Meet Chris Slaughter, the New Executive Director of FII

by Anna Willman

We welcome Chris Slaughter, who has been hired to act as FII’s new Managing Director (and General Circle Lead) as we go forward.

We asked Chris four questions:

• Do you have a philosophy of leadership?
• Tell us three things about who you are at this moment.
• How can the staff best support you as you come into this organization?
• What do you see as your strengths and what you see as your weaknesses?

Leadership

My philosophy of leadership is that we’re all better together. And I learned about leadership by actually leading from below.

I spent 10 years in the Army, and I was Sergeant Slaughter at the end of it. Sergeant (E5) Slaughter and E5 is the lowest peg on the totem pole that has any sort of leadership in the army, the first rung on the management totem pole.

My last duty station was in Arizona, and I was a trumpeter at the time, which is supposed to be the best place in the army for an army musician. But when I walked in the door it turned out this was a horrible, horrible place to be and to work. You could just cut the tension with a knife between the unit commander, the first sergeant, and two groups of senior non-commissioned officers, who were all at odds with each other, and with the rest of the unit – mostly lower-ranked soldiers. And I was thinking to myself, this is just not acceptable for me to spend my last year and a half in the Army in this kind of environment.

So I watched and I talked to people and I listened and I figured out what was going on. And I went to the command team and I said, “Hey, command team, this place sucks. Here’s what I see is going on, and here are three different things that you can do that I think would improve the whole unit and make it a much better place to work, certainly better for me and the rest of us, and probably better for you too.”

And from that experience in listening, paying attention, and my offering a different perspective, trying to find and implement a solution, we began to put together a plan that created a positive work environment. So from the bottom of the rung I ended up working with them at the top of the rung for the entire time that I was there. That’s what I mean by leading from below, without authority.

And so that’s how I approach all of my leadership now. I pretend that I don’t have authority, and create buy in by listening and generating a path forward with others. So when I couple that with sociocracy, which we are practicing here at FII, this is a structure that falls smack dab into how I like to lead by listening and including people.

So I guess if I were to put that in a nutshell, my leadership philosophy is no matter where I am or what my official role is, I always try to either take the position of leading from below or leading without authority, because to me, that’s a true leader. If I have to rely on power based on an official position, then I question my efficacy as a leader.

Who is Chris Slaughter? 

Well, I would say the first thing is I’m very curious. I’m curious about the world, and I’m curious about how we got to where we are and why people are the way they are. And that curiosity has followed me for my whole life, so much that I got my PhD because I didn’t understand how people interacted at work. It’s one of those How can this be? kinds of curiosity. It’s a true curiosity – a delight in exploration.

A second thing about me is that I am very intrigued with artificial intelligence. I leverage artificial intelligence heavily for a very specific reason, and I’ll see if I can put it in context for you very quickly.

I almost didn’t graduate high school. I have dyslexia which was undiagnosed and I don’t even know that it was named in the late 80s. I got my first computer in 1995 and it had a spell checker on it. And suddenly from almost failing English, I took English 101 with that spell checker and I got an A. And so I started leveraging these tools because language is one of the challenges that I faced. I started leveraging these tools, spell checker and Grammarly specifically, and it led me from being essentially an academic failure to completing advanced degrees.

Being able to leverage these tools, now that these large language models have come out, has completely transformed how I work. I’ve been able now to take the abstraction that I live in in my mind and be able to articulate it very well using these tools and it’s an earth shattering spell checker for me.

And the last of the three things about me (today) are that I’m looking forward to adventure, however that adventure shows up. I’m a digital nomad. My wife and I have sold our house and have been traveling essentially non-stop for about 10 months.

There are challenges, but I kind of like it. I like adventure and I like different things, including managing the challenges that come with it.

How Staff Can Support Chris

The most important way the staff can help me is by being open to really giving sociocracy a try. Specifically observing the constructs around disagreement when we’re talking about reaching consensus and really embracing the concept of what are legitimate objections to a proposal – which means not insisting on differences based on personal preferences, but evaluating decisions in terms of what is the best way of fulfilling the organization’s mission and adhering to the organization’s values.

And then also really embracing and understanding what discipline means, because once a path forward is agreed upon, accountability within a sociocratic structure is very different from what we’re used to. I think on the surface people crave a sociocratic organization, but then they suddenly realize that they now hold the future of the organization in their hands. And so there’s a huge responsibility that gets pulled from the top and is distributed to everyone.

When we flatten the hierarchy and distribute the power, we also flatten and distribute the responsibility. And so we need every person involved in the organization taking on that responsibility seriously to make sociocracy work. Because it won’t work if everyone isn’t wholeheartedly committed to carrying out team decisions, including those who for personal reasons might have preferred a different path.

So I think that’s the biggest thing – everyone embracing sociocracy and all of the bits that go with it.

Strengths and Weaknesses

One of my strengths is front loading.

I used to be a big procrastinator. I would wait until the last minute and then I would struggle and I would finally get things done at the last minute. And sometimes I would miss deadlines.

And I learned after a while, through several parts of my career is I like it better if I front

load everything. So when I schedule my week, for example, I want to have all of my meetings early in the week. And if I know I have something to do, I want to get it done and over with.

So being proactive is a strength.

Another strength that I have is being okay with however things work out. Because I learned a long time ago that perfectionism is a myth. Well, it does exist, but it doesn’t exist in the human experience. It doesn’t help, and as an attitude, it causes failure. So there’s a point, right? The concept of diminishing returns.

This is not a low threshold. I’m not OK with mediocrity. I’m kind of okay with 85 to 90%, because if we can reach 85 or 90% and then move on, that is usually going to get us where we need to go. This attitude has increased my daily workflow dramatically, for example, by incorporating artificial intelligence tools into my work.

This is high enough quality to get us the results that we want, so I think that’s a strength. And of course, with every strength and weakness, there is a flip side, because an overused strength can be just just blaringly wrong. Red lights and danger signs. 

The true strength is in understanding that we’re not going to be perfect and at some point we just have to say that’s enough, that it’s time to move on.

Another strength that I have is being able to take highly complex concepts and distill them down and translate them, whatever those constructs are, in a way that other people can understand and take action on them.

So, for instance, sociocracy. I probably had heard sociocracy before I talked to Pat, but I’d never looked into it. So I thought I’d better learn about it and in very short order, I developed a thorough understanding of sociocracy and how it works and how it could work with FII. And I was able to create a training for the staff and the board so we could make an informed team decision about adopting it.

Weaknesses: I’m really lazy. My laziness expresses itself simply as my wanting to just read fiction. Dystopian science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 and Ray Bradbury. If I could, I would just sit and read books all day. So I got used to thinking that laziness was my problem.

But what I‘ve figured out is how to leverage laziness into a strength.

I have become profoundly efficient.

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