The Leadership Equation
April 23, 2009What qualities make for a true leader? As these four alumni have discovered, there is no single trait or answer—other than a willingness to stand up to challenges and make tough decisions
By Kevin Featherly
What qualities make for a true leader? As these four alumni have discovered, there is no single trait or answer—other than a willingness to stand up to challenges and make tough decisions.
Greed. Corruption. Lawlessness. Open any newspaper these days and you might think these are the new traits of leadership—Wall Street’s full of thieves, our baseball heroes aren’t so heroic after all, and numerous politicians have been caught lying.
As a law school that has taught thousands of legal professionals about justice, William Mitchell doesn’t buy it. While defining the exact characteristics all leaders share may be impossible, they do have some things in common. We asked four alumni to share their thoughts on leadership with us. Here’s what we found out: Their backgrounds and styles are as different as their causes. They all demonstrate a willingness to make bold decisions. The list of their shared traits does not include gluttony, fraud, and a penchant for breaking the law.
These are their stories.
Doris Ohlsen Huspeni ‘70 – A Mother’s Touch
Retired Court of Appeals Judge Doris Ohlsen Huspeni remembers the day she kiddingly set Supreme Court Justice Paul Anderson straight. In 1992, Anderson asked Huspeni how she defined her role on the court. She told him she saw herself as a kind of mother figure. “He duly noted that and went on his way,” she recalls.
Ten years later, Anderson reminded her what she had told him. “He said, ‘You know, I think you sold yourself short. You’re really a darn good judge,’” she recalls. “I shook my head. I said, ‘Paul, it’s clear you’ve never been a mother.’”
Huspeni, who raised five children during her career, retired in 1998 but continues to serve on the appeals court four to six months each year as a senior judge. She says she always brought a mediating, mentoring, and maternal approach to leadership, both as the boss in her judicial office and as a jurist on the bench.
In fact, Huspeni’s career genesis can be traced to a parental tragedy. In 1961, she and her husband, Joe, were expecting their fourth child. But the baby girl died at birth. At the time, Huspeni had put her own academic hopes on hold while her husband finished his electrical engineering degree. In the hospital, after the baby died, her husband urged her to finish her undergraduate sociology degree. “He said, ‘You have wanted to go back to school since I’ve known you, and I won’t let you go home and have this be a cloud on you,’” Huspeni says. “‘You’re going back to school.’”
She finished the degree at the University of Minnesota in 1964 (a fourth son was born that same year), and she entered William Mitchell in the fall of 1965. She and Joe had a daughter in 1968, and in 1970, Huspeni earned her law degree.
Her legal career began in the office of State Public Defender C. Paul Jones L.L.M. ’55 who hired three women. The others included Rosalie Wahl ’67, later Minnesota’s first female Supreme Court justice, and Roberta Levy, who would become a Hennepin County district court judge. They covered for each other when anyone had to take a child to the doctor or attend to other family matters. “It was a great experience as a mother with young children,” Huspeni says.
Several years later, Gov. Al Quie appointed her to the Hennepin County Municipal Court and then to the Hennepin County District Court. Gov. Rudy Perpich went one better, appointing Huspeni to the then-new Minnesota Court of Appeals in 1984.
Her experiences as a mother naturally informed her leadership style as a judge, she says. “I felt a very motherly attitude toward the law clerks, and I think that translates to mentoring,” she says, adding that her clerks often played essential roles in formulating her legal analysis. “I felt that we were working together rather than anybody working for me.”
While she is aware that some see the maternal approach as potentially detrimental in a leadership capacity, she says she never saw any alternative. It simply is not in her makeup to play the heavy. “I don’t think I would be capable of managing by intimidation,” she says. “I’d like to believe that my management by consensus worked.”
Jann Olsten ‘74 – The Proper Perspective
In today’s uncertain economy, Jann Olsten’s leadership skills are being sternly tested. The president and CEO of Archiver’s, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based scrapbooking business, has had to order some painful cuts since the markets froze up last year. Archiver’s has also had to delay some expansion plans.
He and company co-founder and board chair Bruce Thomson are betting that the economy won’t turn around until the spring of 2011, and are making decisions based on that assumption. “It’s really cutting back where you need to, to make sure that you survive for tomorrow,” Olsten says.
Olsten didn’t take the usual MBA route to the business world. He started as a lawyer in the mid- 1970s in the Little Falls, Minn., law office of attorneys Gordon Rosenmeier and John Simonett. Later he was a partner with Minneapolis law firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi. For four years, he served as chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and followed Boschwitz to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which oversees Republican Senate candidates’ election efforts. Olsten worked there as executive director.
In 1989, Thomson, a former Olsten law client, brought him on board as chief operating officer at ProEx Photo and Portrait. After ProEx was sold, both men left in 1999 to found Archiver’s. Today, the company operates 44 “memory crafts” stores in 13 states.
Olsten says his law degree laid the groundwork for everything that followed. Without the degree, he never would have made the connections that led him to politics, and without politics, he may never have realized that his true passion was business. “I discovered that I liked running things in business better than I liked giving advice in politics,” he says.
Olsten’s education gave him something else that proved even more critical. Studying endless case law in school forced him to think critically, to pick out the case issues that matter most and set others aside. As Archiver’s continues to face economic challenges, that capacity has never been more dramatically put to the test. “When times are tough, you face problems on a daily basis,” he says. “I think what’s important for a leader is that you need to step back just a bit and ask, ‘What are the critical issues here for our company?’ And then help the staff to focus on those critical issues.”
Paula Jossart ‘99 – The Compassionate Attack Lawyer
Paula Jossart doesn’t know who put the “Beware of Attack Lawyer” sign on her office door. But she knows why it’s there.
“I believe in my clients, and I believe in their causes,” says Jossart, a partner at the Minneapolis law firm Yaeger, Jungbauer & Barczak. “I’m really aggressive about my representation, and thus I have the attack lawyer sign on my door—that’s just who I am.”
A former North Dakota newspaper reporter and editor, Jossart acknowledges that it bothers her when the other side in a legal dispute plays it cute or tries to act sly in answering questions. “I get very aggressive with that,” she says.
Her leadership skills were honed during her newspaper days. At age 22 she was promoted to an editing position in which she oversaw eight community newspapers. During that time, she says, she learned just how important the small things in life are to people. “You learn very quickly that an obituary or a story about who came to visit their grandma over a weekend is important to people,” she says. “That made me a better communicator and better able to understand people. I think that helps you with juries.”
The news background also taught her how to stand her ground against powerful people and interests, another handy courtroom skill. “There might be a judge who doesn’t like the way you’re doing things or doesn’t agree with you, and he or she will scrutinize you and put you under pressure,” she says. “But you really have to stand up and take it—and know that you’re doing what is right.”
Jossart, a personal injury attorney, specializes in the Federal Employers Liability Act. Most of her work involves representation of railroad workers injured on the job without the benefit of workers compensation coverage. However, neither of her two biggest cases has involved railroad workers.
In one of those cases, she secured a $12.5 million verdict for a heating and cooling company worker who was horribly scalded while servicing a faulty boiler at a school. The school district balked at a settlement, saying the technician was at fault for his own injuries. After a long fight, the courts finally sided with Jossart and her client. “I would never let up,” she says. “You really had to stick to your guns.”
In her other big case, Jossart represented a group of families who lived near the site of the worst anhydrous ammonia spill in the history of North Dakota. The toxic gas cloud injured all 100 clients, she says. In that case, her discovery work unearthed documentation that indicated potential destruction of evidence by the defendants. While never proven in court, her findings led to favorable settlements for her clients. “It was a fight,” she says. “There were very, very good defense attorneys on the other side who threw everything at us. It was a wild game of dodgeball many times, and sometimes it seemed we didn’t have a lot of balls to throw back. But in the end, the plaintiffs we represented did very well.”
Jossart, who admits that some of her clients’ cases are so dramatic that they cause her to lose sleep, sees her leadership role in the context of compassionate counseling. “You have to be able to tell [clients] the good and the bad,” she says. “And you have to feel for them. I really do lead with compassion.”
Jossart says that it’s important to put herself in the position of her clients and understand the personal impact of the issues they face. “That helps you make better decisions which not only help them, but also help the case along,” she says. “That’s the only way I know how to lead.”
Hassan Ali Mohamud ‘02 – Building Bridges
As a leader, Hassan Mohamud wears many hats. He is an imam, or Muslim cleric, at the Minnesota Dawah Institute of St. Paul. He works as an advocate at the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis’ Immigration Law Project, and serves on the board of the Twin Cities’ American Red Cross. In addition to that, he holds seminars to help attorneys understand the issues that their Muslim clients face.
Mohamud, the first Somali immigrant to have graduated from a Minnesota law school, was once involved in a public controversy. In 2006, he was among the signers of a fatwa, or Muslim religious statement, issued during a standoff between the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) and a group of Muslim taxi drivers who, for religious reasons, refused to transport alcohol-toting passengers. The fatwa, issued on the letterhead of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, informed cab drivers that “alcohol is the mother of all evils” and “it is not permissible for you to carry on working this job, because it involves cooperating in sin, according to Islam.”
When the fatwa surfaced in the press, the resulting controversy helped put a stop to a MAC pilot program that would require Muslim drivers to place special top lights on their cabs to discreetly indicate their position on carrying alcohol. The program was scrubbed when passengers overwhelmingly rejected the religious accommodation.
Still, Mohamud says that it was not a mistake to issue the fatwa because, under Islamic law, it is not possible to separate personal from religious conduct. The collapse of the pilot program was simply a matter of politics, he says. “There were negotiations between the cab drivers, and I was one of the mediators. I was trying to bridge them because I know [American] law, and I know the Islamic law,” he says, adding that Muslim taxi drivers— who comprise 70 percent of all airport cabbies—had the right to resist under the First Amendment. “This is my role of leadership, to bridge between two cultures.”
Mohamud has continued to work on building bridges, particularly in his attempts to ease restrictions faced by Somali immigrants. For instance, he says, new citizens need to wait only one year to bring their spouses to America, while those on work visas carrying green cards must wait up to five years. “We are trying to eliminate this gap,” he says.
Mohamud, who speaks four languages and has traveled to more than 30 countries, notes that his William Mitchell education was an essential ingredient in forging his personal leadership style. “William Mitchell gave me a lot,” he says. “Whatever leadership style I had before I came to the United States was enriched by the advanced, modern American legal system. That has helped me in many ways to resolve problems.”
Mohamud says that he will continue to forge connections between Muslim immigrants and native Minnesotans and notes that many conflicts could be resolved if both sides simply understood the other’s point of view. But he knows that the process will require immense patience. “I have no problem living in the United States as a good Muslim, practicing Islam,” he says. “I enjoy more freedom here than any other place. Because I do understand both systems, I understand how they work together. But few people understand this. This is the unfortunate part.”
