Deborah Meehan's blog

The Bush Foundation recently sponsored a learning community meeting of leadership development investors and practitioners in Minnesota, where I had the opportunity to learn about a very interesting read more »

When developing a leadership program one of the most important decisions to make is who to recruit to the program.  Yet too many are tempted  to first rush into program design.  Deciding who to serve requires a thorough understanding of the problem being addressed, what has limited progress on the problem to date, how work with a specific target population will make a difference, and what kind of support the participants will need to produce the results you are hoping to achieve.  This may seem like common sense but it can be far more complex than we realize.  To demonstrate this complexity we want to share two examples: one that defies conventional wisdom about who can mobilize resources; the second, an example showing how different programs working on the same problem have different ideas about who they need to recruit.

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I had the opportunity to attend the ILA Conference in London last month. In fact, I have attended every ILA conference for the past 10 years with one exception … and I had a doctor’s note.  This year, the closing keynote by Keith Grint, a prolific leadership scholar from the UK, gave me an interesting new frame on leadership. Over the past two years LLC has been writing quite a bit about the need to expand our understanding of leadership as a collective process.  People rightfully remind us that the catalyst and individual role is essential and of course we agree. It's really one of those both/and situations where we need committed individuals, and we need them to connect their efforts with others to achieve more together than any one person, no matter how fabulous, could achieve alone.  Keith’s framework on wicked problems helped to provide more context to the “why” and “when” of collective leadership and pull together some of our thinking about innovation and systemic change.  

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Who best to introduce Georgia Sorenson for our Member Spotlight, but Deborah Meehan who shares some of her reflections about how LLC took shape over a cup of coffee and a long lasting partnership born . . . .

LLC’s Genesis:  A cup of coffee, napkin scribbles and a good friend

Fifteen years ago I met up with someone I barely knew for one of those pivotal conversations.  I had been meeting with leadership programs around the country in the course of doing alumni organizing for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and could not help but notice that the staff of different leadership programs were dealing with many of the same issues and with very few opportunities to talk to or learn from each other.  I found myself wondering if there would be value in creating a community of learning and practice for people doing leadership development work.  I had never started an organization so I reached out to Georgia Sorenson who was the founder of the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.  Even though I had only met Georgia once, she graciously agreed to meet for coffee in downtown DC.  Georgia became an enthusiastic champion of the idea.  She offered more than support though.  She grabbed a napkin and began sketching out a budget and offered staff and facilities resources for our first Creating Space gathering, the event that launched the Leadership Learning Community.   Georgia rolled up her sleeves and served on the LLC board stewarding the LLC vision and growing our community.  It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate Georgia as a valued founding partner, dear friend, invaluable member of this community and contributor to the leadership development field.             

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In our last newsletter article we initiated a conversation about community change and the role of leadership.  Since then we have been reading a number of interesting evaluation findings and articles on this question that were produced by programs in the Leadership Learning Community.  We are hoping to engage a much broader group in synthesizing what we are learning from these different experiences.  We have created a wiki where we are sharing some of the resources we have been reading and our early attempt to lift up some lessons about community leadership.  We hope you will add resources, examples and your experience to collectively develop our understanding about how to support communities in ways that help them to organize themselves and mobilize their resources to effective action. Below are some of the ingredients of community leadership and action that keep coming up and may be the beginning of the ‘secret sauce’ for effective community action.

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Over the past few years, LLC along with other researchers and practitioners has been calling for a new leadership mindset.  We need to expand our thinking about leadership from focusing on the behavior of individuals influencing others to a more expanded view of leadership as a dynamic process by which many who care about an issue connect their efforts to make change.  Of course, it would follow that if we are trying to support leadership as a process that occurs among people we need to also rethink leadership development delivery strategies. There are three questions we believe we should be exploring: read more »

1. If we are trying to foster leadership as a collaborative process is it counter- productive to select and focus on building the skills of individuals?
2. If leadership is enacted by many people who bring different skills to a collective endeavor, why would we try to cultivate all of the leadership skills in one person?
3. Should we be recruiting and supporting people who want to work on a shared purpose or in a common context to support collective leadership and accelerate action learning?

Did that title pique your interest?  It got my attention when it was offered as a session during open space at the Leadership Learning Community’s first national meeting, Creating Space.  You may have heard the story of that session already, because it was one of those definitive moments in LLC history, one that helped to create an ethos of openness, the word that rose to the top when many of you responded to the question about our secret sauce.

So back to open space…there were lots of great topics, I was also drawn to “Leadership Work/Life Balance” but I was intrigued and could not resist, Deep Secrets, Dark Places.  The session was called by one of LLC’s early board members and a program officer at a foundation funding a leadership program.  The conversation was instantly provocative.  He talked about the dilemma of roles.   He described a familiar situation, “as the staff of leadership programs we often encourage participants to be incredibly vulnerable, sharing deeply personal parts of themselves while we maintain a professional boundary that creates awkwardness and separation.”  The conversation was deep, challenging and …then I had to leave for a check in with the facilitators.  read more »

If you don’t know the story, the Leadership Learning Community, grew out of efforts to convene graduates of multiple leadership programs in target regions across the United States in an effort to build a diverse leadership force for local community change.  I thought it was a great idea but this early effort fell flat.  When I invited leadership programs to share contact information or forward invitations so that their graduates could meet up with other leadership program graduates in their region, one program after another offered variations of ‘no’ that went something like, “We have to get our own fellows together first”, or “our fellows are too busy”.   Of course the good news was that through these conversations with people running leadership programs it became clear that the ground was ripe for some rich cross program learning and people took quickly to this idea and here we are 10 years later.  And maybe the idea of connecting leadership program graduates on a new scale was just a little before its time, but that was then and times have changed!  We can do more to connect the busy graduates of our leadership programs to increase the impact of their efforts, not by working more but by working smarter through networks.

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 We have been involved in a number of conversations lately about how to support leadership in communities so that a community is able to come to agreements on what is most urgent and coordinate their efforts to take effective action to tackle problems or respond to opportunities.  There is growing recognition that the best solutions emerge when people who are directly affected by a problem are the ones making decisions about how to respond.  For foundations who agree with this and want to support communities this means figuring out how to invest in a community’s ability rather than funding a specific solution or work on a problem chosen by people who are not well connected within the community.  (Of course there can be many ways of thinking about what constitutes a community, e.g. a shared identity, a common purpose, or proximity.  For the purpose of this conversation we want to focus on place.) 

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Listening to Professor john powell’s webinar yesterday on Systems Thinking and Racial Justice completely reinforced everything we at LLC have come to believe about systems thinking as an essential 21st leadership competency. (BTW, it’s not too late to check out this amazing webinar that has already generated appreciative comments, “thanks for a GREAT GREAT call” and “I find most webinars boring, but I’ve already been able to apply part of what Professor Powell said to my own work last night. More, please”). Someone on the webinar asked, how can systems thinking be developed? This will be a longer blog than usual because it’s such an important question and because there are lots of great resources I want to share with you. My first introduction to systems thinking was a somewhat academic lecture with negative and positive feedback loops that left me bleary, if not loopy. Luckily, I had the opportunity to attend a Peter Senge seminar. It was a mostly corporate crowd. I was quite surprised (okay, maybe smug) about how profound the idea of aligning personal vision and values was to other participants, and then we played the Beer Game. Suddenly, I was the fish out of water, wishing I had paid more attention to that earlier lecture. read more »