Deborah Meehan's blog

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 »

In 1998, twenty-five leadership programs were invited to participate in a two day “unconference” to experiment with creating the conditions for cross-program learning, field-building, and self-organizing around tough challenges in leadership development work. Today, the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), formally launched in 2000, has engaged over 2000 individuals from close to 500 leadership programs, foundations, academic institutions and consulting businesses who connect through face-to-face meetings, webinars, LLC’s website and social media channels. LLC’s mission is to transform the way in leadership development work is conceived, conducted and evaluated.

LLC promotes and is committed to embodying leadership that is inclusive, networked and collective. This is not always easy. Heroic models of leadership and hierarchical, top-down organizational practices often become our default behaviors if we are not intentional about questioning our assumptions about how to organize our work. In its 10 years LLC has had to hold the tension between drawing on good organizational practices and realizing that as a community of practice and learning we are a different kind of animal needing different approaches. Some areas in which LLC has experimented with network approaches include: read more »

Are nonprofit leaders producing innovation and break through change?

In the past twenty years, have we made impressive progress on even one significant social problem (hunger, poverty, environmental degradation…take your pick)? Beth Kanter, a leading nonprofit blogger suggests we haven’t, “There has been an explosion in size of the nonprofit sector over the last twenty years, huge increases in donations and number of organizations, and yet the needle hasn’t moved on any serious social issue. Growing individual institutions ever larger has failed to address complex social problems that outpace the capacity of any individual organization or institution to solve them.” Whether we agree with the extent of the problem, it would be hard to disagree that we have a problem calling desperately for innovation. Among the proponents of strategies that promise innovation there is one common thread, it’s the work of many! Investing in individuals will not seed innovation and breakthrough change. read more »

Image Source: WSU Extension Horizons

If I had to name the top three books that have profoundly changed my life, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Friere would definitely be on that list. As an activist since my 20’s, I could never quite get my head around the question of what it takes to move people to take action. I certainly had my share of failed efforts in community organizing, despite what seemed to me to be a strong vision for a better Oakland and a commitment to reaching out, persuading, and …okay, maybe preaching. It was the model of the day, the individual leader influencing others to step up and act, and while there are undoubtedly those who are better at the heroic model of leadership than I was as a headstrong twenty something, popular education offers a different way of understanding change, and leadership. Occasionally, I run across programs like the Horizon’s Community Leadership Program funded by the Northwest Area Foundation that integrate the principles of popular education and the results speak for themselves! read more »

Note: This article was also posted as a guest blog on the Beth Kanter blog

Over the last month as we prepared for the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) board meeting we decided to turn the light back on ourselves asking, “How might governing in a more networked way help us to fulfill our mission of promoting leadership approaches that are more networked and collective? And, what would it look like?” The question was sparked by a couple of events. I was happy for the chance to participate in a CompassPoint focus group of seasoned EDs and marveled as I listened to people talk about their boards: What are reasonable expectations? Do we have the right board? Are we supporting them appropriately? etc. I had to wonder about some elusive “gold standard” for board performance that leaves ED’s and boards questioning themselves. Our own board has had many discussions about what kind of board we are and want to be. Maybe it’s time to rethink boards and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s recent book, The Networked Nonprofit, sure provides good food for thought on this topic. read more »