Top Resources for Changing Our Approach to Leadership Development

A couple of weeks ago we posted an article about the need to change our leadership approach in order to achieve greater impact and results in the nonprofit sector. The main premise of the article, written by Claire Reinelt, was that 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: from Individuals to Groups, Organizations to Networks and Silos to Partnerships. (Claire Reinelt, 2010)

We received positive feedback in response to that post, so we wanted to follow it up with some helpful resources for each category.

From Individuals to Groups 

• A Reflection on How Social Networks Can Become a Powerful Tool To Meet Basic Needs and Build Momentum for Change (2006)
  • Author: The Diarist Project (Annie E. Casey Foundation) – Writer: Mikaela Seligman
  • [Excerpt from report] “When Maria Gomez-Murphy returned to the border city of Nogales, Az., she was determined to find ways to help residents improve their lives. To do this, she believed that it was crucial not just to provide specific services, but also to help people better understand – and ultimately control – the forces that affect their lives.”
  • Link: http://www.diaristproject.org/pubs.shtml

• A Conversation on Boundary-Crossing Leadership (2006)
  • Author: The California Endowment based on interviews with Stewart Kwok, CEO and President of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center; Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder and CEO of PolicyLink; Robert K. Ross, President and CEO of The California Endowment and Alonzo Plough, Vice President for Program, Planning and Evaluation, TCE
  • [Excerpt from the interview from Stewart Kwoh] “We continue to find a lack of a culture of collaboration in many of our communities. And I think that as the world has become more complex, many people in the nonprofit sector are still very focused on their own niche because they feel most comfortable there. They feel that that’s where they can make some practical difference. And yet what happens is that that niche becomes narrower and narrower. And so at the same time that we’re working on very concrete advances, we don’t think of the larger possibilities, or larger coalitions, bringing diverse people together who don’t usually work together. And so we miss a big opportunity to make a significant difference in our communities.”

• The Future of Health Care is Social (Fast Company, 2009)
  • Authors: Jennifer Kilian and Barbara Pantuso
  • [Excerpt from the article] “Health care is a personal issue that has become wholly public--as the national debate over reforming our system makes painfully clear. But what's often lost in the gun-toting Town Hall debates about the issue is a clear vision about how medicine could work in the future. In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.”
  • Link: http://www.fastcompany.com/future-of-health-care

From Organizations to Networks

• Running a Hospital Blog
  • Author: Paul Levy
  • Description (from website): “This is a blog started by a CEO of a large Boston hospital to share thoughts about hospitals, medicine, and health care issues.”
  • Link: http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/

• Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis (Harvard Business Review, 2009)
  • Authors: Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky
  • [Excerpt from the report]  “Are you waiting for things to return to normal in your organization? Sorry. Leadership will require new skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty—even after the current economic crisis is over.
  • You’ll have to:
    • Foster adaptation, helping people develop the “next practices” that will enable the organization to thrive in a new world, even as they continue with the best practices necessary for current success.
    • Embrace disequilibrium, keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.
    • Generate leadership, giving people at all levels of the organization the opportunity to lead experiments that will help it adapt to changing times.
  • You won’t achieve your leadership aims if you sacrifice yourself by neglecting your needs.”
  • Link: www.coffou.com/bm~doc/leadership-in-a-permanent-crisis.pdf

• Here Comes Everybody (2008)
  • Author: Clay Shirky
  • “Here Comes Everybody is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.” Source: shirky.com
  • Link: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/

• Monitor Institute: Social Networks for Social Change Presentation (2010)
  • Authors: Diana Scearce, Heather McLeod Grant, Noah Flower
  • Compelling presentation covering basic network concepts, advances in network theory and practice, network and collaboration examples, characteristics of healthy networks, online tools, and network leadership.
  • Link: http://www.slideshare.net/dianascearce/stanford-cs-01-29-10

• Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership in a Connected World (2009)
  • Author: Bill Traynor
  • [Excerpt from article]  “A leader is not a mad scientist on the outside pulling levers and pushing buttons, but rather a mad inhabitant, an intentional inhabitant, who deploys himself as a key variable to influence the environment from the inside. This is a critical cognitive and functional shift in leadership. A leader has to genuinely participate in the environment to deploy himself appropriately. The challenges of this way of being are profound, and these challenges start with fundamental reflection on who you are as a person and how you move through the world: how you exhibit fear, react to change, deal with letting go of power and ego; how you listen and observe, and the keenness of your instincts for both conceptualizing and synthesizing; and how you hold onto or let go of strongly held convictions about what is right and what will work. All these things are rooted in the essence of who we are as people.”
  • Link: http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1384:vertigo-and-the-intentional-inhabitant-leadership-in-a-connected-world&catid=156:tempest-tossed

From Silos to Partnerships

• African Public Health Leadership and Systems Innovation Initiative (The Synergos Institute)
  • “The African Public Health Leadership and Systems Innovation Initiative is creating a replicable model for improving public health leadership and systems performance, beginning in Namibia.
  • The Initiative applies a high-performance, business-consulting approach called the Innovation Lab. It invests in a strategic set of national health leaders including senior government officials, clinical technicians, community health providers and representatives from business and civil society. Health leadership cohorts are guided through an intensive two year process, involving leadership capacity building as well as the creation of innovation projects that address urgent health challenges.” (Source: Synergos.org)
  • Link: http://synergos.org/partnerships/publichealthnamibia.htm

• Cross-Sector Performance Accountability: Making Aligned Contributions to Improve Community Well-Being (2009)
  • Authors: Jolie Bain Pillsbury, Victoria Goddard-Truitt, Jennifer Littlefield
  • [Excerpt from the report]  “The development of cross-sector leadership initiatives to improve community performance has historically shown few positive, sustainable results. Outcomes are often unproductive because stakeholders are engaged in unaligned action on multiple results or no specific identified result. The end result is failed attempts at improving community well-being, little alleviation of the macro problem, and a community in crisis. We maintain that cross-sector strategies are essential and that performance management is both possible and necessary to realize results around community conditions. We propose a theory of aligned contributions that when implemented results in a measurable improvement in community well-being while also leading to improved leadership competencies of the participants. This paper will analyze the Leadership in Action Program (LAP) to demonstrate the success of this framework. LAP, a leadership development program developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and implemented in partnership with The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, mobilizes leaders from multiple sectors and the community to rapidly accelerate results for children and families. We provide a framework for an action learning leadership development environment for public sector administrators and their counter parts from all sectors of the community. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the unique approach behind the aligned contributions framework and argues for the inclusion of its components when designing future community leadership initiatives. In addition, this research provides recommendations and guidelines for public administrators around performance management that will influence effective, equitable, and sustainable cross-sector contributions to community improvement.”
  • Link: http://bit.ly/aEx4yS

• Leadership for a New Era: A New Leadership Mindset for Scaling Social Change (2010)
  • Authors: Leadership for a New Era Collaborators
  • [Excerpt from paper]  “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.
  • Leadership for a New Era was launched because we believe this way of thinking about leadership is only one part of the story -- one that does not fully recognize leadership as a process grounded in relationships that are fluid, dynamic, non-directive and non-unilateral. Understanding leadership as a process requires us to think very differently about how change occurs and how we work with others. We will never mobilize leadership at the scale needed for significant progress on social justice or any other complex issue without expanding our thinking about what leadership is, how it works and how we can support it.”
  • Link: http://www.leadershipforanewera.org/page/A+New+Leadership+Mindset

Additional Resources

• The Network Weaver Handbook (2010)
  • Author: June Holley
  • Link: http://networkweaver.blogspot.com/search?q=handbook

• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009)
  • Authors: Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler
  • “In Connected, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.” Source: connectedthebook.com
  • Link: http://connectedthebook.com/

• Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks
  • Authors: Bruce Hoppe, Ph.D., Claire Reinelt, Ph.D.
  • "Leadership development practitioners have become increasingly interested in the formation of leadership networks as a way to sustain and strengthen relationships among leaders within and across organizations, communities, and systems. Bruce Hoppe and I recently wrote a paper that offers a framework for conceptualizing different types of leadership networks and identifies the outcomes that are typically associated with each type of network.
  • One of the challenges for the field of leadership development has been how to evaluate leadership networks. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a promising evaluation approach that can be used to visually represent relationships between people, organizations, sectors, silos, communities and other entities within a larger system. Core social network concepts are introduced and explained in this paper in order to illuminate the value of SNA as an evaluation and program tool, and provide some cautions about its use."
  • Link: leadershiplearning.org/blog/claire-reinelt/2008-05-22/social-network-analysis-and-evaluation-leadership-networks