Entries Tagged 'leadership' ↓

Soon a good friend of mine, Joel Devonshire, is leaving Ann Arbor, and leaving his place as chair of ICPJ’s Latin America Task Force.

For a going away gift, I’m giving him Leonard Doohan’s Spiritual Leadership: The Quest for Integrity. And, because I am cheap want to conserve paper, I’m reading it before I give it to him (and I’m hoping he doesn’t read this blog so the secret doesn’t get out).

Doohan quotes Keith Grint to say:

it seems taht the errors of leaders are commonplace, but what distinguishes a successful from a failed leaders is whether the subordinates can and will save the organization from the mistakes of it’s leaders.

I’ve seen many organizations flounder under poor leadership. What breaks my heart is that too often others in the organization are unwilling to intervene. The board, the volunteers, the other staff are afraid to speak the truth to the Executive Director, or to hold the Director accountable to respond to these concerns.

(Oh, how I wish I could give examples here to clarify this point.)

This raises three leadership questions:

1. How can organizations build the internal strength to confront leadership mistakes? One of my fears is that I will overstay my usefulness at ICPJ and that nobody will do anything about it. If I go off the deep end or get out of touch with our members and our mission, I want our Board and Program Committees to be strong enough to deal with that reality.
2. How can leaders maintain the humility to accept that they make mistakes and to learn from them? I know I make mistakes. I also know that sometimes I bristle when they are pointed out to me.

Sorry, I can’t offer any simple answers here. Others have written at length about the value of good evaluation, strong boards, and personal development. All of these are hard work; not easy fixes. But given that we all make mistakes, this hard work is necessary

Among the questions that face ICPJ is how we should deal with generation changes. In particular, ICPJ faces three questions about recruiting the next generation of activists:

1. Should we intentionally focus on trying to recruit, train, and engage a younger crop of activists? (For those of you who don’t know, ICPJ’s membership tends toward the older edge of the age spectrum.)
2. If so how do we go about that recruitment?
3. Finally, are we willing to make the changes necessary to recruit younger activists?

I often hear people assert the need to get more young people involved. What I don’t hear is a willingness to move the table so we can be welcoming to them.  Are we willing to:

• give up meeting in church basements;
• spend the extra time to recruit childcare volunteers for every meeting and event;
• have more fun;
• spend less time in meetings in  chatter;
• spend more time in meetings in  chatter;
• put more energy into online outreach;
• make it easier for time and attention-starved people to get involved;
• do more outlandish,  civil-disobedience type events; or
• give up lecturing and telling people how to organize?

These are just some examples. I don’t know what would have to change to be a more welcoming environment for younger activists. I do know that we will need to change.

Jesus taught that you don’t pour new wine into old wineskins (Mat 9:17). If ICPJ is going to welcome the next generation of peace and justice activists into our midsts, we will need to renew ourselves. We will need to change.

Are we willing?

Organizers, marketers, and others often say “we need to get [insert group name here] around the table.”

They assert that they need lawyers, people of color, youth, retirees, Muslims, atheists, farmers, CEOs, midwives, three-toed gnomes, or whatever, and then go off in to recruit that constituency.

Often this is well intentioned. Sometimes it is successful. And indeed, it is an important part of  making our community institutions more representative and accountable.

But it isn’t always enough to drag people “to the table.”

Sometimes you have to move the table to them!

It isn’t enough to tell a vulnerable or oppressed community, “come over here,” when “coming over here” means leaving the security of an established community to enter a setting that is unknown and possibly hostile.

This is a common barrier in white anti-racist work. Liberal whites will say, with every good intention, “our door is open, we just don’t understand why they won’t join us.” Of course, there are valid reasons why people of color would be skeptical. Many people of color have seen to many cases where they have been used as props to make white people feel good, where they have been forced to explain issues of diversity of racial justice, or where their experiences of racism have been dismissed.

Even if your group is different, they have a reason to be skeptical.

ICPJ has a lot of table moving ahead of us.

For example, we have had only limited success in our efforts to include the Arab and Muslim communities. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that many Arab and Muslim Americans recognize that in a post 9/11 America, they are vulnerable to political persecution. Arab and Muslim Americans, especially immigrant Arab and Muslim Americans, are often subjected to greater scrutiny, greater mistrust, and greater surveilance.

In this setting, a reasonable coping strategy for them is to keep their heads down, be good citizens, and say out of controversy.

ICPJ isn’t designed to stay out of controversy. So, we’re going to have a harder time recruiting Arabs and Muslims unless we move the table.

One way we’re doing that is with this year’s ICPJ Annual Meeting. We’re featuring a speaker about the Liberty and Justice for All campaign dealing with due process rights for immigrants. This is both a good issue for ICPJ to deal with and it is a way to be in solidarity with vulnerable immigrant communities.

Hopefully it will move us closer to being more welcoming for Arabs, Muslims, or Latin@s. Even if it doesn’t, it’s the right thing to do.

Moving the table is hard work, but it’s better than keeping the table on inhospitable ground.

Despite a silly cover, Michael Donaldson’s book Fearless Negotiating: The Wish-Want-Walk Method to Reaching Agreements that Work is a very good read, even if you don’t do much negotiating.

The premise of the book is simple: before you walk into to any negotiation you should prepare yourself by knowing you Wish, your Want, and and your Walk away point.

Wish: You wish is where, if everything goes perfectly, you would like the negotiation to end up. Think big. Get everyone on board. Start by creating a grand plan and then whittling it down to a manageable number of wishes. Now you know where you hope things will go.

Want: Your want is where you think the negotiation will end up. You’ve researched the field, you know the people you’re negotiating with, and this is where you expect things to end up.

Walk: You walk point is where you say, “I can’t make this agreement, this is giving up too much,” and you are ready to walk away. You won’t make an agreement that is worse than your walk away point. This is similar to what Getting to Yes calls you Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

That’s it! It is a beautifully simple system.

Of course, simple is not the same as easy. It takes work to do the soul-searching to come up with your wish. It takes work to do the research to have a well-informed want. And it takes work to develop the discipline to write down your walk and be ready to hold to it.

But when you do that work, it smooths the path for a productive negotiation.

Since you know your wish, you an ready to start the negotiation with your big vision and to negotiate from there.

Since you know your walk, you are unlikely to feel “buyers remorse” or worry you made a bad deal.

Since you know where you stand, you’re better positioned to listen to the others in the negotiaiton.

Since you’ve gotten buy-in on your wish-want-walk, you avoid criticism from making a “bad deal.” People have already agreed what’s a good deal and what’s an unacceptable deal.

And this system applies to more than just classical negotiation situations. As I look to the future of ICPJ, I can use Wish-Want-Walk to figure out where I would like the organization to go, where I think it will go, and what future directions would tell me it’s time to move on.

Kevin Kelly has a great take on balancing top-down and bottom-up structures, and he gives editors as an example.

Kelly is a big proponent of bottom-up systems: smart mobs, hive mind, web 2.0, things like that. But he sees an important role for editors to make that work.

He gives the surprising example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not all bottom-up. There is a top-down system for creating the structure. There is a center to look to the future. There are a few people empowered to make editing and community decisions.

And this little bit of top-down is essential to Wikipedia’s success.

Kelly writes:

It’s taken a while but I think we’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.

I appreciate his pragmatism here, which I find much more trustworthy that the ideological purity of decentralization I found in We Are Everywhere.

Now the tough work begins: how to find that balance in different settings.

(Thanks to the Nonprofit Online News for tipping us off on this)

Patrick Hanlon caps his seven assets in Primal Branding with “the leader.”

I expected that he would proclaim the need for a single, charismatic leader: a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, a Jack Welsch.

He lists those, but he also lists more subdued leaders, leaders who base their leadership on their ability to listen, to have vision, to manage multiple skills.

Tomes have been written on leadership, and Hanlon doesn’t dig too deep. He does even give an example of non-traditional leadership such as at the advertising group Mother that has eliminated the role of account executive.

And that’s an important note: just like a brand can have more than one sacred word or more than one icon, it can also have more than one leader.

Indeed, we want many leaders. Our job is to cultivate, train, and empower people to be leaders.

And when we nurture leaders, we give followers and not-yet-leaders something they can connect to, which is what Primal Branding is about.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo: National Archives)

Good ideas are important to our work as organizers, and if we’re lucky we have lots of volunteers and activists sharing their good ideas with us. Listen to them, but be careful, good ideas will kill you…

• If you try to do them all,
• If they pull you off your mission,
• If you’re too frantic to use them well,
• If you’re too insistent on executing them perfectly,
• If you don’t know how to say “no,”
• If they distract you from the work at hand,
• If you don’t know how to listen to them,
• If you’re afraid to refine them,
• If you’re afraid to try them,
• If you’re afraid not to try them.

May you have more good ideas than you can implement, the wisdom to know which ones to run with, and the courage to say “no” to the good ideas that you can’t properly implement.

The Nonprofit Quarterly is reporting on an interesting study that reports that nonprofit executives outscore for-profit leaders in 14 of 17 categories.

Does this mean that nonprofit managers are better lovers leaders? Or does it mean that nonprofit staffs are easier graders?

I do think it’s evidence that nonprofits and their leaders deserve more credit than they often get.

Here’s what I’ve learned listening to The Splendid Table…feed people’s dreams.

Every Week Lynn Rossetto Kasper encourages cooks to make amazing food and feeds their dreams that they can make outstanding dishes. It’s a great show, and Lynn’s enthusiasm is the reason for it.

Recently, a caller phoned in wanting to copyright or patent a recipe he had come up with.

Lynn could have easily smothered his dream under a thousand and four wet blankets. Recipes can’t be patented. Food companies only want to deal with professionals with credentials. It’s a fiercely competitive industry.

And if that’s how Lynn would answer her callers, she wouldn’t be on the air.

Instead, Lynn fed his dream. She told him that he should look at the lines of food that major companies put out and try to pitch it to companies where it fits in with their existing products. She told him to get non-disclosure agreements and not to let them taste it too soon lest they reverse-engineer the recipe.

It was positive. It was encouraging. It was up-beat. It makes you want to listen. It makes you want to cook. It makes you want to be daring.

And it’s how you, as an organizer, should work with your constituents.

I’ve really been enjoying We Are Everywhere. It has challenged me to seriously consider some of the anti-capitalist analysis that I had previously dismissed.

Their chapter Networks: The Ecology of the Movement is a fascinating analysis of how decentralized networks of activists can create powerful actions, such as the Seattle WTO protest. It disabuses some myths of network-based organizing (such as they create events “spontaneously”).

The authors take their cue from ants: nobody tells them where to go but they are very effective of finding the best food, sharing work, and keeping the colony alive. Looking at ant networks, they propose four rules for effective network organizing:

1. More is different: The power of networks is to have lots of individuals and small groups generating ideas, making discoveries and proposing these actions, and then to interconnect these small actors so that ideas can spread.

2. Stay small: When you get too big, communication breaks down, hierarchies emerge, and the network loses it’s dynamism. So, when groups start to reach that point, they need to divide like an amoeba…or an ant colony!

3. Encourage randomness: Just like an ant’s “random” wanderings may find a new food source, a network and a movement need some randomness to find new ways to adapt, respond, and grow.

4. Listen to your neighbors: Knowledge in a network flows horizontally, not vertically. So, for that to work, you need to connect to your neighbors and share ideas, lessons,  and information with them.

Powerful ideas, and network organizing is certainly an important tool to have at hand. That said, I’m left with some questions:

1. Does network organizing lead people to only do the fun jobs and projects? Door-to-door canvassing, fundraising, reaching out to people who aren’t already on board: none of these are as fun as organizing a reclaim the streets party, but I think they are just as vital for the movement. In a network-based organizing model, is there the structure to get these less glamorous jobs done?

2. Do we have anything in common? In a completely leaderless, flat, non-hierarchical movement, is there enough common experience or language to hold us together? For example, Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and Beyond Vietnam speech were two powerful pieces that gave people common frames for discussing the movement. Do we loose this common language in a network-only environment?

Give the article a read. It’s worth a good think.