Whether you’re a manager trying to move your organization in a new direction, an entrepreneur seeking to fix a consumer pain point, or a non-profit leader working to improve society, it can be hard to turn your and others’ passion for a cause into meaningful change. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun safety advocacy group, shares how she channeled her anger over U.S. school shootings into an organization with more than 10 million supporters and a string of policy victories. She explains how to know when your desires, values, and skills align to tackle a challenge, how to build a coalition, and how to keep people motivated. Watts is the author of the book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age.
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’