Moms Demand Action Founder on What It Takes to Lead Change

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.

ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ALISON BEARD: Adi, we are going to talk today about how to make change, whether it’s in your organization, or a problem that you see out in the world that you want to fix as an entrepreneur, or something that you’d like to see happen differently in society. You were a senior leader for a really long time, but I think even from that perch affecting change is really hard, right?

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Look, I love this topic. As a senior leader, I learned that to drive a new initiative to introduce something dramatically new, I had to really own it, I had to really drive it, and most importantly, I had to sustain it. It’s easy to get that initial passion and that initial buy-in, but you need processes and continuing energy to really keep something going for the long term where it makes a difference.

ALISON BEARD: And so our guest today has lots of personal experience with this. She is Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, which is the nonprofit organization in the United States that that pushes for gun safety legislation. She didn’t consider herself to be a leader or a changemaker when she launched this movement. She was a mom who had heard the news about the Sandy Hook School shooting, and she was enraged and sad, and so she wrote a Facebook post and it ballooned into this group that went on to change legislation across the country.

The lessons that she has to offer are really interesting for our audience because she’s talking about, first, how to see yourself as a leader, how to know that I see something, I’m angry about it, I think it needs to change. What am I going to do about it? She also talks about how to navigate that messy middle that you talk about, sort of push through the challenges, keep people energized, keep people focused. And she talks about building coalitions, the idea that no one can make a difference just by themselves. You have to bring together a group and you have to work together.

I really learned a lot from the conversation. I think most of our listeners can, whether you are that manager who sees a process that needs to be changed, or you’re a CEO who sees this important strategic initiative that you’d really love to launch, but you don’t quite know how to get people behind you.

ADI IGNATIUS: I mean, there are two types of leadership. One is a company has a vacancy for say, the CEO, and they bring somebody in and they’re in that role. But then there’s this kind of leadership, which is creating something new, taking on a problem that doesn’t have an organization and a process around it. So how do you do that, where you are driving it, you’re the passion, you create the process? And as I said before, you have to learn how to sustain that energy.

ALISON BEARD: Here is my interview with Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, and author of the new book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age.

So it does feel like we’re in an era where people are fired up about a lot of things, whether it’s societal problems or the way their organizations are run or how they’re being treated as consumers, but translating that from complaints into change is very hard. How do you think our listeners can recognize when a problem that’s bothering them merits more of their attention and ultimately action?

SHANNON WATTS: The short answer is anything that’s bothering you, merits your attention. That is something that is calling you and you have to pay attention to those cues. For me, I had watched mass shooting tragedy after mass shooting tragedy happen in this country, really starting with Columbine, and had watched our elected leaders and others really do nothing.

Flash forward to 2012, I was folding laundry in my bedroom and I saw breaking news on the television that there was an active shooter inside an elementary school in Connecticut. And like so many other people in this country, I was just devastated when I went to bed. I’d been just sitting in front of the television absorbing this tragedy and was in tears. And really sometime during the middle of the night that sadness crystallized and became abject rage.

When I woke up the next morning, I was agitated and I knew I had to do something. It was that idea of what you were just talking about. Something was bothering me. My soul was insulted and I wasn’t sure what I could do. You know, in 2012, Facebook was a very popular platform, particularly for middle-aged women. And so I went on and I made a Facebook page, and that was really the spark that lit the fire of Moms Demand Action.

ALISON BEARD: And how did you know that you were sort of the right person to lead the charge? How do you determine that? As you put it in the book, your desires or emotions that you’re feeling fit also your values and your abilities?

SHANNON WATTS: To be clear, I did not know I was the right person. I think most people thought I was not the right person. I had been a stay at home mom for five years after a career in communications. I was in the Midwest. I knew little to nothing about organizing or gun violence or the legislative process. I had severe untreated ADHD, which has caused all kinds of issues in my life. And I also had a debilitating fear of public speaking, right? This is not exactly someone who others would point their finger at and say, “That woman, she should take on the most powerful, wealthy special interest that’s ever existed.”

It was my values, where I was in my life, I had little kids, five of them ranging in age from elementary school to high school. So my values were really about protecting my family and my community. My abilities were my communication skills. I had a corporate public relations career for over a decade before 2012. And my desire, I grew up as a teen in the 1980s who saw Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who took on a powerful special interest too and won. And so I wanted to be part of a similar army of women and mothers.

And so all those things really came together for me. Thankfully, other women, total strangers from across the country brought their skill set, but those were mine. Those were my values, abilities, and desires that helped me create Moms Demand Action, which is now the largest women-led nonprofit in the nation.

ALISON BEARD: So what advice do you give people who ask you now about how to figure out when their desires, that thing that’s bothering them or they’re angry about or the change that they want to make in their organizations or the world or the companies that they interact with, when they are aligning with their values and their skill sets in a way that will allow them to be successful like you were?

SHANNON WATTS: So the book uses the metaphor of fire and it’s a call to action for everyone to become a firestarter, someone who prioritizes their desires over their obligations. And that’s difficult in a system that’s set up to give us all of these shoulds, these rules that we have to live by. And this is a way to audit where you are, what are the things that are calling you, and then to pursue them. And so if we break it down individually, if you look at your values, those are really your North Star.

And looking at your abilities, some are innate, some are acquired. I think we often underestimate our abilities. We think only of maybe what we got our college degree in or what our career has been in. But if we list all of the things that we’ve had success with, we can see it as personal, professional, maybe even political. And then the third is desires, right? What are the things that have always been calling you? What are the things that you really want to accomplish during your lifetime?

ALISON BEARD: Doing that analysis of sort of do my values and my skill sets equip me to tackle this challenge, is that part of the process of becoming more brave?

SHANNON WATTS: It is. I mean, just even going down the road of identifying those things, your values, your abilities, and your desires will show you and others around you that this is something that’s important to you. But I don’t think anyone can live on fire by themselves. I really do think it requires coming into community. It might be as simple as having a tough conversation or asking for a promotion or leaving a relationship that no longer suits you.

What I have seen is that when you come together in community, those are the people that see something in you that maybe you haven’t seen or they give you the confidence and the encouragement to keep going. So many times at Moms Demand Action, someone would come into the organization and it’s because of a shooting tragedy in their community or because their kid had to endure a lockdown drill. And suddenly they were supported by all these other people and they realized, “Wow, I have skills, values, desires that have been sort of untapped and I want to pursue those and look into those.”

ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like you’re saying the first step is to find allies.

SHANNON WATTS: I think the first step is identifying your abilities, values, and desires. The second step is understanding there’s going to be a blowback. Because even if you’re doing something like I did, which incurred death threats and threats of sexual violence, or you’re doing something even smaller, finally doing things differently in your life. There will be blowback, right? It might be something a colleague says that makes you doubt yourself. So the third important part of it is the community.

ALISON BEARD: So how do you start to build those allies and that coalition around you?

SHANNON WATTS: When I was in Moms Demand Action leading the organization, we really wanted to understand what made volunteers stick around. It is easy to get volunteers to come into an organization after a shooting tragedy. It is much harder to get them to stay because this is their precious time that they’re giving people. And so we decided to poll our volunteers and ask what keeps you around? And what they told us were two things.

The first is that they felt like they were winning. And I think this is actually just advice for life. When you make someone feel like they’re winning, they want to keep showing up. When you take on a special interest, you are going to lose. And so we refrain these losses as losing forward. Maybe you lost this battle, but what did you learn to win the fight? Maybe you grew your chapter, maybe you have new relationships with lawmakers that you didn’t have before. Maybe you have new insight, right? So that insight of people sticking around because they felt like they were winning was very important to us in how we messaged.

The second reason they said that they stayed was that they found their people. And I believe given the pandemic, given social media, that finding your people is more important than ever, and it is more difficult than ever. And so when you find people with like-minded values, it really does awaken something in you to have that support of a community that can become a lifeline for you for the rest of your life, no matter what you’re doing.

ALISON BEARD: So when you’ve decided that you want to tackle a challenge, you’ve started to form a group around you. When you all begin to try to make change, do you set out a vision for yourself or is it more step-by-step? You set a small goal and achieve that. Or as you said, maybe don’t achieve it, but achieve something smaller in the process. Talk about big picture versus incrementalism.

SHANNON WATTS: I think it can be either, but I think it is more realistic when it is incremental. Particularly in activism, people want wholesale overnight change and the system is not set up that way. Almost all activism is a long game, and you have to adjust as you go along because you will lose, you’ll have setbacks, you’ll have surprises. And I think looking at our lives in the same way is important. This idea of incrementalism leads to revolutions.

When I started Moms Demand Action, I didn’t say I’m going to start the largest women-led nonprofit that will pass 500 gun safety laws and take down this special interest that’s been so powerful for so long. I just said I wanted women and mothers in particular to stand up to the gun industry. And how we got there was all incremental and it required constant changes. That to me is the important part of this, is the idea of it is still worth doing even if it isn’t this grand vision, if it is a small step forward to what you ultimately want.

ALISON BEARD: And I know that you were focused mostly on policy change, but did you have successes in working with corporations and changing corporate behavior also?

SHANNON WATTS: We decided early on that we were going to look at this in three different ways: legislative, electoral, and cultural. And the corporate work really fell into that cultural bucket. I can remember I saw that gun extremists were showing up armed inside Starbucks all across the country on February 2nd in honor of the Second Amendment right, 2.2. We were so small that we couldn’t even do a boycott. We did what we call the Momcott. It was this idea of showing people we were going to have coffee instead of Starbucks on Saturdays. We used the hashtag Skip Starbucks Saturdays. And that was incredibly effective, even though we were small.

And just a few months after we started this campaign, then CEO of Starbucks came out and said, “We will no longer allow guns inside our stores.” And we knew we were onto something. After that, dozens of companies from Panera to Kroger to Home Depot, they all came out and said, “Open carry.” This practice of openly carrying handguns or long guns inside stores was no longer acceptable. And that really made a difference to get something that corporate America could latch onto and say, “We can agree on this piece of this issue.”

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned before that people were donating their precious time to this cause, you obviously devoted your life to it for a time. How do you get over that hurdle if you are a busy executive, for example, but you see something within your organization that needs to change or you see an opportunity out there in the world that you could do something entrepreneurial about, or you see a company that’s not operating the way you would like it to and you want to affect change there. How do you balance that with doing everything else that you need to do in your life?

SHANNON WATTS: I remember the night that I started the Facebook page and it was like lightning in a bottle, people from all across the country reaching out. But we went to bed that night and my husband said to me, “This is going to be a big deal.” I had been a stay at home mom for five years, and suddenly I went from that to being busier than I had ever been in my career and I wasn’t getting paid. And it was an interesting time of adjustment. My ex-husband and my new husband at the time really had to sort of step up and do the stuff that I had been doing for so long, whether that was driving kids to soccer practice or helping with homework or making dinner.

It’s difficult and it ultimately comes down to prioritizing. In the book, following on the fire metaphor, I talk about a controlled burn where it’s really important for people to look at what is taking up time in their lives. And that can be as small as Netflix and doom scrolling on social media, and it can be as large as a relationship or a job that is holding you back and trying to figure out what you want to do next. But I’ll give you one example. We had a volunteer in Chicago who was also an employee executive within Target. And Target was allowing open carry inside their stores.

This was in the early days of Moms Demand Action after we’d gone after Starbucks. And this Target leader, a woman in our organization who was also a volunteer, began to have conversations with the executives inside our organization to say, “This isn’t appropriate. This is not in the alignment with our values.” And they listened to her. And yes, there was some outside pressure too from Moms Demand Action volunteers who were showing up with petitions and asking their local Target management to not allow open carry, but ultimately Target came out and said, “Guns are no longer acceptable inside our stores.” And so that was really her doing ultimately because she used her voice on that issue.

ALISON BEARD: And you talked about the preparing for blowback, but how did you deal with it when it was actually coming at you, and what advice would you give for people who are trying to make change again within their workplaces, for example, or out in the wider world who are facing critics and people who are trying to stop them?

SHANNON WATTS: You will receive blowback no matter how small or how large your desires are that you decide to pursue. I had several inflection points where I could have easily doubled back instead of doubling down. So many threats, so much intimidation. But also I was making cold calls in those early days to get advice and counsel, and a lot of people told me, “This can’t be done. You’re not the right person to do it. You shouldn’t do it. It’s already happening.” All of these reasons why it wasn’t me and I shouldn’t start.

And I decided to trust my intuition, which told me that the time was ripe for women in particular to organize on this issue. I also talk a lot in the book about the messy middle. There is suffering involved when you get in the middle of something that you’ve taken on and you have to keep going to get to the other side.

ALISON BEARD: So how do you get through it?

SHANNON WATTS: It is a lot of understanding that it’s coming and then taking steps to figure out how do I find the right people who will support me during this? How do I have confidantes? How do I change in midstream and how do I move forward? I talked to a woman who ran for office twice in Texas and lost both times and people sort of expected her to disappear. She got a lot of blowback from people who said she should not try to run again for office. She should not be ambitious. And instead what she did was take that experience and start an organization in her state to help prepare other women when they run for office, particularly women of color, and to understand that they have a community of supporters that can help them.

ALISON BEARD: And your career before Moms Demand Action was in communications. So talk a little bit about what you’ve learned in the time running that organization about how to communicate effectively on an issue that people might vehemently disagree on, whether it’s gun control or a process that your company has used for a hundred years that you think it needs to get rid of but half the people there don’t.

SHANNON WATTS: I think that my career in corporate communications, learning how to build a brand, for example, at General Electric, really prepared me for the activism that is storytelling. And all storytelling includes two important things, data and coming armed with information and facts to be able to make your case, but also anecdotes and stories. And that’s why in gun safety activism, survivors are really the North Star of everything we do because they have the stories to bring to have with lawmakers and others about what they experienced and why they don’t want anyone else to. And it can be very effective and very persuasive. And so if you have those two things, data and then anecdotes. It’s really the recipe for changing hearts and minds.

ALISON BEARD: I noticed a clever thing you did there. I said gun control, and you said gun safety. Which I think is part of the messaging.

SHANNON WATTS: Yes.

ALISON BEARD: So what mistakes did you make along the way that you think our listeners who want to make change can learn from?

SHANNON WATTS: When I started Moms Demand Action, we were really set on mass shootings and school shootings because that was the reason so many of us got off the sidelines. And it was very short-sighted because mass shootings and school shootings are horrifically tragic, but they’re about 1% of the gun violence in this country.

And it was really important, and I think this is true for anything, is to always be widening the aperture, to be looking at an issue holistically, and to be prepared and okay with pivoting. We had to change our policy many times along the way. When you’re working with volunteers in red states and blue states alike, there are different priorities and different messages that resonate with different audiences.

And so that is a really difficult needle to thread. To make sure that you are always, I think, changing the way that you’re acting. If you are stagnant and your policies aren’t changing along with whatever’s happening in the world, you aren’t growing. I definitely learned that. I think the other important lesson I learned personally, I had been in the corporate world and it is much different managing paid employees than it is volunteers. It can be a lot more like herding cats. Successful organizations, and maybe this is true in the corporate world too, but it’s a delicate balance between top-down and bottom-up.

If you are too top-down, it’s too controlling. If it is too bottom-up, it is too chaotic. And so you’re always trying to adjust to get that exact right harmony so that you are a delicate balance of both. And I think that is the key to a successful business, organization, relationship, anything.

ALISON BEARD: I mean, I imagine if you’re trying to change something within your company, it’s also the people working with you who are volunteering their time to help you do it, so it’s not their day job. Talk a little bit about how you grew into being a leader, because anyone who’s deciding that they’re fired up about something and wanting to take on a challenge, they start with themselves and then maybe they gather a few allies, but then ultimately if they’re successful, it becomes a broader operation. Maybe it’s a dozen people. So how does someone who started with their own desires, values, and skill sets begin to manage something like that?

SHANNON WATTS: I was really fortunate that, again, a lot of these people were perfect strangers who came to the table with these skill sets and helped me create the organization that taught me and brought skill sets that I didn’t have. And so as we grew, they became even more important. I would say six months into the organization, I realized we would have to partner with another organization in order to survive into perpetuity. And I began interviewing organizations inside and outside the space, some in gun safety, some not. And ultimately it was meeting with then Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s team that I realized we had a big army and they had a lot of generals, and we needed that synergy.

And so we decided to collaborate and create Everytown for Gun Safety, which is the umbrella organization and Moms Demand Action became the grassroots army of that. And that turbocharged everything a year in. And we were able to finally have the financial and human resources to hire more leaders, to grow our base, to invest in lobbyists and creating a chapter leadership structure that would help us continue to grow. And that has worked perfectly for over 11 years now.

ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like at some point reaching out to powerful allies and people with leadership experience is useful.

SHANNON WATTS: It is. A lot of people were worried that we would lose that homegrown feeling of activism by creating this relationship. And I don’t think that their worries were unfounded, but ultimately we figured out a way to make sure that the volunteers had a say in everything we do. But creating that relationship with very powerful allies was the key to unlocking exponential growth ultimately.

ALISON BEARD: And finally, just tell me how when you’re working on a project this massive and this challenging, how do you avoid burnout and persevere?

SHANNON WATTS: There were times, particularly after major national shooting tragedies, that it did feel and become overwhelming. I often talk about how activism is a marathon, not a sprint, it’s also a relay race, and you have to hand the baton over to other people. And there were many times that I had to do that. I think I was worried that if I gave away my work, I felt guilty that other people would have to do it, or I felt worried that they might do it better than I do it. And what I learned every time I came back was actually when you give other people the opportunity to step up and bring their energy and their ideas to something, it makes it better.

ALISON BEARD: Well, Shannon, it’s been so lovely speaking with you. And thank you so much for all the work that you and your organization have done.

SHANNON WATTS: Thank you.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Shannon Watts, founder of the non profit Moms Demand Action and the author of the book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age.

Next week, Adi will speak with Columbia University’s Peter T. Coleman about conflict intelligence – an essential skill in turbulent times.

And we now have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts, to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR dot org slash podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team: Senior producer Mary Dooe. Associate Producer Hannah Bates. Audio product manager Ian Fox. and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.