When Anne Reed saw Wisconsin Humane Society’s chief executive officer job posting 12 years ago while on its website looking for a puppy class, she scanned through the qualifications and held them up against her own experience as a litigator of nearly
30 years.
During her cursory review, it didn’t occur to her that she might be qualified for the job.
Reed – at the time still in her three-decade-long career with Milwaukee law firm Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren – wasn’t actively looking for a job change, but the position and the organization intrigued her. And for some time she had an inkling the final chapter of her career might involve giving back somehow.
The next day, she pulled up the job description again.
“It’s like that game where the two lines are either vases or faces, depending on how you look at it. The list transformed in front of my eyes. I could start to see how it was me,” Reed recalled.
Where the description sought five years of nonprofit leadership experience, she realized her volunteer service on the Meta House board could fit. She went down the list and gained confidence she might be a candidate WHS would consider.
She was a fit. Reed was selected to lead the organization in 2009, filling the position after the death of former CEO Victoria Wellens earlier that year.
But the job came with a steep learning curve. Leading a large group of people, operating within a traditional org chart, coming up to speed not only on the organization but also the complicated and sometimes controversial field of animal welfare – all of it was new to Reed, and the stakes felt high.
“This was going to be and will be my last job, and you’d hate to mess up your last job,” she said. “But also, this organization is a treasure in our community; it’s been here since 1879, it’s the largest in the state and one of the largest and oldest in the country. It was then, and I’m happy to say it still is, superb in its quality of work. So, I just felt like this thing I’d been given stewardship of, it had to thrive on my watch. And I didn’t know how to make it thrive.”
Reed is quick to credit those around her with helping her find her leadership stride. She leaned on the counsel of past and present WHS board chairs, advisors in the field, and friends who were working in well-run local organizations in different industries.
She also took learning into her own hands.
“My car turned into a business school on wheels. That is to say, if it was running, there was some sort of audiobook on. I just crammed and crammed and crammed,” said Reed, who estimates it took about three years to settle into the new role.
Building on Wellens’ leadership – who oversaw the replacement of WHS’s former dilapidated shelter with its current Wisconsin Avenue location, is credited with shutting down Wisconsin’s largest puppy mill and spearheaded the elimination of euthanasia of healthy animals at WHS and in the field as a whole – Reed’s 12-year tenure has been marked by growth for the Humane Society, including new facilities and mergers.
In 2011, WHS opened a new shelter in Saukville to replace its former Ozaukee County campus. In 2015, it opened a dedicated spay/neuter clinic in West Allis in an effort to improve conditions for animals in Milwaukee’s underserved communities and address areas of overpopulation. Last spring, it opened a new animal shelter in Mount Pleasant, backed by a $6 million capital campaign.
Reed has also become a champion of consolidation in what is viewed as a largely fragmented industry. Following its initial acquisition of the Ozaukee Humane Society in the early 2000s, the organization has in recent years stretched its reach – through a series of mergers – to extend from Racine to Green Bay to Door County.
The lack of a national, or even regional, parent organization has led to needless duplication of administrative and financial services – and therefore costs – in the animal welfare field while also often confusing donors. Those factors prevent organizations from devoting funding to the types of resources that help animals, such as veterinarians, behavioral specialists, communication specialists, and fundraising and financial professionals, Reed said.
“It really undercuts the mission itself to be as fragmented as our industry is, and that’s something we’d like to correct,” she said.
Reed’s role has her focused on the future and long-term vision of the organization, but she’s mindful of how those lofty plans will be implemented practically. Underpinning the organization’s aspirations of innovation and growth is the mundanity of plans, procedures and protocols.
“It’s hardly the kind of inspiring leadership style one would buy a book about, but I really believe in processes, in setting up ‘here’s what we use for that, here’s how often this group meets, here’s the checklist for this,’ and trying to create things where people are as rarely as possible reinventing anything,” Reed said. “The world brings us something new every day. We don’t need to add to that by turning old stuff into new stuff because we didn’t record how we approach it. We try to create that sort of process scaffolding that then allows individual creativity to flow.”
Anne Reed
President and CEO
Wisconsin Humane Society
Work style?
“I try to start each day with the same ‘runway list.’ It includes a few basic daily home chores and then an hour where I process new email, reply to people who are waiting for me, and do as many quick work tasks as I can. This helps create both momentum and space for the rest of the day and helps make sure that nothing is getting stuck while someone waits for me.”
Advice to your younger self?
“It’s okay not to have a plan. It’s possible to build a great career by just adding value as best you can wherever you are and following where that leads.”
Goal for the next year?
“I’m working on learning to paint.”
Pet:
“Our dog Bradley, who led me to the Wisconsin Humane Society, died this summer at age 12. He was a sweetheart, and we miss him.”
