Center for Community Change Staff Leadership Pilot Project
Center for Community Change
Staff Leadership Development for Transformational Change
A report on what we learned, what we did and
how it shapes our work ahead
August 2009
Table of Contents
- Summary Page 3
- Lessons Learned Page 4
- What We Did Page 7
- What’s Ahead Page 13
- Appendices
- Training Retreat Agendas
- Program Assessment Survey Results
SUMMARY
In the fall of 2006, top leadership of the Center for Community Change recognized the need to prepare staff to lead in high level national campaigns in the coming years and expand their capacity to sustain and lead the organization. By early 2007 the Center formed a design team to create an experimental internal leadership program which was launched in September 2007. This program was CCC’s first-ever internal staff development program in its 40-year history.
Based on the success of the pilot leadership program and recent experiments with bringing the practices from the program into organizational life, the Center is preparing to embark on an organization-wide transformational culture change process. We want to lead and inspire a new wave of transformational leadership that is capable of generating breakthroughs in the complex social problems endemic in our society.
The Center’s internal staff leadership pilot program involved13 staff representing diverse programmatic areas of the organization. Forty-three percent were women, 86 percent were people of color, 64 percent were under age 40, and 14 percent were self-identified LGBT. The design team was comprised of three people: Deepak Bhargava, executive director; Gary Sandusky, then director of organizing unit and now special assistant to executive director; Pamela Chiang, then northwest/west co-team leader and now leadership coach and trainer. The team was supported by consultant Toby Herzlich, a senior trainer with the Rockwood Leadership Institute and respected facilitator and leadership coach. From this point forward in the report reference to “we” means the three CCC staff comprising the design team.
Over the course of 15 months in four week-long off-site training retreats, assignments in between, and structured coaching, mentoring and peer support calls, we enriched each person’s ability to lead with presence, power and greater effectiveness. The pilot program covered a range of things such as: organizing, campaigns, personal mastery, structural racism theory, and purposeful writing. It fostered a deeper connection between key staff working from different geographies, which created new partnerships in designing and leading critical bodies of work. The program also taught new skills in innovative and strategic thinking, created new levels of awareness around emotional intelligence and proactive communication in the workplace, and encouraged personal habits and disciplines so people can lead authentically by example.
Guest presenters included: Professor john powell, a leading scholar on structural racism; Arnie Graf, a veteran community organizer; Sally Lehrman, a journalist and writing instructor at Santa Clara University. The results of the pilot program have been encouraging and CCC has taken the lessons learned and begun applying them more broadly within the organization.
This experimental program taught us many things, of which we summarize briefly here. Over time we understood and valued individual transformational change as true leadership development. We learned that successful individual transformation must be met with organizational transformation and that the will for change must be strong for transformation to manifest. We found that exposing staff to Rockwood Leadership Institute’s Art of Leadership training was an essential launch to our program. Our executive director’s presence and participation in the program made the difference in staff taking the program seriously. Ultimately, staff wanted and valued spaces in which they could make meaning together. We also learned that intentional practice is the only way to fundamental change.
Remarkably, the timing of the pilot leadership program with the Center’s evolving positioning in national politics has opened up new possibilities for how we image our leadership in the progressive sector. We are now committed to change ourselves and influence our field of grassroots community organizing groups over the next several years to learn to think and lead differently in our organizing around issues such as healthcare, immigration reform and worker justice. To make this vision become reality, we believe the Center and the broader progressive movement need to adopt “presence,” power and vision, in turn inspiring meaningful cross-sector partnerships for transformational social change.
LESSONS LEARNED
At the beginning stages of designing the leadership program, the design team did not yet visualize our work as preparing staff and the organization to become, to use an analogy, the Google of the social justice sector – an organization which lives, breathes and inspires others to think big and create new possibilities. Now, after the pilot program we understand the centrality and importance of cultivating an ethos of breakthrough and innovation. We are aiming to get our staff and organization out of the most-traveled ways of thinking, to stimulate them to be more curious and explicit about seeing things differently. Reproducing the same old strategies will not likely transform society. We need our staff and organization to embody this new way of being in order to plant and ultimately harvest transformational change in this country.
In the following section we extracted quotes from an assessment survey conducted by program participants. The full results are attached at the end of this report.
1. Successful individual transformation must be met with organizational transformation.
As an organization we view our staff as agents of change in the world and we want them to be able to lead their work and personal lives with presence, power and vision. We learned that this cannot happen simply by cultivating change within individuals. Rather, breakthrough change – the transformation – happens when the system in which our staff functions consistently supports and challenges them to adopt new behaviors. One participant characterized the challenges like this: “Sometimes I felt like I would hit a ceiling and I couldn’t implement these things because power holders hadn’t been through the program and didn’t see the value of the methods I was trying to use.”
Since November 2008 we have been experimenting with ways to expose all staff to some of the principles and practices of the leadership program. At our staff retreat in mid-July 2009 we broke from our tradition of agendas filled with discussions about campaign and political strategy. Instead, we gave people numerous structured participatory opportunities to deepen their understanding of one another and to enrich their relationships beyond title and position in the organization.
2. The will for change must be strong for transformation to manifest.
We saw greatest success in individuals who had a strong desire to change themselves. They adopted new behaviors and began to embody their true leadership potential. Learning is an iterative cycle beginning with openness to change, then exploration through practicing self-awareness and new behaviors, and then growth through continual reflection and refining of intention and action. At the outset of the program we had a few skeptics and several enthusiasts. The skeptics wanted a skills-based program that would bolster their knowledge of topics such as the economy or social movement history and theory. Engaging ourselves in intellectual growth is very important, but we have come to appreciate that being a good leader isn’t just about what you know. It’s about having Presence, having an ability to see more than one’s own view of the world, and being humbly curious to learn. By the end of the program, participants were strong advocates of our approach to leadership development – first, help participants be aware of themselves, then help them shift their behaviors to be authentic in their actions, and then guide them in discovery and learning.
3. Leading Off with Rockwood’s four-day Art of Leadership opened a new door for understanding leadership.
The Rockwood training broke the ice and mystery for our staff – and gave them permission to dive into the unknown territory. They were affirmed that they were not alone in facing leadership challenges when sitting in a room with 20 progressive leaders from a wide array of organizations. Rockwood’s curricula helped us start off with a common language and shared experience from which to weave themes throughout our pilot program. For example, Rockwood gave us tools to empower people to take responsibility for how they behave no matter what someone else does. They introduced such ideas as how to recognize when you are emotionally “triggered” by an action and how to respond from a centered place, as opposed to a reactive one. After nearly 30 years as progressives fighting reactive struggles to hold onto scraps of social and environmental safety nets, we are in a time when leaders must be centered, and not triggered, to envision the possible.
4. The Executive Director’s presence and participation made the difference in people taking this program seriously.
This was the first time in the organization’s 40-year history that CCC had ever offered an internal staff development program. The participants were selected by the executive director, primarily because we wanted to experiment with this model across a spectrum of key staff who demonstrated the potential or need for leadership growth. The senior staff initially was skeptical because they wanted to engage in intellectual study. When we described the program as emphasizing the importance of soft skills as core to their leadership, they were unsure.
Deepak’s participation and leadership in driving this program sent a message that this was serious, that he was making time for it and therefore these staff should too. In an organization as large as ours staff don’t always have access to Deepak. He is an incredible strategic thinker and compassionate soul. We noticed how staff enjoyed opportunities to learn from and with him. Deepak modeled a quality of deep participation that helped everyone step fully into the program.
5. The staff desire and value spaces in which they can make meaning together.
Peer relationship building, staff expressed, was one of the program’s highlights. Especially because CCC staff work on different projects scattered across the country, there are few opportunities for people to know each other beyond their position and titles. Building stronger relationships between program participants helped sustain them throughout the program as all were increasingly faced with elevated campaign and organizational pressures.
We believe we were able to create community and meaningful space among the participants because of the interactive learning culture we created, which we discuss further in this paper. The manner in which we led the program emphasized community. We convened all our sessions seated in a circle of chairs, cushions or sofas. We never seated people behind tables or in a classroom setting. That kind of physical layout encourages passivity and keeps people “hiding behind their desks.” We wanted people to show up fully and as equals, not masked behind title, rank, or position in organization. This physical layout, and the highly participatory sessions, allowed people to discover qualities about themselves and each other that they had not seen before. The intent here was to create a sense of the whole of each person and the group. We called this ability to see the whole “radical connection.”
Radical connection is a quality of deep listening and communicating with positive intent. It is based on a desire to improve the quality of a relationship. We created safe conditions for people to express themselves earnestly with one another. We did this by giving participants specific instructions to learn about themselves and each other in pairs or small groups. This required a high degree of vulnerability which expanded over the course of the program and ultimately helped deepen the supportive community created. For example, we opened and closed our sessions by inviting people to respond to a centering or reflective question such as, “Where have I noticed shifts in my leadership and where do I notice areas of challenge?” We guided participants to take their time and speak from their hearts. Even though people were in different positions of power in the organization, they opened up, and we noticed emotion filling the room and a deepening of peer bonds.
In doing social change work, progressives tend to overextend themselves and carry the burden of solving society’s problems on their shoulders. Our program pushed the boundaries of understanding leadership as solitary to one that is about partnership. We created an ethos of honesty where people learned to intentionally create meaningful partnership with one another to as a form of support for changing self-destructive behaviors and collectively change the culture of this work overall.
6. Intentional practice is the fastest and only way to fundamental change.
Neuroscientists are now discovering what we’ve known intuitively for a long time, that practice is the only way to break habits and create new intentional behavior. Olympic runners now consciously train not just the physical condition of their bodies, but also their minds. For example, in order to increase speed, runners have to build new neural pathways by constantly repeating fast muscle movements, which sends signals from the muscles to the brain and eventually changes the brain’s biochemical structure. It takes at least 300 repetitions before there is muscle memory of a new positioning. It takes at least 3,000 repetitions before the relationship between neural pathways and muscles align for mastery in performance. This affirms our understanding that for new behaviors to take root and be fully embodied, one needs to engage mind and body through repetition of action.
We encouraged participants to do daily practices that combined reflection with action. The results were spotty overall. People found many ways to not practice: not enough time, urgency of other matters, awkwardness doing the practices when it’s not part of the organizational culture. Had we instituted these practices throughout the entire organization we might have created supportive conditions for people to make time.
7. Consistently bring these leadership principles into the life and work of the organization.
Teaching skills of emotional intelligence or tapping one’s intuition were useful but not reinforced within the day-to-day organizational practices because the program was an experiment that occurred on a separate track from daily operations. Had the organization early on in our pilot program incorporated the leadership principles into the way we run our internal and external meetings, for example, we might have seen greater success in seeing transformational change with our pilot group as well as better results in our social change work.