Deborah Meehan's blog

If our leadership work is wildly successful, who will be better off and how will we know?
 

Most of us working in the leadership field are committed to having some bold and worthwhile impact in the lives of others. Based on a sampling of leadership programs in the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) directory, if just 3 leadership programs were wildly successful, we would see children entering school ready to learn, improved social and economic well-being of the Latino community, and a reduction of AIDS in a large metro area. These are high stakes. There is a lot riding on the success of leadership programs. read more »

Unfortunately, the media missed an important and impressive story about leadership in Oakland. Last week a jury in Los Angeles delivered an involuntary manslaughter verdict in the trial of Johannes Mehserle, a BART police officer on trial for shooting Oscar Grant, a young, African American, unarmed passenger who died on New Year’s Day. Many media outlets reported rioting in Oakland in response to the verdict. First, let’s set the record straight. Between 5PM and 9PM over 1000 people gathered peacefully in different locations around the city. After dark, 5 storefront windows were broken and Footlocker was looted. (An unreported aside, community members placed themselves in front of the store to stop the looting.) No one was hurt, 83 people were arrested, and most were young, white anarchists who did not live in Oakland. Hardly a riot, thanks to the preparation and leadership of youth organizations.
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What if we are capable of more, but our low expectations or limiting models of leadership hold us back? Over the past couple of years we have used an Investment Framework tool to understand the types of results or changes that leadership programs hope to achieve. We recently asked a group of funders to identify the results they were targeting (e.g. more financially sustainable organizations, an increased level of personal confidence) and place them in the matrix. Most of their answers fall under the following categories: individual and organization levels – the upper left hand corner of the matrix: read more »

We often think of leadership as the skills, qualities and behavior of an individual who exerts influence over others to take action or achieves a goal using their position and authority. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is only one part of the leadership story – and one that does not fully recognize leadership as a relational process that is fluid, dynamic, non-directive and non-unilateral. Understanding leadership as a collective process requires us to think differently about how change occurs and what leadership is, how it works and how we can support it.

Traditional approaches to leadership and leadership development assume that training an individual leader with appropriate knowledge and skills will result in an increase of organizational capacity which in turn will lead to better community results. read more »

Last week I had a fascinating conversation with my seat mate on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, Matt P.d. Brown, founder of a company called Big Boing and expert in play. He left me with a number of provocative ideas (I actually pulled out a notebook and pen). Here is my favorite: acknowledging effort increases student risk taking while focusing on achievement or personal qualities actually decreases risk taking behavior. I checked it out when I got home. Researchers Mueller and Dweck found that “children who were praised for their effort showed more interest in learning, demonstrated greater persistence and more enjoyment, attributed their failure to lack of effort (which they believed they could change), and performed well in subsequent achievement activities. Rewarding effort also encouraged them to work harder and to seek new challenges.” read more »

Author: Deborah Meehan

Date: 4/14/10

Original Post: Pegasus Communications Blog

As the debates raged over healthcare reform in an attempt to break the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, I wondered what had happened to "yes we can." The election of Barack Obama was an energizing time that mobilized high levels of participation across the political spectrum. Change was a big theme. Presidential candidate Obama's rallying cry reminded many of us that we were a part of making change happen.

During the campaign, tens of thousands joined meet-ups, used online tools for campaign organizing, and contributed small donations. But what happened to this active engagement among Obama supporters once he was elected? While there is much to learn from the 2008 campaign about how to create the conditions for self-organization and how to leverage social networks, I would like to focus on how our mental models about leadership are limiting our ability to achieve breakthrough change. read more »

I am always eager to try out a different approach that will help us, as a learning community, get somewhere new in our thinking – and what better time than when dealing with a topic as big as “what needs to change in the way we are thinking about supporting leadership for social change”? And what better guinea pigs than the board of a learning community? I had heard a lot of buzz about modeling and as a recovering left brain person I was having trouble picturing how it would work, but with folks I respected like Otto Scharmer doing it, I decided it was time to take a leap of faith. Here is the story of how we used a modeling exercise to reach a breakthrough in our thinking about leadership.

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This is a draft of the framing piece for the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) collaborative research initiative.  This piece is currently being collectively developed by a variety of LNE partners.

To download the document please click here.

Current Leadership Thinking

Over the past 50 years our thinking about leadership, whether in communities or board rooms, has been heavily influenced by heroic models of leadership. We traditionally think of leadership as the skills, qualities and behavior of an individual who exerts influence over others to take action or achieves a goal using their position and authority. read more »

Over the years we have talked a lot about leadership program networks. In leadership program evaluations we often hear from program participants that relationships formed with others in the program are one of the most valuable and enduring parts of their experience. We have heard stories about these relationships fostering collaborations, providing an ongoing source of consultation and advice and as an information resource exchange network. It’s no wonder that leadership programs are eager to leverage the impact of these relationships by building sustainable networks of program graduates.

The network buzz over the last several years has inspired leadership programs to imagine new possibilities for vibrant networks of their program graduates. The good news is that we have an opportunity to learn from a growing field of network organizing strategies. The bad news is that this field of work does not support conventional thinking and approaches to building alumni networks. read more »

It’s important to learn about collective leadership from people who are doing it.  Over a year ago the Leadership Learning Community held a two day Learning Lab, “Learning about Collective Leadership” with 30 community activists who were part of the Kellogg Fellows for Community Change.  The KFCC program focused on building collective leadership capacity within communities. The group came from rural and urban regions all over the US.  We have attached the summary of work done by this group that describes lessons and questions that emerged over the two days and demonstrates the ways in which many of the tips that we have shared over the past several months were put to use to stimulate a high level of collective learning. read more »