Collective Leadership for Collective Impact
What do you do when you realize the monumental project you have undertaken will have to be finished without you?
I admit it: I am a sports fan. I love the intrigue of competition. There is always at least one protagonist, a villain and many subcharacters. Of all the sports out there, cycling is my favourite, especially the 21 stage races or Grand Tours.
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Building individual capacity is a key community development principle, yet how many of us often overlook this step in our efforts? We are so skillful in engaging people in developing a common vision and identifying priorities. We often then move right into a project management approach by defining the best activities to implement, who should do them, what resources we need, timelines, and the type of evaluation methodology required. We also often assume that those involved in change efforts are there because they have passion and they are capable and competent to deliver on whatever they signed up for.
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Here we go again. It is the Quadrennial Quest for the next "great" leader of the United States. It is too bad we are fixated on a Presidential leadership model that has not worked well in the recent past and increasingly holds little hope for the future. Are we ready to embrace a different approach to leadership that is a better practice now and in the future?
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This is the second blog in a series I am writing about collaboration, collective impact and unusual partners. When communities are trying to work and shift more complex issues like poverty, homelessness, the environment, etc, they require the shared wisdom of a wide-variety of diverse partners. This means opening up the collective impact experience to both usual and unusual partners. The usual partners are those organizations and individuals that we feel most comfortable working with. If you work in the community sector, it is likely that your organization feels most comfortable with other community sector organizations, government partners and funders. But there are a wide variety of other partners and resources in many communities that can be pivotal to successful collaborative and collective impact efforts.
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One of the challenges of working collaboratively in community is that most of us move quickly to the work and spend less time scanning the community to both identify and connect with unusual partners. Recently, I had the opportunity to present to the Corporate Council of Volunteer Canada. This second presentation occurred just a couple of days after a meeting with leaders of volunteer centres in Canada.
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