Undaunted: Stretching Through Fear
Featured Narrative: Carolyn Colvin, Former Acting Commissioner, Social Security Administration
You never know all you need to know for any of life’s experience.
Sometimes an arc in life becomes a circle, a single point both launch and return. For Carolyn Colvin, that place was the Social Security Administration. As a young working woman, she began as a typist and later returned to become deputy commissioner at the request of President Obama, coming out of retirement to lead the organization of 65,000. For “a little girl who grew up in a two bedroom home, without inside plumbing,” she says, “it was the highest honor.”
“But,” she adds, “for every job that I’ve taken, I’ve been scared to death.”
It is this matter-of-fact disclosure and lack of pretense during our interview that give me a window into the sincerity and humanity that infuse Carolyn Colvin. Guided by her mother’s values and expectations, the person she describes as her “greatest inspiration,” I get the sense that although Carolyn has traveled a great distance from her start in life, she remains grounded by its circumstances and her mother’s influence, allowing their imprint to guide her work in public service.
One of 14 children, Carolyn Colvin’s mother left grade school to take care of her younger siblings, using the Bible and newspaper to educate herself. She worked in low-paying domestic jobs, as a childcare provider, often using the opportunity of a trip to the library to learn, herself. Later, she’d take pride in beating Carolyn and her sister, both college educated, in games of Scrabble. She imparted values of integrity and “the importance of giving back.” Finding a coin in the street meant donating it to the church. And Carolyn knew that when she was out in the world, she carried the honor of the family name with her, was its representative. Despite having passed away several years ago, Carolyn’s mother still serves as both touchstone and beacon for this leader of one of the great institutions of the United States. Reflecting over her life and career, Carolyn says of her mother, “I’ve tried to live a life that you would have been proud of.”
Initially determined to work in education, believing, as her mother did, that education was the means by which people could affect their station in life, Carolyn changed direction early on while working in a hospital. She saw firsthand the “disparity” between how people with means were treated versus those without. And it was that close-up view that caused her to pursue a broader focus for her career, to invest her efforts in an even bigger lever than education. She realized that “it was really government that determined how you live and how you die, and I wanted to be certain that I had some ability to influence that. Public service was the answer.”
Driven by a passion and purpose so intertwined as to make them indistinguishable from one another, Carolyn was committed to making “a significant difference in the lives of people,” she tells me. And in so doing, she was simultaneously revolutionizing the course of her own trajectory. Working three jobs while raising her two boys on her own, she attended college, constrained only by the number of free evenings her rigorous work schedule would permit. It would be 14 years of night school before she earned her degree. And it is here in our conversation that I ask if things ever seemed bleak.
“It was not easy,” she says without a trace of self-pity. Sure, there were times when she felt overwhelmed, wondering if she’d cross the finish line. But Carolyn was the inaugural member of her family to attend college and carried its significance not only for herself but for those who had been rooting for her. Scores of family members, all without means themselves, contributed whatever they could, often only “nickels and dimes.” And so, even when it was a struggle, the import and weight of her efforts were sustaining: “I felt that I needed to be successful for myself as well as for them,” she shares.
Carolyn went on to serve as she envisioned, working in public sector positions in Maryland and Washington, DC, even spending several years at the Social Security Administration during the 1990s in different roles. There were a couple of years spent as the CEO of Amerigroup Community Care before becoming special assistant to the secretary of the Maryland Department of Transportation in 2009. And, then, the call from the White House. In 2010, she was asked to serve as the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a request that she describes as “the highlight of my career.” She returned to lead the organization where she began as that young typist, an institution that had personally touched her life and the lives of those she loves. She’d seen how Social Security was there for her four young grandchildren when her son passed away at age 34. She knew the safety net it provided, its critical impact. She’d watched the elders in her community, including her own mother, rely on its earned benefit. She had witnessed that it was “the most important social program that this country has ever developed.” After becoming deputy commissioner, she later served as acting commissioner, leading the entire organization. The point of launch and return was also pinnacle.
Carolyn may have experienced trepidation when taking on new roles, but she seems to have an instinctual bent toward leadership that many leaders struggle to adopt their entire careers. As we delve into the intricacies of shepherding the Social Security Administration, she talks about encouraging innovation and about how crucial a leader’s response is “when something doesn’t quite go as planned.” In that moment, leaders set the tone for all future innovation, she says, and if employees think “they’re going to get in trouble,” it will forever inhibit their risk-taking. We talk, too, about getting buy-in from stakeholders, and she admits to walking into meetings knowing “exactly what I wanted to do” and coming out “going in a totally different direction because I’d listened to employees, heard what they had to say, realized that there were things I hadn’t considered.” She knew she wanted to establish multiple channels of communication from the front lines of the organization to its senior leadership, and created, among other vehicles, virtual town hall meetings where she and 20,000 of her staff could interact.
And what about leading the leader? When I ask Carolyn about passion’s role in the work of leadership, if it affects leadership performance, it’s as if I’ve inquired if giraffes are tall. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaims. “You must have passion.” Simply put, the challenges are too great. We go on to discuss the demands of leading an organization of that stature and size, of having multiple bosses, including Congress, about “being pulled in so many directions,” of staying focused on the priority and mission of the organization, and of “getting the right benefits to the right people at the right time.”
If Carolyn Colvin has a leadership credo, it might be captured by her suggestion that leaders not take credit for achievements. “You want to let their light sort of shine through you,” she says of employees. It’s this poetic vision of leadership that makes me wonder if her dedication to working in public service contends for first place in her heart with the work of developing others. Because, when she was a young woman setting out on her path, Carolyn looked forward and pledged her efforts to those institutions serving this country’s most vulnerable. And, now, at 74, having traveled that journey, glancing back, she shares that what fills her with the most pride is “the emerging leaders that I developed who are going to be able to take the organization into the next century.”
Considering the person who was her life’s second greatest influence, Carolyn’s desire to grow and groom other leaders should not come as a surprise. Governor Schaefer of Maryland was the person who translated her mother’s teachings into the formal work of public service, the person who guided her in applying those values to an organizational context, when she first worked for him while he was the mayor of Baltimore City. “He taught us, he expected us, to serve people and to really focus on the one person who was before us,” she explains. But at the same time the governor was demonstrating what it was to lead an organization, he was also modeling what it meant to lead its people. “Governor Donald Schaefer believed that if he saw an ounce of potential, that he wanted you on his team,” Carolyn says. During our interview, it is clear the baton has been passed. As we talk about the essence of leadership and what it means to her, Carolyn says with utter conviction that it is “helping people to see what they are capable of.”
It would seem that life’s struggles have not tempered Carolyn Colvin’s optimism but informed it. When I ask if her leadership of self relates to leading an organization, there seems to be a natural confluence between the bravery and perseverance of her personal journey and the enormous responsibility and vision of guiding an organization: