Rapid Response: Be relentless – so your team can be fearless, w/Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson

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It's in our interest to actually speak to the intersection of how gender, gender identity, access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, and yes, race are really foundational to understanding the core of freedom. My favorite quote by Alice Walker is a poem called Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear. I am sad. I am definitely

Angry. And I have to practice every day to find that hope. that hope to be fearless and to model that. So that my team feels fearless, my team feels unapologetic, my team feels like they can lay it all on the line without penalty.

That's Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Plan Parenthood Action Fund. Plan Parenthood is an institution that often sparks strong feelings from various constituencies, but there's no denying the perilous situation it finds itself in now. I'm Bob Safian. Former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. I wanted to talk to Alexis because every organization goes through periods where things just don't go their way.

How leaders respond to these moments are incredibly important for the organization's mission and for its team. Since Alexis took over at Planned Parenthood, she's faced both internal and external challenges. She's chosen to speak boldly, emphasizing equity and addressing the organization's legacies of racism head on. The lessons she offers are about not shying away from disappointments and impossible dreams, but continuing to stride toward them. It's a case study and entrepreneurial mindset, even if the goal isn't financial or scale in the traditional business sense. She also offers poignant reminders about the role of companies, even in realms ostensibly in the charge of government. Corporate citizens, she notes, are leaders with obligations that extend beyond the bottom line.

I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with Alexis McGill Johnson, CEO of Plant Parenthood Federation of America. Lexus, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. So you have had an intriguing background in academia, working on political action through the Hip Hop Summit Action Network and Citizen Change and Voter Die, and then founding your own startup research firm, which became Perception Institute, successful.

Impactful enterprise working on addressing bias with the likes of Starbucks as well as school systems and police departments and so on. But taking the helm of Planned Parenthood in twenty nineteen And then having Covid nineteen hit. That's hard for any leader to be prepared for what we've been going through. And now

You've got another storm breaking. as abortion restrictions intensify at the state level and the Supreme Court Seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Which has been a bedrock for Planned Parenthood. For decades

Our audience here is primarily business leaders, and so I'm curious from A business perspective In leading and operating your enterprise at this moment, like How do you plan?

How do you react? When uh foundation on which the organization was. Based and has been operating on It's poised.

to potentially evaporate. Well, look, the foundation of the organization, indeed the very foundation of the mission. is about fighting for and protecting the fundamental right to control your body as a basis for self-determination, as a basis for determining who you will be, your freedom, your right, when and if you want to become a parent.

And I think that because it is literally baked into The core of everything we do, everything we do for our patients. It's daunting, but it's how we've been preparing for over a hundred and five years. How is Plant Parenthood strategy Different than it was a year ago. Do you have new contingencies in place?

Or were there systems already there? Anticipating these possibilities. I was a board member for ten years, and I think to understand. what is happening right now, we have to go back at least that decade to see how the political landscape shifted so significantly in so many states. that created the foundation for the number of bans and restrictions that we have.

Our efforts over the last decade have been really to rely on the courts. The courts have been our backstop. And we have seen the judiciary Get remade in the last four years. For many people, it may feel like this moment just happened out of thin air, and we have this court that is now acting in a way completely inconsistent with where the majority of American people are, but they have actually been building. For over a decade to this moment. And I think that that is really the lesson here. It is the long game that it takes not just to win a right, but also to defend and maintain rights.

There was a phase Of Plant Parents' existence where The federal level was your backstop. Your support. And

Your opposition responded by going to the state level. Now that it may be that the federal level is less supportive. Does that Put more emphasis For your organization on pressing back.

At local levels or state levels? I think that We've always been at the state level, right? Climb parenthood as a federation is a uh you know, a network of currently forty-nine affiliates. We have over six hundred health centers across the country. We see More than two point four million patients a year. A couple hundred million come to our website every year for information around sexual and reproductive education. We span the globe, actually. We do work in a number of countries in Africa and Latin America as well. So The

breadth of the work that we do, I think is incredibly important. Your delivery of healthcare is local. And last year alone, there were 600 restrictions introduced in 47 states across the country. We tend to think these things are only happening in the South and the Midwest. It just depends on where you have the power. to push back. I mean as you talk about this. The last year has been a tough year, right? The

position you guys are in now compared to a year ago It is more fraud. It is more fraught. No. I think even for those of us who've been planning scenarios for the last decade. There's no question that listening to the oral arguments on December first, when you hear a clear majority of justices willing to uphold the Mississippi fifteen weight ban, which in itself is unraveling row, but to hear a simple majority of justices willing to take up whether or not rose should be overturned. For someone who has been involved in

fighting for justice of all kinds for so long, that reality really set in when you just feel like the last levers that you have to defend this critical right is on the line. There's no question. It just It feels like the shoe is dropped. Do you go to the arguments? I was in the courtroom, March. twenty twenty during the

oral arguments for a case around admitting privileges in the in the Supreme Court, I got to see Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her last year on the bench. Um, obviously the oral arguments are now live streamed. So I was able to watch and listen to the arguments with my colleagues in real time so that we could really parse through some of the questions in advance of doing media just afterwards. We also use this as an opportunity to rally. I was standing outside of the Supreme Court with my colleagues. from the Center for Reproductive Rights, who were arguing the case, and many other folks and supporters who had come precisely to let folks, you know, understand that they knew what was at stake. Along with these external issues, legal and regulatory

Planned Parenthood had appeared with some internal issues when you came on as CEO as president. You've been on the board before, but there was a difficult period with some staff discord over mission and priorities. And then Covet hit. How did you look at trying to refocus and align the organization. Yeah.

I came in July twenty nineteen. We had a quite tumultuous leadership transition. And the staff really were Demoralized. A lot was happening. internally, but as a board member, you're supposed to be Nose in, fingers out, right? So you don't have a sense of all the things that are going on. And so I was really, I would say.

surprise and concerned about where the staff were. And I felt like my immediate I don't know, leadership instinct was to become like a weighted, you know, just to calm down the anxiety in the staff because we really needed to do was get focused on 2020, get through the election, and then kind of rebuild. the opportunity to really realign and reimagine and rebuild was something that I almost didn't give myself, I would say, permission to do. Two different colleagues in my affiliate community came to me and said, you really need to drive it like you stole it.

It's like you are the president right now. And don't wait for permission to make the transformations that you need to see. And there was a just a moment that it clicked for me. So what did you do? certainly resetting the relationship between the national office and our affiliate colleagues. We're in a a network of organizations that you don't control. They're all run by their individual boards, which is incredibly important, which means that you have to lead by inference, right? And there was a lot of work that we had to do just in terms of rebuilding after a succession of transitions. There was a lot of work that I felt we needed to do to resize ourselves inside of the ecosystem of reproductive rights, health, and justice. Parenthood is obviously a significant provider of sexual and reproductive health care, but we're not the only provider. There are independent providers. There are reproductive justice groups that are largely groups that have been led by women of color. I think finding opportunities to really demonstrate key points of leadership that would signal to those broader constituents and communities that

I could create a space for healing. that I could use our broad platform to grow power because ultimately that's what we need to fight back. When you use the word resize, you're talking about Fewer people? I think

resizing in strategy conversations and decision making, right? Because we carry so many resources and because we have obviously a such a strong national footprint, we're a really important engine, but it doesn't mean we always have to drive. How do you actually create how do you actually sit with confidence with a kind of movement confidence at a table? without feeling like you have to direct every single conversation. So last April in the midst of all this, you authored an opinion piece in the New York Times about Plant Parenthood's legacy. You acknowledge founder Margaret Sanger's association with white supremacists and calling your own organization a Karen that privileged whiteness. So what prompted that statement, that effort? At that time.

So there's never been a moment in my time with Planned Parenthood where Margaret Sanger's history has not been in question. I think that we've had to strike a balance of really wanting to honor her badassery, quite frankly, right? She was relentless about fighting for women's reproduction and freedom to decide when and if to become parents. Like she is the foundation of so many of the rights that we sit on today. And yet we know she grew up in an era that was more than a hundred years ago. And people on one side who were like, you know, she was just outright racist, and other people who didn't want to touch the legacy at all. just like most things, right? The truth is somewhere in between. I don't feel that naming her racist would have been completely accurate and also wouldn't have been an easy way for us to distance ourselves from hundred years of her life without actually interrogating how those behaviors have continued to be perpetuated inside the work and the movement. And so Karen was a nod to

the next generation to my staff to say, like, I see you and we're gonna actually take this work on internally inside of the movement, but also to signal broadly to the community that We are truly going to lean into equity and that very real work that we need to do there. And really lean into leadership. We need to have a practice that actually helps us decenter whiteness, that helps us actually in some ways. become more expansive and more inclusive, that was the needle I was trying to throw.

Was there some part of this effort that was hoped to solidify your internal team also? I would say internal to the national office, but really internal to the movement. It was just to kind of throw the gauntlet down and actually create a Space for accountability. You have to continue to be intentional. You have to really

use equity as a way to prioritize resources and decision making, not just talk about it in beautiful words. But I also know that There will be a lot of pushback, right? There will be a lot of stakeholders who won't maybe not see themselves in a space when you start to talk about equity and naming that there may be potential Karen's lurking in the movement or in the in the organization. And so I think it was To really demonstrate to the team what kind of leader I aspired to be.

That I wanted to speak in the truth. That I wanted to model what freedom looks like. At businesses at organizations, leaders talk sometimes about The degree of difficulty for success for something, right? And I can imagine A certain discussion around like

Abortion is hard enough. to build consensus around. Do you really have to take on race to which may be The only thing that rivals it in divisiveness across the country, like, do you really want to rattle both cages at once? Well First of all.

Abortion isn't as controversial as people think it is. The great majority of Americans believe that uh abortion should be safe and legal and available within their zip code. But I think you can't have a conversation around freedom and access for all people who could become pregnant unless you understand the particular experiences of all people. And so I think that one of the really important shifts that I've made around centering the patient in our experience as our North Star is that it allows us to actually take on the conversations that impact the patients. So it's not just that people are coming to us for access to birth control and abortion and STD screenings when they leave. They may be stopped because ICE has come to their job. They may be pulled over by police officers on their way to school. They may be criminalized because now they are traveling from Texas to Oklahoma in a rent a car and may be deemed suspicious. So it's in our interest.

To actually speak to the intersection of how gender, gender identity, access to sexual and reproductive health care, and yes, race are really foundational to understanding the core of freedom. I think that's really at the intersection of all the movements that I care about. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Lear more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

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Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Before the break, we heard Alexis McGill Johnson, head of Planned Parenthood, talk about navigating a tumultuo transition, addressing the founders' difficult history, and reframing the organization's strategy. Now she gets into the morale challenges that she and her team face with the impending overturning of Roe v Wade and how she's working to underscore the opportunities that she believes are still ahead. She also talks about the role of business in social action and what it means to be a corporate citizen.

Her emotion about what's at stake is palpable, as is her resolve. We all look for silver linings from Covet. In your business, the FDA allowed telehealth prescriptions for a medication abortion for the first time on a provisional basis first, and now it's been formalized. I'm curious how significant that is and how much.

You look for other silver linings and try to focus on them in this tough period. The FDA lifting the restrictions on REMs, I think is a really important game changer for the provision of care, particularly at a time when You know, obviously when we see increasing restrictions and when you see where the court is poised to do, it wasn't quite a silver lining, but I do have to say that the race reckoning in twenty twenty really did. create an opening

Obviously it was horrific how we got there. And and yet it's opened up, I think, really important conversations around what does it really mean to center equity in our work. I've made a huge bet. on centering and resourcing leadership of color and believing that letting the people who are most impacted lead. And so it wasn't quite A silver lining, but I think where we are on the other Side of it.

Is having a language and a Praxis. that is deeply grounded in kind of a bet on ourselves that I think is really powerful. It sounds a little bit like there's sort of implicit acknowledgement that

Maybe the breadth of Planned Parenthood. wasn't quite as rich as it could be. Yeah, I mean and again, it's all a work in progress, right? There have been missteps. Um, but at the same time, like just opening up every day to say, okay, what can I be doing differently? Who can I call that's different in even on my own teams, leadership of color and really paying attention to how they're growing and evolving, paying attention not just to retention and attrition, but you're saying, okay.

How many people is this person managing? What is their budget? Are we actually growing the skill sets if we want to get to a place where these leaders are actually driving us into the future of the movement? And when you talk about your team, like You know, the conditions you face now can impact morale in a different way than the internal dissension did before, but I guess it can be Hard to sort of Keep spirits up?

When you're losing ground in some legal and regulatory areas. How do you keep Your team that human motivation side. positive in the organization. How do you keep your own spirits up and engaged when things aren't going your way? My favorite quote by Alice Walker is a poem called Hope is a Woman Who's Lost Her Fear. And I I think about that a lot. I've meditated. It's sitting up on my wall right now because

I think that's who we have to be right now. We have to be fearless. We have to be unapologetic and we have to Hold I think two really important things. We have to hold both the notion that We will be the leadership.

of Planned Parenthood when Roe is likely overturned or gutted irrevocably. So what does it mean to preside over some version of the end of row? How do you kind of Address that from a heart space. While you were fighting feverishly.

to do everything you can to leave it all in the field. And then how do you Like create the container for people to process those feelings while also saying You know what?

But on the day after. We are also going to be in leadership. when we are rethinking who do we want to be when we are no longer defending a law that quite frankly was not sufficient for the majority of our state. That was, as our reproductive justice colleagues say, was the floor, not the ceiling. Who do we want to be when we are not fighting over the privacy and burden and gestation and admitting privileges, all these things that have chipped away. But we are actually having a fundamental conversation around equality and freedom. And what does it look like? What does it look like in every school? What does it look like in every corporation? The hope that I'm trying to impart to my team right now to say it is going to be dark.

We are literally in the darkness. But On the other side. While we are Processing that.

like Sisyphus rolling the the boulder up the hill in the piece by Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. We have to imagine him happy. Right. Then I think that's the moment we are in and that's the fire that I'm trying to bring into the team. Many CEOs Talk about the broadening demands on them as leaders to heighten stakes on speaking out or not speaking out.

on societal issues for their business, for their employees. What is the role of business in social action and what should it be? I think businesses Have to center their engagement on

Their staff. And the people that they serve. Like this is not something you can pull test. And even if you did poll test, you'd actually find out that the majority of people are with you. You actually have to think about what is right in this moment and who should be involved in these decisions. We don't want lawmakers making decisions about what we can do with our bodies, nor do we want corporations to make those decisions. We want to leave them in the privacy of individuals. And I think seeing more. Courage. And strength.

From corporations. To really stay in line with where their teams are, their teams who are gonna be affected. I think about the companies in Texas all the time over the last six months. Like what are those people doing? What are their employees doing right now when they find out two weeks after a miss period

that they have an unintended pregnancy and they've got to leave. Some of them may be fortunate enough to get on a plane and fly to LA and back in a day. But there are a lot of people, a lot of workers, a lot of frontline workers right now. who are getting in cars and they're driving 18 hours to Colorado or Oklahoma and they are taking off work and they may be fired because they don't want to give the reason as to why they need to make this emergency trip. And they may be putting their kids in the cars because they don't have caregiving at home. So like these are the calculations that their workers are making just to get access to a constitutional right. And to be a corporate citizen, which they now are, and a citizen of the democracy, which they have privileges to being, they need to actually take that citizenship responsibility seriously in ways that help us.

Really drive a different conversation. At the Perception Institute at your firm, you worked with lots of businesses. Are there anything you learned from that? Lessons, maybe, about how businesses might approach the challenges that they feel like they face in addressing bias or in doing what some would say are taking sides. Cause they're trying to make everybody happy, right? Yeah.

I mean, look, I worked on not just with Starbucks, but I worked with a number of large multinational corporations and banks. places where there isn't a significant amount of diversity within their kind of corporate and leadership structure. And what my job was was to to always get them to have some of the uncomfortable conversations around race, but in ways where they could separate out. They could really understand that wasn't about making people bad people. It was about helping them understand how the system impacted their colleagues. And I think that When you help people hear the experiences of their colleagues differently.

And you help people understand and play out. the scenarios I said were like professional scenario planners when you help people play out the scenarios of what it actually looks like in real time. It does create a level of empathy. that I think can help shift direction in conversation, but every level of a corporation has to be involved in that. It's not just the executives or the frontline workers, it's the boards.

It's the shareholders. It's so important for everyone to be engaged and really have a shared language and understanding of how it impacts society and their role in it. Talking with you, I'm reminded of how early in your career you were very focused on voter turnout efforts. And how if voter turnout had worked a different way. Some of these challenges that you're having to deal with now maybe wouldn't have Turned out the way they did. Do you ever regret that you didn't stay

In that realm, you know, would it have made everything easier? First of all, the voter engagement work that's happening across country is incredibly important and valuable. And I think the turnout actually has stayed consistent and strong in the last decade that I have been, or maybe two decades that I've been involved in some of this work. What we've seen, unfortunately, is also an increase in the number of voting restrictions. The ways in which people's ability to exercise and participate also depends by state. And I think that it's not a coincidence that in the same states where we're seeing these incredible restrictions around access to abortion, we're also seeing increased restrictions around voting rights. And I think that tells you something, right? It tells you something about how a set of lawmakers state by state have decided to control and weaponize the rules of power in a way that really is undermining democracy. I know there has been a strong corporate effort around

access to democracy by many corporate citizens in the same way there have been a lot of corporate leaders who've fought for access to birth control because they have a self-interest in making sure that their employees and their consumers have access to these basic rights and to make sure that they're able to support their folks through their tenure and their career. What's at stake for Planned Parenthood? Right now. I think It's not about what's at stake for Clan Parenthood.

It's about what's at stake for the millions of people, almost thirty six million people living in twenty six states. That are poised to further restrict access to abortion, other sexual and reproductive health care. Those are the people that We think about

Every day and literally every single person in the organization across the Federation. They're here because of mission. We get some of the most passionate brightest folks who want to deliver the best care without judgment. And I think about going into this next year.

with the impact that we could see from the Supreme Court. With the number of states that are starting their legislative sessions right now with an intent to take away freedom, to take away rights. and the impact that that will have. On so many people.

On so many family. On so many mothers. Who are the largest group of majority. who have abortions already understand what's at stake. The impact on their communities.

It's unconscionable. And that's really who we have to center in this conversation. as you're talking uh I hear the emotion in your voice and it sounds like part sadness and Part anger. You're not quite sure how to

Walk your way through it. Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean I'm yeah, I'm furious. I'm furious and I know a a lot of leaders talk about resilience and the need to

Find a way to reset and regenerate and Self care is such an important component, particularly given the moment that we're in and the just the relentlessness going into the third year of COVID. And I keep thinking about it's always the people who are most marginalized. who are the most affected. by these kinds of policies.

And so I am sad. I'm definitely angry and I have to practice every day to find that hope. That Hope to be fearless and to model that. So that

My team feels fearless. My team feels unapologetic. My team feels like they can lay it all on the line without penalty because we have to be just as relentless and just as strategic as the opposition has been. in order to build back for the next thirty years. Well, you you also sound very determined, and I I can say that that's uh that's very affecting and reassuring for me. So thank you. Thank you again for having this conversation and going down these roads with us. I really appreciate it. Oh thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk to you. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a wait what original.

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