Key Resources

In 2023, the Leadership Learning Community partnered with the Hewlett Foundation to support leaders in organizations going through leadership transitions.

Leadership transitions are a time of challenge and opportunity for organizations. Transitions include recruiting incoming leaders, offboarding prior leadership, onboarding new leadership, and integrating board and staff. The process is often more robust than leaders, staff, and board are aware of and requires significant investment of resources and attention. When successful, cultural, emotional, interpersonal, financial, operational, and reputational opportunities can be enjoyed.

In 2018, LLC engaged our extensive network to generate content for a tool to support practice leaders in establishing comprehensive leadership development programs that contribute to racial equity. This year we completed the compilation of your knowledge and ideas in the Race Equity Toolkit for Leadership Development. Over 60 members of our network contributed their wisdom and resources to this toolkit.

Our new publication, Leading Culture and Systems Change: How to Develop Network Leadership and Support Emerging Networks, examines why people and organizations working on complex systemic problems (like climate change and structural racism) are using network approaches to make more progress. Network leadership requires a shift away from the dominant thinking that sees leadership as the achievements of exceptional individuals rather than the collective efforts of people working together around commonly held goals and aspirations.

This publication is a guide with very practical ideas about how to make network principles a way of working and leading.

This report was funded to answer the following questions using a series of interviews, research, and findings from a meeting of 45 evaluators and program officers with leadership development expertise, hosted on October 2014 at the Annie E. Casey Foundation: What are the key elements of leadership development approaches that are contributing to measurable progress on significant social problems? What evaluation approaches are being used or developed to successfully measure and document the impact of leadership development that results in large-scale change? What opportunities exist to replicate, spread, adapt, or apply lessons from these models to increase the impact of leadership development programming and investments?

As part of the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) initiative, the Leadership Learning Community has partnered with thought leaders in the network development and leadership development fields to develop the cutting-edge report Leadership and Networks: New Ways of Developing Leadership in a Highly Connected World. This publication is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. This report is written for those who run and fund leadership programs that develop and support leadership for social change. It shares many examples of how leaders using network strategies are increasing the impact of social change work, such as the Barr Fellowship Network and MomsRising.org. Our goal is to inspire and help hundreds of leadership programs to question their assumptions about the traditional leadership models and retool their approaches in ways that will enable them to better prepare those in leadership with the mindset and skills they will need to more fully leverage network strategies. Specifically, the report addresses the following questions: Why do network strategies deserve our attention? Why do we need a new leadership mindset? What are the core principles of leading with a network mindset? What leadership development strategies support a network mindset and skills?

The Leadership and Race publication “How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice” is part of the Leadership for a New Era series. This publication explores the ways in which our current thinking about leadership often contributes to producing and maintaining racialized dynamics and identifies a set of core competencies associated with racial justice leadership. Recommendations are included for helping leadership programs develop and support leadership that furthers racial justice in organizations, communities, and the broader society.