your numbers, but you build teams that want to win together. So, thank you so much for sharing.
Dottie:
Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Carol:
Awesome. Awesome. Okay, until next time, I want to you know that this episode was powered by our team here at Carol Parker Walsh Consulting Group, and we partner with agencies to elevate leaders and build high performing people first teams for safety, sustainability, and with measurable results. And until next time, keep leading people forward. I'll see you soon.
