Low-Key Leadership And High-Flying Growth -- Charity Is Michael Reichert's Calling

Reichert honored

Michael Reichert will be honored tomorrow night for his 20 years as president of Catholic Community Services. The agency's annual Gala Banquet is at 7 p.m. on the sixth floor of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.

The president of the corporation can't find his car. He's forgotten where he parked it. Michael Reichert is a curious sight in his own parking lot, standing in the drizzling rain, looking slightly rumpled, lost.

You'd think the president of a corporation with a $60 million budget and 3,000 employees would have his own stall a few leisurely steps from the front entrance. Where is that dusty little Saturn sedan - the one that regularly putters through the Central Area piping out Paul Simon songs?

As he wanders the lot, stopping to talk to employees, it's clear one of his defining qualities, and a key characteristic in his remarkable leadership of Catholic Community Services (CCS), is his oneness with regular people. He's often called by front-line workers simply as Reichert, as in "Yo, Reichert - forgot where you parked again, eh?"

Yet, this 48-year-old, handsomely rumpled regular guy has been largely responsible for transforming a skeletal agency with a $4 million budget and fewer than 200 employees in 1979, when he was hired, into the largest private nonprofit helper of poor people in the state. Many of his colleagues, employees and others - such as King County Sheriff Dave Reichert, his cousin - hold him up as a

model of leadership.

The apparent tenets of his leadership style:

Lead without creating a distance between leader and led. Determine each worker's passion and find a way to unleash it, or at least allow it to unleash itself. And give workers the freedom to define and redefine their own work.

"There's no formula. It's an art," Reichert says without pretension. He speaks gently and thoughtfully, but with incisive clarity, like a blade cutting through fat. "You create a place where people can live out their calling, and this will do more than any institutional set of plans or directions or vision statements."

During Reichert's 20 years as president of CCS, the agency's budget and staff both have grown 1,400 percent, an accomplishment that, if done in the private sector, would have made him a star in the business community. But because CCS belongs to the world of human services, dealing with the poorest of the poor, the agency's massive expansion has gone largely unnoticed.

The agency, headquartered in Seattle's Central Area, operates nine shelters, 13 family centers and more than two dozen low-income housing projects. It offers floor space to the homeless, housing for the working poor, protection for battered women, home care for the elderly, counseling of every kind, even studio space for artists and writers who live on the streets.

Shelley Dooley, who runs the agency's Dorothy Day House, a downtown housing facility for homeless women, says, "There's a lot of freedom to come up with ideas and to make changes when we need to. In the private sector, in general, you're not allowed to go outside your job description. Here, I'm empowered to do what's good for my program."

For example, Dooley was able to persuade management to bend the rules on not employing people who live in the building. Dooley believed residents of Dorothy Day would benefit from working in and managing their own building. She proposed it and management listened, then encouraged it.

"We have a hierarchy, but it's not like in the private sector where the boss is the boss, and he's somewhere out there," she says. "My boss is available whenever I need her, and I can have personal conversations with Michael (Reichert) if I need to."

Word that CCS was a good place to fulfill a calling spread throughout the human-services world, and this has drawn service-minded people from all over.

People like Anthony Taylor from Washington, D.C., who now runs The Westlake, an apartment complex for homeless elderly men. Taylor, too, started his career in the private sector, but found appealing the flexibility and horizontal structure of leadership at CCS.

"Michael Reichert sets the tone, and it trickles to the rest of the organization," Taylor says.

"The big CEOs in the big companies want you to meet them where they are," Taylor continues. "Michael Reichert meets everybody where they are, emotionally, spiritually. He doesn't make judgments on people. If you're a line worker or a director, he treats you the same, like you're an important person."

Skeptics will say Reichert's leadership style might not work so well in the private sector, and that CCS's success is due to the service-driven people who staff it. But social-service agencies come and go all the time, and few experience the kind of phenomenal growth CCS has.

Reichert will say it boils down to passion, in this case passion for the poor, something he had from the beginning as the son of a Native American mother born and raised on a reservation. As a member of the White Earth Band of the Chippewa Tribe in Minnesota, Reichert experienced hardship and racism firsthand.

Even his father, a red-haired, blue-eyed man of German descent, taught him to pay attention to the way Indian people were treated in this country, which is to say, poorly.

Reichert learned to be a fighter early. He became a state wrestling champion in 1969 for Tahoma High School in Maple Valley, where he did most of his growing up. For a time during college, he considered being a reporter, but decided early that he'd rather do than report.

At the ripe age of 27, after a few interactions with the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, he was recruited by former Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen to be president of what was then Catholic Charities, which was still a branch of the church.

Reichert, with a grin, likes to tell people he hasn't had a promotion in 20 years. He began as president and has remained president through all of the agency's evolutions. His annual salary is $87,000 a year - low in comparison to his counterparts in the business world. Reichert, though, says he feels rich.

One of the hallmarks of good work, he says, is that you change and grow as you do your work. In this sense, the outcome of your work isn't as important as the process. For Reichert, both the process and outcome have yielded good fruit.

He has shepherded the agency through numerous milestones:

The founding of the Archdiocesan Housing Authority (AHA) in 1981. The AHA manages all the shelters and housing facilities in the CCS system. Today, the AHA provides 1,500 low-income housing units and shelter beds - more than any other nongovernmental agency in the region.

The unification of the three major agencies of Catholic Charities starting in 1982. The separate agencies in Everett, Seattle and Tacoma officially became one entity by 1985. Its service area would eventually cover most of Western Washington.

The incorporation of Catholic Community Services in 1988 as a separate entity from the church, enabling the agency to receive government funding and engage in public-private partnerships.

Today, nearly 70 percent of the agency's annual budget is earned through contracts on a fee-for-service basis. Only $7.8 million of the agency's $60 million annual budget comes from donations.

Reichert has also led the agency through some hard times. When CCS moved into the neighborhood in the early 1980s, residents decried the placement of the building in what was then a largely residential district.

The agency has been sued a number of times over local adoptions gone awry, and two years ago a contract worker was sentenced to prison for fraudulently using the CCS name to obtain personal loans. But the lows have been remarkably few compared with the highs.

Reichert's days are spent leading or attending ad hoc meetings that form spontaneously like desert brush fires. Before more formal meetings, his colleagues force him to wear a tie, something he apparently despises. Colleague Rosemary Zilmer keeps a drawer full of ties for such occasions. And many meetings are held in his car, via cell phone, on which he logs something like 5,000 minutes a month.

Reichert says he views the agency he heads as an instrument "to help the church live out its own calling to help the poor."

The theme of a calling is a constant motif in his philosophy of work and leadership. A job is a way to earn a paycheck, but a calling, as Reichert sees it, is a divinely inspired passion to act. And he believes every person has a calling to act.

"The work of Catholic Community Services is to engage in the struggle for social justice," he says. "And there's such a pent-up desire in people to do this work. The question is, does my presence create this desire or simply free it up? I think I free it up."

Alex Tizon's phone message number is 206-464-2216. His e-mail address is atizon@seattletimes.com