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January / February 2010
Volume 22, Number 1

Woman in Charge

Former Brazoria County Treasurer Susan Wendel remembers the first time she met Karen Ann Norris, the tall, striking redhead who would later become the first woman to fully infiltrate and rise to the top of the mostly boy’s club that was the Texas Association of Counties.

It was roughly 1984, give or take few years because a proper Southern woman like Karen Ann Norris never wants to reveal any information that can give up her age. At the time, then-Executive Director Sam Clonts needed someone with a legislative and health care background to assist in a statewide study of indigent health care. Norris had experience working for the state nurses’ association and the trial lawyers’ association and had clerked in the House of Representatives. Clonts had heard about her and tapped her to help with the study; she worked on it first via contract — successfully, as it later led to a comprehensive package of legislation that was adopted in 1985 — before joining the TAC staff full-time.

“She was tall and red-headed and gorgeous and I thought, this is going to be an adjustment at TAC,” Wendel said, during a celebration honoring Norris, who retired effective Dec. 31. “It has been (an adjustment), and it has been a wonderful adjustment.”

But make no mistake, Wendel wasn’t talking about just the flaming hair, the considerable presence, the feminine voice, the charming smile. Those things are undeniable and unmissable, and generally what people talk about when they first see or meet Norris — but that’s only because everything else there is to notice about her is so subtle, so carefully used as to not even be seen. Think of it as the wind, or the rays of sunshine; whatever life-giving force Mother Nature has, Norris has, only it’s more in the form of a quiet, forceful kind of support that has everybody around her working for her, without ever feeling like they aren’t doing something they’d rather not do.

Perhaps long-time Field Services Representative Cris Faught said it best: Norris — and it’s hard calling her Norris when everyone knows her as Karen or Karen Ann, and it’s especially hard since it’s because of the family culture she helped build herself that that all that is so true — Karen has lead TAC for many more years than she’s been in a leadership position, and she’s done it via “empowerment by covert delegation.”

“She’s famous for (how she holds) a meeting. And we’ve all been there with her, and she has an agenda — I mean, she called the meeting, so there’s a reason for that, and you’re sitting in that meeting and talking about all kinds of stuff. Everybody has an idea that they want to talk about, so you talk about it, and Karen is sitting there patiently waiting for the agenda to be filled. And she doesn’t do it herself, she doesn’t say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’” Faught said.

Instead, she listens and she waits, and she tilts her chin down while keeping her eyes up, focused on the speaker, and leads them in the right direction – right not because it’s her direction, but because ultimately her direction can be trusted as the right one to go in. The others figure it out eventually; she just got there first.

“You’re walking out of that room later on and you’re thinking, ‘I earned my keep today, I actually helped these folks make a decision, and it was my notion that did it,’ and then you get back to your office and you start thinking and you go, ‘you know, that was Karen’s idea. That’s where I got that idea,’” Faught said.

If the meeting doesn’t head in the right direction, Karen listened, smiled, nicely asked for another meeting, adjourned everyone, and then quietly and unassumingly spoke to individuals separately about what was really supposed to happen during the meeting. Then there’ll be a second meeting, and everyone will have brilliant ideas they believe are their own. “So she empowers you by covert delegation,” Faught finished. “You don’t know you’ve been had until you’ve been had.”

Well, county government has been had. But without having been had, there’d be no Leadership Foundation, no Best Practices awards program, no County magazine, and who knows what else there’d be none of.

Norris, like many a Southern lady, doesn’t like talking about herself, and she doesn’t like taking the credit for anything she’s done or for which she’s been remotely responsible. If she were the Wizard of Oz — and many comparisons have been made — there’d be no Wizard of Oz; she’d call herself the “Just the Manager” of Oz. Unlike TAC’s former executive directors Sam Clonts and Sam Seale, Norris never considered herself to be the “face of Texas county government”; she didn’t feel that was her role, or that she was capable of being such a thing. She was just an association manager, right up till the day she retired.

“The most important thing for any executive director is that you have the full support of your Board, and that’s something I have enjoyed and am so grateful for,” Norris said after announcing her retirement.

“(All) I’ve just tried to do is strengthen our finances and our operational capacity to be in a better position to meet our members’ needs.”

Throughout the majority of her tenure at TAC, Norris was a dedicated right-hand man known by others as the person to go to with an idea they wanted to develop, grow and implement. She was a reluctant leader, agreeing to take TAC’s helm not because of professional or power aspirations but because the Association needed her at a time of great loss and great challenges. It was February 2007.

Norris, at the time, had been TAC’s assistant executive director.

“I was in my office in the courthouse,” said Brazos District Clerk Marc Hamlin, who had been serving as the Association’s Board of Director’s president for 11 months when Sam Seale, who had been TAC’s highly regarded leader for 20 years, passed away. “And she let me know.”

Selecting a leader to follow Seale could have been a disaster for TAC, and the Board was highly aware of the political nature of the decision. The Board selected a search committee and started a statewide process to find applicants; in the end, there were 83 candidates vying for the position, but only one that all the members fully supported — and she wasn’t a candidate.

“There were so many challenges at the time,” Hamlin said. An anti-government group called Americans for Prosperity had just sued TAC for its lobbying efforts on behalf of counties, and the Legislature was actively talking about capping counties’ abilities to generate revenue. The Board felt TAC needed a leader that had institutional knowledge of the Association, who knew it, who was intelligent, calm. “The first choice that the committee had was the assistant executive director. They said, ‘she is the absolute choice.’ Karen had been there during the time that Mr. Sam couldn’t be there, when he was so very ill. She had been very instrumental in TAC business. She was unconditionally the round peg that fit the round hole.”

Norris denied the offer as flattery, and the Board narrowed down its list of actual candidates.

“Every person that we interviewed was competent. Every person that came in was very capable of performing tremendous things. I knew that each one of the Board members recognized the talents that each person had. We structured all of our conversations about the positive things that each one brought to the table,” Hamlin said. “It was just a wonderful group of people that had so many talents, and if we could put all of those together into one person, it would have been an obvious choice.”

That led the selection committee back to Norris, who again refused, thinking of retirement and believing the Association needed a former county official at its helm; it had always had a former county official as its staff leader.

Hamlin was chastised for not being able to get the job done but was diligent with his efforts to carry out the Board’s wishes. He asked again, and again, and finally Norris agreed to a two-year contract, during which time TAC could develop its succession plan, stay focused on its goals, build its strategic initiatives and stay financially strong during a time of national economic crisis.

“I said Ms. Norris, this is a done deal. I have got to call the Board members and let them know that we have a new executive director,” Hamlin said, adding that Norris maintained the Board’s full support throughout her tenure. “Ms. Norris is one of those people that, when she walks into a room, people want to give her respect because they genuinely want to give it from the inside, not because it is dictated that they do it.”

So those who heard the parting words given at her retirement celebration believed them.

“TAC is always going to be important to me. I would not be leaving if I did not have every confidence in the future of this Association, and it’s because of the new leader that has been chosen, it’s because of the current leaders, the department heads that are currently in place and the work that they continue to do, it’s because of the new emerging leaders that we have at this organization and because of every single one of you and the work that you do,” Norris told her staff.

“If I had anything to ask of you, it’s to remember the bottom line of the importance of that work,” she added. “We promote ethical governance in this state. We promote good, efficient governance in this state. We save taxpayer dollars, and we make them available to take care of very important populations that don’t have the resources themselves. We communicate to and support local officials in the work that they do, and I mean, they are the bedrock of their communities. They are important people, and the work that you do is important.”

Learning about Texas county government is no small undertaking and coming to understand the responsibilities and thinking of an elected official without actually ever having been in those shoes is a challenge.

There is one short but significant story that Norris tells again and again, and it’s from the first time she ever came to learn about the Texas Association of Counties. “I interviewed with Sam Clonts, and he told me that TAC represented all the counties and all the county officials, and I was mystified by how any group could legislatively do that,” Norris said. “And he said, ‘very carefully.’”

Fortunately, Norris is careful. And, she was motivated. Norris had been an independent single mother for a while, and had fallen into association work feeling it would better help her support her two children than other careers. Her own mother had been a teacher while her father co-owned an oil exploration and development company, so it was important to her that her children didn’t grow up without necessary privileges, such as a good education.

She had been working for the nurses’ association, having started as an assistant to the executive director. But she had seen her role go from an administrative position to more of a lobbying position; the association had lost a large legislative battle and had been forced to largely empty its ship, so Norris, then just 25 or 26, was helping run the association’s political action committee, among other tasks, before leaving to finish her bachelor’s degree at The University of Texas.

When the TAC offer came about, it was an interesting opportunity.

“Back then it was a very small organization, and we really just worked on a few important issues,” she said. It was her job to stay around the office and coordinate TAC’s communications to members. She wrote the newsletter and did the endof- year reports. She eventually began to take on larger Board-driven initiatives, like strategic planning, building TAC’s educational offerings to meet the highest national standards and developing remedies to claims impacting TAC’s insurance pools, such as regional safety workshops and a strong return-to-work program.

“When you think about a lot of the things that have happened at TAC that are different than other associations, it is because she has pushed to make us the organization we are,” said TAC Communications Director Jim Lewis, who worked with Norris for 19 years. “I learned a long time ago that if you really want to get things done, the person who is really going to drive things around here is Karen.”

Much of her success lies in her ability to turn to the right people and give them just the right amount of support in just the right way to get the job done.

“When I retired from the Texas Association of Counties, Karen said, ‘Let’s go to lunch,’” said Wendel, who came to work at TAC as a legislative liaison after leaving her post as the Brazoria County treasurer. “And we were having this great lunch, and she turned to me and said, ‘Before you really completely leave, there’s this one little thing I’d like for you to think about.’

“I said, ‘Great, what is it?’” Wendel recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, I got this idea for starting a leadership program for county officials.’ I said, ‘Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea. As a treasurer, I could have used it.’ And she said, ‘Well, I want you to be the coordinator of it, kind of think about what you need to do.’ And I said, ‘Well, okay, what do you need me to do?’

And she said, ‘Well, I need you to write the curriculum, find the locations for all the meetings, solicit the attendees, find the instructors and raise the money.’”

The TAC Leadership Foundation is now a cornerstone for the development of county association officers, giving rising leaders opportunities to learn from those with years of service under their belts as well as the skills necessary to plan for the future and exert influence. It also supports the County Best Practices Awards program, which recognizes innovative Texas programs to inspire others in solving their programs effectively and efficiently.

“Your time is her time,” Wendel said, “but it was an incredible experience. It was one of those things that you will never forget. You will never understand how much it gave to me to be part of that.”

Norris, who said she plans on taking a true sabbatical before deciding if there are other professional challenges she’d like to begin, did share some parting thoughts about county government during her final days at TAC.

She hopes her legacy will be one that includes helping to unite county officials for the purposes of building better local governments, and is hopeful that politics, however dividing they are at the state and federal levels, won’t ruin the bridges that have been built between county offices in the last 20 years.

“There’s just not a lot of places for partisan politics when it comes down to criminal justice and potholes,” she said. “Counties will never have the power or the financial resources to solve all the problems in their community. But because they serve everyone in their area, they are the ideal leaders to step forward and show the leadership necessary to weave all the resources of that area together.”