Claire Reinelt's blog

I have been thinking a lot lately about evidence-based practice. We have been doing research for the Annie E. Casey Foundation on how to apply evidence-based methodologies to our assessment of leadership efforts to more clearly focus on bringing about a change in results (e.g., high student achievement in schools that serve low-income communities and communities of color). read more »

I’ve been inspired reading the Networked Nonprofit to reflect on the challenges facing the nonprofit sector and the crisis of leadership. The rise of the professional nonprofit organization has produced enormous social benefit over the past 40 years, yet the current leadership culture in many nonprofit organizations is neither viable nor desirable. Many nonprofit leaders are simply burned out from the constant pressure to raise money for their organizations and deliver more services on fewer and fewer dollars. The current system for funding and managing work that produces social benefit is exhausting and highly inefficient. Organizational leaders are isolated from one another, and have few pathways for more collective leadership. What will it take to change this leadership system?

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Evidence-based practice (EBP) is commonly used to inform practice decisions in the fields of medicine, nursing, social work, child welfare, and criminal justice.

These fields have established standards of practice that guide decision-making about what treatments and protocols to use with individual patients, clients, and offenders to ensure the highest possible accountability for producing good results.

How is evidence-based practice being used in the field of leadership development?  read more »

By Claire Reinelt

(Article originally posted on Stanford Social Innovation Review Opinion Blog)

Whether we seek to eliminate health disparities or prepare all children to enter school ready to learn, we do not have the leadership we need.  The heroic model of leadership blinds us to the fact that untapped leadership potential exists everywhere.  The dominant leadership model assumes that training individuals will better prepare them to lead strong organizations; and in turn strong organizations will produce better community-level results, but this model falls well short. Reaching the scale and scope of leadership needed to address complex issues requires new approaches to leadership development. Our focus should be on finding, cultivating, and connecting leadership everywhere it exists; across all generations, races, communities, and organizational levels. To activate this untapped leadership potential, leadership thinking and practice need to shift in three fundamental directions: read more »

Network leadership, unlike conventional leadership approaches, is collective, distributed, bottom-up, facilitative and emergent. The individual model of leadership historically associated with strong organizations is more, directive, top-down, and transactional. As we expand our leadership mindset to understand leadership as a collective process, more people are questioning the leadership assumptions that are embedded in traditional organizational structures and processes. While the Leadership and Networks publication will contrast network and organizational leadership as a useful way of highlighting new models of leadership emerging in a connected environment, we believe that these distinctions will become less significant as organizations and communities adopt leadership approaches that are more relational and collective.

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I always enjoy when I come across a description of leadership that resonates with how leadership emerges in networks.  I want to remember where it came from and somehow be able to access it again, but then I move on and forget where I came across it.  Sociologist Philip Slater wrote a book on the transformation of culture in which he reflects about the shifts from a Control Culture to an Integrative Culture (The Chrysalis Effect:  The Metamorphosis of Global Culture).  Here is how he describes emergent leadership:

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In March 2007, the Leadership Learning community (LLC) held a Health Leadership Learning Circle retreat near Napa, California. The retreat gathered 30 health leadership development funders, practitioners, and evaluators to share resources, tools, information and successful approaches to supporting, developing and connecting health leadership. Ginny Oehler and Tracy Patterson were both at the retreat. read more »

Inclusive, networked, and collective approaches to leadership are vital for the development of the social sector, for its power to influence public will and public policy, and for the personal survival of leaders in the sector.

At present, the social sector leadership system privileges the exercise of leadership within organizations. An assumption exists that organizations are the most efficient and accountable way to deliver services and advocate for change. read more »

Expanding LLC's reach and networks

LLC staff wants to thank everyone who participated in our first Leadership for a New Era (LNE) webinar during which we introduced and invited peers to join with the Leadership Learning Community to shape and create the LNE initiative.  (A copy of our webinar slides are attached below.) Our outreach efforts included personal contact, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.  We significantly extended our network with these outreach efforts and attracted people committed to transforming the leadership culture in a number of different arenas, including social justice, service, climate change, and internationally. read more »