Tom Howard: I’ve made sacrifices because of the co-op, but I really don’t have any regrets on that. When I took this job, I remember the last day my predecessor was in the office and he walked out the office. And I was driving home that evening and I actually felt the weight of the world fall on my shoulders because it hit me right then that I was responsible for 13,500 people’s electric service and their quality and well-being of life and to some extent, their economic abilities going forward. And so I’m going to say, before you sign up for the job, make sure you’re willing to accept the responsibilities and expectations that come with it.
Teri Viswanath: That is Tom Howard, the CEO of Callaway Electric in Missouri, and he’s a seasoned veteran in our co-op industry with more than 40 years of service under his belt.
Hi, I’m Teri Viswanath, the energy economist and co-host of CoBank’s Power Plays podcast, a program that features the voices and stories that are important to our electric cooperative communities.
For this month’s lesson in leadership conversation, we also asked Katherine Domingue, CEO and general manager for Southwest Louisiana Electric Membership Corporation, to join the discussion.
As always, I’m joined by my colleague and co-host Tamra Reynolds, a managing director here at the bank. Hello Tamra.
Tamra Reynolds: Hey Teri.
Viswanath: So Tamra, just a quick question. The genesis of this particular podcast, I think, came from that LinkedIn survey that you launched a couple of months ago where you asked your network to give you ideas on programming for us, right?
Reynolds: Yeah, Teri, that’s right. This suggestion actually came in from Tony Anderson, the former CEO of Cherryland Electric in Michigan. He retired a couple of years ago from that role and recently retired from the NRECA board, and I felt that I see his vision, that it would be a great opportunity to lift up the next generation of leaders and hear from seasoned executives that could really help them along the way as they kind of get their footing.
Viswanath: I think the timing of this conversation is particularly important because of the transition that’s underway in our cooperative communities. It’s partially in response to the significant change in the make-up of our labor force but also, the challenges and the pace at which they’re occurring, what do you think?
Reynolds: Teri, absolutely right. Something that I was surprised to discover as I started doing research about this is that more than a quarter of our electric cooperative CEOs have taken on their role within the past three years and I’m not seeing that trend slow down much. As we broadly think about what co-op “mutual aid” might look like, I think leadership lessons is kind of an area where that’s an opportunity.
So, I’m pleased to share the conversation I had with Tom and Katherine, starting with an introduction of these great co-op managers.
Howard: My name is Tom Howard. I’m in a co-op called Callaway Electric Cooperative. I’m currently the CEO of that. I started my career here some 40 years ago in member services and about 30 years ago became the CEO/general manager.
We also a few years ago started up a company called Calabyte Technology. It is a fiber-to-the-home business that encompasses almost all of our electric service territory plus quite a bit of what we call “off system,” but we built into several other communities.
Also, those two companies are located in central Missouri. On the western edge of us is Columbia, Missouri, and on the southern edge is Jefferson City, Missouri. So that’s where we are.
My background, I grew up a on a production farm, still somewhat involved in production farming and happened to serve the co-op and the membership in the very same geographic area that I grew up.
Reynolds: I love that. Katherine, how about you?
Katherine Domingue: I’m at SLEMCO where we’re located in Lafayette, Louisiana. So along I-10, the southern part of the state where I-10, I-49 meet — we have Baton Rouge to our east and we have Lake Charles to our west. Right in the heart of Cajun country is what we like to say.
We are an electric distribution cooperative and we have over 11,000 miles of line and we serve primarily five parishes. We’re very fortunate to have steady growth over the years and have grown our co-op significantly.
I started out 27 years ago as a financial analyst and you know, learn the business, kept growing, kept learning, was able to be honored with the CFO position a number of years ago and about a year and a half ago was honored to become the CEO of SLEMCO.
Reynolds: Tom, thinking about your career and looking back over your career, what leadership principles have stood the test of time for you?
Howard: One of the things we all do, but in particular as time passes, you learn the value of relationships. You can’t do that with emails. You have to break bread sometimes together, sit down at the same conversation. You have to have a personal relationship to get them to answer the phone and take you at face value with a pretty candid conversation.
I would extend that just a little bit further: When it comes to hiring employees, one of the things I’ve grown to understand, you really need to hire the attitude and not so much the resume. When you bring someone into your organization, those really good people with good attitudes will find something to do and bring value to your organization, regardless of their skill set.
My predecessor gave me two pieces of advice. He said, “when you put people on and you got employees, let them make mistakes unless it’s going to break the co-op. Let them make the mistake and learn from it and then go back and help them fix that mistake and make your organization better and it will make them better.” And I’ve often asked other CEOs, would you hire someone that never made a mistake in life? And that answer is probably no, because if you’ve never made a mistake, A, you’ve never tried anything and B, you’ve never had to fix something that went wrong.
Reynolds: Tom, how do you think the role of an electric cooperative, in particular electric distribution cooperative CEO, has changed over the last 30 years since you stepped into that role?
Howard: The thing that I think has changed the most has been the speed with which decisions have to be made. When I got into this role, we could probably belabor a decision in the boardroom three to six months to try to come to an answer. At that time we were an RUS borrower, so it was a very rigid lifestyle.
In recent days, and I say recent, the last 10 to 15 years, divesting ourself of RUS and being predominantly a CoBank borrower, we make decisions between board meetings of greater magnitude than we used to make annually being in the fiber optic business. So time is so valuable and if you’re in a competitive business like the broadband in particular, you don’t have time to belabor things. You have to make decisions and go on and what that’s really evolved into is the trust relationship that a board of directors has to have with their general manager and staff.
Reynolds: What do you think is maybe your most significant contribution to your co-op or co-ops in general when you think about, you know, sort of the legacy that you’ve been able to create and establish?
Howard: I will always go back to some of my initial roots and the mentors I had when I was new in this in the co-op family…I bring this into the culture with my employees and board today. We have to remember that we work for the people that has an end-use meter.
And every decision we make should bring some type of value to those people. If you can’t bring reliability, if you can’t bring safety, if you can’t bring an economic value to those people, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re about to do.
Reynolds: That’s great. We’ll switch to Katherine now. What would you say is your biggest surprise in the first 90 days stepping into the CEO role?
Domingue: Being me here 27 years, I knew a lot about SLEMCO. And I think one of the biggest surprises was how smooth the transition went. I had incredible support both from the board and from my employees. We had a lot of work to get done but I knew I had a team behind me that was ready and excited.
Reynolds: Katherine, how did you establish, you know, trust with your team and your members?
Domingue: I think one of the key things is to be honest, to be transparent, to communicate, to build that credibility. Be respectful. And you need to take the time to listen. You need to take time to spend with your board members when they want to talk to you, maybe one-on-one or as a group. You need to take the time to speak to your employees or when they want to speak to you.
Same with our members. I’ve had members come here to the office and they say, “I want to see the CEO,” and you know what? They’re going to see me. If I’m here, they’re going to see me. I’m going to go talk to them. And it really means a lot. It means a lot to our membership. It means a lot to our employees to be someone who’s available and who they can talk to because that builds trust. I think that’s key for anyone, any organization, any leader is communicate, be honest, be open and be available.
Reynolds: Those are great points, and I would agree. Tom, can you share a moment when maybe you had to lead through a crisis? What did that look like and what did you learn from that experience?
Howard: Tamra, I might share four different crises. Early on in my CEO tenure, I’d been in my chair less than two years and we had an employee fatality. It happened at 9:30 in the morning. The Mayday call came in and inside of an hour I was telling a lady she was a widow.
A second one I would mention as we had an ice storm that caused us outages for six days. In 2009 we moved into a brand-new facility, the same year we put in place I think a 17% rate increase. And if you remember that time period, the recession hit. A last one I might mention was when we went in the internet business in about 2015 — the fiber to the home.
Those were four different examples, and what I learned through each one of them was the leader does set the stage. You have to go out and be strong, and you have to be seen as having confidence in what you’re doing.
I’ve learned it through those times to first, be very candid to the point. Second, as Katherine described, be truthful, be open to communicate with anybody that walks in, but avoid drama. Make sure it’s true before you say it. But the point I want to make is you can only be wrong so many times. And that’s probably once.
Reynolds: Katherine, there were probably times when you had to lean into different resources or mentors to keep you grounded. What does that look like to you and what types of folks have those been for you?
Domingue: First of all, I have to praise my immediate team here at SLEMCO or all of our employees. No one knows it all. And you have to have great team members to be able to help you, guide you and be there to support you. I also have some great board members that have been very supportive. One of our board members actually was the person that hired me 27 years ago. He’s still there and I can count on him.
Our outside counsel has also been a great mentor. He knows a lot of history about SLEMCO, so he can give me valuable insight when we’re facing a situation that might be not necessarily controversial, but you want to make sure that you’re making the right decision moving forward. He gives me his honest opinion and I do value that tremendously.
I have a network of folks just with my participation in different organizations that we can always bounce ideas between one another. That’s always helpful to have that network is critical. It’s critical to your success.
Reynolds: Tom, any resources or mentors that you’ve leaned into over the years and how has that evolved as you’ve gained your own set of skills and expertise over time?
Howard: We here in Missouri have a pretty close and tight managers’ network. It’s not unusual to pick up the phone and call some of my peers and say, “what would you do in this situation?” As Katherine said, I’ve had some board members that’s been really good that it’s OK to bounce ideas off of them and they don’t take it like gospel. They sit down and have that conversation. My mentors can be my staff as well. The members I grew up in the area that I serve. Katherine said it early in today’s session, but one of our most important jobs is listening, if you just listen to people, they will tell you what you need to know.
Reynolds: Yeah, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason, right? I have to keep that in mind sometimes. All right, question for both of you. You know, being in your roles, how do you define success as a cooperative CEO?
Howard: To me, success is safety. Both employee and public safety. When I took this role, I would have told you the most important thing was rates, but I don’t believe that today. I believe reliability is much more important to our members than rates. Then I’ll go to third number, rates. Is our electric service affordable to our people? So do we make business decisions that helps keep rates affordable?
Tamra, the last one I’ll throw in there is quite honestly, employee turnover. Employee attitude and turnover to me is very important and defines success for me.
Reynolds: How about you, Katherine?
Domingue: So I can say ditto to everything Tom said, right? I think one of the things that became elevated for me when I became CEO was that heavy burden of employee safety, right? I get really nervous on the weekends when you know all storms are coming in and I know the men are out there restoring power and it’s just always worrying about them and you really don’t have direct control over them while they’re out there. But safety, safety is critical and safety for both our employees and our members it’s got to be top of the list.
Tom was saying is that you have to have a happy and engaged workforce. If you don’t, then safety really becomes a problem if you have employees that are coming to work and they’re not in the right frame of mind.
There’s really going to be some problems that occur. So you have to make sure that your employees come to work every day. They enjoy coming to work every day. They have all the tools and resources and training that they need to do their job. And that they want to do a great job for you. They’ll have even more of a heightened sense around safety. And so it kind of goes hand in hand, right?
Thomas said it earlier. Every decision you make, everything you do is for your members. Electricity is a life-saving service that we provide and every penny we spend, every decision we make, is for the benefit and should be for the benefit of our members.
Reynolds: So in closing, Katherine, what’s one piece of advice that you’d give to someone preparing to become a cooperative CEO?
Domingue: Just to be true to yourself, be genuine both to your employees and to your members, and don’t try to be someone else.
Leave your self-interest behind and lead with the timeless values of integrity, honesty, because you should always be able to balance those traditional values with innovation and be able to embrace new skills and lead with purpose. But be true to yourself. I think that is one of the best pieces of advice that you can give to anyone.
Viswanath: That is very grounded advice. Building personal relationships, hiring for attitude over resume, and allowing employees to learn from their mistakes. Both CEOs prioritize safety, reliability, affordable rates, and a positive employee culture to measure cooperative success. These definitely check the for box for CEO “mutual aid.”
Tamra, I know that it’s somewhat of a passion project for you and our banking colleagues to really lift up these educational opportunities for both our executives and our boards, isn’t it?
Reynolds: Teri, it is. When I think about the role that we play as cooperatives, and supporting our customers, education ranks right up there at the top. We’ve done a lot recently around elevating opportunities for folks to learn more about financial planning, some leadership, and really focused on giving folks tools they might need to address the changing energy landscape as they think about coming on board from a leadership perspective. Same with directors. I think there’s definitely a role for us to play there as well.
Viswanath: That’s exciting work. I do hope all of you have enjoyed today’s program and will check in with us next month. October is National Co-op Month, an annual opportunity to raise awareness of a trusted, proven way to do business and to build resilient, inclusive communities. We are going to continue that tradition by exploring actionable strategies to support the mental health of utility line workers. Listen in to how our cooperatives are fostering resilience on the front line.
Reynolds: I hope all of you will join us then, but goodbye for now.
