How one-time students of Leadership Anne Arundel are, now, leading the organization, adapting to a changing world, and building community resolve.
It was March 12, 2020. Kris Valerio Shock, newly hired to her position as president and CEO of Leadership Anne Arundel, the county’s premier leadership training and networking institute, was observing Law and Public Safety Day with more than 50 leadership students by visiting the Emergency Command Center in Glen Burnie, where county leaders go if and when some sort of crisis arises.
“And people’s phones started going off,” Shock recalls. “The very next day, the county executive was there declaring a local state of emergency because of COVID.”
Suddenly, Law and Public Safety Day took on a whole new meaning. Shock and her peers were getting what she describes as “a front seat in seeing how our key leaders were leading us through this crisis.”
Like nearly every other organization, Leadership Anne Arundel went virtual that spring. Its Class of 2020, only a couple of months away from finishing the institute’s September–June program, switched to virtual platforms. And Shock saw Leadership Anne Arundel’s mission become much more important.
Left: Kris Valerio Shock speaks at the LAA 25th Anniversary celebration. Top Right: Current LAA President & CEO Kris Valerio Shock with former LAA President Griff Hall. Bottom Right: Nancy Hartzell and Kris Valerio Shock.
“Our role as an organization was to be able to provide the kind of community and connection to allow them to support one another,” she says, noting that Leadership Anne Arundel brings together for-profit businesses, nonprofit organizations, private citizens, and government employees—in short, pretty much everyone who values and wants to learn successful, proactive leadership skills.
As a 2006 graduate of the program herself, Shock first encountered LAA when she was working for the Anne Arundel County Chamber of Commerce and describes the experience as a “very swift way to get a 360-degree understanding of the community.” When she accepted the position of president and CEO nearly a decade and a half later, she had all kinds of fresh ideas of what she wanted to do. Those ideas included an alumni development program to keep graduates of the programs—approximately 1,600 to date—involved even after they finish, as well as outreach efforts to bring in new people who wouldn’t otherwise know about Leadership Anne Arundel.
Griff Hall, LAA graduate of 1996 who served as president and CEO while Shock went through the program in 2006, sees her and Nancy Hartzell, director of operations, as a dream team for pushing the organization forward. “Kris is the right person—she’s got the right skills, she’s got the right background, she’s got the right approach,” he says. “And I give Nancy a lot of credit because she’s been with the organization now for a long time, and I just think it’s at new heights. They’re willing to try out new things. You’ve got to experiment. If you’re going to be adaptable, you must experiment.”
Adaptable is a fitting word. In fact, Shock prefers using the word “adapt” as opposed to “pivot,” which seemed to be the word of choice for so many other businesspeople during the worst of the pandemic. But when the world changed, leadership wasn’t about changing direction—leadership had to change tactics to continue pushing through in a different environment.
While adaptability has always been an important leadership quality, Shock believes it’s one that is much more highly appreciated in a post-pandemic world. “I think we’ve all had to adapt, and we’ve really gotten inside how challenging that is,” she says. “Especially for small organizations, when you’re already stretched to a certain point to be able to do what is needed to do, to be adaptable is challenging.”
Hall says that although Leadership Anne Arundel’s mission remains the same as it was before COVID changed the world, there is now a greater opportunity. “The definition of leadership to me, the one that I really ascribe to, is really mobilizing people to tackle tough problems and tough issues. Well, we still have those,” he says. “Those tough issues show up in different ways, sometimes in unimaginable ways. But the idea is to mobilize people into actions, positive actions. So, for me, the definition doesn’t change. How we go about it clearly does.”
Leaders with skills developed by the program proved to be real changemakers. Shock acknowledges Monica Alvarado, owner of Bread & Butter Kitchen in Eastport, who launched the Feed Anne Arundel initiative during the pandemic. The collaboration on the part of local restaurants; the Anne Arundel County Partnership for Children, Youth & Families; and Anne Arundel Connecting Together (ACT) helped address food instability while stabilizing the shaky foodservice industry by raising donations so local restaurants could distribute meals to people in need. It was, in Shock’s words, “just one incredible example” of the leadership demonstrated in Anne Arundel County during a time of uncertainty. Alvarado not only kept her own business alive but also “created a whole other organization that was able to solve a big problem,” Shock explains.
Leadership Anne Arundel ultimately teamed up with Feed Anne Arundel, along with the Anne Arundel County Food Bank, to hold a food drive in November 2020. The event gave movers and shakers throughout the community a chance to gather in a safe, outdoor environment after months of isolation to work together toward solving a problem. More than 40 volunteers came together to collect about 3,000 pounds of food from about 75 donors.
“Our types of organizations, these community leadership organizations, are now playing such a key role in helping people get on the other side of this pandemic and figuring out how we adapt and change moving forward,” Shock says.
Top Right: In March of 2020, LAA’s Class of 2020 visited the Emergency Command Center in Glen Burnie the day before state and county Covid-19 pandemic quarantining and safety precautions were enacted. Left and Bottom Right: Anne Arundel County Health Officer Dr. Nilesh Kalyanaraman talks to LAA students about his experience as a leader and how his role was affected by the pandemic.
Leadership Anne Arundel was also able to build on its Leadership Speaker Series, part of its alumni development program, with guest speaker, Dr. Nilesh Kalyanaraman from the Anne Arundel County Department of Health, who stepped into his role as health officer only six months before the pandemic. Shock explains that Kalyanaraman was able to talk about his experience as a leader and how that changed in the face of crisis.
“In discussing the opportunity with Dr. Kalyanaraman, we explained, ‘We don’t really want an update on COVID; people can get that from you a lot of different ways. We want you to come talk about what it’s like to be brand new in this leadership role and have something like a global pandemic on your plate,’” Shock says. “It was such a neat conversation because he was really able to dig into his challenges. That was exactly the type of programing that I had hoped we would do one day when I was interviewing for this role: Getting a key leader in our community to not just talk about the specifics of their industry but their journey as a leader.”
After so much change in the past two years, it’s nearly impossible to predict what other ways Leadership Anne Arundel will continue meeting the needs of the community, but the organization has proved it’s ready to adapt to anything.
And its value as an organization is clearly resonating with people—so much so that people aren’t just enrolling because of work. They’re doing it just because of a simple interest in learning. “In the past,” Hall says, “many companies would often send many of their employees or their leadership team through the course…and they might foot the bill. Now there’s a lot more people in the community who aren’t depending on a company to do that. They’re doing it on their own.”
Learn more about Leadership Anne Arundel and how to enroll in the program at leadershipaa.org.
