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DeborahMeehan — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:42:48 CST

Leadership and Networks:

Sidebar: About This Report

The production of this report is itself a story of what is possible when people think and behave in new ways (e.g., letting go of control), to produce a better report and reach many more people. All of the authors of this publication work in different settings (nonprofit, business, academia), and with different institutions; yet we all participated in Leadership for a New Era, a collaborative research initiative designed to promote models of leadership that are more inclusive, networked, and collective. We chose to exercise leadership together. We learned how to co-create content using technologies, like public wikis, that enabled everyone to contribute or edit content without approval or vetting by others. Writing a paper together using a public wiki, as you might imagine, gets messy. Our success depended on developing norms about how to work together, establishing trust in our relationships, being accountable to one another, and talking through issues that came up along the way. We believe that by having multiple organizations co-brand this publication that the collective impact of diffusing these ideas will be much greater. While this may sound like coalition building where leaders strategically negotiate organizational interests for the purpose of a larger goal that advances everyone's issues; it is based instead on a philosophical appreciation of the actual interdependence of our work and acknowledgement that leadership is more about the process of what we produce together than what each one of us alone contributes. We did use social media to support our work, wikis and webinars, but in the end at the heart of this work is collective leadership, a fundamental shift in the way that we conceptualize and practice leadership. While anyone of us could have produced a report on this topic with some good ideas, none of us alone could bring the breadth of perspective and diversity of ideas that were to produce this end result. [I love this paragraph- but I'm not sure it's the best lead. It could be a sidebar, a preface, something on the back cover - if this will be print pub. For the lead - see my notes on overall structure in the comments DS] {I agree - this seems like a really good sidebar or backstory - kmh)

Introduction

We live in a world of skyrocketing complexity. Despite enormous effort of more than 1 million non profit organizations we have not made significant progress on our most critical social problems -- the widening gap between haves and have nots, the failure of global food distribution systems, the rapid deterioration of the environment, and so forth. This is not surprising when we consider the complexity and interconnectedness of our most important social challenges. No individual or organization can solve these problems independently. And yet as John Kania and Mark Kramer point out in their article, Collective Impact, "nearly 1.4 million nonprofits try to invent independent solutions to major social problems, often working at odds with each other."

At the same time, we have seen extraordinary examples of previously unimaginable social change in recent years, such as the Arab Spring of 2011 that led to the deposition of corrupt regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.These shifts have one thing in common: networks. They are examples of what is possible when networks of activists and organizations -- in many cases tied together with new social technologies -- are activated and aligned around a common goal.

To catalyze transformative change, we need to understand how to leverage networks effectively. In order to fully embrace the potential of networks, we need to rethink the role of leadership in supporting change. What exactly does effective leadership look like in a world that emphasizes bottom-up over top-down and letting go over asserting control? And how do we develop and foster this new paradigm of leadership? We need to move beyond leadership models that focus on building the skills of individuals and challenge ourselves to understand how to cultivate leadership as a process by which multiple actors align their efforts to take action. We need a new mental model of leadership and new approaches to leadership development if we are to move the needle on any significant social problem by taking advantage of network strategies and more connected ways of working.

This report is a joint project of people and organizations working in both the leadership development field and the network field. We have come together to produce this report for several reasons:

We believe that preparing leadership with network tools and strategies can amplify the impact of social change work.
We believe that leveraging network strategies requires a fundamental shift in how we think about and develop leadership.
We believe that networks can teach us about the kind of leadership needed to tackle complex problems, which in turn can lead to new ways of developing leadership.
We believe that sharing ideas, resources, and recommendations will move others involved in leadership development work to do more to unleash the potential of networks to solve social problems.

In this report, we hope to help those in the business of developing leadership for social change -- from funders to leadership development providers to activists -- examine current assumptions about leadership, understand new models of network leadership, and propose ways to better prepare those in leadership to use network strategies and tools.

Why the Buzz About Network Strategies?

Networks aren't new, but they are receiving greater attention for several reasons:

1. Expanding use of social technologies. Working through networks has taken on a new urgency because the scale and reach of what networks can accomplish are expanding with the use of social technologies, from texting to Twitter. These tools are making it possible to connect people and organizations in unprecedented ways across innumerable boundaries. They make it possible to link to greater numbers of people (irrespective of geographic distance), to access a greater diversity of perspectives, to accelerate the sharing of information, and to reduce the costs of participation and coordination. These tools can help break down silos and the fragmentation that limit leadership capacity to address systemic problems. Social technologies can support leadership progress on complex social and environmental challenges that require people and organizations to coordinate their leadership efforts across traditional boundaries and sectors. (Working Wikily)

2 Better language and tools for visualizing network connections. Mathematicians and scientists have given us new language and tools for thinking about and analyzing our connections to each other. We have always lived and worked through our networks of relationships, but we now have the ability to see how the underlying structures -- the patterns of connection -- dictate access to expertise and resources in the network, reveal trust and commitment among partners in the network, and predict whether joint outcomes are organized for success. As we understand more about how networks behave, we can use the knowledge to strengthen and activate networks for social change purposes. We now have tools that enable us to create maps to better visualize the webs of relationships between people and organizations (or other entities). Network maps enable us to identify leverage points for helping a network weave connections for greater impact. As we understand the value of different types of relationships in a network we can facilitate connections that increase cohesion, produce innovation, and catalyze collective action. We can also see how information is likely to flow through a network and use this information to address bottlenecks and strengthen communication.

3. Increasingly complex and adaptive challenges and opportunities. The world's social challenges continue to grow in complexity, while most of our problem-solving approaches continue to be too linear. These problems span complex ecosystems beyond the scope of single organizations. As we begin to wrap our heads around what are often referred to as wicked problems, the nature of the problem evolves, rendering our previous strategies irrelevant and often an attempted solution creates another problem. Networks offer the possibility of adapting at the speed of the problem, leveraging many resources in parallel. This requires a new kind of leadership and level of connectivity needed to evolve and adapt with changing conditions.

4. Rise of free agents. We are seeing that networks are leaderful, not leaderless [ref. Lipnack and Stamps, Virtual Teams 1997]. Leadership emerges as people find opportunities to take action on issues important to them. Increasingly, individuals are not working through nonprofit organizations. A number of individuals, often called free agents, give their time and leadership energy to causes without working through nonprofit organizations. Many of these people who are young, and the next generation of leadership are connecting around the causes they care about through networks.

Network strategies are no more the answer to every change initiative than organizations are, yet organizational change strategies have been prioritized for decades as the best way to make change happen. The problem is that organizations create silos that swallow up individual leaders, whose authority and time to act on what matters most is often limited by organizational demands and protocol. Despite our best intentions, the problems of duplication and fragmentation persist and we settle for doing our part on our small piece of the puzzle ... and for the most part, it’s not adding up to a huge collective impact on any major problem. There are several things we would say about leadership and networks

Networks increase influence and reach by amplifying messages through social media, producing innovation by bridging organizations and sectors, coordinating the actions of more people with fewer resources, and aligning the work of individuals and organizations around a common purpose that achieves greater collective impact.
People and groups will exercise more effective leadership if they know how and when to use network strategies to build momentum for change, and use network resources for greater public benefit.
Using network strategies effectively requires different leadership values and behaviors.
Millennials who have grown up in a socially connected world are bringing a strong network centric approach to social cause organizing.

How Network Strategies Are Increasing Leadership Impact

When leadership integrates a network strategy we are seeing significant increases in the impact of their work on global social issues as demonstrated in the stories below.

Suggestion: We could use the case study that Natalia wrote up on Spark and use it to illustrate the points below or we could use the different examples below. DM
[All of the below are tech enabled examples. I'd suggest diversifying a bit. Some ideas area below - DS]

Influence: As illustrated with the example, The ‘Story of Stuff,’ an animated film targeting consumption, social media enabled the message of the film to go viral and 3 years later it is still getting 10,000 views a day, has had 12,000,000 online views that have prompted discussions and action around the world. By inviting a people to translate or adapt the film for their own uses the original film producers increased the global collective impact of the film's message, e.g. it has been translated into many languages, school curriculum has been developed for use with the film, it has been converted into theater.

Engagement: The 2008 Obama campaign mobilized 13,000,000 supporters and generated over $750,000 in small donations. The campaign demonstrated the power of using social tools and social networks to activate citizen leadership. Online tools made it possible for people new to leadership to raise money, find each other, organize house parties, and coordinate canvassing and phone banks. Unleashing leadership at a more massive scale requires more than technology. We need to move beyond thinking of leadership as the exceptional, almost heroic individual to see and support the leadership potential that exists within everyone who can be moved to take action on the things they care most about. A network approach to engagement does not require technology. In Lawrence, MA a network strategy was used to revitalize the community by building connection through community dinners and outreach.

Innovation: The Leadership Learning Community, a learning network of thousands of people doing leadership development work, put out a call through its network inviting anyone who was interested in planning the organization's national meeting, Creating Space, to volunteer. Close to 30 people, some of whom had been following LLC's newsletter offered to help plan the national meeting even though they had not been to any of LLC's regional or national meetings. The volunteer group of over 20 design team members who were dispersed across the country figured out how to combine face to face, conference calls and virtual collaboration tools. The influx of new and diverse thinking brought a good deal of innovation to the design which integrated arts, create new formats and previously untapped facilitation skills.

Action: KaBOOM!, an organization that aspires to create a “great place to play within walking distance of every child” shifted to a network strategy to help people build 1600 “do it yourself” playgrounds in one year…more in one year than they had built in the last 14 years since their inception![i] Again this requires sharing leadership with people who are aligned with your goals and giving up control (not an idea consistent with leadership responsibility).

These are just a few examples of how people and organizations are increasing their capacity to innovate, extend their reach and tackle large-scale problems by broadening the ways they think about leadership, and by using network strategies and tools. As we will explain, these examples are possible because of leadership behaviors and skills that traditionally have not been valued as 'leader like'.

Sidebar: What do we mean by networks? (Do we need to include this or should we refer people to other resources for this level of detail???)

A network is a collection of people, organizations or other entities that are connected to each other by some kind of relationship. Networks have always existed because people are social and form relationships with each other. June Holley, in the Network Weaver's Handbook, elaborates: “networks are sets of relationships and the patterns they create.” She goes on to note that “these patterns influence the quality of communication and the likelihood of collaboration.” We are learning more and more about how networks support communication, collaboration, collective action, and innovation, and how to intervene in a network to strengthen it.

Networks have two basic elements, nodes (people and organizations) and the connections between them, ties. Hubs in networks have one or two people with most of the connections. Hubs are important because they have the capacity to weave the network by connecting people they know. The process of network weaving transforms the network from a hub and spoke pattern to a more web-like pattern with a core and a periphery.

The network core represents the strong bonds among a group of people who have a shared purpose or vision. They are the most engaged members of the network. A strong core means that people can come and go and the network remains strongly connected. A network with a vibrant periphery is more likely to form connections with people in other networks. The periphery of the network offers opportunities for growth and expansion (Fine and Kanter) Networks have strong ties at the core, and weaker ties at the periphery. Social media helps people stay connected, strengthen ties and brings new people and perspectives into the periphery.

The use of mapping tools to visualize networks enables us to assess the network’s overall health. Strong networks have clusters formed around affinity (shared goals, identity) that are linked to a diversity of other clusters. The grouping by affinity creates strong bonds and trust while the diversity supports new ideas, resources and innovation. Unlike traditional organizational structures where information flows down through multiple layers of management, a network is characterized by many indirect connections and shorter communication paths. While particular individuals or organizations may have some prominence in a robust network and help strengthen groups or catalyze relationships between groups, it is the connections that are powerful not the individuals who formed those connections.

We have always had, and will generally always need, two forms of networks in organizations: the formal and the informal. The formal organization is represented by the (usually) hierarchical organizational structure. The links, or ties, in these structures are reporting relationships. They represent commitments and obligations that go in both directions. Formal structures are essential for processes and tasks that require discipline, measurement, and decision-making. [Are these the right metrics? CR -- check with PA]. Formal organizations offer the illusion of control; however it is the informal organization, the organization between the lines and in the white spaces that supports the scaffolding of the hierarchy. Today’s organizational leaders need to be prepared to ask themselves, How do we become smarter about how to nurture and use informal connections? How can organizational leaders create more space for network forms of leadership? How can leadership programs support organizational leaders to develop network leadership competencies?

Why we need to think differently about leadership to unleash the power of networks

If networks offer so much potential, why aren't more people embracing them? Although many individuals and organizations are being encouraged to behave in more network centric ways, also referred to as the Monitor institute as “working wikily” with greater openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making and distributed action (Monitor Institute) better positioning them to adapt to dynamic and changing environments and respond to crises (Heifetz et. Al). This shift in organizational culture and practice cannot happen without a new lens and consciousness about the value of being transparent, decentralizing decision making and distributing leadership. These practices collide with what many believe to best practices in organizational management or what it means to lead. For example, without a new lens it could be difficult for an Executive Director to give up control of their product and even if they did think it was a good idea they would probably have to run the idea through a hierarchical structure for approval. There are two important assumptions that will prevent us from effectively taking advantage of network strategies and opportunities: first, that leadership is the activity of one individual influencing others; and second, that organizations are the most effective means for producing social and community benefit.

IWhat is different about leadership in networks? Network leadership practices clash with strongly held ideas about leadership that are prevalent in the nonprofit sector and society at large. Given the rootedness of our ideals about individual responsibility, we frequently develop narratives about leadership that attribute accomplishments to individual effort and merit overlooking the ways in which many people were contributing to a success. This narrative often leads us to fear being outperformed by others, and a desire to protect our competitive edge. This leadership mindset is not conducive to generosity or transparency. Our elevation of individual leaders relegates leadership to a select group making it difficult to see leadership in everyone who wants to get involved and take action. The Obama campaign would not have had its success if they saw volunteers as campaign workers who needed to be managed by a few central leaders.

The chart below illustrates some of these differences:(This is supposed to be a chart but the table did not copy into the wiki.)

Traditional Leader Model	Collective network leadership
● Leader exerts influence over followers ● Leadership in organizations is top down & hierarchical ● Achievements attributed to strength of individual leader and failures are attributed to his/her shortcomings as a leader ● Leaders can be developed but not everyone has leadership potential	● Individuals and groups connect & align efforts to support a common purpose. ● Leadership is a dynamic process with people assuming many roles ● Achievements are produced through collective leadership effort and failures & experimentation are embraced for advancing collective learning and adaptation. ● Everyone has the ability to exercise leadership

Without a strong commitment to developing a new leadership mindset and a network mindset, nonprofit leadership will default to old and familiar ways of leading and miss the opportunities to better align efforts with others to influence social change. As organizational leadership develops the capacity to use social technologies; and evolve and connect resources through networks, organizations will enhance not only the value of their own work, but also have a positive impact on the sector as a whole.

What new leadership behaviors can we learn from in networks? Understanding leadership in networks is giving us a new lens on what leadership as a dynamic and collective process looks like. Networks are often successful because they embody a set of values (sometimes referred to as a network mindset) that shape how people and organizations interact. Leadership is created through relationships and what we do together not who we are as individuals actors. A closer look at what is contributing to network success can teach us about the leadership process. These examples demonstrate values that are part of the leadership ethos of a network and demonstrate individual and group behaviors that increase leadership impact.

● Generosity: The founder of KaBOOM!, Darell Hammond, explains that they had a breakthrough on their mission of getting a playground within the reach of every child when they asked, "why don't we just give away the model? We can't do everything anyway. If we give it away people can replicate it on their own."
● Letting Go of Control: The last presidential election campaign, developed social technologies that enabled people to organize their friends and communities. This was possible because campaign organizers let go of control and concerns about whether people would do what they said they would do or stay on message.
● Trust and Reciprocity: Networks assume good will and build trust so that people from diverse perspectives and experiences can connect, interact together and find common ground. Lawrence Community Works uses a network centric organizing approach to engage 50,000 members who are driving community change in Lawrence, MA. Community members build trust and connections by hosting dinners to talk about their journey to the neighborhood and what their experience has been while living there. Action emerges from these conversations.
● Transparency: When people in organizations work in ways that are more transparent, accessible and understandable to people outside the organization, the walls between inside and outside become more porous. Transparency creates more opportunities for engagement. Ideas and resources flow more freely and creativity is sparked. The authors of this report agreed to collaboratively write and edit each other’s work on a public wiki in order to elicit more feedback and engage more people in promoting a more inclusive, networked and collective models of leadership. There are now over 200 people signed on to the wiki.
● Accountability: Authentic relationships create the conditions for mutual support and accountability. Accountability and responsibility are not enforced through rules, rather people become accountable to one another and the larger network because they care about each other. Nonprofit executive directors in Boston neighborhoods historically looked out for their own interests without thinking much about the well-being of the whole community until they formed strong, trusting relationships with each other through a fellowship program. Since then, they trust and care about each other deeply, leading them to act in ways that value the whole community, not just their short-term self-interest.

I noticed that Natalia has added a case study on Spark see below

Case Study: Spark ]This was added recently. Maybe it could be connected to the section on needing a different kind of leadership illustrating some of those points with this case study.

Spark is a network of young people (millennials) who are invested in promoting equality for women throughout the world. As a networked organization that operates primarily through the efforts of their volunteers (they only have one staff member), they use the power of networks to execute much of their programming. The network was founded in 2004 by six young women that wanted to get involved with international women’s rights. Since then it has grown to engage over 5,000 people in the Bay Area, contributing over $1,000,000 in grants and pro-bono services to grassroots women’s organizations around the globe.

Transparency and Open Leadership: Spark has a grants committee, comprised of Spark members, that decides which projects should be funded. Initially, the board made the funding decisions, but the team realized that many members were interested in the grantmaking process. As members, they are investors in the organization, and thus it made sense to involve them at a deeper level. This committee has over 100 members who solicit, vet and process applications. They debate and vote on which project receive Spark grants.
Engagement: “We believe in the power of networks. If you use a networked framework to engage people, you can maximize your investment. We wanted as many people as possible to participate in the process.” (Shannon Farley, executive director) Spark encourages all of their members to participate in as many activities as possible, including joining the grant making committee, supporting advocacy efforts (signing petitions and contacting civic leaders), interacting with other members through social media channels, and participating in events such as volunteer days. But the network also leaves the boundaries open enough so members can “tap in and tap out” from activities based on their availability and interest. That way, the network enjoys the full energy of those that truly want to participate in a given activity, without making others feel embarrassed or ashamed for not participating.

Cross-sector Collaboration: One of the underlying values of Spark is that collaboration across sectors produces more innovative and efficient solutions. For instance, a Spark member with experience in investment banking for municipal projects was instrumental in helping devise a more realistic strategy to improve a community radio project in Haiti. “That’s the kind of expertise that traditional social sector organizations would disregard, in part due to biases against the private sector. At Spark, we think divisions between sectors should be blurred for efficiency. And when you blur them, you create opportunities for leadership and engagement that weren’t available previously.” (Shannon Farley)

Spark provides members an opportunity to deepen their engagement with the cause – instead of simply attending an event or donating money, members can volunteer with grantee partners, mentor others, participate in grantmaking, and even join a delegation of members that visit grantees around the world to see the impact firsthand.

Spark is a pioneer in the way in which it operates using a network strategy. As a network, the organization faces some challenges. In particular, Shannon points out that the technology infrastructure has not kept up with the growth of the network.

As foundations and organizations in the nonprofit sector are exploring networked models, understanding the challenges and opportunities of organizations that are operating as networks becomes increasingly important. But many challenges and questions emerge – What is the best way to support networks? What technology and resources are needed to facilitate the growth of networks? How can we measure the impact and value, not only of the results, but also of the lasting connections that the members build through the network? How can organizations adapt their engagement strategies to create greater shared ownership?.

What are network leadership competencies

The wheel of Network Leadership Competencies identifies five key competencies needed to effectively lead within a network or to bring network thinking and skills to increase the impact of leadership in nonprofit organizations. All of the competencies presume a network mindset and network literacy. Network literacy implies familiarity with the concepts of networks and their dynamics; the network mindset is the awareness and understanding that individuals and organizations are embedded in networks, and that social change impacts are more likely to occur as a result of applying network competencies.

Connecting: Relationships are the foundation of networks. Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) is a nonprofit community development corporation working to transform and revitalize the physical, economic, and social landscape of Lawrence, Massachusetts. LCW’s goal is to create a new “environment of connectivity” where residents can more easily connect to information, opportunity and each other. Their belief is that if thousands of residents are induced to “get back in the game” of working together and taking leadership roles in Lawrence, they can truly revitalize the City. [iv](LCW website) . Extending and cultivating trust is an essential leadership behavior that encourages self-authorizing action and open learning.

Bridging and weaving: Network weaving is the intentional process of strengthening and expanding ties in a network, e.g. introducing people, facilitating conversations, reaching out to new people and making people with different points of view feel included. This requires paying attention to culture, practices an structure that create disparities in access and power. Understanding gaps in the nonprofit ecosystem is a first step towards bridging across silos and other divides that interfere with joint action and alignment of effort. The success of the Boston Green and the Healthy Building Network depended on weaving together networks of people and organizations interested in building codes, the environment, and public health. Network weaving starts by understanding who needs to be connected and recognizing that both a strong core and a robust periphery are critical for creativity, innovation, reach and impact.

Organizing: In a traditional organizational model, leaders manage participation through action plans with prescribed roles; in networks, leadership is more distributed and often self-authorizing as people and groups take on different roles, and align their actions to move the system in a desired direction. Network members understand that small and large contributions aggregate to produce a larger collective impact. MomsRising describes the layer cake as a metaphor for providing multiple levels of participation and entry points. They create continuums of opportunity based on interest, time and skill. Making a phone call, selling t-shirts, showing up for an event and organizing campaigns are all valued. Bill Traynor of LCW descibes how critical it is to effective community organizing that networks create multiple entry points for people to find ways to do what they can and feel valued as contributors. Becoming adept at using social media can increase broader engagement and make it easier to support large-scale social change efforts.

Action Learning/Reflection: Learning in networks occurs through constant experimentation and failure. For instance, a group of students experimented with different ways to engage people in climate change before coming up with 350.org. Creating space for collective reflection and assessment enables networks to learn and leverage their successes. Learning helps network members identify how and where their mutual dependencies and cooperation can move their mutual objectives forward and what individual or organizational practices may need to change, transform or be let go. MomsRising celebrates mistakes with "joyful funerals" to enable people to move quickly to let go of things that did not work. Leadership that embraces risk taking, openness and commits to continuous learning and integration is more likely to produce social benefit and transform the status quo. Many funding models for organizations require short-term results for continuous support: this practice often undermines the bold experimentation which depends on learning from failure. Action learning is a hallmark of a vibrant network where plans emerge and action is adapted in response to experimentation with many ideas.

In addition to a dedication to action learning, leaders in networks need to be committed to learning about themselves. Bill Traynor of Lawrence Community Works shares his reflections about the personal learning and reflection one must do to be effective in a network. "The leader has to genuinely participate in the environment in order to deploy herself appropriately. The challenges of this way of being are profound, and those challenges start with a fundamental reflection about 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. How you hold onto or let go let go of strongly held convictions about what is right and what will work. All of these things are of course rooted in the essence of who we are as people.”[v]

Systems Thinking: Efforts to take on societal problems like climate change, poverty, or class and racial disparities, require a deep understanding of how systems work and perpetuate themselves. It is not possible to understand class, culture and power and how to work on behalf of social justice without paying attention to how opportunity structures that create and maintain racial and class inequities. Looking at interactions among multiple factors that influence system performance is critical for identifying leverage points for change. In the RE-AMP project the first course of action for the organizations and funders was to begin by understanding the system they wanted to change. They mapped the system to identify 4 key levers necessary to change the system: stop the building of coal plants, retire existing coal plants, replace coal generated electricity with renewable power and reduce electric consumption through efficiency. This multi-leverage point strategy requires an ability to see the big picture and understand how actions need to align to produce systems change.

What does this mean for leadership development?

Most current leadership development approaches are steeped in traditional ideas about leadership and organizations and are not yet embracing the different leadership thinking, values and behaviors that are necessary for leadership of networks, most is so different and what the traditional leadership development does not tell people trying to lead networks. Just a brief description of HOW different this is. That might include leading across multiple types of boundaries - including across distance and organizational hierarchies and cultures; it also might include leadership responsibility without authority as people try to coordinate and motivate across organizations where participants report to other people and have other job responsibilities. These make network leadership a very different enterprise from traditional organizational leadership.

To support leadership as a collective process with the competencies needed to work effectively in networks and in more connected ways will require that we rethink leadership development delivery strategies. Most leadership program focus on building the skill sets of individuals, often to prepare them to lead in organizations. As we embrace leadership as a process enacted by multiple people engaged in change, what are the costs of selecting and developing individuals? Are we inadvertently reinforcing individualism that has so infused our leadership thinking? If leadership emerges through the process of coordinated action, then why do we assume the needed skills for success should reside in one person (the leader)? If skills and capacity are distributed within groups how do we support groups with the skills they need as a group to move forward.

These are important questions for the leadership development field. While it may well be possible to help individuals learn collective behaviors, and develop and practice collaborative skills within a cohort environment; our traditional approaches have not led to the impacts we seek. Are there better ways to help groups, networks and communities exercise leadership for greater public benefit? There are a number of interesting leadership programs that are bringing a network mindset to leadership development that we would like to share to offer some interesting examples of what it looks like to prepare leadership to effectively utilize network strategies and network tools.

The Barr Fellowship Network Case Study (I am wondering if this is the best case study since it has elements that are more traditional)

The Barr Fellows are an unprecedented network of people that in a lifetime most of us would never be able to pull together and become that close to. This network transcends fields, gender, race to a level that wouldn’t be doable on one’s own. This level of partnership and camaraderie breaks down fears and inhibitions; it’s going to save our sector. (A Barr Fellow) Claire this does not sound much different than a traditional leadership program that creates a network as a byproduct of its work...I am wondering if there was an intentional recruitment strategy about selecting local EDs and providing support that would cultivate an emerging network among them...if so was is specifically the learning journey or could it have been any trust building activities...I want to avoid making it sound like international travel is some how key to nurturing a network. Are there ways to address this in the case study? Maybe emphasize the program goal and outcomes more than the trip. Also can you say how this is different than traditional approaches since the one of the points of the paper is that traditional heroic models of leadership and individually focused programs won't get us where we need to be)

The Barr Foundation and the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) partner together to nurture authentic relationships among cohorts of nonprofit executive directors in Boston to create the conditions for a thriving nonprofit sector among leaders from different neighborhoods and focused on different issues. Twelve executive directors, every two years, begin their Barr Fellowship by taking a two-week learning journey together somewhere in the global south. The learning journey is meant to be a significantly disruptive experience. On the journey they encounter different social spaces, different levels of hope and despair, and a different climate and ecological experience. The intense pace coupled with well facilitated moments of shared reflection create the conditions for deep connection and personal and collective transformation. Usually, relationships among leaders are mediated by organizational roles and identities, and are often limited to the transactional and the formal. The learning journey breaks through this layer of relationship into a more intimate space, a deeper and more human connection that creates more room for self-revelation and builds trust.

The trust developed among Barr Fellows has created a reservoir of social capital which produces enormous community value. Here’s one example: When the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) led an effort to win a Promise Neighborhood grant for Boston, it had very little time to pull together the proposal. The social capital among Barr Fellows was a critical factor that contributed to DSNI’s proposal receiving the highest score among all PromiseNeighborhood planning grants that were awarded. DSNI’s ED, John Barros, called the former ED of the Children’s Museum, Lou Casagrande (both Barr Fellows in 2007) to ask for his help securing memoranda of understanding (MOUs) from 15 of the city’s museums. The museum directors had little or no knowledge of John or DSNI, but they did know Lou. As a respected colleague in the museum world, Lou could vouch for John to his colleagues. The success of Lou’s efforts to secure these MOUs in a matter of weeks, was only possible because of the trust and social capital the Fellowship created.

Case Study: Boston Green and Healthy Building Network (I think maybe this should get move to the Leadership development section)

The Boston Green and Healthy Building Network illustrates the power of social network mapping in action. The Boston-based Barr Foundation had spent several years funding two sets of local organizations that advocated for changes in building codes and standards: public health organizations that saw unhealthy buildings as a root cause of many illnesses, and environmental groups that were focused on the energy efficiency and ecological impact of buildings. In 2005, a senior program officer at Barr recognized that while the “causes” of the two sets of organizations were different, the groups shared a common goal of setting higher performance standards for buildings, and they often approached the same government officials with similar requests. So Barr brought together the various parties in April 2005 to explore whether they could align their efforts, share information, and develop a more unified message for policymakers. Using information collected at the gathering, the foundation developed a real-time social network map of the people in the room. The map clearly showed two principal clusters of dots, one representing people in health organizations and the other primarily people in environmental organizations; it also showed that the groups were not well connected. Seeing the map of their fragmented network, the groups agreed to begin meeting together and eventually formed the Boston Green and Healthy Building Network. This network has increased connections and collaboration across the different groups and has improved access to, and relationships with, many key policy-makers in the city. (Working Wikily 2.0) {From Beth - here is a link to the full pdf report.} [we need the reference here. the text is from Working Wikily - which was based on the case study by Beth Tener, Al Neirenberg and Bruce Hoppe]

Lessons from how leadership is being developed in networks:

Cultivating a network mindset: Leadership programs that cultivate a network mindset focus less on skill-building and more on relationship-building and helping each other to see and experience the power of interconnectedness. Bridging barriers and boundaries, and becoming aware of your position and role relative to others shifts perceptions about where power and influence lie from the individual to the network.

Multiple entry points: A number of organizations that use network strategies create multiple entry points for people to connect to small groups of people around issues they care about. Multiple entry points give people a chance to meet other people, build relationships and find opportunities to contribute their gifts. In this process, networks form, and people grow and develop their leadership as they do work together.

Convening and Process: In the example of the ReAMP project leadership emerged when people set time set aside to get to know each other and find the connections in their work. Network mapping was a powerful tool for visualizing their connections. Participants who all had numerous responsibilities in their own organizations and the container that gave them time and space and the process that supported know each other in deeper ways supported collective leadership.

Learning by doing: In a collective culture where small groups of people are actively supported to take risks and reflect and learn together a couple of things are happening. Bonds of trust and reciprocity are created as each person contributes their ideas, talents and resources; no one person is the “knowing leader.” As the group interacts, issues and conflicts undoubtedly arise. A group’s capacity to manage those issues depends on the quality of relationships they have together, and their collective willingness to find solutions that work for the group as a whole, and move their collective work forward.

Relationship building and weaving: As people in LCW got to know neighbors they had not met, share their stories and talk about their community, collective grievances and aspirations emerged connecting people in their desire and willingness to take action.

Implications for Leadership Development

These lessons are being echoed from other experiments in leadership development that have achieved surprising results in short time by convening multiple stakeholders in a specific region who are focused on an urgent problem, or by convening people in small communities to have guided discussions about their experiences of poverty and what to do about it. There are some striking similarities that point to new approaches to developing leadership capacity:

Support people, groups and organizations who want to work on a common concern: Many of the leadership strategies that can point to dramatic changes in the lives of people in a community are supporting people in the process of taking action together on a specific problem or issue.
Provide convening and process support that build relationships: A number of successful approaches focus on supporting connection and understanding each other better (and in the process ones self). For example, the systems mapping process was helpful to the ReAMP participants and study circles the framed questions for participants in the Horizon’s program helping them to draw on their experiences and wisdom to shape plans, and the neighborhood circle process in LCW used storytelling to build relationships among estranged neighbors.
Facilitate Action Learning: Learning from co conspirators in joint action or colleagues in a field develops everyone involved. Fostering action learning, provide time and structure to reflection, and facilitating communities of learning and practice all develop leadership.
Brokering resources: Maybe an important role for people and organizations who want to strengthen social change leadership is one of identifying and securing resources. Most of the approaches we are drawing from have an asset based philosophy and assume that groups and communities have among their members many of the skills that they need, so they don’t come with a fixed curriculum that some feel presumes a deficit of skills. This is not to say that in the course of work and trail and error that groups involved in change will not recognize that there may be resources, knowledge or skills that would be helpful. The difference is that people engaged in leadership are identifying what they need. Leadership programs or coaches can be providers of what is needed.

Recommendations for developing leadership with the capacity to utilize network strategies and tools:

If you are a running leadership development program:

Existing leadership programs reach tens of thousands of people yet few explicitly recognize the leadership opportunities, challenges and skills necessary to utilize network approaches. Yet, these leadership programs and strategies offer an important venue for people and groups interested in preparing leadership to better understand networks. Becoming adept at using network strategies and tools requires a commitment of time to learning and practice and leadership programs can provide this opportunity. Through leadership cohorts, individuals and groups can learn and practice these skills with others.

Following are recommendations about leadership program goals, design, and curriculum components that can help programs better equip leadership with the mindset and skills to choose organizational and/or network approaches:

Question your leadership assumptions: Our thinking has been heavily influenced by the dominant culture of individualism in this country and permeates the ways in which we think about and develop leadership. Ideas about individual leaders and what it takes to be a leader, e.g. specific attributes, skills, or training could limit opportunities to support millions of people and groups who want to take action together on issues and problems they care about. [integrate this one with 'network mindet' rec or expand? - ds]

Target your leadership development work to large scale change: We will not achieve societal level changes even if we have the most talented leaders working alone or within a single organization. Aiming high for enduring systemic change requires recognition of the leadership initiative that exists in everyone and a commitment to strategies and tools that can coordinate the efforts of vastly more people. For example, the RE-AMP project set a "big hairy audacious goal of an 80% reduction in electrical pollution". This could not possibly be achieved by one organization. This goal became the rallying point and driving purpose for leadership alignment of over 120 organizations. Many leadership programs are designed to strengthen individual skills with the expectation that this will improve organizational performance and result in specific or general community changes that are often not identified or monitored. We need a revolution in our beliefs and behaviors. If we believe we can and must do more (e.g., make sure that every person in this country has access to good health care, quality education and a safe place to live), then we need leadership strategies to help us better leverage vastly more people. [Understanding that network leadership not only can involve but depends on leadership initiative from many more people in many new ways means investing in leadership development training and challenges for many more people in our organizations.ng…reworded to incorporate your ideas…check it out-dm]

Be Strategic in Your Recruitment: If you begin to see your leadership strategy as an opportunity to cultivate or nurture a potential network it is important to think about what alignment of groups will advance the result you hope to produce through your leadership work. The Boston Green and Healthy Building Network described in the case study on page ...... is a great example of strategic recruitment with the intention of building relationships among activists and organizations work in building codes and standards and people in public health.

Cultivate and practice a network mindset: A leadership program or trainings can incorporate network literacy and the introduction of a network mindset into their curriculum. When individuals and groups have an opportunity to reflect on their current ways of behaving, and practice network ways of working, they will be better positioned to apply network tools and strategies in complex situations, and understand when it is more appropriate to use organizational tools and strategies to manage technical challenges. For leaders who have learned to work through organizations there is a learning curve to understand different types of networks. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded a Network Weavers Community of Practice so that people who are weaving networks within and across traditional organizational structures could be in a peer learning relationship to support each others' efforts experimenting with new behaviors and tools. They hired three people with expertise in network weaving and communities of practice to support the work of this community of practice over a six month period.

Develop systems analysis skills: Incorporate systems understandings of culture and power. Those who are providing leadership in networks or bringing network strategies to their work in organizations will not contribute effectively to addressing the structures and systems that perpetuate the unequal distribution of opportunity that lies at the heart of the social ills. [the inequality / social justice frame comes up a lot. If we're using this frame we should be explicit about it up front. To me it signals a specific audience this is more narrow & politically progressive than the broader social change capacity building community- ds]To effectively lead requires knowing how to intervene in a system to change the outcomes it produces. Systems thinking and analysis does not come easily to people who are invested in one issue or one problem, but it can be learned. The Sustainability Institute and LEAD International in the environmental field have led the way in developing tools, games and curriculum to learn to lead with a systems understanding of how things work and how to disrupt or intervene in systems to change them. Systems thinking curriculum can be incorporated into current leadership programs or offered as training components as part of organizational and network capacity building efforts.

Integrate Action Learning: Taking risks and valuing learning from experiences of success and failure is often not a valued leadership behavior but it can be supported through leadership programs that help participants value learning and action learning methodologies.In a supportive community, a group can experiment and learn more quickly together and strengthen their networks by using action learning methodologies. Leadership programs that use action learning deepen participation, and connect participants in a community of practice that builds relationships among people where they often did not exist before. Network strategies have the capacity to accelerate learning through experimentation by supporting multiple actions around common purpose at a new level of scale.

Learning when and how to use social media tools: Effective leadership will need to both understand when their work would be better served by a network strategy and know how to utilize social media tools to their advantage. The range of social media tools and how to use them can be daunting to people and groups when they venture into this new terrain. Social media use in the nonprofit sector is very uneven, often based on generational differences. It is important to introduce basic tools: social networking sites, wikis, Twitter, blogging, Flickr, etc. and provide technical support and a safe space to practice and discuss the ways in which new technologies can help achieve shared purpose. There is usually a learning curve but the payoff can be big. Using the right social media tools in the right way can mean accomplishing more in less time and often with fewer resources. Levi Strauss has initiated a Pioneers for Justice leadership program that is helping emerging leaders understand networks and network tools, including social media. Participants in the program will have a session with Beth Kantor who has written about bringing a network mindset to non-profits. They are also working close with Zero Divide to conduct social media audits and training in social media tools for the participants and their organizations. [I'd suggest dropping the last two sentences - DS]

Visualize network relationships: In addition to understanding why networks are important, leadership and training programs can help participants to understand what a network is, what makes a network healthy, and how leadership can support network growth, purpose and impact with network skills like weaving and bridging. Those in leadership can now learn about and see network or systems using social network analysis. This is important since we are accustomed to seeing organizational charts while networks are invisible. These tools have helped people learn to work in networks more effectively as they see and understand the importance of formal and informal structures, weak and strong ties and the importance of affinity and diversity as demonstrated in the story of the Boston Green and Healthy Building Network. [need to make the link back to leadership development. Are there some nuggets from Claire and Bruce's paper to weave in here?]

Strengthen alumni connections and connect their networks: Many leadership programs are now realizing that their alumni are untapped networks. Without a network mindset and strategy for unleashing the power of these networks, alumni network effects may be limited to small clusters of graduates organized around their class identity, geography or issue interests. With a network mindset, alumni have the opportunity to reach out beyond their cohort to weave connections between and among their networks. The tools that can map and make networks more visible can be used by leadership programs to understand their cohort network and how it can be strengthened and grown so that leadership program alumni networks can be catalyzed to support continuous peer learning, and action on collaborative initiatives or policy change. We can do more to connect the busy graduates of leadership programs to increase the impact of their efforts, not by working more but by working smarter through networks.

We will see a shift in the vibrancy and action being produced by networks of leadership program graduates, when leadership programs incorporate curriculum and tools that do more to help their participants to understand: 1) what a network is and why network strategies can help to amplify their impact; and 2) how to effectively utilize and strengthen networks with weaving and bridging skills. In the meantime, a number of leadership programs that are picking up on the power of network strategies are bringing this thinking to their work with former graduates.

Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance: Case Study of Using SNA to Catalyze an Alumni Network

The Leadership Learning Community and the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance have entered into a partnership to use a social network analysis (SNA) to help catalyze their network of 1000 leadership graduates from 10 different leadership programs funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of the past 30 years. This project is being funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. LLC and KFLA will use social network analysis to grow the KFLA network’s ability to share information, coordinate activities, accelerate learning and take action. Kellogg fellows will benefit from knowing more about other fellows who work in their field, share their interest in an issue like immigration, could be the perfect consultant for a project, or live 5 miles from them. KFLA is one of the better staffed alumni programs and has been able to transmit some of this information but there is a limit to how much they can monitor and communicate information about 1000 people. In short, we want to help the KFLA network participants communicate more amongst themselves, self organize and coordinate joint work with a lighter touch from the KFLA team to exponentially expand the scope of what they can accomplish together.

To do this the LLC Team will survey KFLA alumni and map their connections by asking them questions about who they communicate with, who they seek advice from, who they have worked with, or what issues they are interested in working on. The maps we produce will make the network and the way it works more visible to staff and fellows who want to take an active role in strengthening the network. Maps reveal connections across cohort groups, regions, issues and shared interest, information that can be used to identify and facilitate collaborative opportunities across silos. Staff and fellows will be involved in making meaning of the maps as part of the analysis. This project will use social network analysis to build this capacity within the KFLA staff and among participants. A good part of this joint venture will involve training KFLA staff in how to use SNA tools and coaching KFLA staff and interested participants in network weaving so that the perspectives, tools and skills will be incorporated into the fabric of KFLA’s approach to building and activating its network.

After a year of working with KFLA we will do a second network map to track changes that have occurred within the network as a result of this support. There will be a case study produced at that time too tell this story in the hopes that there will be many lessons and possible applications for leadership programs experimenting with how to connect and leverage the impact of the good work of their graduates. After all, hundreds of thousands of individuals, teams and communities have participated in leadership development activities over the past 20 years. Imagine the collective impact if we could connect these efforts!

[Diana - i think this list will be most powerful if it's targeted. I'd recommend dropping general recs for how funders can support networks. we're writing a whole publication on that subject and can make the link between these two resources…Hi Diana, the primary audiences for this publication are people who run, fund , study or provide services to leadership development efforts. We have not really written this for a general population of individuals leading/working through networks or networks interested in strengthening their own leadership. While the report would hopefully have some nuggets for a broad audience I am not sure how this section is targeted or focused if not for funders. If you think it is duplicative of what Monitor will be producing maybe we eliminate the section below??? dm Hey Deborah - I think its good as is - not duplicative of the funders guide as its evolving. A draft is here:http://networksguide.wikispaces.com/6-7+Draft+Funders+Guide. I've made a few consolidation recommendation below. Happy to work on rewriting these recs if the suggestions work for you - DS]

Recommendations if you invest in leadership development:

Support leadership in network weaving: There are costs involved in network weaving that often cannot be absorbed by any one organization in the network. Foundations can play a role in bringing important resources to this work and even in creating a container for this work to occur. The Barr Foundation through their fellowship program was able to create the conditions for local leaders to build relationships. The Hunt Alternative Fund invested in network weaving through its fellowship programs. Both programs have demonstrated a high return on network investments. Some promising strategies for supporting network weaving include:

Identifying one or multiple people who are dedicated to making and strengthening connections throughout the network.
Supporting social network analysis to help networks make their relationships more visible so that they can strengthen their network.
Hosting in-person gatherings that strengthen connections through attention to quality facilitation, food, and the gathering space.
Creating an online infrastructure, and supporting network technology stewards (people who facilitate use of technology to share information, coordinate or learn together.

Support leadership development programs that incorporate a new leadership mindset and build network capacity: Until leadership development is elevated as an important human capital investment in the non-profit sector leadership programs will not be sustainable on a fee for service business model that has had success in the for profit sector. This means that leadership programs will need continued support from donors to fund leadership development work. These programs can offer an important vehicle for helping existing leaders learn new skills and strategies. Leadership programs can also serve as a vehicle for fostering new networks or strengthening existing networks. The Barr Foundation’s Fellowship is a good example of using a leadership strategy to foster a network among non profit leadership in Boston.

Invest in strengthening network leadership capacity. There have been few targeted efforts to focus on existing networks and nvest in the development of network leaders or weavers to date, but some exciting prospects are unfolding. The Packard Foundation’s investment in the Network Weaving Community of Practice for network weavers facilitated by June Holley, John Smith, and Nancy White (well-recognized network weavers and network technology stewards).

Promote learning about how to strengthen network leadership: As leadership programs, capacity builders and technical assistance providers focus more attention on how to develop leadership competencies within networks and a network mindset among organizational leadership, we need to ask and answer questions across a variety of experiences that will accelerate learning about the impact of networks and how to strengthen them:

What are effective strategies for cultivating leadership with a network mindset and the ability to use network strategies and tools to increase their impact?
What impact are strong bridging and weaving leaders having on network results?
What are the gains from successful network ventures? E.g. What impacts do networks have on social and environmental justice issues, like changing health status in a low-income community, improving air quality, ensuring economic and family success?
What will I and we have to give up to build networks across organizations?

This type of learning can be supported by investing in cross program evaluations, communities of practice, and collaborative learning opportunities. Through opportunities like these practices with evidence of success that point to where the field needs to move to maximize the impact of leadership investments and strategies can be surfaced.

Invest in the development and diffusion of network leadership training materials, curriculum and tools: To incorporate the changes being recommended leadership development programs need resources. For instance, June Holley, a leading practitioner of network weaving, has developed a Network Weaving Handbook with hundreds of exercises to strengthen the capacity of network weavers. The extraordinary number of existing delivery organizations, such as leadership programs and management support organizations, could easily reach and thousands of nonprofit leaders with a network mindset if investments were being made in training curriculum and tools that could be utilized by leadership development service providers. [combine this rec with above one rec about promoting learning? ds]

Embed network literacy in professional development programs: [something from Grady here?] The subject of networks is no longer an amorphous catch-all: there is science about how social and organizational networks are structured, the best way to structure them for different purposes, and a way to talk about distinct network structures, the roles that individual play in networks, and the ways that networks can be leveraged. For leaders in the social change initiative, there is no other way to success except through networks, and being able to talk the talk is the first step in learning to walk. [combine this rec with #1 - support leadership development programs? - ds]

Conclusion:

The health of the planet for future generations is at risk and the increasing wealth gap has created a country in which many people cannot find jobs, attend good schools, live in safe neighborhoods, own homes or afford health care. We have entered into a new social environment where everyone who cares about these issues has an opportunity to work in new ways and can engage and activate many more supporters for their cause. As Clay Shirky points out, “There are thousands of experiments in new social forms going on every day, as people who want to gather together, try capabilities that have only recently become ubiquitous…Our social tools are dramatically improving our ability to share, cooperate and act together. As everyone from working biologist to angry air passengers adopts those tools, it is leading to epochal change.” Leadership of social change efforts can sit on the sidelines wondering if networks are a fad or embrace this opportunity and develop a new network mindset. As this publication points out, this is not easy. It will require us to question what we think we know about leadership and organizing. It will require us to break from the time demands and momentum of existing work in organizations to step into unfamiliar territory and experiment with new ways of thinking and new tools. We offer ideas, resources, and tools for preparing leadership to scale their social change by taking advantage of network thinking and strategies. This work is still emerging and we invite you to help by sharing resources, experiences and your own learning.
[?Add in above: While we have our missions and organizations allow no time for these activities and reflection, we also cannot afford to ignore the new challenges and to better prepare ourselves for them...or something like this. Ng…Hi NG, I tried to incorporate into the last couple sentence…feel free to change DM]

OLD STUFF FOR MOVING AND REMOVAL:

RE-AMP, a network of 125 funders and non-profits are working together to reduce carbon emissions by 80% over the next 30-40 years in 8 states with amazing results. Already they have passed energy efficiency policies, promoted an impressive cap and trade program and halted the development of 12 new coal plants. This example is a success story about taking on systemic problems, and thinking and exercising leadership differently- from the start. It started 7 years ago when the Massachusetts-based Garfield Foundation began exploring ways they could approach highly complex problems through systems thinking and priortizing alignment among nonprofits and foundations. They identified the Midwest as an area ripe for increased environmental impact and invested in a year-long process to map Midwest energy issues that engaged twelve nonprofits and seven foundations. The resulting map and the conversations it sparked help participants understand drivers impacting the regional energy system while building trust and generating shared insight, which ultimately resulted in a common goal and strategy for action.

[Segue needed here]

For the past couple decades, social entrepreneurs have been celebrated by trendsetters in the social change arena based on a model of heroic individuals who provide powerful examples of social impact. While social entrepreneurship and individual ingenuity are certainly important to making progress on complex problems, to fully unleash innovation calls for a shift away from a focus on individual power to collective power. The Story of Stuff was produced by Annie Leonard, and at first glance she could easily be described as a heroic leader whose vision has had undeniable impact.The Story of Stuff is taking on deeply entrenched behaviors of consumption with a short animated video that has reached 12,000,000 viewers.Without taking anything away from Annie there is another important leadership story that should not be lost and requires us to bring a different lens to the Story of Stuff. Annie tapped a growing network in the conceptualization and production of the Story of Stuff. Many people took up leadership to contribute to the quality of the film. With its launch over 150,000 activists and hundreds of organizations around the world who have taken up leadership in the project in a variety of unexpected ways, translating the film, developing curriculum, turning it into theater. Traditional leadership models invest a great deal of responsibility and control for organizational or project outcomes in a single individual leader. By letting go and not trying to control how the film would be used, Annie unleashed the collective leadership of many around the project increasing its impact exponentially. To realize this potential we need to deepen our understanding of leadership as the multifaceted process through which people align energy towards a common purpose, connect and leverage resources for greater collective impact, and spread and adopt innovations quickly.

Network Weaving

nataliallc — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:40:05 CDT

We recently hosted a webinar featuring June Holley on network weaving. We created this page to aggregate content related to network weaving and provide a platform where people that are interested in this topic can interact.

Are you a Network Weaver? Webinar

Presenter: June Holley, Network Weaver
Date: Tuesday, August 23rd 11:00-12:00 Noon PDT This interactive session introduces the term Network Weaver as a way of understanding how leadership is shifting in a networked world. June explains four roles -- connector, facilitator, coach and network guardian — filled by Network Weavers and share activities that you can implement with your networks.

Materials and Information:

Network Weavers Role Checklist
Map your Network
www.networkweaving.com
www.networkweaver.com
http://networkweaver.ning.com
Network Weaver Handbook
RE-AMP Case Study www.monitorinstitute.com/reamp
Other readings

Slides:

Recording:

Participants:

First Name	Last Name	Organization
A	Washington	Siyavula Community Resources
Abby	Yanow	Boston Facilitators Roundtable
Abdi	Mohamoud	Horn of Africa Community
Abony	Holmes Alexander	San Francisco Foundation
Adrienne	Calhoun	PTRC Area Agency on Aging
Alain	Gauthier	Core Leadership Development
Alexis	Gabard	Piedmont Triad Regional Council
Alice	Melendez	Shoten Zenjin Project Support
Amanda	Ziebell-Finley	Minnesota College Access Network
Amy	Erickson	Capacity4good Consulting
Andrea	Wight	UMass Boston
Andrea	Nagel	Interaction Institute for Social Change
Andrew	Saito	The San Francisco Foundation
Angela	Holzer	Ovarian Cancer Canada
Ann	Philbin	Third Sector New England
anna	steinkraus	cornell cooperative extension - tompkins county
Anna	Hargreaves	NM-Dept. of Health
annabella	roig	Esperanza, Inc.
Annie	Kim
Anthony	Smith	Network Center for Community Change
Bao	Vang	Northwest Area Foundation
Barbara	Masters	MastersPolicyConsulting
Barbara	McClung	Program Administrator
Bella	Celnik
Bella	Celnik	LLC
Ben	McClanahan	AEA
beth	rosales	the lia fund www.theliafund.org
Betsy	Webb	Local Government Center, MSU
Brandy	Johnson	Michigan College Access Network
Brent	Herrera	NM-DOH
Cameron	Levin
Carol	Woltring	Center for Health Leadership and Practice
Carol	Hanson	New Mexico Department of Health
Carolyn	Cunningham	United Way of king County
cecilia	roddy	robert f kennedy children's action corps
Charlotte	Williams	PTRC AAA
Cheryl	Endres	Grand Rapids Community College
Chiara	Borrello	Natural Health Consultants Institute
Chris	Skoglund	NH DES
Christina	Stansell	IIE
Christine Dresslar	Moss	Monterey County Health Department
Claire	Reinelt
Colin	Bailey	Legal Services of Northern California
Curt	Mearns	Apex Education
Cynthia	Jackson	The Alzheimers Coach
dalberto	adulis	ABDL - LEAD Brazil
Dana	Hall	SF Food Bank
Daniel	Bustillo
Dawn	Haney	Rooting Nonprofits
Dawna	Vann	Contra Costa Health Services
Deborah	meehan	LLC
Deborah	Flood	Deborah Flood Consulting
Deborah	Fair	PCUSA
Denece	Dodson	First 5 Contra Costa
Dennis	Johnson	Leadership Architecture & Design
Diana	Fox	Reach Out
Doray	Veno	Hanna Learning Centre
Dottie	Lyvers	PTRC Area Agency on Aging
Dr. Laura-Ann	Migliore	University of Phoenix
Dreema	Jackson	California Federation Inc.
Edith	Goldenhar	Bronznick & Co., LLC
Elisabeth	Hyleck	Assoc. of Baltimore Area Grantmakers
Emily	Boness	Fanning Institute
Erica	Greeley	Independent Sector
Eugenia	Gibbons	Environmental League of Massachusetts
eve	yuen	aseb
eve	yuen	bngrp
Fania	Davis	RJOY
Gale	Taylor	Gale Force
Gigi	Barsoum	Barsoum Policy Consulting
Gina	Polley	Legal Aid & Defender Association
giselle	limpawuchara	Network Center for Community Change
grady	mcgonagill	mcgonagill consulting
Greg	Meissen	Wichita State University
Gwendolyn	Smith	Gwendolyn Smith Consulting
Helen Monica	Patten	New Mexico Depart of Health/TUPAC
Istvan	Fay
Jacqueline	Harris	San Diego Housing Commission
Jade	Le'Jeune	student
James	Farley	Leichtag Family Foundation
Janine	Toth	University of Illinois
Janon	Berry
Jason	Weeby	Education Pioneers
Jeanette	Honermann	JMH Collaborative
Jeff	Tucker	AMI
Jeff	Miller
Jennifer	Martin	The Seattle Foundation
Jennifer	Jewiss	University of Vermont
Jerri	Rodewald	Presbyterian Women
Jess	Main
Jessica	Kayse	Neighborhood Leadership Institute
Jessica	Dreistadt	Family Connection
Jessica	Buendia	San Francisco Foundation
Jessica	Potish	Network Center for Community Change
Jessica	Kayse	Neighborhood Leadership Institute
Jim	Maloney	Leadership USA
Jo	Beall
JoAnn	Ashman	Ashman Enterprises
john	poore
John	Cotterell	Dublin City South Volunteer Centre
Joke	Habben	Aarhus University Hospital
Joy	M	NASTAD
Julia	McBride	Kansas Leadership Center
Julie	Palazini	MetLife
Karen	Phillips	International Youth Foundation
Karene	Jones	Presbyterian Women
Kari	Hill	Building Changes
Karya	Lustig	Center for Health Leadership and Practice
Kate	Jones	Network for a Hate Free Community, S. Clara Co. OHR
Kathleen	Rice	klriceconsulting@mac.com
Kathryn	Spencer	CAFF
Katie	Bullock	ILSNC
Keri	Nash	Racial Justice Initaitive of TimeBanks USA
Kevin	Murray	Kevin Murray Strategic Consulting
Kim	Cantrell	CFILC
Kim	Coffee-Isaak	Agricultural Leadership Foundation of Hawaii
Kimberly	Bloch Rincan	Independent Consultant
Kimberly	Bloch-Rincan	Independent Consultant
Kristine	Maltrud	Healthy Native Communities Partnership
LaMarcus	Bolton	American Evaluation Association
Larry	Van De Valk	LEAD New York
Laura	Pierce	Laura Pierce Consulting
Laura	Smith	Tides
Laura	Peck	claros group
leora	jaeger	My Community NM
Linda	Jenkins	Jenkins Consulting Group
Linda	Simkin	Action Research Associates
Linda	Guinee	IISC
Linney	Lau	United Way Toronto
lisa	albrecht	U.S. for All of Us: No Room for Racism
Lisa	Ahn	Self-employed
Liz	Neeley	COMPASS
Louie	Herr	Herr Consulting, Inc.
maggie	osborn	Florida Philanthropic Network
Mana	Tahaie
Manveen	Saini	AMI
Marcos	Sanchez	Nueva Esperanza Inc.
Margaret	Krebs	Stanford
Margo	Hittleman	Natural Leaders Initiative
Maria	Markham	La Piana Consulting
Maria	Alejandro	Community Leadership Institute of Texas
Marissa	Tirona	CompassPoint
Mark	Johnson-Lewis	Mark Johnson-Lewis
Marsha	McMurray-Avila	Bernalillo County Community Health Council
Mary	Ballard	NM DOH/TUPAC
Mary	Wimmer	Mary Jo Wimmer Consulting
Mary	Ferguson	Indiana State University
Mary	Achatz	Westat
mary	woodson
Maureen	Hogan	Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development
Max	Freund	LF Leadership
Meenakshi	Abbi	Tides
Meghan	Kraley
Melanie	Matthews	Campion Foundation
Melanie	Napoleon	Consultant
melisa	march	Innovation Network
Melissa	Brodowski	Children's Bureau
Meredith	Emmett	Third Space Studio
Michael	Gallin	The Greenlining Institute
Michelle	Gislason	CompassPoint
Mimi	Kiser	Interfaith Health Program RSPH Emory University
Miriam	Messinger	Miriam Messinger Consulting
Morna	Ha	NAKASEC
Naava	Frank	YU School Partnership
nance	goldstein
Nancy	Carrillo	Apex Education
Nancy	Hughes	CaUFC
Natalia	Castaneda	LLC
Natalie	Morgan
Neha	Mahajan	Chinook Fund
Nichola	Russell	United Way of King County
Nicole	Bossard	TGC Consulting, Inc.
Pam	Sturner	Leopold Leadership Program
Patricia	Sinay	Community Investment Strategies
Patricia	Munro	World Cafe Europe
Patricia	Adams	YWCA of Greater Milwaukee
Patti	Anklam	Net Work
Peg	Winters	Saint Mary's University of Minnesota
Porscha	Davis	Rehoboth CDC
Ralene	Friend	Friend Hatch
Raquel	Gutierrez	One Tree Many Seeds Consulting
Ray	Baca	NM Dept. of Health
Raymond	Weaver	Cornell Cooperative Extension
Rebecca	Stavenjord	Multnomah county
rhea	laughlin	First 5
Ria	Baeck	Vitis
Ria	Baeck	Vitis
rick	champ	illini christian ministries
Robert	Wilson	Kansas State University
Robin	Teater	ALF Oregon
Rochelle	Spielman	MDH
Rocio	Abundis-Rodriguez	Santa Clara County Office of Education
Roig	Annabella	Esperanza
Romi	Rancken
Ron	Hale	NM Dept. of Health
Ruth	Vega	Planned Parenthood
Ryan Li	Dahlstrom	GIFT
sam	millard
Sanjay	Gupta	Southern California College Access Network
Sarah	Williams	Dayton Christian Center
Sarah	Dirksen	League of MN Cities
Scott	Millstein	Coro New York Leadership Center
Shannon	Coe	CFILC
Shannon	Thibodeau	University of Guelph
Sharon	Anderson	Cooperative Extension Tompkins County
Sharyn	Goodson	Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego
Sheila	Goldgrab	Goldgrab Leadership
Sherry	Timmermann	New Paradigm Partners
Shifra	Bronznick	Bronznick & Co., LLC
Shirlese	Garrick	The Center for Young Women's Development
Stacey	Ramirez	Institute of International Organization
Stanley	Bhasker	Huntingdon Presbyterian Church
Starita	Ansari	msbphilanthropyadvisors.com
Stefani	Wilcox	Institute for Educational Leadership
Stefanie	Ashley	Facilitation Center at Eastern Kentucky University
Stephanie	Evergreen	American Evaluation Association
Sue	Griffey	Social & Scientific Systems, Inc
Susan	Kistler	American Evaluation Association
Susan	Kester	Pacific Gas and Electric
Susan	Foster	consultant
Susie	Polnaszek	Community Foundation for Monterey County
Suzanne	Bean	Center for Creative Learning
Tammie	Jones	YNPN Detroit
Thurmond	Williams	Strategic Advice
Tony	Macklin	Roy A Hunt Foundation
Trish	Rooney	YWCA
Unzu	Lee	Presbyterian Women
Wangu	Mwangi	Learning for Development (L4D) Netherlands/Kenya
Wendy	Wintermute	Cuidando los Niños
Yvonne	McGookin	Bellevue College

Transforming Leadership

nataliallc — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:21:37 CDT

Leadership for a New Era, or LNE, is a collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community that focuses on understanding how leadership can become more inclusive, networked and collective. We believe the dominant model that places a strong emphasis on the individual is limiting our ability to positively impact change in our society, so we have joined forces with a diverse group of funders, researchers, practitioners and consultants in the leadership development field to make sense of what it would take to start shifting the current thinking. While we have limited the focus of our exploration to four main areas: Leadership and Race, Leadership and Networks, Collective Leadership and Leadership Across Difference, we anticipate many other areas will emerge and welcome our contributors to take the lead in exploring them.

First Report of Leadership for a New Era Series:
How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice

Leadership programs can help solve racial inequalities in access to education, healthcare, income and wealth. But according to a new report released by the Leadership Learning Community and other thought leaders in the leadership development and racial equity fields, many current approaches to leadership development actually maintain and promote racial inequalities. This is the first report to analyze the link between major philanthropy investments in the racial equity and leadership development fields. More info!

The publication is co-authored by: Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center (ARC); Sally Leiderman, Center for Assessment and Policy Development (CAPD); Deborah Meehan, Leadership Learning Community (LLC); Elissa Perry, Think.Do.Repeat.; Maggie Potapchuk, MP Associates; Professor john a. powell, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; and Hanh Cao Yu, Ph.D., Social Policy Research Associates (SPR).

Framing Piece for Leadership for a New Era:
A New Leadership Mindset for Scaling Social Change

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. At the Leadership Learning Community we believe this way of thinking about leadership is only one part of the leadership story -- one that does not fully recognize leadership as a process grounded in relationships that are fluid, dynamic, non-directive and non-unilateral. In 2009 we launched Leadership for a New Era (LNE), a collaborative research initiative, to understand leadership more fully. 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 change or any other complex issue without expanding our thinking about what leadership is, how it works and how we can support it. Download the document!

Upcoming Webinars

Marla Cornelius, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services

Presenter: Marla Cornelius, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services
Topic: Daring to Lead 2011: Leadership Development & Support for Nonprofit Leaders
Date: Tuesday, July 26th 11:00-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00-3:00PM EDT)

Executives’ use of coaching, peer networks, and leadership development programs are on the rise and are ranked the top three most effective strategies by executive directors for leadership development and support. And while shared leadership is a common value among the vast majority of nonprofit executives, many find it challenging to put these values into practice through organizational systems and structures. These findings are among those reported in Daring to Lead 2011 CompassPoint’s recent study of over 3000 nonprofit executives nationwide. Join us for a discussion of the report’s findings, implications, and the actions that nonprofit leaders, funders, and capacity builders can take to better support executives and the organizations they dare to lead. Webinar participants will leave with:

A better understanding of the kinds of professional development activities and leadership development support that executives directors utilize most and find most effective
A better understanding of the kinds of challenges leaders face when trying to operationalize shared leadership values inside their organizations
A few concrete action items that nonprofit leaders, funders, and capacity builders can implement to support nonprofit leaders and their staffs.

June Holly, Network Weaver

Presenter: June Holley, Network Weaver
Topic: Are You A Network Weaver?
Date: Tuesday, August 23rd 11:00-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00-3:00PM EDT)

This interactive session will introduce the term Network Weaver as a way of understanding how leadership is shifting in a networked world. You will have access to a simple checklist so that you can identify your strengths and challenges as a Network Weaver. June will explain four roles -- connector, facilitator, coach and network guardian — filled by Network Weavers and share activities that you can implement with your networks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Please credit the author(s) and link back to this website.

Leadership and Race Report

nataliallc — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:47:35 CDT

“We have a rich history in community leadership development and we know the criticality of addressing structural racism and promoting racial healing to remove barriers to opportunity. We are excited because this is an important report that proactively addresses the impact of structural racism on leadership development.” Dr. Gail C. Christopher, Vice President–Program Strategy, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Leadership programs can help solve racial inequalities in access to education, healthcare, income and wealth, but many current approaches to leadership development actually maintain and promote racial inequalities. The report, How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice, suggests that a large number of leadership programs associate leadership with equal opportunity and individualism. This thinking does not recognize that current systems (i.e. policy, culture and institutional practices) can cause racial identity to limit one’s access to life opportunities. It also focuses too narrowly on changing the behavior of individual leaders. Instead, leadership programs should: 1) make their programs more accessible for people of color; 2) help participants understand how race limits the access to opportunities – in other words, the impact of structural racism; and 3) promote collective leadership. This approach will help participants work together to tackle the systems that maintain racial inequalities. The publication offers practical methods and recommendations to help leadership programs prepare their participants to bring a more race conscious lens to all policy and service work; and empower people of color to better lead their communities.
The publication is co-authored by:

Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center (ARC)
Sally Leiderman, Center for Assessment and Policy Development (CAPD)
Deborah Meehan, Leadership Learning Community (LLC)
Elissa Perry, Think.Do.Repeat.
Maggie Potapchuk, MP Associates
Professor john a. powell, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Hanh Cao Yu, Ph.D., Social Policy Research Associates (SPR)

This report is the first in a series of publications, the Leadership for a New Era Series, launched by the Leadership Learning Community in 2009 to promote inclusive, networked and collective leadership approaches. The series is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, The California Endowment, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, Kansas Leadership Center, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Launch Campaign Report

What People Are Saying about the Report...

	"As racial demographics rapidly change and deep racial disparities grow, we need new ways to develop and support leadership that move us to greater racial unity and equity. The Leadership and Race publication provides concrete tools and recommendations to help leadership programs move in that direction.” (Terry Keleher, Midwest Director, Applied Research Center)
	“Although the Greenlining Leadership Academy has always been committed to training social justice advocates to work across racial and ethnic lines and to build multi-ethnic coalitions and alliances, we never fully understood that in order to impact racial equity, we had to begin by establishing and teaching a racial justice framework. LLC’s Leadership and Race report helped us to see that we needed to incorporate this framework into our strategies to achieve racial equity.” (Danielle Trimiew , Academy Director, The Greenlining Institute)
	“The Leadership and Race report is an excellent overview of the deepening conversation among social justice-oriented leadership programs about structural racism and racial equity. The core competencies and recommendations for supporting racial justice leadership neatly distill the key ideas at the forefront of this conversation.” (Christopher Perrius, Director of Development and Communications, The National Equity Project)
	“This publication makes clear that there is a need for ongoing intersection between the fields of leadership development and racial equity.” (Carmen Morgan, Program Director, Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations) “The publication supports our training philosophy quite seamlessly, as if it was written with our training curriculum and participants in mind. We look forward to incorporating it as a tool in our Leadership for Social Change training series.” (Carmen Morgan, Program Director, Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations)

Contact info & How to Get Involved:

Participate in the webinar! Join us onSeptember 28, 2010 from 1:00 - 2:00 PMPST for a free, interactive webinar.We will explore the main findings from the report and collectively brainstorm resources and ideas that can help you and others implement the ideas from the report
Share the report with your colleagues and network through your website, blog, newsletter, and social media channels! (Twitter hashtag:#LNERace)
Visit the Leadership for a New Era website for a list of resources
More information about the Leadership Learning Community
Contact Information:

Natalia Castañeda Chaux
Marketing and Communications Director, Leadership Learning Community
1203 Preservation Park Suite 200 Oakland CA 94611
(510) 238-9080
Natalia@leadershiplearning.org

Twitter.com/LeadershipEra

Leadership for a New Era Events & Webinars

nataliallc — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:50:05 CDT

Leadership and Race Events

Systems Thinking and Racial Justice Webinar featuring Professor john powell, Kirwan Institute (May 16, 2011)
Race & Leadership: Come As You Are - Exploring Racial Identity (April 21, 2011)
Northern California Grantmakers: Philanthropic Strategies to Develop Culturally Inclusive Leadership (October 22, 2010)
Philanthropy New York: Leaders in a New Era: A Conversation on Leadership Development and Race (October 19, 2010)
Leadership and Race Report Webinar (September 28, 2010)
Bay Area Leadership and Race Circle Part 2 (upcoming)
Seattle Leadership and Race Circle Part 2 (June 29, 2010)
Seattle Leadership and Race Circle (March 16, 2010)
Bay Area Leadership and Race Circle (January 13, 2010)
Leadership, Race, and White Privilege Webinar with Sally Leiderman (May 2009)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Leadership and Networks Events

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action featuring Nancy White - Webinar Scheduled for October 10, 2011
Are You A Network Weaver? featuring June Holley, Network Weaver - Webinar Scheduled for August 23rd, 2011
Upcoming Event: July 18th NYC Learning Circle on Leadership and Networks
Strategic Planning for Networks Webinar Featuring Eugene Eric Kim (March 22, 2011)
Bay Area Leadership and Networks Learning Circle (January 31, 2011)
Leadership and Networks Partners Call (January 18, 2011)
Network of Network Funders Webinar, Co-hosted by the Leadership Learning Community and the Monitor Institute (December 15, 2010)
International Leadership Association Conference Session: The Power of Bringing Networks to Scale: Leadership in the Age Social Media (October 27, 2010)
Leadership and Networks Partners Call (July 22, 2010)
Leadership and Networks Partners Call (May 11, 2010)
Boston Leadership and Networks Learning Circle (March 26, 2010)
Leadership for a New Era Engagement Webinar (January 19, 2010)
Leadership Networks and Social Network Mapping Webinar with Claire Reinelt (LLC) and Bruce Hoppe (Connective Associates) (June 2008)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Collective Leadership Events

A Case Study in Popular Education and Scaling Leadership Impact Webinar, featuring Ruby Lee, Northwest Area Foundation; Deborah Meehan, Leadership Learning Community; Patrick L. Scully, Everyday Democracy; and Lynette Flage, North Dakota State University Extension Service (June 28, 2011)
The Inner Dance of Collective Leadership Webinar Featuring Alain Gauthier (April 28, 2011)
International Leadership Association Session: The Future of Leadership Development: Collective Leadership (October 2010)
Alliance for Non Profit Management Session: Shared Leadership: Why it Matters and How to Help Nonprofits Get There (October 2010)
GEO Collective Leadership Session (May 2010)
Bay Area Shared Leadership Learning Circle (October 2009)
KLCC and CEL meeting (March 2008)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Leadership across Differences Events

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Other Events

Coaching as a Leadership Development Strategy featuring CompassPoint (December 14, 2011)
Daring to Lead 2011: Leadership Development & Support for Nonprofit Leaders (July 26, 2011)
Evidence Based Practice Meeting (October 14-15, 2010)
National Public Health Leadership Development Network Conference Session (April 27, 2010)
Sustainable Leadership Networks Webinar (January 2008)
Evaluating Health Leadership Development- A Case Study of the “Ladder to Leadership: Developing the Next Generation of Community Health Leaders” Initiative. By Center for Creative Leadership (September 2007)

Synthesis Framework

DeborahMeehan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:28:51 CDT

Leadership and Networks

Framework

[Updated on 7/19/11] Note: This is a framing piece for the Leadership and Networks Report. We will be using this as scaffolding for the synthesis and pulling the examples and ideas from latest iteration into this piece. Please feel free to help or to provide feedback on this framework and whether this helps to focus the report, especially for the primary audience of people doing leadership development work.

Background: Social media and networks have been in the spotlight of social change. Our interest has piqued against a backdrop of dramatic events: massive protests in Egypt that led to the resignation of Mubarak or 13 million supporters engaged and almost three quarters of a billion dollars raised in Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign. Some media outlets described the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless revolution. But was it? In this report we want to dig into the leadership story behind network successes. Global and domestic events have generated interest about how network strategies and social technologies are making it possible to reach, influence and mobilize exponentially more people. We encourage you to read these useful resources. For those of us in the business of developing leadership, we provide recommendations for adopting network strategies and tools. Even more importantly this report asks all of us to dig deeply and challenge ourselves to understand how leadership is changing (and needs to change). Without a reexamination of tried and true beliefs about what leadership is and how to support it, we may find ourselves sidelined by bold, and impressive network actions that are tackling seemingly insurmountable problems like carbon emissions, poverty or a repressive regime.

Why this report: This report is a joint project of people and organizations working in both the leadership development field and the network field. We have come together to produce this report for several reasons:
1. We believe that preparing leadership with the mindset and skills to utilize network strategies and tools can amplify the impact of our social change work.
2. We believe that it will not be possible for people to take full advantage of opportunities to adopt network strategies without a fundamental shift in the ways we think about and develop leadership.
3. We believe that stories and network can teach us about the kind of leadership needed to tackle complex problems and new ways of developing leadership.
4. We believe that sharing ideas, resources and recommendations will move others involved in leadership development work to do more to unleash the potential of networks to solve social problems.

Where we are now: We have invested tremendous resources in the nonprofit sector and most people would agree we have not made noteworthy progress on any major issue of our day. The income gap in the US is larger now than it has been in over 80 years! The trajectory for global warming is frightening. We live in an increasingly global economy where complex and interdependent problems cannot be solved by one individual or even one large institution. And yet, mainstream ideas about leadership have changed very little. We remain attached to heroic models of leadership placing extremely high expectations on what individuals can accomplish.

What we need: We need to move beyond leadership models that focus on building the skills of individuals and challenge ourselves to understand how to cultivate leadership as the process by which multiple actors align their efforts to take action. We need a new mental model of leadership and new approaches to leadership development if we are to move the needle on any significant social problem by taking advantage of network strategies and more connected ways of working together.

[We need a sidebar on the first page that has a very basic introduction to what we mean by network] A network is a collection of people, organizations or other entities that are connected by some kind of relationship. The pattern of relationships influences things like communication and the likelihood of collaboration. Networks are getting more attention because social technologies like cell phones, social networking sites, and blogs are making it possible for networks to reach more people and coordinate the work of more people with less effort. Scientists and mathematicians have also figured out how to visually represent networks in maps which are giving us new tools to understand what makes networks effective and how to make networks stronger.

Are networks the answer? Network strategies are no more the answer to every change initiative than organizations can be and yet organizational change strategies have been prioritized for decades as the best way to make change happen. The problem is that organizations create silos that swallow up Individual leaders whose authority and time to act on what matters most is often limited by organizational rules. Despite our best intentions, the problems of duplication and fragmentation persist, even in the face of growing recognition that an organization working alone cannot make the really big changes that are needed. We settle for doing our part on our small piece of the puzzle and for the most part, it’s not adding up to a huge collective impact on any major problem. There are several things we would say about leadership and networks:

Networks increase influence and reach by amplifying messages through social media, producing innovation by bridging organizations and sectors, coordinating the actions of more people with fewer resources, and aligning the work of individuals and organizations around a common purpose that achieves greater collective impact.
People and groups will exercise more effective leadership if they know how and when to use network strategies to build momentum for change, and use network resources for greater public benefit.
Using network strategies effectively requires different leadership values and behaviors.
Millennials who have grown up in a socially connected world are bringing a strong network centric approach to social cause organizing.

ReAmp Case Study:
These points are all well illustrated in the story of …..

What new leadership behaviors can we learn from in networks? Networks are often successful because they embody a set of values (sometimes referred to as a network mindset) that shape how people and organizations interact. Leadership is created through relationships and what we do together not who we are as individuals actors. A closer look at what is contributing to network success can teach us about the leadership process. These examples demonstrate values that are part of the leadership ethos of a network and demonstrate individual and group behaviors that increase leadership impact.

● Generosity: The founder of KaBOOM!, Darell Hammond, tells a story about a breakthrough on their mission of getting a playground within the reach of every child when they asked, "why don't we just give away the model? We can't do everything anyway. If we give it away people can replicate it on their own."
● Letting Go of Control: The last presidential election campaign, developed social technologies that enabled people to organize their friends and communities. This was possible because campaign organizers let go of control and concerns about whether people would do what they said they would do or stay on message.
● Trust and Reciprocity: Networks assume good will and build trust so that people from diverse perspectives and experiences can connect, interact together and find common ground. Lawrence Community Works uses a network centric organizing approach to engage 50,000 members who are driving community change in Lawrence, MA. Community members build trust and connections by hosting dinners to talk about their journey to the neighborhood and what their experience has been while living there. Action emerges from these conversations.
● Transparency: When people in organizations work in ways that are more transparent, accessible and understandable to people outside the organization, the walls between inside and outside become more porous. Transparency creates more opportunities for engagement. Ideas and resources flow more freely and creativity is sparked. The authors of this report agreed to collaboratively write and edit each other’s work on a public wiki in order to elicit more feedback and engage more people in promoting a more inclusive, networked and collective models of leadership. There are now over 200 people signed on to the wiki.
● Accountability: Authentic relationships create the conditions for mutual support and accountability. Accountability and responsibility are not enforced through rules, rather people become accountable to one another and the larger network because they care about each other. Nonprofit executive directors in Boston neighborhoods historically looked out for their own interests without thinking much about the well-being of the whole community until they formed strong, trusting relationships with each other through a fellowship program. Since then, they trust and care about each other deeply, leading them to act in ways that value the whole community, not just their short-term self-interest.

What is different about network leadership? Network leadership practices clash with strongly held ideas about leadership that are prevalent in the nonprofit sector and society at large. Given the rootedness of our ideals about individual responsibility, we frequently develop narratives about leadership that attribute accomplishments to individual effort and merit overlooking the ways in which many people were contributing to a success. This narrative often leads us to fear being outperformed by others, and a desire to protect our competitive edge. This leadership mindset is not conducive to generosity or transparency. Our elevation of individual leaders relegates leadership to a select group making it difficult to see leadership in everyone who wants to get involved and take action. The Obama campaign would not have had its success if they saw volunteers as campaign workers who needed to be managed by a few central leaders.

The chart below illustrates some of these differences:

Traditional Leader Model	Collective network leadership
● Leader exerts influence over followers ● Leadership in organizations is top down & hierarchical ● Achievements attributed to strength of individual leader and failures are attributed to his/her shortcomings as a leader ● Leaders can be developed but not everyone has leadership potential	● Individuals and groups connect & align efforts to support a common purpose. ● Leadership is a dynamic process with people assuming many roles ● Achievements are produced through collective leadership effort and failures & experimentation are embraced for advancing collective learning and adaptation. ● Everyone has the ability to exercise leadership

What does network leadership have to do with non-profit leadership? The overwhelming majority of people who are exercising leadership on the issues that are dear to them are still doing it as staff, donors, volunteers and researchers in nonprofit organizations. As demonstrated in the Re_AMP Case Study a network strategy can connect the work of many nonprofit organizations to make a target like an 80% reduction in carbon emissions possible. Of course, this required people to connect, not as leaders of their specific organizations, but in a process of leadership where they could leverage the resources of their organizations and networks for a collectively defined and held goal. Individuals and groups representing the 120 organizations that were part of Re-AMP created the conditions for success by investing significant time to get to know each other and understand what each brought to their relationship and work together. This network mindset may create tensions for people who also hold a view of their leadership as being accountable for protecting the short-term interests of their organization. Does this mean that people working in nonprofit organizations need to have two leadership styles: one for leading inside their organizations and one for network leadership? We think not.

As we engage in leadership in networks, we are expanding our understanding of the kind of leadership we need for dealing with complex problems across all spheres of social change work. We should not confuse organizational management with leadership in networks or leadership in general. Leadership is exercised whenever people seek each other out to collaborate and learn together. This happens within organizations, often informally, without regard to the organizational chart that defines appropriate channels of authority and communication. Informal networks enable information to flow more easily between people, help people find solutions to problems, and are often the source of creative ideas. If our primary lens recognizes leadership as influential individuals, then we may well fail to see leadership in informal networks or recognize the value of connecting to people in different organizations, and cultivating supporters outside organizational boundaries.

Traditional ideas about leadership will not work in a network where behaviors are more inherently collective, where sharing and giving away ideas and credit is valued, or when letting go of control unleashes the potential for many more people to become involved in leadership. Collective leadership can also enhance our work in organizations. As more people expand their understanding of leadership and and cultivate their abilities to exercise collective leadership, they will accomplish more using network and organizational strategies.

What are network leadership competencies?

There are five key competencies needed to effectively lead within a network, use network thinking and tools, and tackle complex problems in the nonprofit sector. All of the competencies are enhanced by a network mindset and network literacy. Network literacy implies familiarity with the concepts of networks and their dynamics. A network mindset is the awareness and understanding that individuals and organizations are embedded in networks, and that social change impacts are more likely to occur as a result of applying network competencies.

Connecting: Relationships are the foundation of leadership as a collective process and strongly valued in networks. Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) is a nonprofit community development corporation working to transform and revitalize the physical, economic, and social landscape of Lawrence, Massachusetts. LCW’s goal is to create a new “environment of connectivity” where residents can more easily connect to information, opportunity and each other. Their belief is that if thousands of residents are induced to “get back in the game” of working together and taking leadership roles in Lawrence, they can truly revitalize the City.

Bridging and weaving: The fragmentation of the nonprofit sector makes large-scale social change and solving complex problems extremely difficult. Understanding where connections are weak, and intentionally building bridges across silos and other divides creates a stronger foundation for joint action and alignment of effort. Network weaving is the intentional process of connecting people, e.g. introducing people who know you but do not know each other; reaching out to new people and making people with different points of view feel included; and inviting and facilitating conversations across differences. Expanding the network’s connections and reach is critical for creativity, innovation, and impact.

Organizing: In a traditional organizational model, leaders manage participation through strategic plans with prescribed roles; in networks, leadership is more distributed and often self-authorizing as people and groups take on different roles, and coordinate and align their actions to move in a desired direction. Network members understand that small and large contributions aggregate to produce a larger collective impact. Bill Traynor of LCW describes how critical it is to effective community organizing that networks create multiple entry points for people to find ways to do what they can and feel valued as contributors. Becoming adept at using social media can increase broader engagement and make it easier to support large-scale social change efforts.

Action Learning/Reflection: Learning in networks occurs through constant experimentation and failure. Creating space for continual reflection and assessment is a practice that enables networks to learn quickly, let go of what does not work, and build on successes. MomsRising celebrates mistakes with "joyful funerals" to acknowledge the value of trying new things, and letting go when things do not work. Leadership that embraces risk taking, openness and commits to continuous learning and integration is more likely to produce social benefit and transform the status quo. Many funding models for organizations require short-term results for continuous support: this practice often undermines the bold experimentation which depends on learning from failure. Action learning is a hallmark of a vibrant network where plans emerge and action is adapted in response to experimentation with many ideas.

Learning about self: Individuals in networks need to be committed to learning about themselves. Bill Traynor of Lawrence Community Works shares his reflections about the personal learning and reflection one must do to be effective in a network. "The leader has to genuinely participate in the environment in order to deploy herself appropriately. The challenges of this way of being are profound, and those challenges start with a fundamental reflection about 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. How you hold onto or let go let go of strongly held convictions about what is right and what will work. All of these things are of course rooted in the essence of who we are as people.”

Systems Thinking: Efforts to address societal problems like climate change, poverty, or class and racial disparities, require a deep understanding of how systems work and perpetuate themselves. It is not possible to understand class, culture and power and how to work on behalf of social justice without paying attention to how opportunity structures create and maintain racial and class inequities. Looking at interactions among multiple factors that influence system performance is critical for identifying leverage points for change. In the RE-AMP project the first course of action for the organizations and funders was to begin by understanding the system they wanted to change. They mapped the system to identify 4 key levers necessary to change the system: stop the building of coal plants, retire existing coal plants, replace coal generated electricity with renewable power and reduce electric consumption through efficiency. This multi-leverage point strategy requires an ability to see the big picture and understand how actions need to align to produce systems change.

What does this mean for leadership development?

To support leadership as a collective process with the competencies needed to work effectively in networks and in more connected ways will require that we rethink leadership development delivery strategies. Most leadership program focus on building the skill sets of individuals, often to prepare them to lead in organizations. As we embrace leadership as a process enacted by multiple people engaged in change, what are the costs of selecting and developing individuals? Are we inadvertently reinforcing individualism that has so infused our leadership thinking? If leadership emerges through the process of taking action, then the needed skills for success do not reside in one person (the leader), they reside in the capacity of small groups of people contributing their skills, coordinating actions, and collaborating for greater impact. If networks are essential for large-scale change, then why do we focus so much attention on individual skill-building. In a community change project wouldn’t it make more sense to connect people with different skills and life experiences to strengthen their social capital so that they can be lead more effectively together. These are important questions for the leadership development field. While it may well be possible to help individuals learn collective behaviors, and develop and practice collaborative skills within a cohort environment; our traditional approaches have not led to the impacts we seek. Are there better ways to help groups, networks and communities exercise leadership for greater public benefit?

Lessons from how leadership is being developed in networks:

Cultivating a network mindset: Leadership programs that cultivate a network mindset focus less on skill-building and more on relationship-building and helping each other to see and experience the power of interconnectedness. Bridging barriers and boundaries, and becoming aware of your position and role relative to others shifts perceptions about where power and influence lie from the individual to the network.

Multiple entry points: A number of organizations that use network strategies create multiple entry points for people to connect to small groups of people around issues they care about. Multiple entry points give people a chance to meet other people, build relationships and find opportunities to contribute their gifts. In this process, networks form, and people grow and develop their leadership as they do work together.

Convening and Process: In the example of the ReAMP project leadership emerged when people set time set aside to get to know each other and find the connections in their work. Network mapping was a powerful tool for visualizing their connections. Participants who all had numerous responsibilities in their own organizations and the container that gave them time and space and the process that supported know each other in deeper ways supported collective leadership.

Learning by doing: In a collective culture where small groups of people are actively supported to take risks and reflect and learn together a couple of things are happening. Bonds of trust and reciprocity are created as each person contributes their ideas, talents and resources; no one person is the “knowing leader.” As the group interacts, issues and conflicts undoubtedly arise. A group’s capacity to manage those issues depends on the quality of relationships they have together, and their collective willingness to find solutions that work for the group as a whole, and move their collective work forward.

Relationship building and weaving: As people in LCW got to know neighbors they had not met, share their stories and talk about their community, collective grievances and aspirations emerged connecting people in their desire and willingness to take action.

Implications for Leadership Development

These lessons are being echoed from other experiments in leadership development that have achieved surprising results in short time by convening multiple stakeholders in a specific region who are focused on an urgent problem, or by convening people in small communities to have guided discussions about their experiences of poverty and what to do about it. There are some striking similarities that point to new approaches to developing leadership capacity:

Support people, groups and organizations who want to work on a common concern: Many of the leadership strategies that can point to dramatic changes in the lives of people in a community are supporting people in the process of taking action together on a specific problem or issue.

Provide convening and process support that build relationships: A number of successful approaches focus on supporting connection and understanding each other better (and in the process ones self). For example, the systems mapping process was helpful to the ReAMP participants and study circles the framed questions for participants in the Horizon’s program helping them to draw on their experiences and wisdom to shape plans, and the neighborhood circle process in LCW used storytelling to build relationships among estranged neighbors.

Facilitate Action Learning: Learning from co conspirators in joint action or colleagues in a field develops everyone involved. Fostering action learning, provide time and structure to reflection, and facilitating communities of learning and practice all develop leadership.

Brokering resources: Maybe an important role for people and organizations who want to strengthen social change leadership is one of identifying and securing resources. Most of the approaches we are drawing from have an asset based philosophy and assume that groups and communities have among their members many of the skills that they need, so they don’t come with a fixed curriculum that some feel presumes a deficit of skills. This is not to say that in the course of work and trail and error that groups involved in change will not recognize that there may be resources, knowledge or skills that would be helpful. The difference is that people engaged in leadership are identifying what they need. Leadership programs or coaches can be providers of what is needed.

Recommendations and questions for people doing leadership work:

Learn about network strategies: There are lots of great resources, you can join or start communities of practice with other leadership folks who want to get up to speed and compare notes about what it means to adopt a leadership mindset, practice yourself with new social technologies, think about what it would mean to have a more networked design for your program and how it could help your alumni organizing.
Question your assumptions about leadership and the role of individuals: Can you bring a new lens to stories of change and the role of leaders, or leadership?
at model of leadership are you promoting in your leadership development work?
Question what you have assumed about leadership development delivery strategies: Is there a way of inserting leadership development into change work and supporting the groups work rather than focusing on individuals?
Bring network thinking to your program graduates, they are a network. You could use network maps to help them learn more about the way their network is working and to strengthen it to support increased collaboration.
Competencies: In your leadership development work are you helping to cultivate competencies the increase connection, action learning, bridging and collective action.

Leadership and Networks (Overview and Resources)

bcelnik — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:07:22 CDT

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Overview

The Leadership and Networks collaborative research project, launched by the Leadership Learning Community in 2009, seeks to influence how leadership is cultivated and supported in the social sector; and to more effectively support efforts to mobilize collective action across sectors to address more systemically complex social and environmental issues. For more information about this project please contact Claire Reinelt .

Purpose: To improve the capacity to catalyze, develop and support leadership networks in the social sector.
Rationale: Broadening our approach to leadership development from a focus on leader characteristics and behavior to include how leadership emerges through relationships, communities, and networks opens up new opportunities for understanding and promoting leadership that can address complex, systemic challenges with new thinking and solutions.
Audience: Leadership development programs and foundations investing in leadership that are currently supporting individuals, groups and/or networks.
Products: Short (12 page) publication outlining the main insights from our research, a competency assessment tool to help leadership programs and foundations investing in leadership implement some of the recommendations around leadership and networks, and an online resource directory featuring key documents and tools (see resource directory below).

Updates:

Synthesis Framework 7/18
Synthesis 6/10

Resources

Instructions: To add links, please find the right content type category below and enter the name of the resource, the URL and a brief description. To upload files please select the "add attachment" option under "more tools". Please keep in mind that this website has the capacity to store up to 40 attachments so we encourage users to post files as links (vs. attachments) when possible. If the file is not currently online, please see the FAQ section for additional instructions. For more information check out the Leadership for a New Era user guide!

Check out the Leadership and Networks Zotero Library!

Books

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Nonprofits
Allison Fine, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age
Alison Gilchrist, The Well-Connected Community: A Network Approach to Community Development
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Brafman, O., 2006. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, New York: Portfolio.
Raelin, Joseph, Creating Leaderful Organizations
Siegel, D. (2010). Organizing for Social Partnership: Higher Education in Cross-Sector collaboration. NY, NY: Routledge.
Beth Kanter and Alison Fine, The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change
Li, C., 2010. Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead 1st ed., Jossey-Bass.

Practice Guides

Patti Anklam, Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World
Vandeventer, Paul and Myrna Mandell, Networks that Work: A Practitioner's Guide to Managing Networked Action
Network for Good, Measure Everything: Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It? (Analytics and Measurement Techniques)

Articles

Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt , Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks . This paper offers a framework for conceptualizing different types of leadership networks and uses case examples to identify outcomes typically associated with each type of network. One challenge for the field of leadership development has been how to evaluate leadership networks. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a promising evaluation approach that uses mathematics and visualization to represent the structure of relationships between people, organizations, goals, interests, and other entities within a larger system. Core social network concepts are introduced and explained to illuminate the value of SNA as an evaluation and capacity-building tool.
Valdis Krebs and June Holley, Building Sustainable Communities through Network Building
Skye Bender-deMoll, Potential Human Rights Uses of Network Analysis and Mapping
Bill Traynor, Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership in a Connected World
Bill Traynor, Building Community in Place
Monitor Institute, Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset
Lisa Weinberg, Leadership Development for Community Action: An Ethnographic Inquiry: Northwest Federation of Community Organizations
Jennifer Dodge, Sonia Ospina and Roy Sparrow, Making Partnership a Habit: Margie McHugh and the New York Immigration Coalition
Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, "The Six Practice of High Impact Non Profits" from their book, Forces for Good (2008). The article is an excerpt from the book, as published in Fast Company magazine, and promotes "nurturing nonprofit networks" and "sharing leadership" as effective practices.
Hygeia's Constellation: The thesis publication by Bobby Milstein, coordinator of the Syndemics Prevention Network at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Syndemics takes a critical perspective in looking at the interaction between disease, social conditions and navigating health futures.
Heather Gowdy, Alex Hildebrand, David La Piana, Melissa Mendes Campos: Convergence: How Five Trends will Reshape the Social Sector (2009)
Wilfred H. Drath, Cynthia D. McCauley, Charles J. Palus, Ellen Van Velsor, Patricia M. G. O’Connor, John B. McGuire:
Direction, Alignment, Commitment: Toward a More Integrative Ontology of Leadership (2008)
Otto Scharmer, Leadership development is not about filling a gap but about igniting a field of inspired connection and action, October 2009.
Ross Wirth, Transformative Networking (attached below). This is a work in progress concept paper on building leader networks to bring about emergent organizational and community change.
Peggy Holman. From Chaos to Coherence: The Emergence of Inspired Organizations and Enlightened Communities (see below).
Yannick Rumpala, “Knowledge and praxis of networks as a political project,” Twenty-First Century Society: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences 4, no. 3 (2009): 277.
Steve Waddell, “A New Approach to Network Leadership,” Networking Action, May 4, 2010, http://blog.networkingaction.net/?p=517.
McLeod Grant, H. & Fulton, K., 2010. Monitor Institute: KaBOOM! Case Study, Monitor Institute.
Claire Reinelt, Leadership and the Networked Nonprofit, July 28, 2010.
John McGuire, Charles Palus et al., Transforming your Organization -- A white paper that provides a framework for transforming an organization's leadership culture from a development approach that focuses on the individual heroic leader to the "unfolding, emergent, realization of leadership as a collective activity."

Videos

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century. A keynote by Eben Moglen from the Software Freedom Law Center that provides a compelling and moving story about "the weaving of open source into the century long struggle for freedom, dignity and human rights."
Shirky, C., 2005. Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html.

Presentations

Social Networks for Social Change. A well-done powerpoint by the Monitor Institute (Noah Flowers, Diana Scearce and Heather McLeod Grant) on Network Basics, Understanding Your Network, Characteristics of Healthy Networks, On-Line Networks and Social Media, and Network Leadership and Mindset.
International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age; featuring Noshir Contractor, Manuel Castells, and others; includes conference videos and written summary: http://ascnetworksnetwork.org/
Collaborating Via Artifacts : Understanding the Real Difference Between Online and Face-to-Face Collaboration (by Eugene Eric Kim)
Social Media Network Analysis with NodeXL, Marc Smith, 2009

Initiatives

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has a Organizational and Network Effectiveness Wiki with lots of valuable resources on leadership and coaching, organizational and network assessment, strategic planning and mergers and such.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has been fostering and supporting social networks in its neighborhood, community, and leadership initiatives. They have overseen the publication series of five reports that looks at the definitions, research, power, practices, and insights relating the impact of social networks on family strengthening and community change as part of their Making Connections Initiative. These reports demonstrate that positive social networks is a key ingredient to creating authentic, sustainable change in struggling neighborhoods among other important outcomes.
The Barr Foundation convened a group of experts and facilitated a study on the growing use of network strategies by nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, and foundations. The report Network Power for Philanthropy and Nonprofits includes their key findings.
Monitor Institute and the Packard Foundation partnered on a two year inquiry on Philanthropy and Networks Exploration (PNE) into how foundations can tap and support the power of networks.
The California Endowment has launched a 10-year initiative: the Building Health Communities: California Living 2.0 I in 14 California communities. A CalConnect Social Networking Site has been created so that community members, policymakers and health experts throughout the state can share experiences and information

Research projects

Lawrence CommunityWorks -- a community network case study

Capacity-building and assessment tools

Skye Bender-deMoll, Potential Human Rights Uses of Network Analysis and Mapping This paper is one of the clearest statements about how to use network approaches to have an impact on policy and transform a field of practice (e.g., human rights). Very practical tools are described and specific projects are suggested. The paper was prepared for the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Peter Plastrik and Madeline Taylor, Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change. The Handbook starts with the point of view that networks provide social-change agents with a fundamentally distinct and remarkably promising “organizing principle” to use to achieve ambitious goals. The handbook provides practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about “connectivity.”
Peter Plastrik and Madeline Taylor, Network Health Scorecard focuses on key aspects of any network: purpose, performance, operations, and capacity. It's designed for group use--network members answer each question and then discuss their answers--or on your own.
June Holley, Network Weaver Checklist.
The Monitor Institute: Network Effectiveness - Diagnostic and Development Tool

Blogs with good resources on networks

The Monitor Institute -- Working Wikily: Making Sense of Networks and Social Change -- is a blog designed to provide practitioners in the social sector with a filter for the events that are pushing the field towards a more networked form of work and a perspective on how and why those events are unfolding. A number of good resources on network effectiveness.
- Network Resources: Leadership
Networks, Complexity and Relatedness -- A blog by Patti Anklam
Interaction Institute for Social Change Network Blog
- A recent post by Curtis Ogden Leadership for Our Times describes three leadership approaches: adaptive leadership, facilitative leadership and network leadership; and the interconnections between them.
Connectedness -- A blog by Bruce Hoppe
- A recent post Influence and Social Capital of 21st Century Leaders describes different network leadership strategies.
Claire Reinelt 's blog at the Leadership Learning Community site
Network Weaving -- A blog by June Holley
Network Weaver website -- resources by June Holley
The Network Thinker -- A blog by Valdis Krebs
Impact Alliance -- Network Strengthening Resources
Networking Action by Steve Waddell
Putman, K., 2010. 20 Social Media Resources for Nonprofits. Philanthropy411 Blog. Available at: https://philanthropy411.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/20-social-media-resources-for-nonprofits/.

Videos

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy -- A three minute video that demonstrates the role of leadership and followership in creating a movement, and draws out lessons learned for movement-building.

Bibliography

Check out a bibliography that Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt created on social networks and leadership. You can search the bibliography by topic categories provided on the right-hand side of the page.
Network Building for Social Change-- A resource list put together by the Interaction Institute for Social Change

Steve Waddell, a national and international expert on global networks and social change has more than twenty years expertise as a researcher, practitioner and facilitator of global, regional and national networks. Check out his lengthy bibliography on his website Networking Action
Resources for Connected Nonprofit Leadership: A Collection of Research. This is a collection of readings put together by Beth Beard and Janice Epstein for Impact Brokers. It includes three main sections: Networks and Leadership, Social Capital and Networks, and Social Capital and Those that Nonprofits Serve.
Building Networks for Learning -- The first articles look generically at how to build and map networks, the next series of papers address different aspects of working together - team building, communities of practice and learning groups, and the last set of links provides resources on institutional approaches for working across groups and organisations, including partnerships and boundary organisations.

Wikis and Learning Communities

Knowledge Sharing Toolkit: wiki featuring information on knowledge sharing practices.
Network Weaver Wiki
Leadership and Networks Delicious Feed
The Change Alliance Using Stakeholder Processes and Complexity Thinking in Governing for Sustainability and Social Justice

Network Effectiveness Resources (David and Lucile Packard Foundation)
Working Wikily Wiki: Project space for the Knight Foundation and Monitor Institute Emerging Network Practices project.

Case Studies

Network Development and Catalyzing Collaborative Action on Poverty and Injustice (Synergos Institute)

Meetings and Events

NYC Leadership and Networks Learning Circle at the Surdna Foundation (July 18, 2011)

Network of Network Funders Webinar, Co-hosted by the Leadership Learning Community and the Monitor Institute (December 2010)

Leadership and Networks Partners Call (July 22, 2010)
Leadership and Networks Partners Call (May 11, 2010)
Boston Leadership and Networks Learning Circle (March 26, 2010)
Leadership for a New Era Engagement Webinar (January 19, 2010)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Please credit the author(s) and link back to this website.

Supporting Community Leadership

nataliallc — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:42:21 CDT

General Theory of Community Change and the Role of Leadership

A lot of work has been done to understand more about what needs to be in place for a place based community to effectively take action to improve community life and well being. There is a growing body of experience and literature telling us that the best solutions are produced when its people closest to a problem who decided what issues to focus on and how to tackle them. There are many positive examples that support this belief described in detail in many of the materials sited below. The knowledge and resources a community can bring to this problem are often not tapped (or stifled) when people outside a community are the ones promoting a specific solution. We also need to understand what gets in the way and prevents communities from taking positive action. Some of these obstacles reside in structures that deliver advantage to only some members of the community while perpetuating the lack of resources to others, often along lines of race and economic status. As a result, deep divides may exist between individuals, individuals and organizations that are not meeting their needs, and often among institutions and city officials. There are several critical questions for those who want to support community change that emerges from within the community:

1. What undermines a community's ability to organize its members and resources to produce changes that improve the well being of everyone, especially those most in need?
2. What ingredients make it possible for a community to take effective action on issues and opportunities important to its members?
3. What strategies or supports could help a community to develop what it will need to develop and realize a vision of a better life for its members?
4. What is the role of leadership in the community change process?
5. What would indicate the success of strategies or supports intended to help a community develop its capacity to lead community driven change?

We would like you to help us answer these questions. Please share resources, stories and comments. This is a public wiki. If you would like to contribute just let us know you would like to be a writer. We hope together to develop a theory of change about how to build community leadership capacity.

Assumptions

There are a number of assumptions about the value of community driven change that have created the context for this project and we would like to make them explicit up front.

Community vitality, problem solving and positive change occur when people across a community connect to identify and tackle the tough problems they care most about.
A number of communities are not able to respond optimally to problems or opportunities, often because of structures that reinforce differences in access to resources related to ethnicity, race and economic status; history of conflicts, constituency politics that divide different parts of a community,external market forces, etc..
It is possible to provide external supports/strategies that can increase a community’s long term and sustained ability to proactively mobilize its resources to improve the lives of its members.
Strong collective leadership that builds on difference (often by engaging in difficult conversations) is a key to a community’s adaptive ability to respond positively to challenges and opportunities.

General Theory of Community Change

To develop a theory of change about building community leadership we are drawing on practice and research from the leadership development field and the community capacity building field.

What creates the capability for a community to act on its own behalf to impact change?

Although there are many types of community (identify, field of work, geography), for the purposes of this exploration we are focusing on community of place. Change is absolute. Change is often imposed on communities by external forces, political agendas that originate outside of the community, economic interests and market forces, an initiative based on research not grounded in the community, changing demographics, etc. The primary question is one of how to support a shift so that change is initiated and enacted from within a community on its own behalf.

Elements of Community Change:

Many people studying community change acknowledge several key areas of change: Purpose, Processes, Relationships and Resources. Below are some of the concrete elements of community change related to these key areas. They are drawn from a quick scan and aggregation of a number of different resources that have been produced about building community capacity. The resources are sited at the end of this brief synthesis. These elements are organized in different ways but are present in much of the research and evaluation findings.

Focus on positive community improvement: Ability to align efforts around a common purpose and goal that will improve some element of community life. Alignment is increased when there is a sense of urgency about the issue being taken on. Sometimes people who have more resources are better able to organize themselves to advocate for a change that benefits only a small part of the community. The community purpose needs to extend to even the most disadvantaged people in the community with a recognition that a problem in one part of the community, like a poor performing school, will effect the well being of the entire community. Alignment around a "community good" needs to bring a class, power and culture lens to whether a proposed purpose is increasing or closing the divide of opportunity and disadvantage.

Work from community history, values and culture: Ability to make meaning together of the community’s history, values and culture in order to build on strengths and willingly engage one another around historic tensions, pain, or mistrust.

Integrate collective process and individual agency: Individuals recognize the opportunity to take effective action with others and they grow their commitment and skills individually and collectively through processes that support: identifying a problem or opportunity that has generated a lot of community interest or concern; developing strategies for achieving some change on behalf of the common goal; and holding one another accountable for following through on commitments.

Learning from Action: Experimentation is appreciated as part of learning and strong feedback loops that support adaptation and keep the work moving in a forward direction. Participants learn to use data to understand and monitor changes in their community’s well-being.

Build relationships that bridge among individuals and institutions: Strong connection and trusting relationships create a strong social fabric from which share frustrations and aspirations emerge to motivate joint action. Among these connections it is important to have the strong ties which create solid bonds and to also reach out to build new ties that bring new ideas, perspectives and resources to the work across different parts of the community. This includes people and institutions.

Understand systems and structures: Individuals and institutions identify the interdependence and intersection of multiple issues and the potential to work on policies or through institutional partnerships in order to leverage larger changes in the system that produce more enduring benefits.

Access and utilize resources: Material and knowledge resources are available to support the work of the community in moving from a shared sense of purpose to action.

What is the role of leadership in community change?

For people in a community to believe that they have the power to create change through their interactions with one another requires thinking differently about leadership. Often times people in communities believe that it is only a few recognized leaders that have the power to do anything. Leadership is unleashed within a community when any individual or group who wants to do something to make things better is supported to act. Leadership in a community is the process by which people in a community come together for a purpose, take action and learn from their experiences about how to create change that will improve their lives. When leadership is seen as a process it is possible for individuals, groups and organizations to acquire, develop and mobilize from within the community the abilities needed to create change. Below are some of the specific capacities that have been successfully developed through leadership strategies. These are individuals and collective capacities that contribute to the likelihood that a community will exercise leadership to organize and generate solutions to challenges or respond to opportunities.

Action learning
Developing vision and purpose
Use of data
Group meaning making
Storytelling
Values identification
Relationship building
Action planning/organizing
Systems thinking
Culture, class, and power framework
Self reflection
Crossing boundaries

Community Leadership Delivery Strategies:

These are examples of delivery strategies that have been used successfully to develop some of the capacities described above, capacities that increase the likelihood that a community will be able to design and implement changes strategies.

Community Coaching: Horizon’s
Collaborative Leadership Projects: BCBS, Sierra Health,
Collective leadership program/training components: KLCC, Leadership Plenty
Multi-stakeholder Recruitment Convening: e.g. Theory U
Theory of aligned contribution: LAP
Network strategies: Lawrence Community Works
Popular Education: Promotoras, Horizons
Organizing: IAF, Highlander
Embedded within Initiatives: Building Healthy Communities
Youth development

What outcomes would indicate that a community is developing the capacity to produce positive change that improves the well being of its members?

Individual outcomes:

More individuals believe that they can exercise leadership in their community and are willing to commit time and resources to involvement.
Individuals who want to take action are finding ways to connect with others and growing their commitment and abilities through joint work.
People are successfully building new relationships with people who are different from themselves.

Community outcomes:

Communities are able to identify a common concern or opportunity and align their actions to make progress towards their goal. (Community change efforts produce positive result and learning from failure.)
Communities are using data, policy change, and an understanding of systems to work on enduring solutions that improve access to opportunity for all members of the community.
Active members of the community believe that they will be able to take more effective action on community issues in the future because they have the process, relationships, skills and resources they need to act.
More people are connecting, and across new boundaries to work together, even when it requires working through conflict and difficulty.

Resources:

“Kellogg Leadership for Community Change: Crossing Boundaries, Strengthening Communities”, Maenette K.P. Ah Nee-Benham

“Community Capacity Building – A Review of the Literature", Government of South Australia, Dept. of Health

“Capacity Building in Rural Communities: Lessons, Observations, and Opportunities from Leadership Scholars, Practitioners and the Northwest Area Foundation’s Horizons Program”, Diane L. Morehouse

“Engaging in Sustainable Community Change”, "A Community Guide to Working with a Coach” both by Ken Hubbell and Mary Emery

“The Role of Leadership Development in Place Based Initiatives”, Leadership Learning Community

“Theory of Change: A Practical Tool for Action, Results and Learning”, Annie E. Casey

“Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale”, Margaret Wheatly

“Collective Impact”, Mark Kramer and John Kania

“Mapping Change: Using a Theory of Change to Guide Evaluation and Planning”, Grantcraft

“A Guide to Community Coaching”, Everyday Democracy

Leadership and Networks: Preliminary Framework

nataliallc — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:06:52 CDT

[Updated on 7/18/11] This is a framing piece for the Leadership and Networks Report. We will be using this as scaffolding for the synthesis and pulling the examples and ideas from latest iteration into this piece. Please feel free to help or to provide feedback on this framework and whether this helps to focus the report, especially for the primary audience of people doing leadership development work.

Leadership and Networks
A Preliminary Framework

Background: Social media and networks have been in the spotlight of social change. Our interest has piqued against a backdrop of dramatic events: massive protests in Egypt that led to the resignation of Mubarak or 13 million supporters engaged and almost three quarters of a billion dollars raised in Obama’s 2008 presidential election campaign. Some media outlets described the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless revolution. But was it? We want to dig into the role of leadership in network success stories. Without re-examining tried and true beliefs about what leadership is and how to support it, we may find ourselves on the sidelines of impressive network actions that are tackling seemingly insurmountable problems like carbon emissions, poverty or the hold of a repressive regime.

Why this is important to people doing leadership development: The opportunity to reach, influence and mobilize exponentially more people is important to everyone who is engaged in change work and raises a number of important questions for people who are supporting and developing social justice leadership:

Is the ability to utilize network strategies and tools an important leadership competency for everyone?
Are traditional leadership models effective in today’s connected environment?
What can we learn from leadership in networks about new ways of leading and developing leadership?
What can people doing leadership development work do to better prepare leadership in a connected and networked world?

Where we are now: Tremendous resources have been invested in the non-profit sector and sadly, this massive amount of effort is not achieving a similar scale of transformation and positive change on “wicked" social problems. We live in an increasingly global economy where complex and interdependent problems cannot be solved by one individual or even one large institution. And yet, mainstream ideas about leadership have changed very little. We remain attached to heroic models of leadership placing extremely high expectations on individuals going it alone.

What we need: We need to move beyond leadership models that focus on building the skills of individuals and challenge ourselves to understand how to cultivate leadership as the process by which multiple actors align their efforts to take action. We need a new mental model of leadership and new approaches to leadership development if we are to move the needle on any significant social problem by taking advantage of network strategies and more connected ways of working together.

Are networks the answer? Network strategies are no more the answer to every change initiative than organizations can be, and yet organizational change strategies have been prioritized for decades as the best way to make change happen. The problems of duplication and fragmentation persist, even in the face of growing recognition that an organization working alone cannot make the really big changes that are needed. We settle for doing our part on our small piece of the puzzle and for the most part, it’s not adding up to a huge collective impact on any major problem. There are many reasons to pay attention to networks and what they mean for leadership:

Networks increase influence and reach by amplifying messages through social media, producing innovation by bridging organizations and sectors, coordinating the actions of more people with fewer resources, and aligning the work of individuals and organizations to produce greater collective impact on our goals.
People and groups will exercise more effective leadership if they know how and when to use network strategies.
Using network strategies effectively requires different leadership values and behaviors that clash with mainstream leadership assumptions
Millennials who have grown up in a socially connected world are bringing a strong network centric approach to social cause organizing.

What can we learn about leadership from networks? Networks are often successful because they embody a set of values (sometimes referred to as a network mindset) that shape how people and organizations interact. These examples demonstrate values that are part of the leadership ethos of a network and demonstrate individual and group behaviors that increase leadership impact.

Generosity: The founder of KaBOOM!, Darell Hammond, tells a story about a breakthrough on their mission of getting a playground within the reach of every child when they asked, "why don't we just give away the model? We can't do everything anyway. If we give it away people can replicate it on their own."
Letting Go of Control: The last presidential election campaign developed social technologies that enabled people to organize their friends and communities. This was possible because campaign organizers let go of control and concerns about whether people would do what they said they would do or stay on message.
Trust and Reciprocity: Networks assume good will and build trust so that people from diverse experiences can connect, interact and find common ground. Lawrence Community Works began hosting dinners for people to tell their stories and now 50,000 have connected and are acting on things they care about.
Transparency: When people work in ways that are more transparent, accessible and understandable to people outside their organization, the walls between inside and outside become more porous. LLC involved more people and generated more ideas for a collaborative research project by using a public wiki.
Accountability: Accountability is created through relationship (not rules) when people care about each other. Nonprofit executive directors in Boston neighborhoods historically looked out for their own interests until they formed strong, trusting relationships with each other through a fellowship program to incubate a network.

What is different about network leadership? Network leadership clashes with strongly held ideas about leadership in the nonprofit sector and society at large. The chart below illustrates some of these differences:

Traditional Leader Model	Collective Network Leadership
Leader exerts influence over followers Leadership in organizations is top down & hierarchical Achievements attributed to strength of individual leader and failures are attributed to his/her shortcomings as a leader Leaders can be developed but not everyone has leadership potential	Individuals and groups connect & align efforts to support a common purpose. Leadership is a dynamic process with people assuming many roles Achievements are produced through collective leadership effort and failures & experimentation is embraced for advancing learning and adaptation. Everyone has the ability to exercise leadership

What are network leadership competencies? There are at least five key competencies needed to effectively lead within a network, utilize network strategies and tackle complex problems.

Connecting: Relationships are the foundation of leadership as a collective process and strongly valued in networks.

Organizing: In networks, leadership is more distributed and often self-authorizing as people and groups take on different roles, and align their actions to move the system in a desired direction. Network members understand that small and large contributions aggregate to produce a larger collective impact.

Systems Thinking: Efforts to take on societal problems like climate change, poverty, or class and racial disparities, require a deep understanding of how systems work and perpetuate themselves. It is not possible to work for social justice without paying attention to how opportunity structures create and maintain racial and class inequities.

Bridging and Weaving: The process of building diverse relationships is essential to social change endeavors. Revealing gaps in the nonprofit ecosystem is a first step towards bridging across silos and other divides that interfere with joint action and alignment of effort needed to tackle complex problems.

Action Learning/Reflection: Learning in networks occurs through constant experimentation and failure. Creating space for collective reflection and assessment enables networks to learn and leverage their successes. In the process of learning with others individuals learn also about themselves as agents of change.

What does this mean for leadership development? To support leadership that works effectively in networks and in more connected ways we need new leadership development delivery strategies. We can learn from how leadership is being developed in networks:

Multiple entry points: A number of organizations using network strategies have created multiple entry points that draw people into the work and provide many opportunities for people to take on new roles and acquire new skills in the course of the work.
Learning by doing: In a collective culture where people are actively supported to take risks and have the opportunity to learn together, a couple of things are happening. Everyone can be part of the leadership of doing and by learning together everyone is being developed.
Convening and Process: When people set time set aside to get to know each other and are supported with processes that help them understand how their work connects in a larger ecosystem, opportunities for collective action and accountability expand.
Relationship building and weaving: As people in LCW got to know neighbors they had not met, share their stories and talk about their community, collective grievances and aspirations emerged connecting people in their desire and willingness to take action.

Implications for Leadership Development
There are several implications, ideas and questions for people doing leadership work:
1. Learn and practice network strategies: Read up, experiment with new technology, try bringing a network lens to your program design and ideas about recruitment.
2. Question your assumptions about leadership and the role of individuals: What model of leadership are you promoting in your leadership development work?
3. Question your ideas about leadership development:Can you embed leadership development into change work to support the process rather than focusing on individuals?
4. Bring network thinking to your program graduates: Help them understand themselves as a network so they can weave, bridge and strengthen learning and collaboration.
5. Competencies: In your leadership development work, are you cultivating competencies that help participants to increase connection, understand systems, promote action learning, effective bridging and collective action.

Leadership and Networks Writers April 2011

nataliallc — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:41:02 CDT

April 21 2011

1:30 pm PST

Participants: Patti, Steve, Beth, Nance, Diana, Grady, Claire, Bella, Deborah, Natalia

Presentation:

Leadership and Race (Overview and Resources)

bcelnik — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 11:42:47 CDT

Update: The final Leadership and Race publication has been launched! Download the report or click here for more information.

Overview

We live in a multi-racial world where the ability to accumulate wealth, find a job, attend a good school, or live in a healthy neighborhood is largely determined by race. The Leadership and Race publication explores the ways in which our current thinking about leadership may actually be contributing to these growing disparities. Through this short publication we seek to influence leadership funders and practitioners across the nation to promote more inclusive leadership approaches and ultimately, promote racial justice.

Resources

Check out the Leadership and Race Zotero Public Library!

Books and Articles

"New Leadership for the 21st Century." In Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America, by Angela Glover Blackwell, Stewart Kwoh, and Manuel Pastor.
"Inside Inclusiveness: Race, Ethnicity and Nonprofit Organizations." The Denver Foundation.
"Weaving Color Lines: Race, Ethnicity, and the Work of Leadership in Social Change Organizations," by Sonia Ospina and Celina Su, in Leadership.
"Systems Thinking and Race" -- A primer by Stephen Menendian and Caitlin Watt irwan Institute for the Study of Race and
Ethnicity at The Ohio State University
“Power, Safety and Learning in Racially Diverse Groups,” By Erica Foldy, Peter Rivard and Tamara Buckley in Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2009, Vol. 8, No. 1, 25–41.
"Taking on Postracialism" by Rinku Sen (2009)
"Holding the Whole: Transformative Leadership" - a PowerPoint presentation by john a. powell at the 2nd Annual - A Gathering of Leaders, November 2008
Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment by The Applied Research Center, Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (2009)
A Conversation with Deborah Meehan of Leadership Learning Community – Cultivating Leadership for a New Era

Source: The New Prosperity Date: October 27 2010 Author: Alexis Schroeder

Leadership and Race Webinar: Key Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership Programs to Promote Racial Justice
Supporting leadership that promotes racial justice (Race-talk.org)

Guest blog on Race-talk.org By Deborah Meehan, Executive Director, Leadership Learning Community

Are Nonprofit Leadership Programs Culturally Biased?

Source:Common Good Careers Blog Date:October 15, 2010

Supporting Leadership That Promotes Racial Justice

Source: AlterNet
Date: September 14, 2010

How to Build, and Support, Movement Leadership

Source: ColorLines
Date: September 15, 2010

Do Subtle Discrimination and Social Justice Belong in Leadership Development Programs?

Source: RacismReview
Date: September 16, 2010

The Mosque in the Mirror

Source: TheAmerican Prospect
Date: September 20, 2010

Initiatives

Aspen Roundtable on Community Change - Structural Racism Initiative

The Roundtable began its work on structural racism in response to a call from leaders in fields such as community revitalization, social policy, anti-poverty, and philanthropy who were concerned about the racial disparities that they were observing in their work and frustrated by their inability to talk about race and racism, much less get a handle on it. It was commonly acknowledged among these leaders that although their work focused on low-income communities of color, they encountered very little discussion about race or racial issues or their effects on these communities and the children, youth, and families who resided in them. In order to directly address this need, the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change developed The Project on Structural Racism and Community Building.

The Denver Foundation's Inclusiveness Project

The Expanding Nonprofit Inclusiveness Initiative (ENII) is a project of The Denver Foundation, led by a steering committee of community leaders from throughout the seven-county Metro Denver area. Through its grantmaking work and conversations with leaders in Denver's nonprofit sector, The Denver Foundation discovered a widespread
community interest in developing a deeper understanding of how inclusiveness of diverse voices and experiences enhances and expands the work of nonprofits. The Denver Foundation Board of Trustees established ENII as a vehicle to help the community benefit from an increased knowledge of and commitment to inclusiveness. The mission of ENII is to enhance the effectiveness of Metro Denver's nonprofit organizations by helping nonprofits become more inclusive of people of color. While the ENII steering committee and The Denver Foundation recognize that all forms of inclusiveness are essential, the focus of this initiative is on issues of race and ethnicity.

Third Sector New England's Diversity Initiative

In 1990, a group of Boston-area funders established the Diversity Initiative. The program, today called the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative (DII),provides technical assistance and funding to nonprofit organizations in the Greater Boston area that are committed to creating greater racial, ethnic and cultural diversity within their staff and boards. In 2001, the program became part of Third Sector New England.

Since the first Diversity and Inclusion Initiative grants were given, the program has held collaborative learning as a core value. Fundamental to the work of diversity and inclusion is an acknowledgment that institutional racism exists within nonprofit organizations. Organizations can be transformed to be more reflective of the populations being served racially and ethnically. And they can develop a greater respect for and appreciation of cultural, gender, ability, class and orientation differences.

Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity

The Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) began as a multiyear project intended to increase the amount and effectiveness of resources aimed at combating institutional and structural racism in communities through capacity building, education, and convening of grantmakers and grantseekers. It is now a project of the Tides Center.

Diversity in Philanthropy Project

The Diversity in Philanthropy Project is a three-year (2007-2009) voluntary effort by foundation trustees, senior staff and executives committed to increasing field-wide diversity. Their website features a number of case studies including one on Evaluation with a Diversity Lens (see below), and many other useful resources for those interested in expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion in board and staff, grantmaking and contracting.

Foundation Coalition

A group of leading California philanthropies, released its Strengthening Nonprofit Minority Leadership and Capacity of Minority-Led and Other Grassroots Community-Based Organizations report outlining their five-month planning process and the initial grantmaking activities comprising their collective pledge to increase diversity funding in that state by some $30 million during the coming 2-3 year period.

Research Projects

Increasing the Participation of People of Color in Leadership of the Nonprofit Sector (LLC)

The Leadership Learning Community partnered with the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2004 & 2005 on a research project to draw on the combined experience of more than 100 leadership programs with regard to strategies for increasing the access to and sustainability of leadership positions for people of color in the sector. The first phase of the project led by Deborah Meehan begin_of_the_skype_highlightingend_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlightingend_of_the_skype_highlighting was titled "How to Increase Leadership Opportunities for People of Color." The second phase of the project was titled "Multiple Styles of Leadership: Increasing the Participation of People of Color in the Leadership of the Nonprofit Sector," and was led by Elissa Perry. Download the notes from one of the focus groups and reports from both phases of the work at the link above.

Developing a Racial Justice and Leadership Framework to Promote Racial Equity

The Leadership Learning Community partnered with the Leadership Team at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Center for Ethical Leadership to conduct a scan to identify promising strategies for supporting and enhancing leadership that can make significant progress on undoing structural racism; and healing, repairing and reconciling communities. This document shares some of the core insights from the scan and highlights a number of national programs that are doing leading edge work in these areas.

Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment (ARC)

The Applied Research Center (ARC) and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) developed the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment following ARC’s 2004 publication of Short Changed: Foundation Giving in Communities of Color. They piloted the assessment with the Barr Foundation and the Consumer Health Foundation. The results of their research are available in the report Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment. Their findings may be helpful to other funders and grantees to move from a focus on diversity to racial justice.

Taking Back the Work: A Cooperative Inquiry into Leaders of Color in Movement-Building Organizations

This Research Center for Leadership in Action report by Angie Chan and Linda Powell Pruitt with Will Allen, Joyce Johnson, Ricardo Martinez, Reggie Moore, Richard Moore, Ai-Jen Poo, and Cidra Sebastien highlights insights from leaders of color committed to social justice who together asked: How do we build, strengthen and sustain movement-building organizations led by people of color? Over the course of eight months, they generated four strategies for leaders of color to maintain the integrity of their work and remain accountable to communities, develop supportive relationships, deepen their understanding of race and educate others, sustain their organizations, and nurture new leaders.

Measuring Racial-Ethnic Diversity in California's Nonprofit Sector (An Overview)

The Urban Institute's Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy conducted a statewide survey on diversity on nonprofit boards, executive directors, and staff in California's nonprofit sector. This is a summary piece by Carol J. De Vita and Katie L. Roeger that appeared in "Charting Civil Society" a series by the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy (November 2009).

Tools

Racial Equity Tools

A web site designed to support people and groups who are working for inclusion, racial equity and social justice. The site includes ideas, strategies and tips, as well as a clearinghouse of resources and links from many sources.

Evaluation Tools for Racial Equity

Created for Community Groups and Individuals:

Who want to know more about how to do evaluation.
Who are working on changing their communities.
Who want to be certain that their evaluations take into account issues of racism, power, privilege, and oppression

Foundation Diversity: Policy & Practices Toolkit

Foundations have made strides in the development of policy statements and procedures that incorporate diversity into both grant making and organizational practices. The scan by Social Policy Research and sponsored by The California Endowment yielded innovative examples that resulted in this Foundation Diversity Policies and Practices Toolkit. The Toolkit is organized into five categories pertinent to philanthropic leadership in diversity, race, equity and justice: (1) policy statement, (2) governance and workforce, (3) grantmaking, (4) contracting with vendors and consultants and (5) investments.

Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment -- A tool that assists grantmakers to assess the racial justice potential of their grantmaking. This assessment tool is available as Appendix 3 in Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from Racial Justice Grantmaking

Evaluation With A Diversity Lens: Exploring Its Functions And Utility To Inform Philanthropic Effectiveness Ricardo Millett provides practical advice for funders who want to embark on the practice of evaluation with a diversity lens (EDL) EDL is an approach to program evaluation that emphasizes the importance of incorporating diverse voices (particularly those of intended program beneficiaries) to identify problems and to
engage in program design, implementation, and data analysis. Click here to read more.

Race Matters Toolkit (Annie E. Casey Foundation) -- This toolkit is designed to help decision-makers, advocates, and elected officials get better results in their work by providing equitable opportunities for all. The toolkit presents a specific point of view on addressing unequal opportunities by race and offers simple, results-oriented steps to help you achieve your goals.

Meetings and Events

Race & Leadership/Come As You Are - Exploring Racial Identity
Date: April 21, 2011
Time: 11:30-1:30PM
Location: Casey Family Field Office, 1123 23rd Avenue, Seattle, WA
Hosted by: Casey Family Programs, Catholic Housing Services, Center for Ethical Leadership, Executive Coaching: Collective Leadership, Minority Executive Directors' Coalition, Leadership Learning Community, Non-Profit Anti-Racism Coalition, Plymouth Housing Group, and interested individuals
RSVP: Karma Ruder at kruder@ethicalleadership.org or call 206-328-3020
How does racial identity shape the leaders we've become in relationship to families, communities, workplaces and with others? This session will be a series of short, interactive activities and discussions with a large group debrief.
The Race and Leadership dialogues are a volunteer-driven effort to develop meaningful discussion and action steps toward change.

Northern California Grantmakers: Philanthropic Strategies to Develop Culturally Inclusive Leadership
Date: 10/22/2010
Time: 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: One Market, Landmark Building, Suite 400
There exists a range of approaches to nonprofit leadership development. Examples include encouraging civic leadership, organizational assessment of leadership capacity, and fellowship models of leadership development. As funders explore the spectrum of nonprofit leadership programs—and the juncture between race and leadership—there are additional considerations around investing in leadership and communities of color. In a recent collaborative research initiative by the Leadership Learning Community, such considerations are outlined in the Leadership and Race publication How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice.

Presenters:
Deborah Meehan (moderator) is the founder and Executive Director of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC).
Shiree Teng is Principal at Teng & Smith Inc.
Danielle Trimiew is the Academy Director at the Greenlining Institute.
Akaya Windwood is President of the Rockwood Leadership Institute.
Linda Wood is Senior Director of Leadership and Grantmaking at the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund.
Dianne Yamashiro–Omi is the Program Manager of Equity Diversity at The California Endowment.

Philanthropy New York: Leaders in a New Era: A Conversation on Leadership Development and Race (October 19, 2010)
Leadership and Race Report Webinar (September 28, 2010)
Bay Area Leadership and Race Circle Part 2 (upcoming)
Seattle Leadership and Race Circle Part 2 (June 29, 2010)
Seattle Leadership and Race Circle (March 16, 2010)
Bay Area Leadership and Race Circle (January 13, 2010)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Please credit the author(s) and link back to this website.

Strategic Planning for Networks Webinar

nataliallc — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:49:28 CDT

By Eugene Eric Kim Original article posted on the Blue Oxen Associates Blog
I was overwhelmed by the participation and response to my webinar on Strategic Planning for Networks, hosted by the Leadership Learning Community last Tuesday. Patti Anklam posted a nice summary on her blog, and my slides are available on Slideshare:

Over 100 people participated, and there were a number of thoughtful questions I didn’t have a chance to answer. Clearly, people are hungry to put these ideas into practice into their own networks. I’m going to answer people’s questions here. I also created a group on WiserEarth, and I invite anyone interested in continuing the conversation to join that group.

Setting Participation Expectations

The majority of the questions were about participation. Someone asked about strategies for increasing participation. When we got started with the Wikimedia process, we had set pretty high participation goals (using the 90-9-1 Rule as a hand-wavy guide, as I explained on the webinar). However, I also told my team that if one unexpected person started actively participating because of our open process, that was a net win at the end of the day, because it wouldn’t have happened without an open process, and it would improve the quality of the plan. I think this “one new voice emerging” is a great bar for people who want to try this process and who are nervous about the resources required to get more participation. Even if you don’t get droves of participants, opening up your process affects alignment in other ways.
At the beginning of the Wikimedia process, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner expressed her worst case scenario about the process, which was that community members would feel angry and disconnected about the resulting strategy. We all shared this fear. Honestly, even though we were consistently hitting our participation goals, this scenario haunted me every time we did another big outreach push. How would people respond to the work at each stage?
At the end of the process, we presented the strategy at the annual Wikimania gathering in Gdansk, Poland, where about 500 Wikimedians were in attendance. Even though the feedback to that point had been overwhelmingly positive, I was still nervous. As it turned out, something completely unexpected happened at the conference. Many people approached me, not to complain about some aspect of the process or the final strategy, but to apologize. They had felt badly about not participating more actively. Because we had spent so much energy inviting people and being transparent in what we were doing, those who did not or could not participate more actively still felt included in the process and aligned with the final result. They even felt guilt about their lack of participation, a guilt I assured them was completely misplaced.

Ensuring Diversity

Several people from the webinar asked about ensuring a diversity of voices in the process. I answered this on the call, but I want to elaborate on my answer here with some concrete examples.
There is no magic formula for ensuring diversity other than holding it as a core value and proactively practicing it. This holds true for diversity in any process, strategic planning or otherwise.
In a traditional strategic planning process, you generally interview outside voices and produce a synthesis that you usually share with a limited group. We did the same thing with our process, except that we published our rough notes so that everyone could see and build off of what was said. By doing this transparently (our fourth principle), we encouraged people to do their own interviews as well.
People did. For example, several Chinese Wikimedians interviewed Chinese bloggers to get a broader understanding of how people in China perceived Wikimedia. We had no plans to do this ourselves, so simply by opening our process up, we were able to get valuable voices into the process that otherwise would not have been represented.
When it comes to inviting diversity, space matters a lot (our second principle). For the Wikimedia process, we were obviously going to use a wiki, but we configured ours to make it more inviting and to maximize diversity of participation.
We inherited some advantages by using MediaWiki, the open source software that runs all Wikimedia projects. For example, as you might expect from an international project, MediaWiki has good support for multiple languages. We were as proactive as we could be about translating our core pages, although we were constrained by a small pool of volunteer translators, whom we worked very, very hard. MediaWiki also has decent web accessibility for the disabled.
We also had to overcome some of the disadvantages of MediaWiki. For example, the Talk page feature can be challenging for people to use. We wanted to include participants who were not necessarily active Wikimedia contributors, so we used an experimental extension called LiquidThreads that was easier to use for discussion.
Space is important, but it’s not everything. We were very proactive in inviting diverse voices to participate.
For example, early in the Wikimedia process, we put together a selection committee to help us seed some task forces from thousands of applications. (I describe this process in more detail below.) We wanted this committee to be diverse and committed, and we asked several people we knew to recommend candidates. The initial list was not diverse. There were only a few women on the list, and most of the candidates were from North America and Europe. This wasn’t a surprise, as it’s reflective of the demographics of Wikimedia’s contributors. But it also wasn’t good enough. I asked people to start over, and I spent a lot of time talking to as many people as I could, trying to find great candidates who were not as well known. This was hard, time-consuming work, and we were under intense time pressure, but it had to be done. We ended up with a great committee that was over 40 percent women and that represented all regions of the globe.

Fail Forward Fast, Take 1

Several people from the webinar asked for more examples of failing forward fast (the fifth principle). Two of our biggest had to do with how we framed our ask.
My facilitator on the Wikimedia project, Philippe Beaudette, alluded to one of them in a recent Fortune article about our process. The first thing we did when we started the process was create a space (second principle). The second thing we did was ask people for their thoughts (first principle). We framed this as a Call for Proposals.
We had three goals for this proposal process:

Encourage community engagement. In order to get participation, we needed to get people engaged in our space. There was no better way of doing this than saying, “Share your thoughts!”
Inform the overall process. Again, this was about listening to as many people as possible, so we could start to understand what the key questions, challenges, and opportunities were.
Encourage action. This was really important. We weren’t asking for proposals because we (the facilitators of this process or the Wikimedia Foundation) wanted to review them and decide what we wanted to do. We wanted the community (which included us) to see the good ideas and get activated as quickly as possible.

We had great success with the first two goals — we received hundreds of proposals in a few weeks, all carefully organized and discussed by the community, and all of which surfaced critical issues — but we had trouble with the third. People assumed that we were asking for proposals, because we were going to review them and then act on them, which was not the point.
The Fortune article suggests that we hadn’t clearly defined that part of the process up-front. That wasn’t the problem — not in this case at least. As a way of modeling transparently (fourth principle), I was the first to make a proposal, which described this very proposal process, saying exactly what I said above.
It wasn’t that we weren’t clear up-front. It was that we didn’t frame our ask well. There were two problems. First, we called this whole process a “proposal” process. The word, “proposal,” implies that it’s something that some higher body will review, a notion seemingly bolstered by the fact that people perceived to be in a position of power were the ones doing the asking.
This was further exacerbated by our use of the active rather than the passive voice, a point that Samuel Klein underscored many times. Compare:

Please post proposals so we can hear your ideas.

versus:

Please post proposals so your ideas can be heard.

The former is stronger — it’s how we’re taught to write in school — but there’s an implicit hierarchy in the language. Not so with the latter.

Fail Forward Fast, Take 2

Our second ask-related “failure” happened when we asked for volunteers to participate in a “deep dive” process. (The participation chart on my failure slide on the webinar alluded to this process.) This was a two-month period where we asked volunteers to deliberate deeply about a particular topic (with topics divided into Task Forces) and to come up with a set of recommendations for the community at large. We would seed each Task Force with applicants screened by the selection committee described above.
Even though Task Force members were selected, everyone was invited to participate in a any of the conversations, all of which were happening openly on our wiki (second principle). This turned out to be a critically important design decision.
In the selection process, as a way of setting expectations up-front, we said that participation would require 10 hours a week for 10 weeks. Those 10 weeks happened to coincide with the holidays. It seemed only fair to include this information in the ask, but in retrospect, it created a huge, unnecessary problem.
The paradox about volunteerism is that your best volunteers are generally already overcommitted. That’s because they tend to be the ones who are most responsible and the most effective. So when you ask these people to commit 10 hours a week for 10 weeks (which happens to correspond with the holidays), they are going to say no.
However, if you simply ask them to spend an hour thinking about a set of interesting questions, those (already super busy and much desired) volunteers are much more likely to say yes. Once they are engaged, they are more likely to stay engaged. That’s simply how they’re wired. Our ask drove away a lot of the types of people we wanted to participate. We had to compensate for that by spending a lot of time asking people individually to participate, essentially recanting the original expectation around commitment.
Some of our Task Forces got off to great starts, and because this was an open process, the activity naturally attracted other participants. However, some of our Task Forces were completely inactive. As we scrambled to prod those groups into movement, openness once again worked in our favor. Because the topics and spaces were well-defined and opened, other participants emerged and started carrying those discussions. Most of those people were people none of us knew. As we watched these conversations emerged, we developed relationships with the people doing great work, and we asked them to join the Task Forces, a role that they had already adopted without being asked.
This was the most stressful part of the process, and the fact that things were not going the way we had hoped didn’t help. But this is the critical point about Fail Forward Fast (fifth principle) and my mantra, “If you’re not screwing up, you’re not trying hard enough.” You don’t just assume that you’re going to make mistakes, you require it. I literally had a checkbox for failure on my list of indicators, because I wanted it to happen.
We weren’t going to do the right thing every time. The only way we could learn what was right was by trying things, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. None of our failures were debilitating. We were always able to adapt and move forward.

Increasing Online Engagement: LNE Case Study

nataliallc — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:31:39 CDT

Session on the Network Weaving Community of Practice
February 10, 2011 11:30 AM PST

Participants:

Goals:

Engage this community of practice in helping us think about how we can increase the online engagement of the community that has aggregated around the Leadership for a New Era Project

Strategies we have tried:

Send monthly updates to keep the community informed
Hold engagement webinars to get people talking to each other
Post discussion threads on the LNE site and other social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc)
Document events, generate questions after events

Ask participants to write blog posts after the events and posting them on the site

Questions:

How do we encourage participants to interact more with each other online?
How do we define and communicate the expectations for engagement?
How do we support multiple forms of engagement (entry and exit points)?

Leadership and Neworks Bay Area Circle January 31, 2011

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:12:25 CST

Monday, January 31, 2011 10:00AM - 1:00PM
Location: The Monitor Institute (San Francisco, CA)
Hosted by the Leadership Learning Community (@LeadershipEra) and Monitor Institute (@WorkingWikily)
Twitter Hashtag: #leadershipnet

Presentation

Participants

First Name:	Last Name:	Organization:
Bethsaida	Ruiz	SFDA Victim Services Division
John	Esterle	The Whitman Institute
Pia	Infante	The Whitman Institute
Susan	Baade	UCSF
Odin	Zackman	DIG IN
Stacey	Ramirez	Institute of International Education
Danielle	Trimiew	The Greenlining Institute
Claudia	Paredes	The Greenlining Institute
Hector	Preciado	The Greenlining Institute
John	Kelly	The Hub
Julius	Paras
Elissa	Perry
Arnold	Chandler	Bay Area Leadership Network of Color
Andrew	Leider
Matt	Weldon	UCSF
Celia	Boren	Institute of International Education
Shannon	Farley	Spark
Jamie	Allison	S H Cowell Foundation
Rajkumari	Neogy	Argien Consulting
Elouise	Burrell	Scintilla Productions
Matt	Weldon	UCSF
Diana	Scearce	Monitor Institute
Noah	Flower	Monitor Institute
Carla	Dartis
Mary	Manuel	The McKay Foundation
Marla	Cornelius	CompassPoint
Kim	Ammann Howard	BTW informing change
Jara	Dean-Coffey	jdcPartnerships
Jessica	Gheiler	Monitor Institute
Glenn	Fajardo	TechSoup Global
Eleanor	Clement Glass	Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Sharon	Price	Rockwood Leadership Institute
ahmad	mansur	urban economy institute
Toni	Battle	"Embrace Diversity...Embrace Success"
Jeanne	Bell	CompassPoint
Robert	Schwartz	Level Playing Field Institute
Diana	Bermudez	Independent Consultant
Ellen	Clear	Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Erica	Wood	Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Manny	Santamaria	Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Merle	Lawrence	Levi Strauss Foundation
Jennifer	Sokolove	Compton Foundation/Switzer Foundation
Amy	Morris
Stacie	Ma'a	Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation
Bob	Uyeki	Y&H Soda Foundation

Notes:

It’s important to find the time to convene and reflect; even during the workshop, some participants chose not to join sub-groups that discussed any particular topic, but rather to reflect on what had been presented earlier in the day.
Younger leaders may have a totally different understanding of leadership, and networked leadership. As such, use reflecting on the topic may not be reflective of the collective.
There is a difference between leadership as a process and leadership that is embedded in networks. There is a question around whether it is useful to continue to use the term “leadership” when its significance is so radically different. As a corollary, there is a need to define traditional and networked leadership functions.
Systems thinking is about identifying / characterizing elements of networks and how they work; meanwhile, connections within our networks are mostly about human relationships. Thus far, however, few have tied those two together. A cornerstone book on organizational learning buried in systems is the 5th Discipline.

Open Space

Balancing direction and emergence in leadership
How external parties can participate effectively in leadership: the “Outside” Game
Influence of conveners when there’s a power differential
Bridging sub cultural networks: geeks vs. activists
Role of self to productively participate in networks—and then what?
Sustainability of networks, other examples of successful networks?
Limitations of networks and possibilities of blended models / hybrid alternatives

Networks & Sustainability

How can networks be reinforced and be sustained?
To what extent do you have to inject formal processes?
What are realistic expectations for ongoing connectivity when the network may not need to achieve something right now?
Importance of having multiple people who are managing the coordinating and communicating role
When you’re working on shared goal – something that’s more targeted – there’s more need for coordination, a hub that helps move the work along
Sustainability needs will differ depending on what type of network it is – e.g. more (central) infrastructure for more targeted goals
Accountability is important for network cohesion
Not everyone has to be equally engaged
The face-to-face time is important for building and (re)building the accountability and trust
Ongoing engagement is hard for large groups. What’s the potential for engaging pods / clusters? Can build more trust and engagement in smaller groups and can then bring that to the collective. In this case, the ‘hub’ or the leader is helping groups think through the process
Other questions raised:

Are you a leaders that’s providing direction? A leader that’s providing space for people to come together? At what level are you transferring leadership?
How to effectively bring new people into a network? And how to do so with limited resources?
How to get network thinking into organizations?
What is the difference between collaboration and networking?

Balancing Direction and Emergence in Leadership

Overall, crowds are not good at setting direction. The key question is when to step in and provide a direction for the crowd. Kevin Kelly writes about the top-down, bottom-up construction of networks.
Rather than considering “direction” to be a single vector, it might be useful to consider direction as two vectors, or rather parameters, which delineate a space in which the crowd can act. These parameters should be large enough to allow for innovation. This is similar to Diana Scearce’s notion of “handrails” for the network.
By defining the parameters – and perhaps, redefining them through engagement with the crowd – a leader may simultaneously undergo a process of self discovery. The parameter he or she puts forth ultimately defines the network.
A leader’s role may be more Outreach Coordinator and less Director. At the same time, there is a choice to be made about how much to coordinate the network (i.e., have members follow similar processes / protocols), versus allowing members in the network to follow their own processes / protocols. It may be more important for members to align around specific goals and to work in a way that facilitates communication and resource sharing (vs. having them all agree to a set of processes / protocols).
The leader’s role may include identifying additional (distributed) leaders within the network and getting them to talk about the collective, to agree on the general objectives of the network and the rules of engagement. This may also save the leader from having to play “bad cop” if / when network leaders act as bottlenecks, as leaders that are distributed across the network take on responsibility. Bringing these individuals together would also facilitate connections between distributed leaders (vs. having a broker).
Initially, part of the leader’s role is to create a level of confidence that there is a process – which is open but bounded in some way (e.g., that there are agreed-upon, feasible milestones that will help orient the network as it progresses).
At a first meeting with potential distributed leaders of the network, it is best not to speak about the solution to the issue at hand—as the solution is complex and there will not likely be agreement. Rather, it is better to agree on objectives for the network and to set up a process (e.g., discuss potential steering committees). Immediately after this convening, follow up is crucial.

Emergent Group

Missing element: distributed power model
Hang up around the expert idea
Tools you need are different because entry ways are different
How do you evaluate the value of network efforts?
Internal distinction between network model and collaboration or coalition?
Cost of the network – need to raise up value of relationships (as measurement and important structural piece)
We want everyone to collaborate but we fund in a siloed manner
Network as a mindset, as well as a tool
What is the minimal resourced infrastructure you need to sustain a largely volunteered network?
Networks do not imply end of expertise
Need practical information to validate successful examples and lessons learned

Summary

What actually are we talking about? i.e. ‘networks’ – code for soft skills?
How is it ‘network’ both a mindset and a tool?
What is the power of networks? The relationships that get built? Outcomes that it can produce? How do we measure that?
Impact on investment? What is the value proposition?

Blog post by Pia Infante, The Whitman Institute. "Is it a strategy? An outcome? A tool? It’s a Network!" (February 2, 2011)

Final Reflections

There need to be creative ways of acknowledging contributions of people in the network, to make the boundaries between paid / unpaid much more tangible.
The next iteration of this convening should include examples of organizations that are operating using a network centric model and making choices around leadership.
Hopefully, the pendulum doesn’t swing and organizations are able to operate under many different forms of leadership and to entertain multiple frameworks of leadership.
Just as there are multiple points of entry, it is also important to recognize the importance of multiple points of graceful exit for network members.

Gues Blog Post by Pia Infante: Is it a strategy? An outcome? A tool? It’s a Network!

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:05:16 CST

By Pia Infante, The Whitman Institute February 2, 2010 Source: The Whitman Institute Blog

From the Hollywood hit The Social Network to the recently published non-profit “how to” guide The Networked Nonprofit, it’s clear that in the private, public, and philanthropic sectors - we are abuzz about the power of networks. Particularly social networks.

I had the opportunity a few days ago, at the Leadership and Networks Conversation co-hosted by the Leadership Learning Community and The Monitor Institute, to reflect with a lively and lovely group of smart people on the phenomenon known as networks. [Or perhaps formerly known as coalitions and associations.] My break away discussion group was made up of folks from foundations, leadership development programs, and staff from the host organizations.

We posed many questions: What precisely are we talking about when we talk about networks? Where is the power of a network (in the convening hub? The outcomes it can produce?) How do we measure the impact of networks? How is the social networking of today different from the coalitions and alliances and associations that have always existed in every sector to organize around specific agendas and solutions? Does the intuitive, proliferating advent of technology on a global scale “upgrade” our existing notions of networking? Are social media tools the 21st century evolution of communication tools like phones and copy machines that helped spread the organized wildfire of Civil Rights Movement in the 60's?

Some use the concept of network to mean something like membership – for instance membership around a cause the Sierra Club. Another understanding of networks is famously illustrated by Facebook “friends” – a large, loose grouping of people who an individual may know through professional, social, family, political, and shared interest channels. Allison Fine and Beth Kanter define social networks as “at their most basic level simple, intuitive structures…with two main components: people or organizations … and the connections between them.” (pg. 27, The Networked Nonprofit)

I gravitate towards the notion that networks are intuitive. And also that networking itself is an ancient (tribal, perhaps), not a new, concept. And, at the fundamental center of it, networking is about the relationships and connections between people. The Leadership Learning Community’s own suppositions that leading networks requires nurturing of trust and reciprocity, transparency, the bridging of differences, and multiple points of engagement are all built on very familiar strategies for creating, nurturing, and sustaining authentic relationships over time. Fine and Kanter themselves emphasize that social networking tools do not replace face-to-face engagement, though these tools make it possible to stay in stronger or lighter touch with people when time and geography might have inhibited that.

Indeed, Shannon Farley, the Executive Director of Spark in San Francisco (a participant in my group) often shares that relationship building and sustaining is the core engagement strategy in keeping Spark’s network of over 5,000 young professionals in touch with each other and the grassroots women’s projects that they support through mainly individual donations every year. She describes how low and high touch engagement opportunities (from taking two minutes to send an email to serving on the grants committee which decides how to direct funds raised), often enable members to self organize given that Spark accomplishes its sizable mission with one staff and a cadre of volunteers. The Whitman Institute’s own John Esterle reflected on the networking phenomenon from a funder perspective. He noted that foundations have always been slow to fund the “soft skills” of relationship building and that sometimes the moniker of Leadership Development is used as an overly wide umbrella under which soft skills, like relationship building and reflection, are shoved. The Whitman Institute’s openly iterated support for relationship building, clear purpose, and reflection as integral components seems distinct from many other philanthropic approaches. And John wondered aloud if networking, as potentially the next “sexy” best thing on the funding horizon, might become another code word for explicitly funding soft skills?

Several participants who represented other foundations expressed yet another important edge to the conversation. To what end? We have mammoth economic, social, and political problems that are uprooting long-standing support structures of the poor and disadvantaged in California. What are the outcomes we want to see happen and are networks with distributed responsibilities the most strategic way to achieve those? What if certain efforts, like Rock The Vote, actually truly need a well-informed command center that gives out directives and delegates work to folks? [It seems Obama’s campaign was built on a platform that integrated both centralized command and self-organizing tools. See an interesting Conversation Agent analysis of the Obama's social media platform here.] It brought up some concerns folks had about what seemed to them a trend towards centralized, distributive, and non-hierarchical leadership structures being held aloft as a gold standard. The rich discussion that ensued is material for another blog post on the sector’s evolving understanding of leadership!

As a process aside, I was struck by how powerful it was to have foundation folk and folks who get funding from foundations sitting together in open dialogue. The perspectives being shared were unexpectedly wide ranging. There certainly wasn’t automatic agreement and, actually, several points of disagreement throughout the conversation. We did exchange respectful communication, curiosity, listening, and what I experienced as a cathartic moment of real engagement on the big questions we raised. In fact, the most refreshing take away from the experience is that the questions stay with me, even as any final answers elude. So. Is a (social) network a tool? A mindset? An outcome? I’m undecided. What’s your take?

Why Join LNE

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:56:01 CST

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Unique opportunity to establish relationships with key stakeholders in the field, get exposure for your materials and research, challenge your own assumptions and contribute to the development of a comprehensive website and a series of cutting-edge publications that seek to promote a more inclusive leadership model with the potential to expand the reach and impact of our leadership work. For more background please read the Leadership for a New Era thought piece. Join Now!

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Leadership and Networks Writing Partners

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:50:31 CST

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Are you interested in being a partner for the Leadership and Networks collaborative research project?

Joining as a partner will enable you to connect and align your work with others in the fields of leadership development and networks to improve the capacity to catalyze, develop and support leadership networks and network leadeship in the social sector. Some benefits include:

Play a key role in helping bring a stronger network focus to leadership work
Engage with other top experts around the issues that matter to you
Gain exposure for your work – increase the reach of your work by tapping into leadership development networks across the social sector
Opportunity for acknowledgment of your participation on the final publication (if you choose to participate in co-branding efforts)

You may decide on your level of involvement with LNE, based on your availability. Here are some of the ways Research Partners usually contribute:

Contribute to framing the questions that are essential to explore
Share relevant resources on the LNE topic website
Participate in discussion via webinars, calls, face-to-face meetings, online discussions, etc.
Help write or edit the synthesis on the LNE website, as well as the publication – if you want to co-brand the publication
Endorse and promote the content of the publication, tools and/or online resources

If you are intersted in being a partner please contact Claire Reinelt.

Current Partners

Beth Tener is Principal of New Directions Collaborative, a consulting collaborative that helps leaders and organizations work in networks to build alliances to address common challenges; learn with peers and share what works; and make new connections to advance individual and common goals, particularly related to sustainability.
Bruce Hoppe is Founder and President of Connective Associates, a networked organization with expertise in leadership development, collaborative innovation, and community transformation. He is co-author of a forthcoming paper in Leadership Quarterly (with Claire Reinelt) on Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks. Twitter account: http://twitter.com/behoppe
Claire Reinelt is the Research and Evaluation Director at the Leadership Learning Community. Claire is co-author of a 2010 article in Leadership Quarterly on “Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks.” Twitter account: https://twitter.com/creinelt
Deborah Meehan is the Executive Director at the Leadership Learning Community. Deborah has extensive experience in developing network strategies to connect leadership program graduates. Twitter account: https://twitter.com/deborahmm
Diana Scearce and the Monitor Institute. They published a recent paper entitled Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset. The paper examines how networks and working with a network mindset—embracing principles like openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action—can help funders and activists increase their impact. Monitor and the Packard Foundation partnered on a two year inquiry on Philanthropy and Networks Exploration (PNE) into how foundations can tap and support the power of networks.
Eugene Kim is cofounder and principal of Blue Oxen Associates and LLC Board Co-chair. He has developed collaborative strategies for a number of organizations, focusing especially on inter-organizational collaboration and collaborative learning. In a recent blogpost he talks about the difference of face-to-face and online collaboration. Twitter account: https://twitter.com/eekim
Gibran Rivera is a Senior Associate with the Interaction Institute for Social Change. Gibran frequently facilitates network development and often writes in his blog on networks and community. IISC has compiled Network Building for Social Change-- a resource list on network mapping tools, networks in action, network technology, network blogs, and readings. Twitter account: https://twitter.com/GibranX
Grady McGonagill, McGonagill Associates. Twitter account: https://twitter.com/gradymcg
Kathy Reich is a Program Officer in the Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy Program, working with grantees across the Packard Foundation to improve their management, leadership and impact.Twitter account: http://twitter.com/kdreich
Kendra Harris, East Carolina University. "I completed my dissertation on a shared locus of leadership and collaborative leading and would like to continue to explore, research and contribute to the literature on these emerging perspectives."
Natalia Castaneda is the Marketing and Communications Director at the Leadership Learning Community. Most recently Natalia has focused on exploring how to best leverage collaborative technologies and social media to communicate and establish relationships to support collaborative projects. Twitter account for LLC: https://twitter.com/LeadershipEra

Patti Anklam is author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World. She writes a blog Making Networks Work At Work and in the World. Twitter account: https://twitter.com/panklam

Thought Leaders and Potential Partners

The following people and organizations are doing work that is informing a point of view about leadership and networks. We invite you to add people and organizations that have expanded your thinking and practice about leadership and networks and to give a brief description of their contributions. For those who are already mentioned here, feel free to add additional resources or make changes to the descriptions.

Madeline Taylor and Peter Plastrik partnered with the Barr Foundation to publish Network Power for Philanthropy and Nonprofits. The Barr Foundation convened a group of experts and facilitated a study on the growing use of network strategies by nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, and foundations. This report includes their key findings. Madeline, Peter and the Barr Foundation also collaborated on Net Gains- A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change. The Handbook starts with the point of view that networks provide social-change agents with a fundamentally distinct and remarkably promising “organizing principle” to use to achieve ambitious goals. The handbook provides practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about “connectivity.” They also collaborated with Bill Traynor on a case study of Lawrence CommunityWorks.

Bill Traynor and Lawrence Community Works. Bill recently published an article in Nonprofit Quarterly entitled Vertigo and the Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership in a Connected World. Bill also wrote an article on Building Community in Place with valuable advice about how to build community in a network environment.
Bill was a keynote catalyst at Creating Space IX and spoke on the ethic of reciprocity in community networks. Here's a youtube conversation between Frankie Blackburn (Impact SilverSpring), Bill Traynor and Judith Rosenberg (TEAMS).

Janice Epstein, Beth Beard and Impact Brokers. LLC awareded Impact Broker’s Boston Member Circle a Community Seed grant to support an online learning lab to explore the themes of social capital and networks within the framework of adaptive and collective leadership. Janice Epstein wrote a series of blog posts published on the LLC site that focused on leadership in a network environment. The blogs draw on learning and experiences of Impact Brokers, a cooperative of nonprofits, investors, consultants and community partners that is coming together to improve collective capacity to tackle complex social challenges. In many ways IB represents a “network of networks.”

The Social Network Team at Annie E. Casey Foundation (Audrey D. Jordan, Annie E. Casey Foundation;
Mary Achatz, Westat; Nilofer Ahsan, Center for the Study of Social Policy; Bahia Akerele, Annie E. Casey Foundation; Terri Bailey, The Piton Foundation; and Bill Traynor, Lawrence Community Works). They have overseen the publication series of five reports that looks at the definitions, research, power, practices, and insights relating the impact of social networks on family strengthening and community change as part of their Making Connections Initiative. Audrey Jordan who leads the Social Network Team at AECF published A Reflection on Why Social Networks Are Critical to Sustainable Change
June Holley has been helping communities around the globe form Smart Networks by training and supporting Network Weavers.

Valdis Krebs is a leading researcher on applying social network analysis (SNA) and organizational network analysis (ONA). A series of case studies is available on the orgnet.com site.
Beth Kanter writes a fantastic blog on How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change
Steve Waddell, Networkingaction.net

Leadership and Race Writing Partners

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:50:01 CST

Elissa Perry, Think.Do.Repeat

Hanh Cao Yu, Social Policy Research Associates
john powell, Kirwan Institute
Maggie Potapchuk, MP Associates
Sally Leiderman, Center for Assessment and Policy Development
Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center

How to Participate

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:48:36 CST

Participate in LNE Events!

Check out previous and upcoming events!

To get email invitations for upcoming events please register for the Leadership Learning Community Newsletter at www.leadershiplearning.org.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

LNE offers room for everyone in the leadership development field to collaborate in the way that makes sense to them. Here are a couple of ways of engaging with LNE:

Initial Engagement

Share research: Post reports, articles, and things you have written to the topic pages.
Connect: Pull out ideas, concepts, contributions from your work that relate to a particular theme.
Outreach: Identify and invite the participation of others who have knowledge related to the themes.

Ongoing Engagement

Conceptual Framing: Create categories and an organizational framework to help synthesize and develop knowledge in a specific topic area.
Convening: Convene a meeting of participants to test out frameworks and early synthesis.
Commenting: Comment on synthesis pieces to deepen them for publication.

Partnership

Content Development: Extract, organize and begin to synthesize knowledge.
Writing: Begin the writing and create new content based on collaborative learning.
Funding: Support the entire initiative and/or individual areas of work (i.e. leadership and race)

Please review the community norms for additional information.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Please credit the author(s) and link back to this website.

What is LNE

nataliallc — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:44:26 CST

Vision:

We want to contribute to a shift in leadership thinking and practice from a primary focus on individuals to approaches that support leadership in the context of collective work, networks, communities and social movements and that are culturally inclusive, systemic and focused on preparing individuals to lead collectively with others whose leadership cultures and practices differ from their own.

Process:

We are committed to an inclusive and transparent collaborative learning, writing and publishing process. We formed an Advisory Committee to guide the launch of this initiative, to engage in partnership outreach, and establish community norms. With the launching of this interactive website we hope to expand the number of people who can contribute their wisdom and expertise to this initiative.

Themes:

Leadership and Race, Leadership Networks, Collective Leadership and Leadership Across Differences.For more information about the Leadership and Race publication please contact Deborah Meehan. For more information about the Leadership and Networks publication please contact Claire Reinelt.

Deliverables:

A collaborative website that will serve as a lasting repository of information for people in the leadership development field
Four ground-breaking publications around the following topics: Leadership and Race, Leadership Networks, Collective Leadership and Leadership Across Differences. Take a look at the proposed publication template.

Timing:

The Leadership and Race publication was launched in 2010. We are currently working on the Leadership and Networks publication, which will be launched by June 2011. The other two pieces will be launched in late 2011 or 2012.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Please credit the author(s) and link back to this website.

Leadership for a New Era - Recently Updated Pages

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Final Reflections

Gues Blog Post by Pia Infante: Is it a strategy? An outcome? A tool? It’s a Network!

Why Join LNE

LNE Members

Leadership and Networks Writing Partners

Leadership and Race Writing Partners

How to Participate

Participate in LNE Events!

What is LNE

First Report of Leadership for a New Era Series:
How to Develop and Support Leadership that Contributes to Racial Justice

Framing Piece for Leadership for a New Era:
A New Leadership Mindset for Scaling Social Change

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