Leadership for a New Era
Advisory Committee Conference Call
Thursday, February 25, 2010
11:30-1:00PM PST (2:30-4:00PM EST)
Call In Number: 1-866-550-7765 Conference Code: 2389080

• Welcome
• Year one Review/Action
• Review Goals of LNE
• Progress in year one
• Lessons Learned
• Collective Work on Leadership Model
• Future Plans
• Promotional strategy
• Questions

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Participants on call: Deborah Meehan, Natalia Castaneda Chaux, Bella Celnik, Laura Smith, Eugene Eric Kim, Alain Gauthier

Welcome and Check In
Deborah welcomed everyone and asked: As you look over the materials, what is one lesson that jumped out at you?

• Eugene said that he is fascinated by these kinds of experiments. He thought the content on the wiki was tremendous - materials and deliverables really stood out. He was interested in the conflicts, experiments and innovations - interested in the "back stories."
• Natalia found it interesting in finding out how the actually writing was going to be done - how to get all the writers to collaborate.
• Deborah was pleased with the huge numbers that turned out for the meetings on the content work: "Conversation about Leadership and Race" convening of the Bay Area circle drew 45 participants; a scheduled March Meeting in Seattle on the topic has already attracted 40 registered participants; and a Boston circle announcement that just went out on the Networks piece has 10 people already signed on. The energy and interest level, demonstrates that the content is really important to people.
• Laura noted how true the diagram in the PowerPoint is - spoke to real struggles in the real world.

Year One Review Overview
Some of the highlights from year one of the LNE initiative include:

• Commitments from 20 partners - bringing a good level of expertise; and they have actually gone in and gotten engaged
• Now over 100 registered to the LNE website
  
• Convened a number of webinars about how to engage in the LNE
• Number of face-to-face convenings with great interest demonstrated - high level of face-to-face engagement
• Content and Production
• Have synthesis on Leadership and Race posted to the wiki
• Had meeting with collaborators and are into the collaborative editing process (Leadership and Race)
• Funds have been secured to print the first publication, Leadership and Race
• Outline for Leadership and Networks has been posted to the site
• Resource directories for all four areas have been populated (and continue to have resources added)
• Accomplished building the collaborative workspace - content quality is high
• Originally thought we would write all four pieces - once the decision was made to work in a more collaborative way, had to shift the way work working to include collaborative partners (who will also help with the distribution of the pieces)

Lessons Learned
Deborah reported that after writing the synthesis, where a great deal of materials were synthesized, those identified as collaborators were invited to come in and help edit the piece. Found that because so many people's work was cited, the focus became on their making certain that there work was accurately represented, as opposed to getting people's ideas, etc. Also, on a call with writers, concern about the cited materials arose (ex. who actually began thinking about structural racism) - became evident that they were looking at the synthesis as a "scan" on racial justice literature - and not thinking about it as a piece about leadership. Who is the audience - piece seemed to be speaking to those in the racial justice field as opposed to the field of those doing leadership development work. The decision was made to back up - began to do the work on Rethinking Leadership for Social Justice as a complementary document (Race and Leadership piece to be reworked).

• Did not walk away with a clear sense of how to collaboratively write the piece
  
• Rethinking co-branding
• Big take-away - it always takes much longer; and collaboration take a lot longer, but getting us to deeper place

Eugene asked, if had to set it up again, what would be done differently:

• Would not have engaged the writers after the synthesis was completed (asking for their edits, contributions, comments); taking on the synthesis of everyone's work did not engage them on a higher level. Also, did not need to go into the level of depth in citing all the materials.
• In reworking the synthesis, focus on bringing race conscious lens to the work of leadership programs; how to help leadership programs change the way they do their work - development of assessment tools.

Eugene offered that sometimes when approaching a project like this, really open with a good number of people writing together, the "bigness" can be a barrier. Need to have mechanism for developing greater trust and shared understanding, in advance - might have mitigated these problems. On the other hand, the same problems might still have come up - but, build in that thinking into the process . . . how to address/mitigate sooner.

Important Learning (Deborah) - Should have had the phone conference earlier, before began writing synthesis. Prior to writing, start with the phone conversations where begin to map out central areas to address in the piece.

New learning about collective leadership in working on the Leadership and Race piece (Alain) - social identity part of the process - a lot contained in the content connects with collective leadership.

Collective Work on Leadership Model
Decided on the need to put forward a piece on what is leadership - Rethinking Leadership for Social Justice.

• Request that Advisory Committee work on piece together
• What does it mean for us, as a group, to get out the piece?
• Does everyone need to endorse it?
• What does that look like?

Eugene asked if what was meant was that the Advisory Committee take ownership of the piece. Opportunity to have paper represent what the shared notions are of what leadership is all about. Piece is the cross-cutting piece, need to be process of shared understanding. Share piece with all the collaborators.
Since some of the partners are not doing any leadership work, it is important for them to see the frame that holds the whole.
Building "shared understanding" is a much slower process - creating a point of view that is co-created by partners.

Alain pointed out that it was missing the inner piece that needs to occur first (another step).

Who is the "we" - the "our"?
Observation: The "we" was the LLC team - but with Alain's iteration, the "we" has grown. He also said that the "we" will be built gradually, as people are moved to contribute to the leadership piece. Eugene added that we not become paralyzed by the "we" question - growing the "we" by having them be part of the process.

• Eugene also pointed out that we need to get people up on how to post comments, edit, etc. on the wiki - and do this early on.
• Deborah invited everyone to visit the wiki and read/edit, post comments, etc. on the piece.
• Take the Leadership and Race synthesis (still in process of being reworked with the leadership development framing) and get collaborators engaged.
• Program Assessment component to be added - help people make the changes we are proposing.
• Still a lot of relationship building that needs to occur - use more webinars, individual outreach and then bring into collaborative relationship with one another.
  
• Claire (Leadership and Networks piece) is in conversation with potential partners - engage people in the process more before doing the synthesis (post outline first as an initial engagement strategy).

Future Plans

• Getting feedback from Leadership and Race collaborators on leadership piece
• Have already met with the designer
• Have something for collaborators by end of April
• Have not yet secured funding for the Leadership and Networks piece
• Redrafting the proposal to raise funding for 2010 LNE
• Looking for others to take up the two additional LNE pieces - Collective Leadership and Leadership Across Difference
• Critical piece right now is funding - Deborah is working on that piece

Promotional Strategy

• Initally identified three roles for people in LNE (Collaborator, Writing Partner, Publication Lead)
• Identified the promotional work to include the Writing Partners - promotional strategy where each would identify someone from their organization to work with Natalia on promotion.
• Have not yet had the opportunity to discuss co-branding and promotional strategies with partners.
• At this point, rethinking promotional strategy - don't know what that will look like at this time.
• Natalia asked for input and suggestions