Francie Genz, CEO of Formation: Workforce Collaboration Requires Checking Egos at the Door

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Regular listeners know I’m a big fan of creating partnerships with industry sectors as a way to spur job creation and improve workforce development. Today, I’m delighted to welcome Francie Genz to the podcast, who is advancing this approach as CEO of Formation.

Amongst other initiatives, Formation has been building the NextGen Sector Partnership model and toolkit, which is now active in 100 communities in 20 states across the US. I’m looking forward to learning about that model and Formation’s other work to help regions build resilient economies and expand economic opportunities.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Francie.

Francie Genz

Thanks, Van. It’s great to be here.

Van

So, Francie, let’s start by you telling us how do you mobilize people in the private sector to engage as leaders in partnership building, given the complexity and the challenges involved?

Francie

Yeah, you know, I think it’s such a central question, Van, and if you care about workforce development, if you care about jobs, we have to care about the roles that the private sector plays in this work. And I think everybody knows employer engagement is important. A ton of energy and effort gets expended trying to build partnerships with employers. For every program initiative or grant, there’s always some sort of an employer outreach component.

But I think that if we’re really honest, so many of those partnerships and efforts end up being pretty transactional in nature, where they’re time-limited. Oftentimes, employers are in sort of a passive advisory role, as opposed to being really proactive, strategic partners, and not just sort of seeing themselves as customers, or beneficiaries of workforce programs and investments.

So my work, and really sort of my obsession over the last dozen or so years, has been this question of what does it take to get the private sector to engage differently, to see themselves as co-owners and co-investors in the work of talent development and more broadly, making their industries more competitive and their regions more conducive to industry growth and innovation?

I just really believe that we’ve got incredible assets and community colleges and universities and workforce and economic development institutions, but if we can’t get the private sector to lean in and play the right roles, we’re going to miss the mark. And I think that part of it is an expectation, you know, raising the bar on what we expect from the private sector. But then also it’s about good process. It’s about relationships. It’s about getting organized to create the conditions for the private sector to play those different roles.

Van

So, having the private sector lean in as co-owners and co-investors….you talk about this as building true private sector partnerships. Talk us through some of the elements and how do the partners begin?

Francie

Industry partnerships, sector partnerships have been around for ages and ages, as you know well. But the step that’s often skipped, I think, is understanding the context in which a sector partnership operates. That there are almost always dozens and dozens of tables that are convening employers to have conversations about workforce. Sometimes they’re narrowly focused, you know, a table focused on a particular program, an advisory board, CEO forums, industry groups. And if you think about collectively what that adds up to, it means there’s a whole bunch of places where employers are being asked to engage and they’re spread very thin across so many different, independent and frankly, competing efforts, right?

I think we need to be honest about how fierce the competition can be for time and attention of employers. So I think it begins with a recognition that if we’re going to get employers to engage in a different way and step up in a more sustained manner, we can’t go it alone. We can’t have individual institutions and programs sort of vying for the time and attention of employers independently. It’s essential that there’s a shared table. And what that really requires — which I think is one of the really powerful transformative elements of the NextGen model —  is it requires economic development, workforce, and education institutions to jointly engage employers and to agree that we’re building a shared table as opposed to doing our own thing.

What that makes possible, then, is the opportunity for more integrated, aligned solutions where you’ve got multiple institutions jointly responding to the needs of employers as opposed to doing their own thing. But that’s hard and it really takes a team and it takes a commitment to seeing the holistic picture of where and how employers are engaged and it takes some time. But I’ve seen it work in places to know it’s possible and that’s what keeps me in it.

Van

Well, Francie, this concept of competition is so true. Back when I was executive vice chancellor of the California Community Colleges, I used to say, look, the public sector and the public actors need to learn to dance together before approaching the private sector because it’s not the private sector’s role to sort all of us out.

Francie

Yes.

Van

And when I say all of us, it’s the community colleges, it’s the workforce board, it’s even economic development entities, which could be public sector as well. Talk us through an example, a moment,  of like when it worked and when it didn’t because you had a good leader that perhaps is the organizer of this ecosystem. I mean, is it person specific or is it method specific?

Francie

Well, I’ll say yes, in the sense that yes, it is about people, it’s about leadership, it’s about relationships, but it’s also about good process. I think that sometimes we see that as an either/or, that there just must be some charismatic leaders or something in the water that makes this possible in Chicago, but not in Omaha. And I think two things about that: one is that we dramatically underestimate how many untapped, powerful civic leaders in the private sector there are in most regions. I think there are many, many leaders who have yet to be engaged in many civic or workforce development efforts simply because they’re not tapped in, they’re not plugged into those networks. So I do think there’s a lot of latent leadership that a lot of regions have an opportunity to tap.

It matters, certainly, to have some strong business champions at the outset, but I think in terms of the more replicable, disciplined piece that is applicable in a variety of places and contexts, it does take an organization acting on behalf of a broader team that recognizes that we really need fundamentally to shift our approach to employer engagement. That as opposed to viewing this as a one-time initiative or program — we’re gonna do a sector partnership maybe because we got a grant or the state’s telling us to do it — instead really viewing this as we need a different way of working, a mechanism for being able to more accurately and comprehensively understand the needs of industry and respond in a holistic manner.

So, it does take an organization or a couple of organizations that are ready for what I would call a cultural change. It’s a cultural shift in thinking about what do we expect of employers, what do we offer, how do we conceive of our roles, and a willingness to engage in this work in a manner that really is collaborative.

The last thing I’ll say that I think is essential, and kind of doesn’t work without this, is a willingness to really insist on the private sector being a part of the solution as opposed to believing that the role of workforce and education and economic development is to deliver the solution to employers entirely. There has to be in some ways a raising of the bar of what we expect from companies and that is best done when it’s done jointly. A group of organizations saying you know we are going to be in this because we all will benefit from a different kind of private sector leadership and so let’s engage in a process that makes that the expectation and the norm.

Van

I’m going to pull on one of the threads that you’ve talked about, which is that in every community there needs to be basically a trusted intermediary organization who’s going to set the table and convene the team and then get them to think about the culture change and focus the conversation. Doesn’t that organization come in different flavors and forms depending on the community? Because in some places your economic development entity is really strong, in other places it’s the chamber or maybe it’s the college, which is maybe the only institution especially in rural communities. What’s your observation on that?

Francie

Absolutely. First I want to say I have a love-hate relationship with the term intermediary. Yes, we need an entity that sits in the middle — maybe that’s the most basic definition of an intermediary — and yet it’s the art and science and the nuance of what it takes to fulfill that role that I think is often really misunderstood or oversimplified.

I agree intermediaries come in so many different shapes and sizes. And I think one of the things the field really badly needs is a typology to understand this really hard, really important work. You’re exactly right. It’s not one size fits all. A chamber, an economic development organization, sometimes a pairing…in our work, we’ve seen a co-convening model be quite effective. Maybe it’s a community college paired with an economic development organization or an industry association paired with a workforce development organization. And a lot of my work and the work that I’m doing in formation is really studying what are the capabilities required for organizations to play that role effectively, functionally? And where does the organization need to be positioned?

So I think it’s both about what the organization does and how it’s different, as well as how the organization is positioned relative to the private sector as well as other public sector partners. Which are the organizations that have credibility with and proximity to business leaders? But one of the distinctions that I often look for, that I think really makes the difference is, is it an organization that is seen as business-serving — where their primary role is to serve members, so their business model may be organized around dues — versus an organization that’s willing to see themselves as a coach and a partner to business? In other words, willing to exert some influence to shape private sector behavior and not just deliver solutions.

And again, it’s in the spirit of really thinking about the role of the private sector as a partner, where we need the private sector to be leaning in. We need there to be some authenticity in the relationship where there’s a give and take. Some chambers, some economic development organizations, I think, are leaning into that role. And increasingly, modern economic development organizations are seeing their role as being able to sort of mobilize and motivate change in private sector behavior, but not all are.

Certainly on the education side — community colleges or workforce organizations — it’s a question of whether or not they have the positioning and relationships with the private sector to be able to build the kind of partnership that really will galvanize a critical mass of companies. So I see it as sort of two elements: how do you both have the right positioning vis-a-vis private sector but also be seen as neutral on the part of the many, as you were saying earlier, competing education workforce economic development entities?

That’s a unique niche, and when it’s done well, I think it can have a really transformational effect on a region. But yeah, I don’t think we know enough about really what it looks like and what it takes, and there isn’t quite a mold for it.

Van

So you’ve been cutting your teeth and kind of refining the model of the NextGen Sector Partnership Toolkit in over 100 communities now. What is the call that you get inviting you into a community? What does it sound like in terms of their pain point or why they’re inviting you in?

Francie

Well, I’ll offer an example of a place that I’m just beginning to work. Richmond, Virginia, where the call — and I think this is fairly typical —  the call is often, we’ve got some big ambitions as a region. We really want to move the needle on economic mobility, on job access, on inclusion, on getting more local people into local jobs, for example. And I think many regions have these kinds of ambitions and aspirations, but what they recognize is the lack of a practical mechanism to operationalize that work and to operationalize it in a way that includes the private sector.

We’ve seen for decades, right, the big initiatives that are led or driven by civic actors, nonprofit actors, government. And often the emphasis is more on the planning than on the doing, and the emphasis tends to be more on the public and nonprofit actors than on the private sector. In Richmond, for example, the team came to me having engaged in a really rich and deep, multi-year process aimed at supporting economic mobility for residents within the region, but have gotten to the point where they’ve planned enough, they’ve talked enough about what could be, they’ve analyzed their data quite a bit, they’re ready to get activated, they’re ready to really do something.

And because this is an effort driven by a chamber, and many of the private sector leaders are involved, they want a methodology for operationalizing the work that very much emphasizes the private sector’s role. So, this is an example where a region has the right aspirations, the right ambitions, the right actors teed up, but they lack the process and the discipline to convert that into very tangible, quantifiable, measurable action that keeps business leaders in the driver’s seat.

In other instances, regions come to me because they recognize that the weak link in their ability to actualize their big goals is the private sector or community foundation or community college or workforce organization. They recognize that they’re only going to be able to really move the needle on jobs or inclusion if they get the private sector to lean-in in different way. So it often, I think, comes from many years of trial and error. We’ve run a bunch of programs, we’ve tried stuff, and yet we can’t get the private sector to step up in the way we need to and to stay engaged over time and that’s often what lead people to the model.

Van

So, Francie, let’s take your example of Richmond. So, Richmond has aspirations, has done some conversations and legwork. Give us some example of the steps that you would advise them or coach them to take so that they could engage the private sector properly. Just give us some nuggets on what’s inside your model and your toolkit.

Francie

Well, it starts with deciding where to begin, what industry sector to prioritize, which is a step that is not to be given short shrift. The question that we ask is what is the industry sector that merits your coordinated and collective action in the form of a sector partnership? Because not all sectors do, right? Not all industry sectors are significant economic drivers, significant generators of good jobs, and not all are right and ready for organizing in the form of a sector partnership. So this is where it’s important to be grounded in data and grounded in an understanding of where are the most ripe, rich economic opportunities that really have potential to be a driver of the regional economy in a different way.

We tend to emphasize thinking of the sector selection from an economic development lens as much as from a workforce development lens because NextGen Sector Partnerships address both the comprehensive needs of an industry — related to infrastructure, permitting, innovation — it’s about growing the industry, as much as it is about preparing people for jobs in the industry. So identifying industries that really do have potential to significantly drive the region’s economy. Any industry that’s growing is also going to have workforce needs, so certainly we recommend considering what’s the makeup of jobs and to what extent are there common workforce needs within the industry.

So that’s step one. Pick a sector, find a target that’s ripe and ready using both quantitative data and then more qualitative insight from individual business leaders. Are there conditions either within the region or outside that lend themselves well to collaboration or inhibit collaboration? For example, healthcare is, as you know very well, can be a very challenging industry to organize in terms of competitive dynamics within the industry, but it’s also an industry that faces a real imperative to come together because there are many challenges that can’t be addressed by individual health systems. So, you know, it’s a weighing of which industries are most ripe and ready.

Having identified the right industry sector to target, or I’ll say the right one to start with, the next step really is ensuring that you have enough buy-in from what we call the public partners — your regional economic development groups and chambers and your industry associations and your colleges. This is a shared approach. It never works for the lead organization to come in strong saying, we’ve got a new initiative, we’re launching next-gen sector partnerships and they brand it and they call it their own. It can immediately sort of put us back into the mode where we’ve got yet another table that is competing with other efforts within the region. So, it’s very important that it’s framed from the outset as a collaborative endeavor and a shared table.

Going back to our conversation about the intermediary, the convener, we often say that it’s not as glamorous a job as it might sound and important that the organization playing that role really makes clear that they’re operating on behalf of the broader region. It’s not their party alone and we say that the rules of the game are that you check your ego and your logo at the door. This is not the place for individual partners to be pitching their wares and promoting their individual programs. So that level setting is extremely important and actually can be quite time consuming and sometimes the hardest part is getting partners to buy in to the idea that this is a shared table.

But once you have enough of a coalition that understands the vision, then it’s a matter of recruiting your industry champions and it only takes a couple in the beginning. We usually recommend two to five industry leaders from the targeted sector that represent the breadth of the kinds of companies that you’re wanting to engage in terms of size, in terms of subsector, and wanting to find CEOs who share this vision and understand that they know their business’s success is connected to the success of the industry and the industry success is connected to the success of the region, and those champions need to be compelled by the vision of what a sector partnership could be.

But it generally doesn’t take very long. I’ll be honest…the work to get public partners to agree to do this jointly can sometimes take months. I found with business leaders, it’s usually a 15 minute phone call or so. It’s really just sort of presenting, hey, we see an opportunity to more holistically support your industry and bring together a table at which you and your peers will define an agenda, but know that you’ve got a team at your back willing and able to support. Initially the ask is pretty modest, saying, can you help us pull together 20 or so of your peers for a two hour meeting? And hey, could we host it at your facility or your location. Generally speaking, it’s not too hard to make that ask. Sometimes there need to be a few more conversations to get business leaders sort of comfortable with what is this going to look like.

What I found, though, is that the power of the model is that you’re harnessing the bias toward action of the private sector; the bias toward let’s just try stuff, let’s iterate, let’s repeat. And when applied in the in the realm of workforce development…workforce development maybe seems simpler than it is. Workforce development is housing and childcare and education and so many complex issues. Getting a business or teams of business leaders to be able to apply their problem solving acumen to these complex challenges is really what a sector partnership is all about. I find generally business leaders are drawn to the idea that this is their table, that they can help really push the conversation toward action.

And then from there, it’s launch. Hold the meeting. Get at least 20, 25 CEOs in the room. We do insist — this is a nitty gritty, but it really matters – on the setup of the room. We insist on having the business leaders seated at the central table, and around the perimeter of the room is a subset of your community college and workforce and economic development organizations who have been very carefully prepped to participate in listen-only mode, meaning, we’ve got to give the floor to industry. We’ve got to let the employers drive this conversation. They are well intentioned and we need their insights and we need their help. But if we take over the conversation too quick, we know that business leaders will lean out and disengage.

And from there it’s off to the races and that’s when partnerships evolve in all sorts of different directions. But generally speaking, those are the steps that have worked in enough places that I can confidently say, that’s what you gotta do to get one of these off the ground.

Van

Well, I have to say, as you outline these steps, they resonate quite well with my own experience of what it takes to get started and to keep going. And I love that you have sort of codified and put it into a model that others can leverage. Now, just to give you a moment to give a call out, are there any of these 100 communities that you wanted to give kudos to?

Francie

Well, we’ve been in a reflective mode here as Formation is launching this week after about 12 years that the NextGen community of practice has grown and now we have a new sort of umbrella organization to support it. I’ve been reflecting a lot on some of the longest standing partnerships in our network, some that have been around for upwards of a decade.

Northern Colorado stands out near and dear to my heart. NoCo Manufacturing and NoCo Healthcare Sector Partnerships are two of some of the longest running and strongest sector partnerships in the country that I think really set a standard, not just for what they’ve accomplished, but for their ability to reinvent themselves, that the bar for success of a NextGen sector partnership is you couldn’t shut it down if you tried. There’s just that much momentum, there’s that much understanding of the power of collaboration. So, a convening organization may change, funding may come and go, business champions may retire, and yet the partnership itself endures as a long-term network.

And so looking at a place like Northern Colorado that’s been at this for quite some time, you can really see the way that it sort of seeped into the DNA of how the region is organized and how they operate. There’s a level of systematizing how industry engages with schools, how industry connects with one another. I think one of the innovations in Northern Colorado that I wish more places would take on is the regional advisory committee model. This was initiated by the manufacturing sector partnership in the early days. I remember Dave Carlson — one of the manufacturing champions of the partnership — saying, you know, I’m personally invited to sit on so many different advisory boards, but I’m not really the one who should be commenting on the very specific skill requirements for these occupations. I’d love to have my strongest employees in those roles participate, but I can’t give that much time from my superstar employees.

So what came from that conversation through the sector partnership was a recognition that wouldn’t it be great if we could, in addition to program specific advisory meetings, have a regional advisory meeting where we could get a much better turnout of manufacturers, have a much deeper conversation, and let’s get everybody in the room, including our K-12 CTE programs and our colleges.

So, once a year, they hold this regional advisory meeting, which is a chance to have a much broader conversation about transformation and manufacturing workforce. It’s an opportunity for educators to connect with one another and identify how might we learn or link programs and opportunities. The second advisory committee meeting of the year still happens in the normal way at the college or at the CTE program. It’s an example of where that region has just really matured its understanding of what’s possible when you come together. So I give them quite a shout out.

But there’s many other places within the network. I will say that increasingly, I’ve come to believe that we learn as much from missteps as we do from successes. And fundamental to what makes NextGen Sector Partnerships work is that they are iterative. It’s a constantly evolving, continuous learning machine. You try stuff, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, but you course correct and keep going. So, over the years — given the economic shifts underway, changes in context and funding — I think many places have used the model to be able to sort of plant the seeds of a different way of working that allows partners to be more resilient, more adaptive over time.

There’s plenty of examples of partnerships that cropped up, that existed for a couple of years, and that got some really good work done and then evolved into a new chapter and into something new. And to me, that’s very healthy. It’s a sign that the partnership is as dynamic as the economy and that we’re not building something overly calcified. So it’s as much about building a problem-solving muscle as it is about an initiative that has the same logo and the same website over many, years. Although some have that, too.

Van

Well, thank you for sharing those…especially the example of Northern Colorado that sounds like they’re doing great work. Now, let me pull out a little bit. I know you’ve been doing some reflections recently. Here’s a question: what’s a workforce development practice from the past that will no longer be of help in the future, given all the factors that are affecting employment and work? What’s your thought on that?

Francie

Mm-hmm. Well, I was just talking with a team in Philadelphia about this the other day. I think we are ready to officially retire the analyses that claim to be able to pinpoint specific skills gaps, meaning a supply and demand analysis. I wish that we were able to — with the level of precision that sometimes data can make us think we have — to pinpoint that we need exactly this many welders or exactly this many radiation technicians. I think we’re in a time where the economy is changing faster than it ever has and the rate of change is only accelerating. And so I think that the somewhat blunt instruments that we’ve used in the past — using like cast data to project and then using supply side data on training program completion rates and trying to do the math of where exactly are the disconnects — it can be directionally useful, but I think that it oversimplifies what really is required to be able to build adaptive talent pipelines.

What I see in a lot of places is that we make assumptions about the level of precision that we have, either through data or even that employers have about their workforce needs, and underestimate just how profound the pace and scale of transformation is changing workforce needs on a continual basis. And so I think the key is being able to have a general sense, ask very good questions, be relentless about getting to the root of the problem, but I think sort of static dashboards and tools that suggest that we can exactly know what the gap is between supply and demand are a thing of the past. The world is too complex for that and we have to think instead about working through networks, working through partnerships and relationships. We can’t rely on data alone. Certainly has a role to play, but that’s one thing that I feel ready to let go of because I just haven’t seen it work.

Van

And so, Francine, why don’t we close by giving you the last word on what makes you optimistic about the future of workforce development.

Francie

I feel incredibly optimistic at what’s possible at the regional scale. I think that’s really what gives me a lot of hope in these days when there’s so much uncertainty, so much volatility in the world. I think that it’s incredible what can happen at the regional scale where relationships really are the glue, where pragmatism, a focus on let’s do stuff, let’s try it, let’s be honest with one another about what is and is not working, the possibility to be able to create the kinds of feedback loops that enable more adaptation and responsiveness. I have seen even incremental shifts have enormous impact for people, for students, for job seekers.

I think there’s a level of creativity and resourcefulness that can be unlocked if you bring unlikely partners together. To me that’s the power of good sector partnerships, is that you’re really harnessing the different perspective of the private sector with the depth of knowledge and understanding of workforce developers, educators, economic developers. A lot of really good work can happen if you can get the right coalitions to get focused and get stuff done.

So my hope is that we’re in a moment where there’s a willingness to challenge old assumptions, to try stuff and not be overly bound by this idea that there’s a playbook written. I think the playbook’s being written in real time, and I think it’s an exciting time to be experimenting. It’s an exciting time to be really rethinking ways that we think about preparing people for jobs. I feel hopeful that we have an opportunity to kind of recreate how we think about workforce development, how we think about institutions, and how we think about the people that drive them. At the end of the day that’s really what matters. So I do feel optimistic. I’m not just hamming it up. I have a lot of hope that the regions I’ve worked with have really instilled in me.

Van

Well, I’ll put an exclamation on the comment about regional scale. There’s something about the region where you can access and tap into solutions that may be not feasible at the local scale and may be much more manageable than at the state or federal scale. It’s been so wonderful to have you share your practical advice today. Thank you very much, Francie, for joining us.

Francie

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.