Person, Role, System: What's Your most Powerful Role?
5:36
Last week, a colleague and partner - Natasha Steinback - shared with me a set of definitions she's curated on community wealth building. It's visual, plain language, and full of generous attribution to the source materials. It embodies the idea that making art is one of the things that humans do best. It got me thinking about how each of us exercises leadership inside the systems we belong to.
Natasha's definitions draw on years of work with dozens of people working on building community wealth. Reading it confirmed for me that we are surrounded by people for whom pooling resources toward big change isn't just something they do. It's tied deeply to their purpose.
Reading it brought me back to frameworks first introduced to me by Annie E. Casey Foundation, as part of Results Count ®. The person/role/system framework introduces the idea that each of us is a unique person. We come with family and cultural experiences, personality preferences and ways of working, and we bring all of it into our work. Each of us also holds roles, in our family and community and work and other lives. And those roles depend on the systems we participate in.
For example, I'm a parent in my household system. I'm a leader in my organizational system. I'm a contributor to the work that Natasha Steinback, Colleen Christopherson-Cote, Donna and others steward with the Saskatoon Poverty Reduction Partnership. I'm a co-steward of the Canadian Collaborative Funders Initiative (CCFI), a group of funders and partners working out how philanthropy can collaborate for community-driven change. I'm a volunteer in the associational life of beautiful, still-reeling-from-flood neighborhood where I live.
I hold at least five roles in five different systems, which offers me five different points of influence and accountability.
Person, role, system
Aligning my efforts with others means understanding the perspective and experience I bring into collaborative spaces. It means knowing that other people bring other perspectives and experiences, and listening and observing well to see what these might be. It means looking for where possible synergies sit. Three lines of inquiry help me do that.
Person. What about my history, cultures and temperament shape what I notice, what I value, and how I show up? How does who I am influence how I exercise leadership in my various roles?
Role. What authority do I hold, by virtue of the titles I hold? What informal authority do I hold, and where does it come from? How might these various types of authority be deployed to advance community-driven priorities? (A title is but one source of authority. Trust, relationships, expertise and history are others and - in collaborative work - they matter so much more than we sometimes remember. )
System. Where do I exercise my primary leadership role? What sector am I in, and how does that shape my role? And how do I define success when I hold person, role and system in view at the same time?
Moving groups forward & the edges of your authority
One Results Count ® concept I return to often is B/ART: the Boundaries of Authority, Role and Task. The concept is intuitive.
When roles are clear, they define the tasks different people are responsible for, and their authority to accomplish them. (If my role is as a participant in a meeting, my task is quite different than if I am a facilitator.) The task defines the authority you need to operate in a role, and it sets the limits of that authority.
Understanding these boundaries helps you hold your role in a conversation or convening. It helps you collaborate with people over whom you have no authority.
And the transformational question is often the simplest one: what is the work that the people in this room can do together?
The answer can lead you to the bold but feasible results, grounded in the innumerable assets of the people in the room. Clarity about B/ART turns frustration into a contribution. Knowing the edges of your authority is what lets you act with full force inside them, and see clearly where to influence beyond them.
The work in this room
None of us leads from nowhere. We lead as unique people from particular roles embedded in systems that carry rules, histories, harms and incentives. When we're clear about who we are in what role and in what system, we can deploy our energy into the transformational work that is within our B/ART.
At your next meeting, look around the room and wonder: what is the work that the people in this room can do together? Then notice what shifts in how you take up whatever role you are in.
And check out the growing movement around collaborative funding models that Tamarack, Philanthropic Foundations of Canada, SETSI, and hundreds of nonprofits, charities, funders, and investors are holding. We’re mapping who is pooling funds in Canada and for what and what is enabling it. We’re sharing examples of some of these collaborations. We’re ultimately looking to make it easier and more efficient for funders and investors to pool financial and other resources in service of transformational change.
Gratitude to Natasha, local leaders around the country, and the hundreds of CCFI partners who show what it looks like to hold our roles with care. And gratitude to all of the Results Count ® practitioners who showed me how listening, sensing and synthesis help groups live into their most powerful roles.
references
The person/role/system and B/ART concepts in this piece draw on Results Count®, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s leadership development approach, and on previous work, including Zachary Green and René Molenkamp’s work on B/ART. Jolie Bain Pillsbury, Mariam Urquilla, and Mark Friedman and many other results-based leaders contributed to the evolution of the Results Count methodology - and to my learning as a changemaker. I have learned from Dr. Adriane Johnston-Williams, Sarah Rajski, Ritika Kurup, Colin Groth, Bill Crim, and other results-based coaches, as well as from community leaders across the US and Canada who have done the work that inspires these and other frameworks.
