Oral History Program Rona Rahlf Interviewed by Ashley Scoresby 19 April 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Rona Rahlf Interviewed by Ashley Scoresby 19 April 2016 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Rahlf, Rona, an oral history by Ashley Scoresby, 19 April 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Rona Rahlf, president of the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce. It is being conducted on April 19, 2016 and concerns Rona Rahlf’s career experience and minority leadership. The interviewer is Ashley Scroresby. AS: This is an oral history interview with Rona Rahlf conducted by Ashley Scoresby on April 19, 2016 at 10:30 a.m. at Mrs. Rahlf's office at the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce. Thanks very much for doing this interview. Please start by telling us about your background (your childhood, teen years, where you grew up, etc.). RR: Well the first 14 years were in Shelby, Montana, which is just a few miles from the Canadian border. It's up on the northern highline. My father owned retail stores on main street and grew up there, but then the economy crashed, I guess you could say, and we ended up moving to Billings when I was 14. I graduated from Billings West High, did the usual high school kinds of things in Billings, and then left to go to BYU. Went to BYU in 1983. During my high school time, I was working at a store called The Closet in the mall, the Rimrock Mall in Billings, and loved it, loved being able to work and the independence. I transferred to The Closet here in Provo when I came down to school. Well, there was a lot of drama at that store. The deal that my parents and I had was that I would pay for first semester, they would pay for second semester. Well, financially that didn't work out, and I ended up having to come home, didn't know about financial options, didn't pursue any of that, so I went and enrolled at Montana State University at the Billings campus. Returned home and went to school and was assistant managing one of the 1 stores in the mall. I met my husband, and we dated and ended up getting married in 1985. During that time I was going to school and working at various retail stores in the mall. Shortly after I got married I decided, you know, working weekends and evenings just wasn't going to be great for a family or any kind of a relationship. So I thought, “I'll go see what's out in the market for a new job,” and found a job listed in the newspaper for an advertising sales representative for a weekly newspaper in Billings. I thought 'I can do that.' And so, the rest is history. I convinced the Billings Gazette to hire me to work for their weekly newspaper, and I did that for two years. Then my first child was born, Ben. I thought I wanted to stay home, you know, be a full-time mom. So after Ben was born, I stayed home for six months and I went almost crazy. My husband was about ready to take me to the psych ward because I was so bored, not having any adult conversation, I guess, day in and day out. So I learned a lot, that I like to be out, I like to be engaged, I like to be busy, busy doing meaningful work. Not that raising children isn't meaningful work, I'm not saying that, but I learned I could do both. In the meantime, my former bosses called me back from the newspaper and said, "Hey, we just bought this weekly newspaper, would you like to come run it, be the manager of this?" I'm like, "Okay, what is it?" Well it was our competitor product that I had been selling hard against during these two years and it was a measly 16-page publication when I took over. It was all part of the Billings Gazette owned by Lee Enterprises, so I had the opportunity to take that on, and grew it from 16 pages to over a hundred pages every week of advertising space out of Billings, Montana. 2 It was great because they let me do what I wanted to do, I just had to deliver the results, and I far exceeded the results. So I loved that. In the meantime, I had another child, so I had two kids, and the company kept giving me more opportunity to start new publications. I added in more weekly publications, including the one I started with, the Yellowstone Shopper. I had a couple weeklies, a business publication, helped some other weeklies in the state within the company, just had great leadership opportunities to turn around publications and get them headed in the right direction. About that time, I stopped going to school because I had this great business opportunity and kids and pursued that. Subsequently, I ended up spending the next 18 years at the Billings Gazette in various positions, up to being the ad director for this 30-milliondollar operation and had 150 employees reporting to me. It was during the days of the internet, you know, newspapers grappling with do you charge for content or not content? I called it the holy war because the newsroom and the ad department were fighting over how to deal with that content. By then I'd had my third child. My third child was a daughter, and again, I had a great partner with a husband who helped raise; we split the duties, and took care of life, and raised family. I had an opportunity to change lanes from ad director to human resources. So I did a two-year time frame within human resources where I managed and worked with all the newspapers in Montana and Wyoming as their regional HR resource. It was a lot of fun because I got the opportunity to go everywhere and play in everybody's party instead of just being stuck in advertising. Especially the newsroom. The newsroom and advertising, you know, don't cross that line. Well, in HR, I could go over there and see what 3 was going on. I really enjoyed those two years. In the meantime, the Butte, Montana newspaper, the publisher there was leaving to go to another company, and I was asked if I was interested in taking over that newspaper. I thought, "Oh, it's Butte, Montana!" Have you ever been to Butte, Montana? AS: I have not, but I've heard. RR: Butte Montana is a rough, rough town. A historic town, but it's tough. It's well known in Montana as being the place you don't want to go. But it was a neat opportunity, and I had been going there for my HR responsibility, so I was getting to know the community. I decided that if this was my opportunity to go be a publisher, then I had to take it. Made the difficult decision to move my family from my family who was established in Billings to Butte, the hole of Montana. My youngest daughter summed it up, saying, "This is just a crappy town," when we first took her into town. She's like, 'Oh, this is just a crappy town." So I moved a 16-year-old son, 14-year-old daughter, and an eight-year-old daughter from their family, their cousins, and ripped them away from them and moved them three hours away. So that was an experience. But it was a great career experience for me. That community, they fight hard for themselves, but they take the bad, the ick that's there, all the mining tailings, the pit, and turn them into opportunities. Now there's tourist attractions. They're making money off of the pit, full of toxic water. So, great opportunity to participate in that community, as a publisher, on the chamber board, and to help get some of those programs at play there that are now doing quite well. I was in Butte two years. I said to my bosses, "Please 4 don't leave me in Butte. Please, please don't leave me in Butte." [laughter] AS: [laughter] "Get me out of here." RR: [laughter] Yeah, so an opportunity came, the company was expanding and they bought a group of newspapers, and one of them was in Glens Falls, New York, which is located 40 miles north of Albany and 20 miles from the Vermont border, so fairly north. They needed a longtime Lee Enterprise employee to go and kind of convert their culture to Lee Enterprises. So I went and looked it over, and said, "What the heck? Let's go for it." So I drug my family from Montana to New York. My son left on his mission during that time, so he really wasn't in New York when we were there. I had a great experience there. Again, the opportunity to turn that newspaper into a high-performing newspaper. We ended up winning the top award of the company that year, in 2007, as enterprise of the year. Sold over a million dollars in growth advertising revenue that year. As a team, it was a big accomplishment that we were able to do that, and not being an original Lee Enterprise newspaper. Great opportunity, and a lot of fun. Then Provo, the Daily Herald publisher, they were making a change in publisher, and they asked if I wanted to go to Provo, which I had been telling them I wanted to get back to the west, back into the same time zone as my family, and I was like, "Yeah, we'll go to Provo." And they said, "Do you want to talk to your husband?" and I said, "No, no, he's fine. We'll be going." [laughter] So we packed up and moved back cross country to Provo in 2008. During my time in New York, I was given additional newspaper responsibilities. I had papers in California, Arizona, another one in New York, and 5 one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania that reported to me. I was their group publisher and worked with them to help them create revenue streams, problem solving, cost cutting, just everything operational, just top to bottom. That was a really great experience too, to coach a leader in their community how to move that organization forward. I came back to Provo, kept all those newspapers, participated on the CEO team, strategic planning, revenue growth plans, those kinds of things. So I was really given a great opportunity and exposure to how to make the I think at the time, we were the fourth largest newspaper company, how to make it run and how to keep the shareholders happy. So that kind of takes us up to where we're at now. Do you want me to keep going? AS: Yeah, tell me about now. RR: Okay, well when I got to Provo and got things cooking and rolling here, I'd moved my family three times quite a bit, and my husband too. Not just the kids, but my husband. He sells cars, loves selling cars, been doing it for 30 years. He was able to do it from community to community and do okay, but every time we moved he started over. He was getting pretty well established, and this is a vibrant, dynamic community, and I thought, "You know, there's got to be opportunities here that I don't need to move to continue to progress in leadership and skills." So about the time I started thinking that way, I was approached by a chamber friend about taking on a project at his organization called Fishbowl, it's an inventory management software company up in Orem. He had written a book called 'The 7 Non-Negotiables of Winning' that is prevalent in his culture there at Fishbowl, and he wanted to turn it into a leadership development program that could be rolled out to their clients and help 6 them improve their culture. I thought, “Wow, that's a pretty good fit. I have an established success of a culture and workplace. I knew how to pull content, create content, and work with others to develop a program.” So I retired from Lee Enterprises after 28 years. It was quite traumatic. Not as traumatic as when I quit the Billings Gazette after 18 years, I sobbed all day long. But it was an exciting, new career to pursue- going from publicly traded to privately held; had no intention of any exit strategy as a privately held company, all local, and a tech, and a building full of men. The men part wasn't so different because I was used to working with a lot of men in the newspaper industry. So there was a big cultural shift there. But I enjoyed it, I think I got the groove and thrived and still have a lot of friends there. Later in the summer, my friend Val Hale took a job with the governor's office of economic development, leaving the position open here as the president of the chamber. I had served on the chamber board, was board chair over my time here when I was at the Daily Herald, so the board approached me and asked if I would be interested. After many conversations and time passing, I decided to go from Fishbowl to the Chamber of Commerce, to work with again, the mentality of HR. It's like, "Wow I can go to any company, I can see what's going on across the board, from global business to local to, you know..." So that part was exciting. So I started here at the chamber in 2014, and that's where I am today. AS: Okay, great. I think you've touched on a little bit, but what experiences did you have in childhood and on that led you to believe you could be or were a leader? RR: I loved to work. I loved creating things and setting things up, getting them 7 working. Even as a little kid, I would create playhouses and get them all set up, and we'd play with friends-just kind of a self-directed, self-motivated kid, I guess. When I was old enough to not babysit to make some money, I went out looking for a job and found a job at the Tasty Freeze in Shelby. That was great because that's where all my friends came to hang out, and I got paid to work and visit and flirt and all that good stuff, but was given, kind of by default, responsibility for closing the shop because the manager I think had some addiction problems, let's say it that way. It's 2 o'clock in the morning and she's not there to close up, so okay, what do you do? So you just take care of business. I think because of the work performance, and I did it happily, I wasn't a grouch or a grump, I enjoyed it, that that responsibility came. Through that experience and then when we moved to Billings and I got to work at the hospital cafeteria, and doing tray lines for the patients-again, just doing your job and being given more responsibility starts to build that in your mind that, "I could do this. I can take more on." So I had great supervisors and bosses that recognized that and provided that opportunity without me saying, "Hey, give me something to do." They just fed it to me because I was willing to do it. Same thing at The Closet. I just, would tackle anything new, I would take the initiate to change displays and sell. That just gave me opportunity after opportunity. Same thing with the newspaper industry. Once I applied for that initial job at that weekly, I never applied for another job after that because they just said, “Will you do this, will you take this?” 18 years, well, 28 years of just progressing... AS: Yeah, naturally. 8 RR: Yeah, I think it built upon itself. I don't know if being the oldest child, but being raised by a father that was involved in retail, chambers, community, he was a leader, always an example that I was able to hone as, "This is just what you do." You just jump in and get to work and solve problems. It just kind of worked out, and I was able to take those stepping stones up the way. AS: Yeah, okay. What are your core values? And how have they influenced your leadership experiences? RR: Core values. Well, integrity. I'm very transparent. You know, if there's something that's gone wrong in my operation, I always let my direct supervisor know, “ Here's the problem, here's what we're doing to have it fixed, and I'll report back.” So it's being transparent so there's no distrust because I was withholding information. Maybe sometimes I shared too much, but I felt that I needed to do that. So the integrity, I think serving. I learned way early on that you can build a team when you're more collaborative than bossy. So work in a collaborative environment, and seek to be inclusive. So inclusive, collaborative, integrity... Let's see, positive, optimistic, honesty. Don't lie to me. That will put me into orbit. Just give me the bad news early. We can deal with it. It's not brain surgery. We can figure it out. Hard work, I guess those are my core values. AS: Name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader (maybe someone who has been a mentor to you), and how did they affect your life and leadership abilities? RR: The first, probably, major one was, his name was Wayne Sheely. He was the publisher at the Billings Gazette. He was a couple levels above me when I was 9 given the opportunity to manage that weekly newspaper that was 16 pages. Then there were some structural changes and I became his direct report on the management team. But he allowed me to do my thing but be there as a coach. He was a very busy man. He was your typical publisher with a cigar and would walk around, you know, just as you would envision the typical, in those days, when you could smoke in the room. AS: [laughter] Right. RR: But he was very supportive of me and women in general, but he took me under his wing and, you know, coached me, was very giving of his time. He would say, "You're the only one that will camp out to meet with me because it's important." I would sit in his office, I'd make an appointment and they would always go long, and I would sit and be patient. I would bring stacks of work to stay busy while I was waiting for him. But he was encouraging, he was praising, he was constructive in his criticism. I remember one time we were working on a logo change design for the Thrifty Nickel, and he was drilling me. He was going through all the questions, "What about this? What about this?" He said, "This doesn't look like the national Thrifty Nickel logo." I'm like, "Well, it does because I've been talking with the Thrifty Nickel company, you know, to make sure we're in alignment." Well, what he later told me was that he didn't really believe that I had done all that homework, so he was testing me to make sure I had done it. And that just raised that level of trust, that “She is doing her homework, she's not taking the lazy, easy road, but she's doing all these steps to make sure it's done right.” He said that was of great confidence 10 in him that he was then able to place even more into me. He's the one that gave me the opportunities to grow for those 18 years in Billings. I guess it's not 18, he retired, so 12 or 14 years. Then he retired and a new publisher came along, and I learned a lot from him. But he was probably the most instrumental in helping build my leadership style and management style. He was very visionary. I would always marvel and say, "How do you know all this? How are you seeing this?" He taught me how to kind of look up from what you're doing and pay attention to what's motivating people and where's the end game. Learned a lot from him doing that. I also learned the power of the chair, I call it. The power of the chair is the person who's sitting in that place of authority, and it's not necessarily the person, it's the chair. It's the position. And to not let that go to your head because you could not be in that chair sometime. You won't be. You're not permanently in that position. In all of my roles after that, especially as publisher, I would remember that, and to be responsible with that authority and power because there's only one of those publishers in most communities. It brings a lot of responsibility and power to tell those stories in the community. So he really helped me see and understand that. And frankly there's sometimes when he abused the power, and I made a mental note and said, "Oh, he stepped out of line on that one." AS: Yeah, "Don't do that." Those are powerful too, though. RR: They are. You learn both sides of it. AS: Okay, how do you think you've been a mentor to others, and what value do you place on mentoring? RR: Well, a huge value on mentoring because it helped me get to where I'm at. It’s 11 good to have someone to go to, to confide in, that you can build that trust. I've mentored direct reports, I've mentored colleagues and friends. I think one of my strengths is I'm fairly direct but I don't cut your knees out of from underneath you when I give you feedback, saying, "Ah! That one's way off. Did you think about these?" To coach them, to take a coaching approach but also encouraging, "You're not stretching far enough, you're not reaching far enough. Have you thought about these things?" Get them thinking so they can solve the opportunity or the problem themselves. So mentoring I think is critical to that. I've had opportunities to mentor a couple of students at UVU, being on the Woodbury School of Business advisory council. AS: All along the way, probably. RR: Yeah, it's really important, and I appreciate those that have mentored my kids as they've grown up and taken on careers and family. It's a great pay-it-forward kind of approach too, and it always comes back, and you're always a better person because of that. AS: Okay, what do you see as the biggest challenges of being a minority leader in Northern Utah, which is predominantly white and male? What do you do overcome these challenges? RR: The interesting thing about Utah is everybody knows everybody. They went to school together, I mean, they are longtime buddies. In the workplace, when business is done, it's relationship to relationship more than not. So they rely heavily on their buddies. Two things are a challenge for me. I'm not from Utah, I didn't go to school with all of these men, and I guess there's a third one. Women have not seized or taken the opportunity or given the opportunity to move into 12 leadership positions. There's just not very many, particularly in Utah County, that are in a leadership role. So most of the conversations start out with, "Oh, hey. How are you? How's so and so? How's so and so?" And they're talking about their high school buddies. So that creates an immediate challenge to how to connect with the group when you're not there. I have found here that I've never ever been mistreated or made to feel little on purpose. I think that there are habits, cultural habits, that have been learned over time that men need to unlearn. From sitting in a meeting and they're talking amongst themselves and they forget to engage everyone in the room, male and female, that they gravitate to who they know. So a really good leader, and there are several good leaders in this valley that recognize that having a diverse conversation and having lots of thoughts and ideas creates a better outcome and they're very proactive at engaging women, engaging other men, other minorities at the table. So it's been a little frustrating, but I'm learning to identify and understand that, and I tease them about it. Like, "Oh man, here we go. The Orem Tigers story again." So I kind of razz them a little bit so that they recognize what's happening but in a fun way, and they're like, "Oh, yeah" and then somehow it keeps me in the conversation. It doesn't work every time, but sometimes it does. I think when it comes down to business and you've got a valid, important idea or solution that it becomes my job, it's on me to make sure that I'm understood and that they understand what the options are so that I feel understood and know that the decisions or the outcomes that we move forward, that we're all on the same page. So I think that the challenge is just to help those white males understand their old behaviors and thinking processes are just that, 13 they're old, and to get them to open up and be more aware of how to build a better conversation, that there are more than one way to do it. I think it's just encouraging them to be open minded. I'm a pretty good example of a female leader in a Utah Valley chamber. My board, we've been working, it's not quite 50/50 men and women, but the hiring committee that offered me the job, I think there was one woman in the interview, and she was the treasurer of the board at the time. So there's still a lot of work that can be done to open those doors and to provide opportunity and equal pay. That was one of the challenges when they came to approach me. I said, "Listen, I know what Val made, I created that pay plan when we put him in that role." I was the board chair at the time, and I said, "You can't afford me. You've got to go find some more money." I could have easily taken that job at the lower pay, but I'm like, "No, I'm worth more. I have these skills. I can do these things for the chamber. Go find the money." And sure enough, they did. AS: Way to go. RR: They found the money. Part of it was they put that responsibility back on me to • find the rest of the money, I guess which is typical of leaders, right? They do that to us all the time. AS: Sure. RR: I do it too. Part of it is standing up for yourself, knowing what you're worth. Honestly that culture was not prevalent in Lee Enterprises. It was, "Here's the offer, take it or leave it." There was very little negotiation, particularly on the pay. And there were gaps between what men and women publishers were being paid and men and women group publishers. I was the first female group publisher. 14 You just have to take your shots when you can and decide, "Is this the hill I'm gonna die on? Am I going to fight until I die on this one?" Or "No, I'm gonna try a different strategy to get it there." But the chamber one, I said, "Nah, you can't afford me. Go find some more money." [laughter] It was kind of fun telling them that. [laughter] AS: That's pretty great. Okay, what advice would you give emerging young minority leaders in order to be successful? RR: Show up. Show up where the meetings are happening. Be part of the solution. Don't wait for the white males to reach out to you and invite you in. Volunteer, work your butt off, show that you have great ideas and solutions. But show up. The world is run by those that show up. If you don't show up, then shut up, you know what I mean? AS: You can't complain. RR: Exactly. When you have the opportunity as a leader to make a hiring decision, choose the best candidate whether they're male or female or what ethnicity they are, and pay for the job. Pay for the skill. Don't cheap it out. When I took over the Herald, there was a marketing director, she was female, she was severely underpaid. She was the only woman on the management team, and it was like, that's not right. So instead of just taking her from A to Z overnight, which would have been a red flag because of budgets and stuff, just gradually moved her up so that she was equivalent to her male peers doing just as important work. So take those opportunities when you have that opportunity to reposition people's pay, titles, responsibilities, and know people are giving you the best. Again, no matter what gender or ethnicity, we all come to work wanting to do the best, so 15 give that opportunity as a leader. AS: Okay, what other insights can you share about being a minority leader in Northern Utah? RR: It's interesting, when you sent me those questions, I never thought of myself as a minority leader. AS: I know! RR: But when you look at all of the, you now, meetings I have with the leaders here, our board of governors, our executive round table, they're all men! I've engaged several groups of entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, to try to identify what their challenges are to help overcome that and create environments; whether it's childcare, some of them are stay-at-home moms with businesses but they want to interact and mingle with others, so let's solve the childcare problem. It ain't easy. Liability is a major stumbling block. No one wants to take on that liability. But it's worthwhile. You learn so much and grow so much more when you have others to collaborate with and interact with, and so to create those environments is important. As a minority leader, I feel sometimes a heavy burden of being a woman, you know, should I take on this cause? I've kind of decided that I just need to go about doing my thing, and when those opportunities come along to bring others along, other minorities along, to do so. But if I make a big deal, a big campaign about it, I think it loses its effectiveness. I have an agenda. I don't want to go about my business with a very overt agenda that could become detrimental. I don't want to become that squawky, high- pitched voice. I want to be recognized for the good work I do, and I'm a woman. I'm not doing work because I'm a 16 woman, I'm a person doing good work, and to show them that and build that trust. So, yeah. I think we all just need to step up and say, "I can do this," and then deliver. And do it in a collaborative way, not in an adversarial... AS: Or "it's all about me." RR: Right. That's not going to get you very far either. AS: Yeah. Okay, thank you! 17