Some Sample Language Around Collective Leadership

An excerpt from a Leadership Funders' Invitation

Why we propose to focus our learning on collective and community leadership:

Confronted by the scale of change we seek, the changing environments in which leadership is exercised and the contributions and limitations of current leadership development work, we find ourselves asking how we can increase the impact of our leadership development efforts. One member of the LLC Board and Funders Circle writes, “Traditional models of leadership are often out of step with the demands of contemporary communities. Increasingly, diverse populations must find ways to share power, resources and decision making. We operate from the premise that while many 21st century communities are eager to shape new visions for themselves, they often lack the relationships and collective leadership experience required to realize these visions.”

What we mean by collective leadership:

An increasing number of leadership programs believe there is a need to help individual leaders work more effectively across boundaries and to support the collective leadership of a group. Some are attempting to cultivate an understanding of how diverse groups, especially those representing multiple organizations and stakeholders, identify shared purpose, vision and joint action. While there is not clear language or definition of “collective leadership,” as we listen to those who describe their work, there seem to be some simple unifying assumptions:

Collective leadership is about relationships, with the group and among the group

Collective leadership results in collective action and shared accountability

Collective leadership is exercised on behalf of the greater good

A foundation for deeper inquiry and learning:

Members of the LLC Funders' Circle have begun to take up questions of collective and community leadership through their work over the past several years. We are in a good position to build on a diversity of practice, research and evaluation that can enrich our learning about the potential scope and impact of collective leadership and how it can be nurtured and developed through our leadership development work. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation initiated the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change, a program that promotes and nurtures collective leadership in communities. The California Endowment has undertaken an evaluation of their strategic investment in leadership development that seeks to provide participants with the skills to cross traditional boundaries of race, class, organization, and sectors. The Northwest Area Foundation partnered with the Ford Family Foundation and the Russell Family Foundation to bring together grant makers investing in community leadership to explore the convergence of learning. Participants asked how to shift the unit of impact analysis from the experience of the individual to measures of a community’s success, creatively identifying and addressing its problems.

Areas for potential collective inquiry and resource exchanges:

In the registration form you will be invited to share key questions you have about collective leadership that you would like to explore together. A sample of the questions that have emerged and may be taken up are:

What are we learning about the impact of collective leadership models and approaches that may have relevance to all of our leadership work?

What in all of our current strategies and leadership development work is supporting participants to successfully expand their influence, sustain connections to one another, partner and collaborate, cross boundaries, access or create networks and mobilize resources and people to create social change?

What in our current leadership development work might be reproducing fragmentation, and what strategies are diminishing fragmentation and isolation?

What are we learning about processes, skills and context that help individuals within a group and the group itself to develop shared values, purpose and action?

What is the intangible quality at work in a collective leadership process (spirit, emergence, energy, intuition, authenticity, connection) and how can it be nurtured?

Joint Circle Session: There will be a joint session of the Funders and Evaluation Circle meetings on January 18th from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. This meeting will explore how evaluation is being used to foster collective leadership, what tools are being used to evaluate collective leadership, and what else may be needed in order to understand how collective leadership emerges and what impact it has.