A good number of you who participate in the Leadership Learning Community are consultants who work in the leadership development field doing  evaluation, curriculum development, curriculum delivery, research, etc.  As you know, in the last couple of years LLC has come to value our consulting opportunities as an important applied research arm of our work.

Through many of our consulting jobs we get to help the field implement or test many of the ideas that we are promoting through our research.  In this spirit we have invested more heavily in this important work and we our growing a robust consulting services program.  We see this is an opportunity to partner with many of you and bring together consultants who may not have many opportunities to work collaboratively into teams where we can learn more quickly together and reap the benefit of many perspectives. 

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I met Kenny Bailey through a Network TA Providers group that was convened in Boston by the Barr Foundation. A group of 20+ providers were given the opportunity to work in teams  on a joint project to strengthen the network leadership capacity of a community-based networks.  Kenny and I worked on supporting a youth service network in one of Boston’s neighborhoods. We became familiar with each other’s work and interests through this action learning project. The project ended after several months, but we knew each other enough to that I turned to Kenny when we were called upon to design an innovation lab for a client.

Kenny and his partner, Lori Lobenstine became our partners for the Boston Innovation Lab. I was excited to work with Kenny and Lori to co-design a process for coming up with innovative approaches to find ways to support and catalyze 1000s of leaders to transform their communities so that children everywhere grow up healthy and whole.  Their ability to create spaces to play with new ideas, and encourage experimentation and learning was marvelous and refreshing.  Here’s how one person described the experience.

What we experienced today shifted the conversation about leadership, and it shifted the entry point. Not how do we as individuals develop, but instead it was how do we come together to solve these real social issues, and what space and what process can we create to engage 1000s of people in solving these problems. That is a very different approach to leadership development. It’s not about “I want to be a better leader”, but I want to be a part of this creative process; that becomes the new standard for leadership. We’ve known that shared leadership is important, but we don’t really know how to do it. Today’s examples felt like they were moving in that direction. read more »

I have been involved in conversations lately about stipends and I would love to hear about your experience and perspectives.  A number of leadership programs grapple with the issue of stipends.  This is important if we want to provide equitable access to leadership development opportunities.  Not everyone has the same resources available to cover childcare costs, gas, or missed time from work that might not be compensated.  Some community programs are providing stipends to participants to remove the financial limitations to participation.  Not only community based programs are thinking about this. One model I am familiar with provided compensation for an individual’s lost work time to their institution or to the individual if they were consultants.

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A few months ago we asked you to share ideas about how to support communities who are  taking action and producing solutions to the problems they care about most.  Now we're sharing some of your ideas, as well as some of our own findings through a community leadership project for the Bush Foundation.  In this article we share key elements of community change and important capacities being cultivated by community leadership programs.

Elements of Community Change

Neighborhoods and communities all across the country are struggling economically; many communities do not have jobs, access to healthy foods, healthy places to live, clean air, parks, quality education, or the social and financial capital that enable families and children to grow up educated, healthy, and secure.  And yet there are hundreds of ways in which groups of citizens are working together to improve their communities. They are organizing youth, creating community gardens, addressing racial tensions and conflict, and seeking more effective ways to use scarce resources. We are learning from these stories about the kinds of support that enliven community spirit, encourage dialogue and catalyze action.  The elements are drawn from a quick scan and aggregation of a number of different resources that have been produced around building community capacity.  These elements are organized into different categories but are present in much of the research and evaluation findings. read more »

Job security is a thing of the past; to survive and thrive in today’s world we need to learn how to become entrepreneurs of our own lives. I’m acutely aware of this as I watch my young adult daughters and their friends navigate the start of their careers.  In a recent book, The Start Up of You, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha provide insightful and valuable advice about building personal and professional networks, and why they are so important to our survival and success now and in the future.  We know that personal and professional networks are the best way to find a job, but how do we get value from our networks on a day-to-day basis?  How do we cultivate our networks so that we can easily tap the intelligence that is there to get insights about people we interact with, learn how to navigate power dynamics and cultural norms, or get emotional support and strength to keep us going?  On a personal level, I found their advice very affirming and empowering, and I vowed to give my daughters this book to read. read more »

Guest Blog Post by Dr. Max Klau, Director of Leadership Development, City Year

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Presenter:  Dr. Grady McGonagill

Date:  TBD

In this webinar Dr. Grady McGonagill, LLC board member and principal of McGonagill Consulting, will present key findings from his new book—Leadership and Web 2.0: The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web—which he has co-authored with Tina Doerffer from the Bertelsmann Foundation in Germany. The Webinar will offer an overview of the leadership constraints and opportunities being generated through innovations in Internet-based technology. 

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