Leadership Beyond Boundaries

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2010-03-19T13:01:00.001-04:00

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YWLP: Helping Young Women Lead with Values and Purpose

2009-08-07T07:39:00.010-04:00

By Jennifer Habig

The Young Women's Leadership Program (YWLP) was developed at San Diego Campus of the Center for Creative Leadership for high school sophomores and juniors. The 2009 program, which began in July, is designed to help these young women:

Make educational and career choices that are in alignment with their preferences, values, skills, and interests;
Confidently choose leadership roles when working with teams;
Exhibit improved communication as a team leader; and,
Continue education after high school at an institution to help achieve their career goals.

Through interactive activities, discussion, practice and reflection, participants work through the following questions with their peers and CCL staff throughout the week.

How do your values impact your actions?
How does your personality impact your actions and how do you like to work with others?
What do you want to do with your life and how do you get there?
How do you clearly and confidently communicate your thoughts and ideas?
What is your responsibility to make the world a better place?

The students are subsequently putting what they’ve learned into action as they work in partnership with a nonprofit organization to complete a community service project. Each project team is assigned a mentor to encourage participants to reflect on what they’ve learned and set practical goals.

Graduation will take place on August, 2009 as participants share what they learned while working with their teammates on their service learning project. This occasion allows the students to celebrate their success with community leaders, family, friends and CCL staff.

Visualizing New Futures with Women in Rural Ghana

2009-08-02T13:08:00.012-04:00

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We met Cheri Baker, a Peace Corps Volunteer working in Ghana, on our recent trip there. Over breakfast we quickly shared some of the tools that CCL has developed with the hope she can put them to good use. We were delighted to receive her dispatch (below).

Work began soon after moving to a very rural village in the Northern Region of Ghana. As a Health/Water and Sanitation Peace Corps Volunteer, my work is incredibly varied and always interesting. Through constant interactions with the villagers in Kpendua, I have learned more than I ever imagined about another culture and its people.

Since I first moved to Kpendua, I have marveled at how strong and hard working the women are. Because I was so impressed with their dedication to their families, a group of village friends and I decided we should start a Women's Group. But at the first meeting, more than 65 women showed up to participate! In time, our one women's group became four separate ones, and our work together ever since has been very worthwhile.

At the majority of our monthly meetings, my Ghanaian counterpart and I teach interactive lessons on HIV/AIDS, nutrition, proper breastfeeding, hand washing, or a topic of a similar nature. For the two strongest and most active groups, we are also trying to create business plans for alternative livelihood projects like corncob charcoal and beekeeping. But the most interesting work I've done with them has been related to the role of a Dagomba (a tribe in Ghana with whom I live) female, gender equality in a village, and leadership development activities.

When I first moved to Kpendua, I used a well-known Peace Corps technique (specifically a PACA tool) in which you begin by posing a positive question to get the group comfortable and more receptive to information gathering, then following up with a more difficult one that makes the group think about some negative aspects of their life.

After a meeting in the capital of Ghana with Lyndon Rego, Steadman Harrison III, and Phillip Brady from CCL, I was able to bring some of CCL's techniques to a village in the North. In three separate women's group meetings, I repeated the same PACA tool…but this time with a very helpful visual aid: CCL's Visual Explorer Cards. And wow, what a difference they made! When I first posed the question to groups of villagers more than a year a go, I just got blank looks in response. When pried, I could get some answers out of the villagers, but the concept and reasoning behind my questioning was too unclear. They couldn't seem to fathom why I was asking them, "What aspects of your life here do you appreciate?" When pushed, they could only answer about tangible things. They'd say, "We like that we have a clinic in our village that serves nine surrounding communities," or "We like that we have a Primary School." I was disappointed to find that that was all I could get out of them. Frustrated at the time, I eventually moved onto other techniques.

But this time around, using the same technique with the Visual Explorer cards made all the difference. While it was still very difficult, the women were very chatty once they understood the concept of the meeting. I started by asking the women, "What is the best thing about living in Kpendua?" (Most villagers I live with trouble with the concept of the word, "best." They also have trouble with the concept of "goals," "improvements," and "future plans," but that's another frustrating story!) When I rephrased the questioning to, "What is already happening in Kpendua that makes you the happiest? What is successful? What is good about living here?" I was able to get a few very informative and interesting responses.

The most impressive answer I repeatedly received was related to the Visual Explorer (VE) that depicts a group of young boys standing with their arms around each other's backs. Through that photo, the women talked about how it's great that everyone here helps each other, specifically to floor compounds (an amazing communal and very musical experience), plaster the mud walls (with a mixture of cow feces and mud), harvest groundnuts, and gather maize for naming ceremonies. Another group commented that they were happy that when a man asks other villagers for communal labor farming, men gladly ride their bicycles to farm to help weed. In addition, they were happy we have meetings and discussions so everyone's voices can be heard.

The photo of the dilapidated house by a riverside drew murmurs of approval. The women said, "The house is very beautiful; it is big and the landlord would be proud to own the house. We are happy that Kpendua has strong mud rooms for strangers (Ghanaian English for "guests") coming to visit because it's nice to have strangers."

It was also interesting to hear a woman exclaim she was "happy because she has strong legs to do all the work that women do daily" and that "It's too hard for the women who can't walk well." All this just from a photo of small baby's feet held in an adult's hand!!

When a woman holding the card of crayons asked the translator if it was a picture of bowls, he explained to her that it doesn't matter what the photo is and that what matters is what she sees. As she grew more comfortable with her thoughts, she made a long speech about how happy bowls make her. She clarified that female villagers use bowls to eat, and food is important. After pushing her to continue, she answered that bowls make her happy because it's nice to serve and share food at baby naming ceremonies and funerals.

Though the inevitable tangible answer did come up repeatedly, it was great to hear what the women thought was going well in their communities. They realized they were lucky to have a competent Nurse who could take care of them when they were sick at our clinic, which serves the nine surrounding communities. Another woman's photo reminded her of mosque, and she explained that Fridays made her very happy because everyone was "praying very seriously." Another woman said she was happy we have a road big enough for lorries to pass through our village. Yet another said it made her happy when there was a full moon because people could walk around freely and see at night. (Kpendua has no electricity.) A woman who said it made her happy to see development in Kpendua discussed the photo of an old woman's eyes. Kpendua has a school, a clinic, a mosque, and light poles waiting for electricity. (Though the district has been claiming that "the electricity will certainly come soon" for more than two years, we do have light poles lying on the ground in the middle of the village!)

And in a response that portrayed a major tradition in the tribe, a woman said she was happy that the elders here are respected and make the major decisions for the rest of the village after looking at a VE of an old lady.

After this question, I asked a new series of questions trying to pry answers out of them about they want to happen in Kpendua. I asked questions like, "What do you see in the photos that makes you sad about living in Kpendua? What is difficult? What can we improve on in Kpendua?" This part of our meetings consistently proved very interesting. I have been here for almost two years, but I can rarely get any concrete answer out of this type of question. No matter how patient I am and how many times I explain that my role as a PCV is not to give money, most people just answer this question by saying that they want me to help them buy a tractor. And get more money. This was the first time I was able to hear what the women really want. The VE cards really helped them open up.

With the VE, I now know that the women with whom I work want a special grinding mill to make shea butter. And on a related note, they want bulk traders to come directly to the village to buy the unprocessed shea nuts. I also learned that they want more Moringa Oleifera trees, a major nutrition project I have been working on with them for about a year. And they want more water, since there are currently only three working boreholes for 3000 people. (There is supposed to be one for every 300 people.) By looking at a VE of an overturned shopping cart, a woman said she wanted to learn how to do beekeeping. (Apparently word of one of my potential upcoming projects has spread!)

They don't want any more lorry accidents (we had a very serious one a few months ago killing seven people from Kpendua and injuring literally everyone else.) And they don't want people to "grow lean" and suffer without enough food. After gazing at the VE photo of a pile of skulls, a women said she didn't want any more warfare within the Dagomba tribe. (An ongoing chieftaincy dispute has split the tribe into two major sides.)

But the most exciting answer for me was when each group mentioned that they want latrines!! In the entire village, I still have the only latrine while everyone continues to go to the African "bush" to use the toilet. The women all agreed that they want latrines so they don't have to go to toilet so far away anymore. This answer made me so excited because my counterpart and I have been talking until we've felt like we were blue in the face trying to desensitize the village to the need for latrines.

Overall, the use of the VE was a huge success. Though one of the women's groups kept asking my counterpart to direct them more with clearer directions, he kept refusing for the sake of the activity. We also spent a great deal of time stressing that there were no wrong answers. They didn't have to know what the picture was of; instead we wanted to hear about anything that they saw. Admittedly, it was also sometimes difficult to get the women to say how the photo related to Kpendua instead of just explaining what they saw in the photo. Even so, I heard more about what aspects of life they want to leave the same and what they want to improve than I have heard in a long time. It was pleasant to hear the women interact so freely with each other, and I enjoyed watching them work together to try to figure out what was on each card. Near the end of each meeting, women were answering the questions very clearly without using the cards. It was the first time they were so open and forthcoming with their responses. It was an amazing change. I will certainly be using these cards again soon!

See the Visual Explorer Blog post with VE pictures imbedded!

Developing Leadership Skills for 10,000 Women in Bangalore

2009-08-01T18:40:00.002-04:00

CCL’s Anupam Sirbhaiya delivered a leadership development program for the 10,000 Women program in Bangalore along with Acumen Fund and Indian School of Business. 10,000 Women is an initiative created by Goldman Sachs to increase the number of underserved women receiving a business and management education. The following is excerpted from a report by Nicole Orillac and Sophie Forbes of Acumen Fund:

The training was held on June 27, 2009 in Bangalore, India at the Goldman Sachs offices. A total of 21 participants out of 30 members of the 10,000 Women Bangalore program, attended the training in addition to two ISB professors and a guest speaker.

The key objectives of the training workshop were to:

- Introduce a model for personal development that participants can continue to use;
- Empower participants to come up with a plan on how to stay connected and support each other in the months coming forward;
- Provide practical tools for mentoring each other and their employees

The training workshop was based on a variety of resources, both technical and people, from Acumen Fund, ISB, and CCL and was supported by funding from Goldman Sachs.
The workshop was designed to be one full day. At the start of the training, participants were asked to share what they expected to learn from the workshop. The common expectations from the group were to learn how to motivate their employees, to keep themselves motivated, to sustain and activate the existing network among the 10,000 Women and to reflect about their own personal strengths and weaknesses.

The day began with a session for focused on cohort building. Two activities – Most Admired Person and Questions Carrousel - provided a platform for participants to recognize the similarities in their experience as women entrepreneurs. In the “Questions Carrousel” activity the participants were asked to answer five questions individually and then separate into five groups (one group assigned to each question) to analyze the answers. Most groups identified emerging answer buckets for each question which came as a surprise to the participants.

In Session 2, focus shifted from the collective to the individual. Participants spent time reflecting on a significant event or experience from their past that impacted their lives as women entrepreneurs. Afterwards, the facilitators asked the participants to recollect the experience one more time and analyze if there were any other people involved and the roles these people played. The key take away for participants was the realization that often people take for granted that there are other individuals around them as they go through life experiences and that these people play different supporting roles: some act as advisors, others as sound boards or motivators, etc.

Next, the facilitators linked the lesson drawn in the previous session about supporting roles to CCL’s ‘Assessment-Challenge-Support’ (ACS) model for personal development. Participants understood that the process of learning is dynamic and that to get to the next level of personal development it is common to first go through a “dip” in which productivity decreases and support is required. During these phases it is important to asses the situation, identify the challenge and seek the right form of support.

After having lunch with their Goldman Sachs mentors, participants returned to the training room for a round of putting in practice the ACS Model. Using images, participants assessed their present and future position as entrepreneurs by answering the questions “Where I am today as an entrepreneur? and Where do I want to be?” Subsequently, participants identified individual and collective challenges in their path to be the entrepreneur they would like to be.

Five buckets of collective challenges emerged from the exercise:

1. Finding/recruiting the right people;
2. Market entry strategy (new market/diversifying/expansion);
3. Systems and business processes (Designing and implementing);
4. Getting funds/investors;
5. Personal development.

Later in session 5 the facilitators helped the participants explore different resources available within the group to address the group challenges identified in session 4 and create a framework for support.

Each group developed a different strategy for support. For example, the group working on “Challenge 1: Finding/Recruiting the right people” made a list to classify their peers according to their area of business or expertise and suggested they be the primary contacts to reach out to when looking for candidates with those specific skills or sector experience. On the other hand, the team working on “Challenge 2: Market entry strategy” mapped out the steps that from their experience are key to consider when addressing the challenge in question and volunteered to help their peers in tackling any or multiple of the steps.

To complement the personal development piece of the workshop, participants studied how to communicate important information about performance to subordinates, peers, or superiors in a way that helps them hear what you are saying and identify ways in which they can improve.

The premise being that learning how to give and receive feedback is an important skill for personal development. The training session ended with a review of the day’s lessons learned, a confirmation that the majority of the initial workshop expectations were met and completion of evaluations.

The day concluded with the presentation from Chetna Sinha, the guest speaker of the day. Ms. Chetna Sinha, president of the Mann Deshi Mahila micro-enterprise development bank, shared the challenges she faced in building an enterprise that today has 5 branches, over 86,000 clients and 7,900 members.

Rotary & CCL Partner - Youth Leadership Seminar

2009-07-28T11:50:00.005-04:00

This picture may look like passive youth but inside each of them they are trying to understand what values are core to them; and, are my daily decisions and behaviors in alignment with my core values? This is an example of one of the activities that CCL designed in partnership with Rotary District 7680.

The goal for this program is consistent with the Leadership Beyond Boundaries initiative - making leadership development affordable and accessible for all...what would the world look like if more youth had the opportunity to participate in leadership programs? Early on in conversations with Rotary we heard about their need to revamp an older leadership program and create a newer world class and globally relevant youth leadership seminar for rising Jr's and Sr's in high school. As a result, CCL packed a four day schedule full of relevant and interactive content. Topics ranged from values & social identity to team building, communication, conflict, feedback and goal setting.

While the target audience for this program was youth, adult mentors were designed into the program. What CCL and related research is recognizing is how the role of adult mentors, when intentionally designed into a program, can be beneficial to both the youth, providing valuable support and guidance, and to the adult mentor, being a leadership developmental opportunity for them.

Early feedback suggests most all participants and mentors agree that the experience was powerful...and too short!

To view more pictures of this program check out our Flickr site

Leadership Essentials at XLRI, Jamshedpur, India

2009-06-23T22:10:00.003-04:00

By Meena S. Wilson

Orientation week at Xavier Labour Relations Institute, a premiere provider of post-graduate business management (BM) and personnel management and industrial relations (PMIR) programs in India. CCL is tasked with introducing 240 incoming students to the essentials of leadership. The four CCL faculty and adjuncts – Anupam, Meena, Sudha and Kaushik, are confident and edgy about taking on four cohorts of 60 young adults in their early to mid-20s over 2 days. We need not have been.

They had come from every corner of India. Aiming for C-level jobs eventually, the students were keen to know more about leadership and how to develop themselves. They were pleased with their dip into social identity, mental models, EQ, ACS, learning curves, SBI and learning from experience – all the more so since their program was designed to be highly interactive, experiential and oriented toward peer learning. As could be expected, each day ended on a high with visual exploration of their personal image of leadership and circling up to share what they would carry back into their world from the Leadership Essentials experience.

Leadership Beyond Boundaries -- Looking Back

2009-06-23T17:00:00.010-04:00

We recently looked back at the road we have travelled with the Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort. In the two years since we launched this effort, CCL has reached some 2,000 people in Asia, Africa, and North America through our training. An additional three- to four-thousand more people have been reached via trainers who we've trained. This includes populations such as: women's self-help groups, orphans, police and prison officers, principals and teachers, college students, village communities, among others.

We're now working to scale a number of models that we hope will take leadership development to millions more to build self-esteem, empowement, and leadership skills. Join the movement via our group site on Facebook.

Leadership Essentials for Kate B. Reynolds Grantees

2009-06-15T14:10:00.002-04:00

by Judson Bobo

Health care professionals from NGOs across North Carolina recently gathered for a weekend of leadership training in Fayetteville, NC. This meeting comprised the second of a series of leadership development sessions resulting from the collaboration of the Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) Leadership Beyond Boundaries initiative and the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust (KBR). The aim of this training is to give public health care officials across the state the skills they need to become better leaders in their respective work places, and to enhance cooperation and teamwork among this group as a whole. The more effective these professionals become at leading their individual organizations, the more effective they are at maximizing the effectiveness and impact of limited resources. The better they learn to communicate and work together, the better able they are to guide North Carolina toward a brighter future for those who need, but cannot afford, health care.

Joel Wright and Lynn Fick-Cooper acted as facilitators during the weekend and presented the Leadership Essentials® workbook to the 24 participants, who were selected by KBR. According to the participant feedback gathered at the end of the weekend, the material introduced new skills that were highly applicable to North Carolina’s health care industry. The participants appreciated the simplicity of the presentation while commenting on the depth of awareness it facilitated and the utility of the leadership tools. One participant’s comment describes the breadth of learning he received:

“We [learned] a lot of basic information on leading: how to go about leading, how to engage people, how to work collaboratively to pool our resources instead of fighting over a smaller pot of resources, how to expand our whole notion, our mental model, [concerning maximization of] resources. How to get people to tap into their passion, how to [motivate] people to follow a vision that is bigger than just the bottom line.”
- LE participant

Another participant reflects on the big picture, on the long-term effects of the collaboration between CCL and KBR – how it affects North Carolina’s financially needy on a large scale:

“While it is an indirect investment, it is a very significant one, a very critical one that ultimately serves the clients that we serve. I want to thank the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust for the opportunity to attend this training.”
- LE participant

The basic leadership skills that KBR is helping spread among regional health care NGOs is having a positive impact on this industry. By making leadership development widespread and affordable, society, as a whole, benefits. With success stories in Africa, India, and most recently the United States, Leadership Essentials® really is changing the world, one leader at a time.

CCL Seeks Affordable, Accessible Publication Offerings in East Africa

2009-06-08T10:24:00.004-04:00

See the full article by Jesse James Deconto in the News & Observer:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1558820.html

Excerpt -

So, for example, Africa Rising helped to connect Greensboro's Center for Creative Leadership with Kwani, an organization that aims to nurture African writers who can portray their continent from an insider's perspective. The center wanted to expand the reach of its leadership training materials into East Africa but needed to cut the consumer price by about 80 percent.

"There's a hunger," said Steadman Harrison, a senior innovation associate with the center. "You have to find a price point that meets their pocketbook."

The center needed publishing partners who could translate their intellectual property into new languages and cultures at a low cost and without abusing the organization's copyrights.

"We don't have people on the ground in places like Nairobi, Kenya," Harrison said. "We have to work with an organization we believe we can trust. ... Africa Rising was a good vetting organization."

Leadership Beyond Boundaries Alumni Facilitate UNEP Session in Kenya

2009-05-19T09:57:00.007-04:00

by Bancy W. Kubutha and Kristin B. Naituli

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) gathered about 40 university students from all over the world in Nairobi, Kenya, from 20th to 26th, April ’09, for discussions and learning on Climate Change: Role of the Sustainability Generation. The overall objective of the workshop was to provide a forum for college students from different regions of the world to engage creatively and innovatively on current environment and sustainability challenges. The workshop program included a session on Student Leadership Development in Universities around Climate Change Issues.

We had two objectives as we started preparing for this event. We wanted to share how we had approached leadership development for a big group of students at Egerton University, with this group of international students attending the UNEP workshop. At the same time we wanted to give them a personal taste of how experiential learning can take place using very simple tools and techniques. From working with Egerton University students on leadership development we observed that leadership training can help students improve their self-awareness and self-esteem; we also observed positive changes in career ambitions and increased confidence in their ability to succeed in life.

As universities are breeding grounds for leaders, we started the UNEP session by a discussion of what leadership is and of the importance of student leadership development in Universities. A participatory question on the role of leadership in addressing climate change issues led into an interesting discussion among the students on how students can inspire, challenge, enable, encourage and be role-models for others in creating an environmentally sensitive society. We learnt that leadership development in universities can be instrumental in helping students unlearn stereotypes, negative attitudes and beliefs that may currently be inhibiting the expression of leadership and leadership ambitions among students. The visual explorer exercise helped guide the discussion on effective leadership in tackling climate change. This rolled into a very lively and entertaining session on mental models. Almost everybody in the workshop had insights and experiences with mental models that they wanted to share. The multicultural background of the participants made the discussion even more fun and interesting to listen to as it unfolded.

It seems, from what we are experiencing here in Kenya, that leadership development in Africa, and possibly elsewhere too, is not so much about lecturing leadership principles, but rather about unlearning mental models through dialogue and learningful conversations. By talking and freely exchanging views, new insights based on one’s own realizations can be reached. A deeper understanding of the concepts is then allowed to emerge from within and learning takes place spontaneously.

Many participants enquired about the availability of the visual explorer tool. We also received requests from Kenyan student participants to set up leadership training at their local campuses. We realize leadership is important to everyone irrespective of their backgrounds; the challenges that the world is facing can and will be addressed through leadership. Leadership development is very relevant and it’s all about contextualizing it in the different areas. We felt encouraged for having contextualized leadership and made it relevant in addressing climate change issues.

Mission to Ghana

2009-05-03T13:17:00.010-04:00

IFAD and the Center for Creative Leadership collaborated on an initiative to develop a grassroots empowerment instrument and intervention. Khalid El Harizi, Lyndon Rego, Steadman Harrison, and Phillip Braddy visited a series of government agencies focused on food, agriculture, and rural enterprise development. The team visited rural development agencies and projects in Accra, Akosombo (see related IFAD blog post), Cape Coast, Kumasi, Mampong and other areas to understand needs and approaches.

In Accra, we facilitated a group discussion with some 18 representatives from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and IFAD. The conversation explored the assets and aspirations of the poor and how empowerment can help increase confidence and unlock potential. We also met with the chief director of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, an agency that is focused on building good governance and balanced rural development. The chief director spoke of the need for leadership development among public officials and requested assistance from CCL for a program for nearly 90 directors in June 2009, to be followed by a program for other officials at the regional and district level. CCL also visited with Asheshi University in Accra that is interested in train-the-trainer programs for its faculty, and with a number of microfinance entities in Southern Ghana.

In Kumasi, CCL and IFAD conducted a session on empowerment and development for the management team of RTIMP, a government unit responsible for providing technical assistance for Ghana's main food crops. The staff expressed an appreciation for this approach and the desire for development for staff, farmers, and the collective – stating that “every individual has to build on their strengths.” Drawing on this understanding, we crafted an empowerment methodology and an instrument that assesses three components of empowerment (i.e., cognition, emotions, and behavior). The methodology and instrument were meant to enable the government agents to engage with the rural community as development partners, gain empathy for the community needs and aspirations, and help the community identify strengths and assets and how it can collectively achieve desired objectives, such as gaining access to loans and clean water. While we were able to thoroughly field test and finalize the empowerment methodology during our visit in Ghana, the empowerment instrument we created is still under development. Thus, we will need to continue to work with IFAD to field test and refine the instrument to ensure it is a useful assessment for its intended purpose and population.

With the RTIMP team, we conducted sessions in two outlying rural villages for some 120 people to test these methods. These were villages without electricity or running water. The participants were mainly farmers and included the village chief and elders. The RTIMP government agriculture agents facilitated the sessions using the methodology we had developed. The sessions were quite powerful for all involved. For the people, it created individual and collective awareness of assets, aspirations, and challenges. It built collective leadership to take the challenges. For the government agents it increased empathy, understanding, and relationships of/with the community – they were told, “with this conversation, I can trust you more.” An RTIMP facilitator stated: “What we have done will be helpful for every development worker. You learn with the community.” An observation is that this methodology of building empowerment is an important supplement to the assistance to address rural poverty. This approach contrasts with traditional approaches that set objectives for the poor with little support by way of mentoring or facilitation.

In Kumasi we met with a key officer at the Rural Enterprise Project (REP). The agency, along with the Business Advisory Centers (BAC), helps to increase rural production, employment and income through small off-farm enterprises. REP and BAC represent models that serve to increase the capacities of the poor. Seventy percent of their clients are able to set up their own enterprises. The REP officer expressed much interest in adding leadership development to their roster of services. CCL stands ready to provide a train-the-trainer program that will transfer knowledge and resources to REP trainers.

We concluded our trip to Ghana with a two-day Leadership Essentials program for 40 representatives from IFAD supported projects (MoFA, RTIMP, REP, BAC) and local NGOs working in the area of development and microfinance. The participants described the program as very different from what they had experienced before in other training. They appreciated the interactive approach and the opportunity to learn from each other. They commented on the need to create feedback-rich environments in their workplace and more collaborative approaches.

CCL and IFAD plan to continue to develop and test the empowerment instrument and methodology as a resource for community empowerment and engagement by development agencies. The work in Ghana demonstrates the potential to enable development agencies to engage communities more holistically, to fold human and empowerment development into economic development efforts, and to help communities take ownership of their challenges.

Leadership Essentials in Afghanistan

2009-05-03T12:36:00.003-04:00

Clemson Turregano traveled to Afghanistan to deliver a Leadership Essentials program to the Afghan Army. In a series of posts on the Leading Effectively blog he recounts the experience:

"We would have to deliver in Dari. We would be working with a population that although very intelligent, and may not have a had a great deal of formal education. Every one we would be working with had served in war, with the Northern Alliance, the Mujahadeen, or even the Soviets. Some of these men had actually fought against each other, on opposite sides, at different times.

They were already good leaders – what can we do to help them become better, think differently about themselves, and their organization? How can we possibly help them think through the obstacles and focus on a vision for themselves and their country?"

He continues:

As the Afghan officers arrived for the program, many were what I pictured – hardened warriors, surviving not only years of war, but also seven testy years of uncertain peace. These men were the ones who were left, after thirty years of fighting an external enemy, then internal strife, then oppression, and now insurgency – these men had met and mastered the challenge of being true warriors. But could they lead an Army?

For the next three days, the Afghan Officers and their mentors endured the same challenges, revelations, bonding and cohesion that are the hallmark of a CCL program. At first skeptical, they drew their leadership windows, describing what made them good leaders and what they wanted to learn about leadership. They chose images from Visual Explorer that defined leadership ‘in their hearts and in their heads.’ They survived the Blizzard exercise and created consensus through teams – something many believe is close to impossible. And they mastered the helium stick activity, working together as teams to communicate and break down barriers.

At the end, one of our students, the nephew of General Massoud, commented to our American Sponsor, with his hand over his heart ( a gesture of great sincerity in Afghanistan), “..thank you for brining this to Afghanistan – we needed this training…All Afghanistan needs this training...thank you…”

Then I realized that in spite of the danger, the location and the population, we were not doing anything different from what CCL does every day – act on its beliefs, its principles and its mission:

All people are leaders and simply need to find the best way to lead.

Anyone can learn to be a leader if they want to stretch and try new approaches.

When provided support plus a safe and secure environment, people, regardless of background, will experiment with new ideas and create new opportunities."

A Day at Good Shepherd’s Fold Orphanage in Uganda

2009-04-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

by Mark Ferencik

Over 1,900,000 Ugandan children have lost at least one parent to AIDS. With numbers ranging from 1.2 to 1.7 million, Uganda currently has one of the highest populations of orphans in the world.

In March I had the opportunity to visit an orphanage in Uganda that is caring for over 75 orphans and educating an additional 150 local village children. A long time friend, Steadman Harrison III from the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC invited me to join him on a trip to this wonderful place that he has been visiting for over 4 years. Good Shepherd’s Fold Orphanage is located in a small village called Buundo, about 15 miles from the town of Jinja, where the water of the Nile river begins its long journey from Lake Victoria to the Egyptian delta. When I say small, I mean one dirt road and a web of narrow dirt paths to most of the mud homes.

My company sets aside one day for service per employee that can be used as for a service project. I used this day in special service to the orphanage by taking portraits of each child. These pictures will be used to keep record of the children, provide an up to date photo to the financial sponsors of each child, create a special photo album for the guest house so that visitors can better learn each child’s name, and my own secret wish - to give each one a special picture of themselves to keep in their few personal belongings.

Caralina, one of the missionaries’ children, was my primary helper (although my entourage grew and grew as more kids heard what I was doing). She brought a list of all the children to make sure we got everyone’s picture. I brought enough equipment with me to do a more formal lighting setup with a photographer’s umbrella, stand and lights. After milling over the logistics of getting every kid to the correct spot in some orderly form and sit still for some stranger to take their picture I opted for a lighter approach. Every house has a large porch and the shaded sunlight was soft enough for good portraits. I also needed a dark backdrop as dark skinned children lose lots of their detail in high contract lighting. The exterior doors at each house are made of gorgeous tropical hardwoods that served as perfect backdrops (the woodworker in me kept trying to find a way to bring one home in my suitcase). So Caralina and I went from house to house. She gathered the children in a group outside each house. Enticed by the promise of a “sweetie” (lollipop), I lined them up, one at a time in front of the door for their picture. Caralina carefully made sure every child was checked off the list. It took a lot of running around and a good sunburn on my neck but we managed to get the job done.

At first it was just an overwhelming number of children and I’m not very good at remembering names. For Ugandan children, forgetting their name can be taken as a sign that you don’t care for them. So I tried my best to remember the few names I could and for the others I just did what I could to avoid having to use their names in conversation. Fortunately you don’t have to know a kid’s name to play with them.

The missionaries running the orphanage do an excellent job to keep everyone healthy, well fed, protected and well educated. The local staff of 7 guards, 10 farmers, 4 cooks, 10 housemothers, 6 maintenance workers, a nurse, an office manager, 2 housekeepers and 12 teachers provide tremendous care for these beautiful children. They grow enough food on their own farm to feed all the children with enough left over to sell to the local villagers. The maintenance department keeps the buildings and vehicles in great order. There is a beautiful church on the grounds. I will never forget the beautiful singing of the children and being surrounded by the little kids that just wanted to sit close and hold my hand for the whole worship service. A little boy named Jimmy, who just lost a front tooth the day before, wiggled in close to my left side and grinned with a big gap the whole time.

When you are at an orphanage the question always arises about how do you get parents interested in adopting these children? Wouldn’t it be much better for them to live in an affluent country like the U.S. or the U.K.? In some cases the answer is “yes.” There are many younger children who would clearly flourish elsewhere and not miss the culture they are born into. Some of the older children have a very strong desire to be elsewhere and adoption would be a great option for them. However, most of the children have a very deep sense of family with the other children and the caretakers. They are Ugandans after all and Ugandans have a strong sense of social fabric. A child taken out of Uganda trades two very different lives: a simple life where basic needs are met and joy comes from the simplicity of an evening soccer game for a world where our excesses kill us in the form of fatty foods, stress from credit card debt and addictions of all kinds. It’s not that adoption isn’t a great option, just that it’s a more complicated issue than I ever thought about.

Steadman has grown particularly close with a very special group of boys who live in structure called Agape house. When he first started visiting the orphanage 4 years ago, Agape house was reserved for the sickest children. A number of the children are HIV positive and they were kept separate from the rest of the children mainly for their own protection from illness. On this trip we were surprised to find that Agape house had been integrated with a full age range of boys from high school to young elementary school sick and healthy. We spent several evenings in Agape just talking with the boys, playing some guitar songs together and just giving them the hugs around the shoulders that they so badly want from a father figure. They are such sweet kids with not even a hint of cynicism. My dear friend was very choked up the last evening as we left Agape house telling me how badly these kids need a father and how much he wants to bring his family to Uganda and live there. After 3 weeks of being away from them I’m beginning to better understand his feelings. The missionaries who live there and the housemothers do a wonderful job taking care of the kids and giving them whatever affection they can but it’s clearly too big of a job to give each child the personal attention they need.

You can help. Donations are always needed. There are always more children to take in. There are always improvements to be made to structures and there are always ideas for improving the lives of the children. If you feel a calling to consider adoption there are many children who would love to meet you. If you have any interest in the beautiful, friendly people of Africa – find a way to go there. If you would like to know more about the orphanage visit their web site www.goodshepherdsfold.org. There is so much more to share about the trip. Please contact me if you would like to know more.

Leadership Essentials and Public Health in Africa

2009-04-06T16:24:00.003-04:00

In early March, Steadman Harrison represented the Global Voice of Leadership team in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia delivering the Leadership Essentials Program for a group of 92 senior leaders from 14 African countries. Columbia University's International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP) came together for a 3 day conference focused on strategy, innovation, and leadership development. CCL provided the Leadership Essentials Program in response to the request for an affordable and accessible solution for a large diverse group of public health leaders. Leveraging the strong relationships with Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) alumni in Ethiopia, we were able to bring co-facilitators to the classroom to join us on short notice. The large group of 92 met together for some plenary sessions and the majority of the exercises took place in smaller group sessions facilitated by Ahadu Gebreamlak, JT Vaughn, and Briana Harper. Social Identity, CCL's Assessment-Challenge-Support model, Visual Explorer, and the 7 Dimensions of Global Leadership reflective tool all received a great deal of appreciation.

Early Leadership & the Graphic Novel Exercise

2009-04-06T15:36:00.002-04:00

This past Friday members of our Early Leadership team delivered Social Identity and the Graphic Novel Exercise for a group of 35 university students. Half of the student group were from the Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve in Brussels, Belgium. The other half were American students from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. As part of their studies with the Center for Entrepreneurship, these students had worked together in geographically dispersed teams to complete a business planning project over the past 3 months. The dialogue surfaced various frustrations with communication, culture differences, trust building, deadlines, and negotiation. As part of the Graphic Novel Exercise they were asked to present individual leadership stories using a single 8.5X11 sheet of paper, breaking it into frames. They were then instructed to get together in their project teams and consolidate the 4 sets into one story representing the entire group's story. At the close of the session they presented the story to the entire class. The professors, including Bryan Toney (Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship) were impressed with the rich debrief the process provided. Several of the students commented how the session brought about a much deeper sense of resolution closing the chapter of their completed projects and allowing them to use humor and other creative means of giving each other feedback where they voiced feelings that had not yet been shared. Our team was really pleased and impressed with the group work.

The idea for the Graphic Novel Exercise was inspired by Tom Kealey of Stanford University. Tom presented his work with the Graphic Novel Project at an Association of Managers of Innovation (AMI) meeting last Spring in San Diego and we subsequently co-delivered one workshop using this exercise here at CCL. The Graphic Novel Exercise is a great tool for younger audiences. The students commented today how it helped them reframe "creativity" and how they were surprised that - despite very few of them having formal background in art, design or graphics - they were able to pull together coherent stories that the whole group could follow.

Leadership Metaphor Explorer

2009-03-05T18:22:00.005-05:00

Leadership Metaphor Explorer™ is a postcard size deck of 80 illustrated metaphors for leadership. It can be used for coaching, talent development, leadership awareness, reflection & dialogue, for youths and adults--it helps people get a bigger mind about leadership. The metaphors illustrate three stages of leadership logic: dependent, independent, and interdependent leadership.

For more information about Leadership Metaphor Explorer, please see our website at http://lmeccl.blogspot.com

Social Entrepreneurs: Transforming Society (and Self)

2009-02-16T17:10:00.013-05:00

On a winter morning, a young photojournalist named Anshu Gupta was making the rounds of Delhi in search of news when he saw a rickshaw with an unusual sign stating “We collect bodies for the government.” Intrigued he approached the driver and learned that he picked-up bodies found on the streets of the city for a small fee. The winter months resulted in a spike in the number of deaths from people who lacked adequate clothing and shelter, so much so that the driver couldn’t keep up. The insight led to Anshu creating an NGO named Goonj and a system to channel surplus used clothing from the rich in the cities to the poor. The Goonj network now operates in half of all India to distribute something abundant in one area and desperately needed in another. The poor receive the clothes not as charity but an affordable price or in exchange for work, creating dignity and sustainability.

Anshu’s story was one of many we heard at the XLRI Social Entrepreneurship Conference in Jamshedpur, India. Among the dozens of inspiring accounts, there were those of Pradip Sarmah who created a model to enable rickshaw drivers to own their vehicles, Chetna Gala Sinha who created a b-school for rural entrepreneurs, and Rajiv Khandelwal who created a bureau for providing migrant workers with services. In each case the social entrepreneur developed a model to bring essential services and empowerment to a population that had been exploited or ignored by corporations or the government. The innovations created were often strikingly simple yet scaleable.

Social entrepreneurship is a wave that is transforming the social sector. Social entrepreneurs create solutions to address critical needs unaddressed by government or business. In contrast to many nonprofits and social service agencies, social entrepreneurs bring an innovative approach that leverages the resources and talents of the poor and often use business-like approaches – even for-profit models – to create sustainable solutions.

So what makes a social entrepreneur? A CCL team had attended the XLRI conference to gather feedback on a competency model we had developed for the Acumen Fund Fellows. In the stories of the entrepreneurs and a dialogue we facilitated with participants, we heard and saw:

an uncompromising commitment to the poor but an orientation that bypasses charity for business models
a genius for seeing needs and solving problems
a willingness to take a personal stand and stand-up new solutions
a measure of empathy and humility matched by courage and perseverance

Can social entrepreneurs be made? The world clearly needs many more social entrepreneurs and many educational institutions – from Duke University and Stanford in the US to Oxford University in the UK to TISS and XLRI in India – are working to nurture a new crop of social change agents. At the conference we saw no shortage of passion from talented young people wanting to make a difference for the poor and disadvantaged. As a development organization, we believe that skills can be acquired and honed when there is a commitment to learn and grow.

Our efforts indicate that in addition to learning the hard business skills, a necessary sphere of development is building the soft skills that underlie a social entrepreneur’s success – self-awareness, empathy, resilience, creativity, influence, an action-orientation, and the ability to build relationships. The Center is working to create a curriculum that can help develop these essential competencies. The social entrepreneurs we have met have invariably gone through a profound internal transformation that fueled the social transformations they have created in the world. Bringing change into the world requires that we begin with ourselves. As Gandhi said, we must become the change we want to see in the world.

Poverty - A Leadership Dilemma

2009-02-10T04:11:00.004-05:00

Mahatma Gandhi was famous for powerful sayings and even more powerful actions. He said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” He acted on convictions like, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.”

On a recent visit to India I witnessed first hand the violence of poverty and the creative power of individuals becoming change.

The rural poor of India – especially women – are extremely limited in their power when they stand alone. One might work all day and earn the equivalent of a single US dollar. Most of that will be immediately spent on the necessities of life – food, clothing, and shelter. What is left over (sometimes pennies) provides almost no buying power.

The self-help group enables women to stand together and as a collective they increase their power. The left-over pennies at the end of a days work from fifteen to twenty women can buy household supplies, can be saved for a week or two weeks to buy raw materials for a business.

Non-government organizations (NGOs) across India have seen the power that self-help groups can provide and are doing what they can to foster the creation of more and more of these collectives. One NGO that we met with in New Delhi, PRADAN, has worked with more than 10,000 self-help groups (SHGs) across seven states in India, representing a total membership of more than 150,000 rural poor women. These SHGs have mobilized a total savings of 6 million US dollars.

Each SHG is typically assigned a mentor. The mentor promotes the self-help group concept at the community and village level and coordinates the meetings. Leadership roles are assigned like group leader, secretary, and treasurer. A pattern for saving money is established and the group talks together to decide how they will spend the money. Sometimes money may be loaned to serve individual house-hold needs. A group may decide to create a common business and use their collective purchasing power to support the business. A single mentor in a village quickly becomes the change they want to see.

How do these women navigate the complexities inherent as a large group of people come together around a common piece of work? How do they agree on a shared vision for what to do in the future (Direction)? How do they map their existing resources and pull together to meet the challenges (Alignment)? How do they set realistic and tangible goals that they can achieve along designated milestones (Commitment)? These are fundamental principles of leadership.

NGOs like PRADAN help these women dream of what the future can be. They help the group assess their current situation. They provide tools and models for dealing with the conflict and communication issues that will inevitably come up as a diverse group wrestles with consensus and the need for giving and receiving feedback.

Our goal is to provide these NGOs with the very best tools in the world to make these mentors and the self-help groups they serve successful. We want to reach hundreds of thousands of grassroots leaders – the rural and urban poor. When we all stand together there is an even greater power to change the world.

LBB Alumni Train Leadership Essentials for Egerton University

2009-01-13T17:19:00.005-05:00

by Kristin Naituli and Bancy Wanjiru

It was indeed a great learning opportunity for the three of us, [Kristin Naituli, Mary Chepkoech and Bancy Wanjiru] in hosting a recent Leadership Essentials workshop. We had a huge number of participants, so much content to deliver over a very short period of time and with limited resources. But guess what! WE DID IT! We did our best, though everything didn’t go the way we expected or planned, but those were learning opportunities for us. Having not had an experience like that before, the students were eager to learn, very excited about the whole idea and very happy to be involved. In fact, most of them want to be involved in such a program more often. They want to develop leadership competencies at a personal and corporate level.

This most recent run of Leadership Essentials was a one day event that took place on Saturday Nov 22, 2008 at Egerton University, Njoro Campus. We had 74 subjects from the Student Leadership Practices Inventory survey, then 8 student assistants, and 5 participants from ERMIS Africa.

We invited the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Administration & Finance, a Professor who is also on the Board of ERMIS Africa, and a lecturer involved in student career-development. These three started out by sharing about their leadership development journey and the students really loved having real leaders talk about their real life experiences. The leaders also expressed gratitude and appreciation for being invited to this very special and groundbreaking event.

We facilitated the Visual Explorer tool to define leadership and to clarify the distinction between management and leadership. After tea-break we spent considerable time explaining the Kouzes and Posner Leadership model including The Five Practices of exemplary leadership (practices they were being evaluated on in their 360-assessment instrument):
- Model the way
- Inspire a shared vision
- Challenge the process
- Enable others to act, and
- Encourage the heart

We then distributed the personal leadership profiles (from the 360-degree assessment using Student Leadership Practices Inventory (SLPI) to each of the students and went through each page of the report / profile explaining it step by step ending with a brief session on personal action-planning to improve on leadership practices based on the strengths and development needs on the feedback report. After lunch we came back for Development is Dynamic and Learning Curve, Emotional Intelligence, and Situation Behavior Impact Feedback Model (SBI).

As we delivered the training and interacted with the students, we realized what we were offering was actually what they were looking for. They are thirsty for more, they want to be prepared mentally for the challenges awaiting them in the market place and so we felt the need to prepare a proactive toolkit – at least for 4th year college students who are about to get to the job market, take them through a basic course with important elements like Mental Models, Development is Dynamic, the Learning Curve, Essentials of Emotional Intelligence, SBI feedback as well as personality preference tests to help them know themselves and understand others. These are tools that would be very useful to young professionals who are going out into a competitive market place with aspirations of taking leadership in various fields.

We also had assessment forms in place similar to the forms given to us by CCL to use for the workshops we facilitated the last week in Addis. As we handed out the forms at the end of the day and the students started filling them, our microphone team put this really soothing music on through the speakers. And we witnessed the entire room settling down at an instant, actually the group as a whole was transcending in front of our eyes and all of a sudden this tranquil peace dawned and stayed with us as they were all really focused on filling their feedback forms, down to the last line item. It was almost divine! We could basically touch and feel the peace and the joyous energy just take hold of all of us.

In this elated atmosphere we did our closing ceremony calling each of the participants by name and having them come up to shake hands and receive a certificate of participation. We resolved to engage in the five practices more often and as such enhance our individual leadership capacities. We ended as we had started with a word of prayer and a vote of thanks.

In addition to the workshop modules, we had a "democracy-wall" at the back of the room with paper, markers, tape and space for participants to express their feelings, discoveries, observations and suggestions (I FELT, I NOTICED, I DISCOVERED, I WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST) as the workshop was progressed. It’s always a joy to see this noble task of developing leaders grow from one level to another with every passing year.

Community Leaders Speak

2008-11-29T19:17:00.008-05:00

Some 60 community leaders from North Carolina attended three simultaneous Leadership Essentials programs held at the Center's Greensboro campus on November 24 & 25, 2008*. A video created by Josh Weinstein of Inside Cinema captures some of the participants' voices on the impact the program and importance of leadership development for nonprofits.

Evon J. Smith, Executive Director of Goler Community Development Corporation, was a participant in the program. She wrote to us about her experience:

"I suspected the leadership class was worth every minute! Each tool helped everyone in my group think differently about our emotional communication at work and our interactions with others in our personal life. It was great! The people that were in our class were wonderful and contacts we would not have the opportunity to make otherwise. I got more out of the class than I expected. Our facilitators connected with the class by presenting the information in so many different ways you could not miss getting it. Many of us stated that we wish we had a week to delve deeper into the cases where we could apply the tools learned over and over. Please never underestimate the value that this opportunity has for community leaders, especially those in the non-profit industry. "

* The program was sponsored by the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.

Revolutionary Effects of Leadership Development

2008-11-03T09:58:00.002-05:00

Written by Amon Anderson of Acumen Fund - Nairobi, Kenya

I’ve been studying, working with and thinking about leadership development for the last seven years, but I never stop being surprised. This summer, I led an idea session for the Center for Creative Leadership to brainstorm how leadership development could be applied in the context of poverty. But in this group of East Africans, West Africans, and North Americans, we could barely agree on semantics—leadership for the base of the pyramid, bottom of the pyramid, leadership for the majority, leadership for all… But no matter what we called it, we all could agree that not only did the poor have little access to leadership development tools, but the research and resources at hand had limited relevance to someone living in poverty.

That is not to say that there aren’t leaders. I have had the honor of meetings leaders born into poverty and raised through adversity who demonstrate true leadership irrespective of socio-economic status. Living in Ethiopia, I met Solomon, a young man who lost three of his limbs when the Addis-Djibouti railway overturned on route to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia’s second city. Solomon ended up in one of Mother Theresa’s clinics and tried a variety of prosthetic options, none of them feasible for the life he would lead in Ethiopia. He decided to pack it up and return home. Solomon wanted to start his own business and I worked with him over a period of months to figure out how he could make it happen. Solomon left his old community, where people saw him as half the man he once was, and established one of the most successful video rental shops in his new neighborhood. His business has grown quickly because Solomon has impressed and befriended those around him, and he’s not done yet. He’s sending home money to his mother, employing boys from the street and he dreams of opening a proper internet café. After such a devastating accident, many in Ethiopia take to the streets as beggars—either by choice or by force—but Solomon chose a different path. His optimism, courage, and work ethic helped him found his shop and attract a growing number of customers each day.

For me, leadership is about unlocking human potential. In my work with the Cherokee Gives Back Foundation and the Acumen Fund, I have struggled to find entrepreneur-leaders and provide them with the financial support needed to succeed and alleviate poverty through market-oriented solutions. But finance is only part of the picture. I have participated in two Leadership Essential programs, designed by the Center for Creative Leadership’s Global Voices of Leadership initiative, and experienced first-hand the impact of “leadership development for the majority.” I see immediate potential to introduce these tools to a broader audience in East Africa, but I see an even greater opportunity/challenge. How do we take this concept of leadership development and apply it to the people living in the villages and slums. In East Africa, the “pyramid” looks more like the Eiffel Tower—a needle at the top and large in its foundation. I believe that realizing the human potential of this “foundation” will require creativity and a cross-disciplinary effort. But I also believe in the power leadership development to transform the paradigm. Solomon is one of those extraordinary leaders who succeed, no matter the odds. There are many more out there like Solomon, and with appropriate and accessible leadership development, the effects could be revolutionary.

The Caribbean Health Leadership Institute

2008-11-02T21:01:00.006-05:00

Brendan Bain, Director of The Caribbean Health Leadership Institute (CHLI), shared this report on their work and impact. CCL prepared faculty at CHLI to offer leadership development for public health leaders in the Caribbean.

“Behind Every Cloud…”
Brendan Bain, Director

October 25, 2008

When AIDS came to the Caribbean, who would have thought that it would lead to the birth of a leadership training program for Caribbean health professionals? And who would have envisaged the establishment of a partnership for this purpose between the leading Caribbean university, a top American Public Health school and one of the best leadership training centers globally? In an unusual sequence of events, the advent of the Caribbean HIV/AIDS epidemic and the establishment of a multi-disciplinary HIV/AIDS group at the University of the West Indies (UWI) have led to an international partnership for the establishment of the Caribbean Health Leadership Institute (CHLI) with funds provided to UWI through a cooperative agreement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It is relevant to note that at the dawn of the new millennium, the Caribbean had the second highest prevalence of AIDS in the world, second only to Sub-Saharan Africa. By 2007, although case rates had fallen, the region was still second globally and ahead of all other regions in the Americas. (According to the UNAIDS 2008 report, the estimated adult prevalence rate of HIV infection in the Caribbean was 1.1% in 2007.)

In 2001, an organized HIV/AIDS Response Program (HARP) was started at UWI, a multi-campus university with a student population of over 40,000. Four years later, UWI HARP Regional Coordinator, Brendan Bain, a specialist in Clinical Infectious Diseases and Public Health, was invited to start a regional coordinating unit (RCU) within UWI HARP as part of a new multinational Caribbean-wide training program for health care professionals and community-based workers – the CHART Network Initiative (www.chartcaribbean.org). In 2007, UWI HARP competed successfully for a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the establishment of CHLI, to be linked with CHART. The five-year grant is valued at approximately US$2.1 million, with funds coming from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) via CDC.

The CHLI program aims to add to the cadre of competent, confident and committed leaders and managers in the health sector of the Caribbean and to engender positive change in health systems that function in relation to HIV/AIDS and other health issues. The program is being administered by UWI in partnership with the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and is patterned after the successful National Public Health Leadership Institute program run by staff at UNC. The curriculum is delivered mainly by distance learning and includes two three-day residential retreats. The distance learning component of the CHLI consists of a series of Internet-linked seminars, referred to as webinars. In order to take part in the webinars, scholars arrange their schedules across the time zones and the sessions are facilitated by UWI and UNC faculty.

In December 2007, in preparation for the launch of the first learning cycle, three members of the new CHLI academic team attended the 10-day Leadership beyond boundaries program at CCL in Greensboro, North Carolina. The three: Peter Figueroa, Chief of Epidemiology and AIDS, Ministry of Health, Jamaica; Michelle Harris, Lecturer in Public Health at the Jamaica campus of UWI; and Jose Ortega, Professor of Public Health at the UWI Barbados campus. The exposure gained at CCL provided them with new ideas, approaches and materials as they prepared to lead and interact with the first CHLI scholars.

In April 2008, 23 persons from 12 countries, including the mainland nations of Belize, Guyana and Suriname, were welcomed into the first 10-month learning cycle. The group included leaders of governmental and non-governmental organizations at forefront of the response to HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, deans of two medical schools and senior health administrators.

The first residential retreat was held at the Rose Hall Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica in June. The guest speaker was Stephen Blount, Director, Coordinating Office for Global Health at CDC Headquarters. The UWI Vice-Chancellor and the new Director of the Caribbean CDC GAP, Dr. Shirley Lee Lecher were special dinner guests. Joining the Caribbean Faculty were Edward Baker and Stephen Orton from UNC and Karen Dyer from CCL. Former PAHO/WHO Country Representative, Veta Brown, a retired therapist, Mr. Peter Carr, a former PAHO/WHO representative, and Earl Wright, Director of Mental Health Services in the Jamaican Ministry of Health, were present as mentors.

Peter Figueroa gave the opening presentation. His memorable words were, “Life is a journey!” “Success is a journey & not a destination!” “Leadership is a journey and not a destination!” Stephen Blount spoke about the challenges of Health Leadership in a changing world. He highlighted changes in the Global Economy, in International Relations with new players and structures and the reality of climate change as a few of the environmental realities facing health professionals and Governments. He referred to the several Public Health Challenges in the Caribbean, including chronic non-communicable diseases, injuries, HIV/AIDS, mental health and substance abuse and food security.

The agenda allowed for periods of personal reflection and self-assessment using the Change Style Indicator® from the firm of Discovery Learning and the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO-B®) questionnaire. Many of these experienced leaders were using these self-assessment tools for the first time and several expressed gratitude for the insights they gained from their use. Participants reflected on their learning styles and were introduced to the basics of Peter Senge’s systems thinking approach.

The group of 23 scholars was then divided into five smaller teams. Each team was assigned a mentor and was set a seven-month challenge to work on an Action Learning Project based on a current health issue in the Caribbean. The groups will report to each other at the second retreat, to be held at the Accra Beach Hotel in Barbados in early December.

CDC Headquarters has responded superlatively to the first year of CHLI. In their first feedback report, CDC’s reviewers’ commented that the program demonstrated “excellent project vision and goals and a continuation plan of action which is based upon the solid year 1 accomplishment.” They described it as a “contemporary blend of adult education approaches, technology and practices [that] will make for a powerful learning experience” and stated that it “seems to be rapidly building on the success of other proven leadership and management development programs.”

In February 2009, CHLI will enroll a second cohort of 35 scholars, with invitations being put to persons from 17 countries. The first cohort of scholars will be encouraged to form a Caribbean Health Leadership Alumni Network. The vision is to foster a culture of life-long learning among these leaders and to encourage an intergenerational relay of leadership skills and practice.

The CHLI faculty and staff are enthusiastic as they continue to develop CHLI. We wish to thank UNC and CCL for their partnership in this unique Caribbean initiative.

Learning Generosity and Leadership from the Poor

2008-10-18T11:05:00.015-04:00

Blog Action Day 2008 focused on poverty. Nearly 13,000 blogs responded with an outpouring of posts on October 15. CCL's Leading Effectively blog featured two contributions:

In Reflections on Poverty, Talula Cartwright traces her family’s history and recalls when hardship was deeply woven into the fabric of America:

"Some of my ancestors had been potato farmers from Ireland. They lived in holes they dug out of the hills. When the potato blight came, they starved. The ones who were lucky came to America on ships. A lot of them died. Some of my other ancestors were Choctaw Indians. When the U.S. Government computed the poverty index sometime back, they said it was anything below two-thousand-something for a family of four. At that time, the average income for a Choctaw family was less than $700 a year. And it was for way more than four people. The Choctaws were very poor people. But they were one of the five civilized tribes. (That means they didn’t fight back.) So back in the eighteen-hundreds, when the Irish were starving, the Choctaws sent them some money! A hundred dollars or so. An enormous amount of money at the time. I have a painting on my wall that commemorates this. The Irish hired a Choctaw to paint it, for their anniversary. The poor, honoring the poor."

In Tragedy of the Commons, David Altman wrote about rethinking individual wellbeing in the wake of the global financial crisis:

"...we could travel down a path leading to a Tragedy of the Commons or we could take a seemingly more circuitous route down an alley called the Prosperity of the Commons. The tragedy path brings with it short-term feelings of happiness (perhaps like a cocaine-high). The prosperity route comes with much pain and sacrifice but will ultimately bring benefits that are nearly impossible to see in the short-term."

These posts speak to the value of interdependence and mutual concern in the face of hard times. They also bring to mind lessons from another recent crisis.

During Hurricane Katrina one of most generous demonstrations of caring came from the people of Ville Platte, Louisiana, one of America's poorest communities. The town rallied together to welcome and care for some 10,000 evacuees fleeing the storm (more on this story). This act of collective kindness is an important statement in our age of affluence and inequity . It is often the poor who can teach us best about generosity, community, and collective leadership.

Viral (and Vital) Leadership Development

2008-10-16T10:00:00.012-04:00

Preston Yarborough, Assistant Director of Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) attended the Leadership Essentials (LE) program with a group of colleagues. He wrote to us about the impact the program has had at the university.

"UNCG wants to develop more leaders and better leaders within its campus community. This development process occurs at two levels: the student level and the faculty/staff level. These two levels are intertwined. To best develop student leaders, we strive to also develop those faculty and staff who create a learning environment for our students.

This past summer, The Center for Creative Leadership played a strategic role in this process. Eighteen UNCG employees participated in the CCL’s Leadership Essentials program. Many of these participants were Student Affairs staffers who work directly with students, or they were director-level staffers who run student-oriented departments. The program has already delivered some exciting returns.

Since participating in LE, a participating staff member has trained 20 additional staff members on social identity and leadership. Furthermore, the Executive Board for the Student Government Association (SGA) received social identity training as well. Later in September, UNCG will host over 400 college students for its Triad Leadership Academy. Once again, elements of the Leadership Essentials program will be passed on to student leaders.

Leadership Essentials has been a success for many reasons, but one of the most significant ones is its portability. Modules can be delivered very easily and there is not a great need for extensive organizational resources. The models are clear and relevant. The assessments are easy to work with, and the program can be equally effective if delivered in segments or in its entirety.

By the end of this coming semester, UNCG will have presented Leadership Essentials content to approximately 700 students. This content has been incorporated into staff trainings and faculty/staff enrichment programs. UNCG is thankful for the opportunity to partner with CCL and looks forward to continuing our relationship."

We are pleased to see this viral transfer taking place and the sharing of learning. In a similar program held at another university in India, we heard that the simple and clear representation of core leadership concepts in the LE program made them easy to understand and share.

CCL is running another Leadership Essentials program at our Greensboro campus on November 24-25, 2008 (download PDF brochure). The program, which is meant to make leadership development more affordable and accessible, is open to nonprofit, educational, and community organizations.

“The teacher and the student create the learning.”

2008-10-14T13:45:00.002-04:00

by Joel Wright

How often does this really happen between a parent and a teenager?

I can only guess what you might be thinking? How is this possible? I’m sure we can all remember teenage moments when our parents or an older adult sat you down for a teachable moment. I squirm even at the thought of some of these moments while simultaneously wondering how they could be more comfortable, rewarding and co-developmental for both parent and child.

Contrary to my memory, and in quest of how to enhance early leadership opportunities, this past September I witnessed an inspiring and engaging exchange between many parents and their teenagers. These interactions occurred at the Greensboro YMCA during a Black & Hispanic Achievers program orientation/open house where CCL & YMCA staff designed activities where parents and teens could share with each other where and when they learned various life lessons about leadership.

The inspiration behind creating these interactions came from CCL’s recent initiatives with early leadership development (those from their early teen years to early thirties). What we continue to hear is that the most influential leaders that young people learn from are those who are around them day in and day out. It’s these people they see who are modeling leadership in action. In particular, it’s parents, family members, teachers, and coaches. While this is no surprise in some regard it does pivot the focus from exclusive youth development programs to considering designs that engage young and adult.

With the intent of increasing the connection and intention of leadership development between teens and parents we designed a few short, quick leadership activities. Two new activities we designed for this program were: “Leadership Family Tree” and “Leadership Life-Line”. Both proved profound and engaging.

One early leadership story we heard from a 13 year old was about being on a baseball team. He shared how “my baseball coach would take me out of the game and put someone in that wasn’t as good as me but I gave them tips on how to play that position like I did and at the baseball banquet I was given the award ‘team before self’. That was my leadership role.”

Countless other stories were surfaced by both young and old. In reflecting on and processing all these stories, we kept hearing a couple of key words coming to the surface. The first was responsibility. Young and old referenced early leadership lessons taking place when they were given or assumed responsibility to do something. Examples spanned from sports, to baby-sitting or house-sitting, to various formal and informal roles in school. A few of the other key words pointed to leadership skills, traits and/or lessons that were being enforced early on. They include: respect, listening, truth telling, “think of others before yourself,” or “help those who need it”. Such simple lessons but yet so significant for the stature of a leader. Amazingly, these short, simple activities proved to be immensely profound, comfortable and inspiring for all.

In three ways, many of us at CCL found this day and these activities extraordinary. First it allowed a comfortable shared learning exchange between parent and child. Second, the interactions allowed for a mutual appreciation and respect to occur between the two that added to the depth of the discussion. And third, the exchange often left both parent and child surprised about how much each could learn from the other.

When training, I often quote an Asian proverb, “the teacher and the student create the learning.” I do this as a quick reminder that the person in the front of the classroom, the “leader”, doesn’t always have all the answers. In fact, often the learning, growth, creativity and community are only enhanced when everyone contributes. Certainly, on this Saturday in September parents and teenagers created the learning and it was leadership in action.

11,520 Minutes to Transformation

2008-09-16T00:11:00.003-04:00

Janice Tan of Halogen Foundation in Singapore was one of the trainers who attended the Leadership Beyond Boundaries train-the-trainer program in Mumbai, India. She wrote to us of her experience. We are pleased to share her words with her permission.

"It is one of those rare moments in life when one is blessed with an amazing learning opportunity that transforms into a life-changing experience that just doesn’t allow you to remain who you were before. And to have that happen at the point in life most needed is just icing on the cake. That one such rare moment took place from 25 August 2008 to 1 September 2008, in bustling Mumbai for me.

In a place foreign to me, where race or age did not matter because learning and respect did; I began to fall in passionately in love with learning and the person within me. I had spent 11520 minutes of my life with 22 amazing human beings who journeyed, laughed and learnt with me. They were whom I regard as teachers of life, friends who affirmed and comrades who inspired. The "magic" in the environment was made up of support, respect for everyone and the passion to learn. What I have learnt these 11520 minutes is far greater than I’ve ever received from the formal education I had. This was where I discovered my educational eutopia.

Their lives inspired, speeches taught and affirmation nurtured a part of me which I was unaware existed. I began to articulate thoughts that I have always hesitated to express and that became a crucial learning for my personal thought process. Thoughts evoked during meaningful conversations became more than just mere food for thought, but sustenance essential for development. Leadership Beyond Boundaries truly reflected the essence of the experience, it transcended not only cultural and racial boundaries, but that of self-limiting precepts too. Now, moving forward to live out and honor the learning and people who have invested in me. I will commit to pay it forward by taking my learning to greater heights and enabling others with them. "

Janice works with hundreds of young people in Singapore and beyond. The people who spent time with her in India described her as "amazing." We are delighted that the Leadership Beyond Boundaries program will help her increase the tremendous impact she already has in helping so many young people unlock their potential.

Reflections from Leadership Beyond Boundaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

2008-09-15T14:36:00.005-04:00

by Bancy Wanjiru, Program Administrator for ERMIS Africa in Nakuru, Kenya

I count it a privilege and an honor to have had the opportunity to participate in the leadership beyond boundaries program in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 14th – 23rd, July 2008. The program presented one of the most exciting opportunities I’ve had in my life to rediscover the person I am and rethink my vision and role as a leader. Having participated in a CCL’s workshop before and gone through various publications by CCL, I knew right from the start that the content of the program was going to have a big impact on me as an individual, my vision and those around me. It was an opportunity that opened me up to a whole new world, stretched my vision and mind to see and think beyond geographical boundaries and challenged me to develop my multicultural skills. It was an opportunity that ignited my passion for leadership development, built my confidence in delivering leadership sessions and challenged me to step out of the norm and pursue the noble task of liberating the leader that lies within individuals.

My expectations of the training’s content were high, but I was anxious about who I would meet in a foreign country where I have never been before. As the program started, my anxiety melted away at the introductory social identity session, perhaps there was no better way to start - it certainly helped break barriers within the team. For me, it was a very comprehensive way of introducing me to myself and to others. I got to know who is who in the classroom and within the first hour of the program, it felt like we had bonded and known each other for a long time. We were friends, sharing the same passion and with a common goal to learn and grow together; and so the classroom became a place where we put aside our credentials, age and positions to focus on our development as leaders.

My experience in the classroom was different from any other I have had before. Sharing with participants expanded my knowledge base and helped me generate more ideas and identify leadership gaps existing in my life and my society back home. I learnt from experiences the team shared as the discussions presented a platform for new perspectives, opportunities, insights and challenges in development that helped me contextualize the concepts of leadership to see how they fit in my personal, social and work life. The facilitation process opened me up to a simple yet impact way of delivering a leadership training, I learnt the need to open my mind to learn from the trainees and allow discussions flow around the concepts shared. The learning process challenged my thought process and brought new insights and perspectives that I find useful in leading myself and others as well as facilitating development and growth in others. I realized that whether one is a facilitator or a participant, opportunities to learn are unending.

I am passionate and keen to share these insights with friends, workmates and those that I lead in different social settings because leadership can be learnt, leadership is everybody’s business and leadership development is about self-development. I am grateful to the Center for Creative Leadership and ERMIS Africa for having invested in me through this program; it was a learning opportunity that impacted my life and changed it in a very special way.

Leadership Development for the Majority

2008-09-03T13:15:00.003-04:00

Originally posted on Lamp Post Reports - August 17, 2008 - by John T. Vaughn

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), based in Greensboro, NC over the past forty years has established itself as one of the, if not the, premier leadership development institutes. CCL’s specialty, historically, has been providing leadership development to Fortune 500 & 5000 type companies, the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Special Forces among other top clients. CCL has written and researched extensively on the subject of creative leadership, defined as “the capacity to achieve more than imagined by thinking and acting beyond boundaries” (from HBS case study on CCL). Currently, they have satellite offices in Colorado Springs, Colorado; San Diego, California; Brussels, Belgium; and Singapore. Dissatisfied with reaching only the 20,000 or so clients who annually pass through CCL training programs, CCL launched the Global Voice of Leadership (GVOL) initiative roughly three years ago. The GVOL initiative was launched with the intention of providing forty years worth of knowledge capital in leadership development to the majority (some like to call it the base of the pyramid).

CCL has been working on this initiative in a number of ways, but the one I can speak most knowledgeably of is their effort here in Ethiopia. Back in February I attended CCL’s first ever Leadership Beyond Boundaries course, a two week course to provide leaders in the developing world with the necessary tools and training to take what they learn about self awareness, direction, alignment, commitment and giving feedback back to their staff (most located in the developing world). The first course was hosted at CCL’s headquarters in Greensboro, NC but leaders based in Nigeria, Lagos, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, India, the Caribbean, the US and other areas attended. Needless to say, it was quite the diverse group and I learned a tremendous amount.

Since that time, CCL has been engaged in a more intimate, though informal, relationship with Cherokee Gives Back. Gives Back’s presence in Addis provided CCL a base from which to recruit attendees for a Leadership Beyond Boundaries program held in Addis Ababa in mid-July. The workshop turned out to be quite a success. During the last two days of the workshop, the primary attendees (eleven in all, from various countries in East Africa) were required to practice what they learned by delivering a Leadership Essentials workshop to nearly forty local leaders (again, with the hope that these leaders would then train their staff or colleagues). These forty local leaders were from various sectors including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector and university students. The feedback from the program was generally quite positive, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Since the completion of the Leadership Beyond Boundaries workshop, Steadman Harrison and Dou Fall of CCL have been meeting with various organizations throughout Addis Ababa. These meetings have included a range of organizations and institutions from faith based youth programs, to Midroc (the largest private corporation in Ethiopia), Addis Ababa University, various NGOs and other grass roots organizations.

Even CCL, it seems, has been a little surprised by the high demand and prior knowledge of their organization and expertise here in the Horn of Africa. Steadman and Dou have proposals that, if signed, will keep them busy in Addis for at least the next few months.

As well, discussions have been initiated with community leaders around the topic of bringing leadership development to the majority, or base of the pyramid. This is certainly a challenge, as nearly 80% of the population is located in rural areas (costly to reach), and a large portion also do not read or write. At our first brainstorming session, the idea of broadcasting a leadership development series over the radio was mentioned as a possible distribution channel. At first glance, this idea appears to have potential as it is very much an orally based society and many people have radios, or at least access to them. As well, start-up costs should be minimal, but legalities may prevent such a series from ever launching.

One thing is clear, the demand for CCL’s expertise in creative leadership development and creative solutions is very high among the private sector, academic community, NGO sector and at the grass root level. With any luck, the contracts signed over the past few weeks will allow CCL to continue its focus on leadership development in the Horn, with the ultimate goal of providing their expertise not just to those capable of paying traditional rates but also to the majority, the base of the pyramid.

teaching children to lead and to follow

2008-08-28T10:12:00.004-04:00

by Sarah Glover

We had a guest speaker at CCL recently, Martin Tan, who is co-founder and Executive Director of the Halogen Foundation in Singapore. His presentation and my conversation with him really got me thinking about how I can better connect my personal passions and volunteer work with CCL work. I’ve always wanted to work with “disadvantaged populations”. I feel a calling to do what I can toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. So in my first conversation with Martin, before his presentation, I was thinking about that kind of work and trying to mentally apply what he was saying to helping people who are disempowered -- people who are far from the typical CCL clientele.

We were talking about role models and images of “leaders” that children grow up with and how important it is to have a model that you can actually imagine yourself emulating. If our image of “a leader” and the role models we think of are powerful public figures like kings or presidents, or exceptional heroes like Mother Theresa or Mohandas Gandhi, not many of us will feel like we can meet that level of criteria to be “leaders”. However, if our image of a leader includes someone like a parent, coach, teacher, or neighbor, then many more of us will feel hopeful that we too can be leaders.

The degree to which children are encouraged to aspire to leadership varies quite a bit – across culture, class, and family (I need to find out if there is research on this). Some children are raised from birth to think of themselves as leaders or to aspire to be leaders, and good role models are pointed out to them and placed in their path. They are applauded when they exercise leadership behaviors and chastised when they are too passive. Other children are raised from birth to think of themselves as followers, and whenever they try to exercise leadership they are chastised for being too assertive and are encouraged to “step back in line”. They receive praise for compliance and good humor. For these children, the good leaders they encounter in their lives are nice to follow but irrelevant as role models.

Neither of these two extremes is necessarily better than the other. There are positive and negative consequences of raising children for leadership: one positive is building their self-confidence; one negative might be creating feelings of superiority which can lead to arrogance. Likewise, there are positive and negative consequences of raising children to follow: one positive is developing cooperative behavior; one negative could be creating feelings of powerlessness which can lead to apathy or resentment.

The world needs people to follow as much as it needs people to lead: we need young people to grow up feeling confident and cooperative, feeling neither “entitled” nor “victim”. What if, instead of categorizing ourselves as leaders or followers, we more mindfully encouraged every person to be both?

This insight is not completely new in the world, but it got me thinking in a new way about what I want to do. The Halogen Foundation are already operating from the belief that all humans can be leaders and that all leaders need to know how to (and be willing to) follow. They define leadership very simply for young people: it’s influence. You can influence people for good or ill, but either way you are leading. They tell young people, “All of you have this capability.”

One thing in particular that Martin said made an impression on me: that Halogen will refuse to do leadership development programs for any subset of students in a school – whether the elite or the disadvantaged. Doing either would undermine their message of equality, so they’ll only do programs for the whole school. Halogen’s work serves the elite and the disadvantaged at the same time and brings them closer together. So now I’m re-thinking my own focus on a subset of the population. Why would my message (whatever exactly it is!) not apply to everyone equally? Food for thought.

Be the Change

2008-08-27T11:49:00.005-04:00

Thanks to James Perez and Marie van Vuuren for helping our
Global Voice of Leadership initiatives with the "Be the Change" video.

Learning How to Change Gears

2008-08-06T11:16:00.005-04:00

I was descending a hill during my evening run at the park recently when I overheard a boy coming up the hill on a bike call back to his sister with a desperate question. "Am I going uphill or downhill?!" he cried as his hands worked frantically to adjust the gears on what looked to be new bike. "Uphill!" his teenage sister retorted obviously thinking her brother a bit daft. I chuckled at the tone of their exchange; I have four siblings myself and am intimately familiar with such sibling, er, conversations.

But as I rounded the bend and ran along the short side of the lake situated in the center of this wooded park, I chuckled more at the familiarity of the boy's struggle. So focused was he on learning how to change gears on his new bike he seemed to have completely forgotten what "uphill" was versus "downhill."

How often don't we do this? When faced with the acquisition of new knowledge or a new skill, our energies get so channeled into incorporating and mastering it that we overlook old skills and knowledge. Or in the midst of a significant change, we temporarily neglect to tap into what we already have/know/do well to help propel us forward to a new normal.

I did this very thing at work last month. At the beginning of a new social media project with a tight deadline, I zoned in on acquiring the necessary technological knowledge. Burrowing into best practices online and reading articles and white papers and books and blogs and listening to podcasts quickly sucked me in. I was frantically trying to figure out the new tools when a friend and colleague I had confided my angst to reminded me that I have an extroverted preference and was overlooking the old "skill" of connecting with people. Reach out to people who already know the tool and talk with them about it? Why didn't I think of that?!

Because I was too focused on changing gears and couldn't recognize that I was going uphill.

Leadership Beyond Boundaries Maps New Terrain

2008-07-18T09:16:00.017-04:00

CCL conducted a second GVOL Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) train-the-trainer (ToT) program at its Greensboro campus in late June/early July, 2008.

Twelve teachers, trainers, and coaches from the US, India, and Caribbean attended the training to learn a new two-day program titled Leadership Essentials and absorb the CCL way of facilitating leadership development. The new trainers then delivered the two-day Essentials program to nearly 60 participants from the local community via 5 concurrent programs the following week.

The Leadership Essentials model is designed to be a leadership program that can be delivered at a low cost and with minimal amenities. It uses self-score instruments rather than 360-degree assessments and flipcharts in place of PowerPoint. The participants in the ToT program plan to use the Essentials model to provide leadership development to people in nonprofits, government, schools, churches, and prisons.

The LBB program is one of a number of CCL initiatives that are designed to make leadership development more affordable and accessible. The LBB program will be delivered by CCL in Ethiopia in July and in India in August.

For the program flyer: http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/LBBflyer.pdf

Early Leadership Development in Sri Lanka – Preparing for What’s Possible

2008-06-20T16:24:00.004-04:00

By Joel Wright

In March 2008 I returned to Sri Lanka where from 2004 – 2005 I worked with the National Council of YMCAs to design and deliver various leadership programs. During that first trip, the Indian Ocean tsunami rushed ashore and as a result, several of the young adults I was training were tapped into regional leadership positions to assist in the recovery and community rebuilding efforts. Part of the goal for the return trip in March was to explore and better understand the impact that early leadership training had in the face of responding to a crisis. The other focus of my trip was to continue CCL’s Global Voices of Leadership effort of developing and testing leadership content that could become curriculum for our early leadership development effort.

The first leadership program conducted was a one day program that translated some of CCL’s core content: Direction Alignment Commitment (DAC) and Assessment Challenge Support (ACS). Typically used with executives around the world, DAC & ACS was adapted to youth friendly scenarios and examples making it understandable and relevant to this younger audience. Additionally, this day program included CCL’s Active Listening guidebook which was converted into curriculum and used as a piece of the program. While the program went extremely well there were some good lessons learned about better ways to facilitate when content is being translated into another language. Overall, the program was a success and I must say I’m always amazed at how eager Sri Lankan youth are to learn and engage. To me it speaks to how much they are craving these types of developmental opportunities.

As is often the case when I’ve traveled as a leadership trainer, people often spring requests on me, could you run an impromptu program for a group of about twenty youth? It’s why we’re here, is usually my response because to deny these young people an opportunity to grow towards their potential just doesn’t feel right. As a result I found myself working with my wife and two of her fellow public health graduate students conducting a last second program that combined the YMCA’s motto of spirit, mind and body with leadership for life. The combination proved potent with one young Sri Lankan sharing, “I think it’s very useful to my future life so I think now I’m a perfect person.” Since sharing this statement around CCL one colleague said, “Perfecting people in 3 hours! Awesome.”

While every portion of this trip to Sri Lanka proved to be powerful perhaps the biggest surprise was in reconnecting with those young professionals whom I trained prior to the tsunami and hearing about the impact those early trainings had on them. As I listened and collected stories and experiences about the tsunami, it became increasingly clear that each of the four young professionals “tapped” into leadership positions, cited their early leadership training as important in helping them fill their role, connect and collaborate with everyone from local community members to the multiple different organizations, agencies and individuals who came in from all over the world. Such a unanimous response pointing to parts of their leadership training was indeed quite a surprise and nearly everyone interviewed discussed the importance of developing future leadership at the grassroots level.

In talking about the impact of leadership training with many different people in Sri Lanka, I often asked the question, what role would leadership training have on youth around the country? Many responded with similar answers such as “youth need this” or it would be the “best thing” in the midst of their situation.

It’s stories of impact and hope such as these that we at CCL continue to hear about around the world and that drive us to ask, what would the world look like if more or even all youth could have access to leadership opportunities? Perhaps we let one Sri Lankan youth answer this for us, “it would enable youth to work on improving all aspects of our society.”

Walking New Roads

2008-06-19T22:08:00.005-04:00

Debra Millar of CHF is profiled in an article in CCL's 2008 annual report. Debra reflects on her
22 years of working in the area of public health and HIV/AIDS prevention in Kenya and other African countries and on the importance of leadership development:

"It ’s very clear to me that the most impactful wave of assistance needs to be in the form of leadership development. These young, dedicated leaders can change the face of their countries," says Debra, while acknowledging that the stakes are high."If sound ethical leadership doesn ’t develop in a typical for-profit organization, it doesn ’t make as much money, or it goes out of business. But if we fail to develop ethical leadership in troubled regions,the consequences are far, far greater."

CHF International, a global non-governmental organization (NGO) that is currenly collaborating with CCL to build leadership to reduce ethnic conflict and address HIV/AIDS in Kenya.

CCL Takes Leadership Essentials to Emerging Countries

2008-06-19T21:44:00.004-04:00

The Center for Creative Leadership's Leading Effectively newsletter features a piece on the GVOL effort that is the focus of this blog.

It states:

"The Center for Creative Leadership works with some 20,000 people each year. But what would it take to bring leadership development to 2 million or 20 million people? And what if CCL expanded beyond developing senior-level executives and sought to develop young people? And what could CCL do to reach out to develop leaders in emerging economies such as Africa, India and China?"

Train-the-Trainer Programs Scheduled for Grassroots Leadership Development

2008-05-10T12:42:00.007-04:00

CCL will be hosting additional runs of the Leadership Beyond Boundaries train-the-trainer program in the US, Ethiopia, and India. The program is to provide NGO, not -for-profit institutions and community leadership trainers with essential knowledge and skills to facilitate a leadership development program for underserved populations.

The 8-day program encompasses three major components:

Experience leadership development: Exposure to Leadership Essentials -- a leadership development model developed for NGOs, not -for profit and educational institutions.
Learn how to facilitate leadership development: Training in the Center for Creative Leadership’s model of leadership development grounded in the Center’s four decades of leadership development experience. Covers content knowledge and facilitations skills development using a methodology used to train CCL faculty known as The CCL Way.
Practice delivery of a leadership development program: The program is capped by a training session in which the trainer delivers Leadership Essentials to a live audience with active CCL support and feedback

The scheduled dates are:

USA – June 23 – July 2, 2008
Ethiopia – July 14 – 23, 2008 *
India – August 25 - Sept. 3, 2008 *

Inquiries can be directed to Dou Fall (falld@ccl.org)

A Train-the-Trainer Workshop for NGOs

2008-03-08T11:23:00.009-05:00

CCL hosted our first Leadership Beyond Boundaries Train-the-Trainer Program on February 11-22, 2008 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Participants from Cherokee Gives Back, CHF, IntraHealth, LEAP Africa, TISS, UWI, and World Vision traveled from Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, the Caribbean, India, and North America to attend the program.

The program was prompted by NGO client requests for facilitation training to be provided along with leadership development content and tools. For the program we used an approach known as the CCL Way, a methodology used to prepare new CCL trainers in facilitation techniques and the core concepts that form CCL's approach to leadership development. In addition, the training included orientation to assessments and coaching, and modules and exercises related to change, conflict, decision-style, and influence.

The two week pilot program provided valuable learning for both CCL and the participants. The Center plans to offer future workshops in Africa and India.

Coaching and Social Change: An Experience with Ashoka in Egypt

2008-03-08T10:18:00.009-05:00

David Dorn and Mike Rosenthal, two coaches from the Center, conducted a coaching session for a group of Ashoka Fellows and staff in Cairo. Ashoka is an organization designed to advance social entrepreneurship. Ashoka Fellows work in some 60 countries to address a wide spectrum of human need and social challenges.

The coaching session was intended to share our coaching approach and gather input on coaching skills development for grassroots leaders. The CCL coaching approach of asking questions rather than offering solutions resonated deeply with the Ashoka participants. They indicated that solutions to be successful must emerge from the people and can't be imposed from up or the outside.

This is a key idea. In India and elsewhere we've noted that the NGOs that are able to achieve scale are the ones that espouse inclusion within their organizations and in their engagements with the community. The leaders of these organizations understand that gifted individuals can be catalysts but change takes collective action. Change agents may be more effective when they act as coaches and facilitators rather than consultants and experts.

The experience with Ashoka was a powerful and an inspiring experience for the two CCL coaches. They were moved by nature of the diffcult challenges Ashoka Fellows take on in Egypt as well as their unique spirit and creative orientation to social problems. Insights from the Ashoka experience have helped inform our efforts with regard to NGO and community leadership development.

Liberia Women’s Empowerment Colloquium

2008-03-07T09:22:00.006-05:00

Karen Dyer, Shera Johnson-Clark, and Dou Fall of CCL conducted leadership workshops in Liberia as part of the Women’s Empowerment Colloquium. The objective of this initiative, envisioned by Republic of Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is to empower women at various levels to become effective leaders and make a difference qualitatively on issues at national and international levels.

Approximate thirty-five (35) women and three (3) men attended the CCL workshop. Represented in this group were community/NGO leaders, governmental leaders, colloquium steering committee members, and leadership consultants.

CCL has been involved in constructing the leadership dimensions of this global initiative. We are excited about working to develop new and transformative models for developing the leadership capacity of women leaders in Liberia and beyond.

Boundary Spanning Leadership

2008-02-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

by Christopher Ernst

In his recent Newsweek article What People Will Die For, the influential columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote about a growing global phenomenon – the persistence and intensification of the boundaries between subnational groups. With the waning influence of the battle of ideology (liberalism, communism, socialism), humans’ oldest identities have moved to the core of intergroup relations. In Pakistan, the societal rift that most deeply envelopes the life and loss of Benazir Bhutto is the divide between the country’s various regions. In Kenya, the tragic events associated with the recent election stem from a break-down along tribal lines. In Iraq, intractable divisions of religion continue to stall efforts toward a more peaceful future.

While the pull of old identities is currently most visible in developing nations, Zakaria notes that this trend is alive and well in the developed world. While Belgium went six months without a government because of the harsh divisions between Flemish and French speaking populations, Scotland elected a party whose central platform pivots on independence, seeking to unhinge the 1707 Acts of Union that established the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales.

Leadership research and practice has traditionally focused on the need for leaders to manage and protect group boundaries. As the events Zakaria describe make clear, the opposite response is increasingly called for – the ability for leaders to reach across, span, bridge, and bring groups together across boundaries.

Through the Leadership Across Differences project, (http://www.ccl.org/leadership/research/lad/index.aspx_), CCL is currently seeking to understand the increasingly important and necessary role that boundary spanning leaders play in bridging divides between groups in service of a larger vision, mission, or goal.

Critical challenges in Pakistan, Kenya, or Iraq will not be solved by leaders working only within a single identity group. Likewise, this holds true for any of the most pressing issues of today including poverty, education, human rights, healthcare, and the environment. The implication for leadership is this – as ancient identities work to pull groups apart, the role of leadership will increasingly be to create the context and space for these groups to come together. When group boundaries are successfully bridged, pent-up breakthroughs and innovations are unleashed. This is both the challenge and the opportunity for boundary spanning leadership.

Organizational Leadership Development in Ethiopia Among NGOs

2008-01-28T11:29:00.000-05:00

Update from Steadman Harrison

The CCL Leadership Essentials Workshop content begins with an individual leader focus and moves quickly to broaden an organizational leadership development lens. In prototype workshops conducted in East Africa from November 2006 through January 2008, experiential exercises were used to draw out the lessons and best practices regarding working with others. Trust Walks, Move the Mindset/Money, and Visual/Metaphor Explorer are a few of the tools we thread together in the Assessment/Challenge/Support (ACS) framework to address organizational leadership development. Participants are asked to think beyond their own personality and learning styles to consider the organizational culture and community context where they work.

In a recent workshop with nearly 100 participants from Ethiopian NGOs, CBOs, and FBOs a group of 10 volunteers took on the role of managers, 10 blind-folded participants took on the role of employees, 25 observers shared the perspective of the rest of the organization, 25 observers shared the perspective of the local community in need, and 25 observers played the role of the local, province and regional government ministries. As the managers and employees worked through a simple task to move a physical object representing NGO funding out from a fixed point to a nearby circle representing the community in need, the observers noted in the debrief how easy it was for those focused on the task to lose sight of their purpose and to literally forget about the community they were serving. Managers missed opportunities to engage with the rest of the organization available for support and complained about the challenge of working with government representatives when new rules and regulations were being communicated. During the debrief of experiential exercises and appreciative inquiry tools participants routinely draw the parallels to their everyday work and see the analogies and metaphors of these simulations come to life. Participants report that their understanding of their impact on others, their appreciation for the complex cultural context within which they work, and the importance of building clear direction, alignment, and commitment through their leadership influence increases throughout the course of their workshop experience.

Leadership for the BoP and the Bottom Line

2008-01-27T12:11:00.000-05:00

By Philomena Rego and Lyndon Rego

On our trip to India in December 2007, we met with several corporations, educational institutions, trainers and young professionals. Most inspiring was our meeting with KC Kurien, who heads the people diversity initiatives at Pantaloon. Pantaloon Retail (India) Limited, is India’s leading retailer with more than 500 stores in 51 cities across India and over 25,000 people. What’s especially noteworthy is that the majority of employees come from lower economic groups. Organized retail is emerging as an important source of jobs in India, and is expected to add 2.5 million jobs by 2010. We found Pantaloon’s training approach to be remarkable on a number of levels:

While the war for talent in India is aimed at attracting the best educated, Pantaloon’s employees are typically young people from slums who might not have a degree, but have aspirations like everyone else.
Their innovative approach centers around helping these individuals be successful and providing opportunities and resources for developing their self-esteem and aspirations for their life and work. They ask recruits “what is your dream?”
The training approach is holistic and extends beyond building skills needed to fulfill job requirements to encompass the overall well being of the employee. They provide parenting classes, continuing education, and even have a happiness index to gauge overall employee satisfaction.

We asked KC, who came to Pantaloon after heading the design school Shristi, how he developed this unique orientation. He said he gained insights from watching beggars at a traffic intersection and reflecting on why some beggars were more successful than others. He found that it had to do with self-confidence. KC’s stint with design enables him to look at developing people with fresh eyes and to try new approaches.

Pantaloon’s parent organization is the Future Group, led by the visionary Kishore Biyani. The organization’s manifesto speaks of “rewriting rules” and “creating the future” and identifies among its core values: leadership, building relationships, humility, introspection, openness, and adaptability.

The link that Pantaloon has traced between individual self-awareness / empowerment and organizational success is at the heart of the Center’s vision to make leadership development more accessible and available in our world. Pantaloon -- and the aptly named Future Group --provides an inspirational example of how we can create a brighter future for those at the bottom of the pyramid through leadership development.

Learning to Lead

2008-01-21T13:29:00.000-05:00

By Philomena Rego

As a social worker educated in India, I had been through a graduate program where field placement was a requirement. At the time, only a few institutions were doing internships and fieldwork but now these approaches are commonplace in colleges as a way of providing students with practical experience.

Looking back, I gained work exposure and the application of theory to practice from the fieldwork, but the experience produced little insight about myself and my ability to work with others. It was ultimately of little long-term value.

In returning to India with an eye for ways to make leadership development possible for young people, it occurs to me that these field experiences are a fertile ground for building self-awareness and team skills. For this, we can couple these programs with assessment, reflection, coaching, and feedback. This would impart students with not only practical experience in their field of study, but the critical leadership skills that they can use for a lifetime.

Employers in India have complained that fresh hires arrive with a deficit of soft skills. The value of this particular approach is that with the added leadership emphasis, we could transform a common practice into a potentially powerful and valuable action learning platform.

We’ve begun discussions with a couple of Indian colleges to work to prototype an action learning approach for students. If successful they may be a model that can be scaled across the educational landscape to help turn a new generation of learners into leaders.

What's at Stake in Schools

2008-01-20T07:54:00.000-05:00

One of the organizations we’ve encountered in our effort to make leadership development more accessible in our world is the African Leadership Academy (ALA). The Academy is a new educational institution that will prepare talented 16-19 year olds from all 54 African nations to take on roles of leadership. We recently received a note from Chris Bradford of ALA spotlighting some of the incoming students. Here’s an essay from Belinda, a 16 year-old Zimbabwean girl:

“In June last year (2006), I noticed a certain family in our neighborhood constantly came to my house to literally beg for food. I was greatly disturbed and concerned at this behaviour. I investigated further into the issue and was saddened to discover that this family was child headed by Anna (13 years old). Anna, who was looking after her sisters (10 and 8 years), told me that her parents had died of AIDS in January (2006) and because all the money had been used up, she had resorted to asking for food in order to survive.

I was moved by her story and with the intention of helping, I asked my mother to lend me some money. With it I purchased 30 chickens at point of lay. I had calculated that if each chicken laid an egg everyday, I would have a crate to sell after school. I would sell the eggs to my neighbours and on Sundays I would take the eggs to church. With money constantly available I began to meet the orphans’ daily needs.”

ALA notes that Belinda has continued to empower Anna by teaching her how to grow vegetables in a garden. With the money from raised from the sales of the eggs and vegetables, Anna was able to support her daily needs and pay her siblings’ and her school fees.

Belinda’s approach evokes that of social entrepreneurship and speaks to the potential of young people. In his article, Everybody a Changemaker, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, voiced the need to focus on developing young people so that they gain “applied empathy, teamwork, and leadership” skills. It was important he said that we include those who have traditionally been subject to the kind of education that leaves out inspiration and empowerment.

“The children of elite families grow up at home and usually in school being expected to take initiative and being rewarded for doing so. This confident ability to master new situations and initiate whatever changes or actions are needed is in essence what defines the elite. Entering adult life with confidence and mastery of empathy/teamwork/leadership skills is what ultimately has given this small group control of the initiative and therefore of power and resources for millennia.

However, the other 97 percent grow up getting very little such experience with taking initiative. Adults control the classroom, work setting, and even sports and extra-curricular activities. And this situation, coupled with society’s attitudes, drums home the message to this majority: “You’re not competent or perhaps even responsible. Please don’t try to start things; we can do it far better.”

Clearly young people like Belinda rise far above their circumstances, and ALA intends to enable them to hone their skills as agents of change. There is desperate need for many more institutions like ALA, however.

The gulf is great between their potential and the present state of education in places like rural India, spotlighted in a feature in the New York Times, where teachers seldom show up at decrepit schools and children learn little.

“Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for continued growth.

“When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. “They’ll say, ‘We came every day and we learned nothing.’ ”

In India, CCL is exploring the development of a leadership program for school principals. Helping school administrators to think creatively about their challenges is key but only a small part of what must happen. Ultimately, we need millions of schools to embark on the path that ALA has taken. It will take a lot of us working together at the global and local level to bring about this critical transformation.

Overcoming Want and Waste

2008-01-19T14:14:00.001-05:00

In the last couple of months, two long awaited BOP innovations were unveiled: the One Laptop Per Child ($100) computer and the Tata Nano ($2,500) car. Both these innovations aimed at providing access to those who previously could not afford a laptop or a car.

While much of the innovation in our world is focused on pushing the forward edge in terms of features and functionality, the OLPC and the Tata Nano focused on cost cutting as the frontier for innovation. Crossing this frontier offers access to millions new consumers. The OLPC and Nano price targets were widely labeled as unrealistic at the outset but as they drew close to launch, they resulted in a bevy of copycat offerings from mainstream producers in the computer and automobile fields. What the OLPC and Nano proved is that the true barrier to be crossed is not technical viability but that of vision and will.

As more products cross the price-innovation threshold, a worry is about the significant environmental problems that can be expected to ensue with greater consumption. Finding a way to produce green (yet affordable) products is a frontier that we must begin to tackle. Here too the great, big barrier is not about feasibility but that of vision and will. Will we see creative leaders like Negroponte and Tata embark on these challenges soon? There’s not a moment to waste.

Leapfrogging the Digital Divide

2007-12-25T22:35:00.000-05:00

I am spending the holiday break in Goa, India. We are staying in a rural area named Santana. I am pecking this out on a BlackBerry while looking out across miles of marsh, populated with frogs, swarms of birds, grazing buffalo, roving pigs, and wandering country chicken.

What's remarkable to me is that this remote area -- where there is no trash pick-up and only occassional bus service -- is quite accessible via mobile technology. While I can't buy the local paper without getting to a nearby town, I can read the New York Times just as well as anyone in New York City.

In India, people are starting to use communications technology to overcome hurdles. College courses are telecast from major universities to hubs around the country where students attend remotely, farmers are making selling decisions based on market data via Internet links, and in traffic-choked cities, telecommuting is becoming a norm. In other parts of the world, banking and money transfer services are finally feasible for millions of rural people via cell phones.

What is the potential of these technologies to make leadership development and resources more accessible? CCL is exploring a number of possibilities along this axis. I anticipate that in years to come more of us will be able to live, work, and learn just fine in places like Santana, sitting as I am right now under a coconut tree listening to the chirp of the grasshoppers.

Designing a Sustainable Future

2007-12-24T05:43:00.001-05:00

At the Design with India conference I attended in Bangalore, Geetha Narayanan, the founder of Srishti asked, is the current economic model (that pits development against the environment) the only way forward for India. While the conference showcased the work of talented commercial designers, the role of design as a means to take on social challenges was very much front and center. How can we make sure that economic development doesn’t marginalize the poor or destroy the environment? In Bangalore, the pace of development is simply staggering. New shopping malls, office complexes, residential high-rises, and a commercial airport are all mushrooming, outpacing roads, power, and water supply. The growth is dynamic and creating prosperity, but not without unwanted side effects. The idea that design can make a difference is key.

Design thinking doesn’t assume that what’s gone before is what should be, or that problems are intractable. The ability to envision and enact fresh solutions is predicated on the belief that such solutions are possible in the first place. Poonam Kasturi is a designer who is building such solutions. She is created Daily Dump (http://www.dailydump.org/), an enterprise to support urban composting. Sixty percent of Bangalore’s urban waste is organic. Turning it into compost, reduces landfill and facilitates recycling of the non-organic waste, such as cardboard and plastic. Poonam’s solution is an elegant stack of earthen pots that can fit physically and aesthetically into small urban apartments. At Poonam’s design school, Srishti, alumni say what they learn that is the most important is the ability to think creatively. A broader challenge for India, is to increase the number of people who can think and create the kind of future we want.

The Center is working in India to increase the number of creative thinkers in an educational environment that has traditionally favored rote learning. In meetings with a number of educational institutions we’ve found a readiness to think about the role of creativity and leadership in preparing students for the future. We’ll have more to report on this front in the months to come.

Thank You for Your Support

2007-12-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

You may have recently viewed our e-Spot by MediaSauce describing the leadership development needs in Africa or perhaps you have read the content of this blog and are wondering how you can help us with our goal to make leadership resources accessible and affordable to people everywhere.

Your gift to the Center for Creative Leadership is important and will make a difference. Please take a few minutes to provide CCL with the necessary details to process your gift.

Please click here to GIVE NOW.

Note: It is most helpful if you do not select a Special Fund in Section 2 and instead simply type the text "Africa" in Section 3.

Thank you!

Business Takes on Poverty

2007-11-17T21:04:00.000-05:00

Is using business practices to address poverty an idea whose time has come? One indication is that the top two gurus in the The Thinkers 50 biennial poll are C.K. Prahalad, who wrote The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and Bill Gates who is now increasingly known for his focus on global health, development, and education. What unites these two individuals is the sense that we need new approaches to dealing with the issues of poverty.

Here’s what Gates had to say on the subject at his 2007 commencement address at Harvard University:

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

Prahalad is perhaps the leading agent of this line of thinking. In his landmark book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid he argues:

For more than 50 years, the World Bank, donor nations, various aid agencies, national governments, and lately, civil society organizations have all fought the good fight but have not eradicated poverty ... If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up. Four billion poor can be the engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity ... [and] a source of innovations.

Prahalad was spotlighted in a 2006 BusinessWeek profile that offered a compelling case for why the BoP matters to business. More recently, Prahalad looked ahead to the future at the 2007 BOP conference, paying special attention to environmental concerns (an hour-long video clip of his presentation is posted online).

The focus of the best business minds on ending poverty is cause for optimism, not only for their ideas and actions but for their ability to inspire many more of us to lend our own efforts to this great cause.

Can You Relate?

2007-11-17T09:06:00.000-05:00

Increasingly in our world, large and small organizations are seeking alliances to create and deliver goods and services. At the same time, the failure rate for corporate alliances is in the range of 60% - 70%. An article in Harvard Business Review (Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work) suggests that too much emphasis is placed on strategic aspects of the alliance and too little on building the relationship between people within the two entities on which the alliances ultimately thrive or flounder. The authors, Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss, suggest that a shift in emphasis is required (see graphic).

In the social sector, the importance of alliances is far greater, as is the desire to focus on the important outcomes. Yet, weaving the fabric of the joint relationship is essential. Rebecca Gajda in the American Journal of Evaluation (Utilizing Collaboration Theory to Evaluate Strategic Alliances) states, “Without a basis for trust and healthy inter-personal connections between people, strategic alliances will not have a solid foundation on which to stand. Collaboration depends upon positive personal relations and effective emotional connections between partners. Trust is only developed between partners when there is time, effort and energy put into the development of an accessible and functioning system for communication, and interpersonal conflict needs to be recognized as normal and even expected as the level of integration and personal involvement increases.”

The ability of people to build relationships and trust is linked to emotional intelligence and the ability to navigate differences. The Center’s work in the Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort is very much about helping individuals enhance their self-awareness and interpersonal skills. This is a growing imperative as we seek to accomplish more through collaborations, alliances, and partnerships. In the end, our ability to make grand cross-institutional relationships work rests on the humble ability of the individuals involved themselves to relate and collaborate.

Liberty in Liberia

2007-10-24T19:59:00.000-04:00

The Center for Creative Leadership has been invited by the Government of Liberia to help develop a global leadership initiative for women in government. The effort is being championed by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, and Tarja Halonen, President of Finland. In her two years in office, President Johnson Sirleaf has already enacted a dramatic transformation in Liberia, a country that has seen its share of horror.

Johnson-Sirleaf has set her presidency as an example of a new kind of leadership. In a speech on leadership at International Institute For Strategic Studies, she stated:

"I pledged to demystify the Presidency, and decentralize the governance system in a spirit of participatory democracy, which will ensure that every segment of our society will become an effective stakeholder, rather than a disinterested bystander, in the running of the country.

"... [a] daunting challenge which our leadership faces in the post- conflict period is getting our war-weary populace to renew their faith and confidence in themselves as a people capable of forging a much better future. This may sound simple, but it is not. In the context of post-conflict leadership, it devolves on us to provide the proper environment that will enable our people to regain their self-confidence. In this regard, we have the responsibility to put in place a governance system based on transparency, accountability, rule of law, and respect for the fundamental human rights of our people, as well as create opportunities for the re-emergence and rekindling of their abundant entrepreneurial skills and aptitudes."

Sirleaf's words are far from empty. The change in Liberia was contrasted by Steve Radelet, a development expert, in the New York Times:

[Before Johnson-Sirleaf] "... the 14-year civil war had killed 270,000 people -- an astonishing one out of every twelve Liberians -- and forced another 250,000 to become refugees. The economy had completely collapsed, with GDP falling by more than 90 percent between 1989 and 1996, one of the largest collapses ever recorded anywhere in the world. Children as young as ten had become pawns in the violence, with warlords abducting them from their families, stuffing them with drugs and arming them with AK-47s."

The situation today is far different, says Radelet, who has been back a dozen times in the past two years:

"Each time I come there are new signs of change: schools and clinics are being reopened, stores are restocked and repainted, the streets are ever more crowded with commercial activity, and electricity and water are being restored (there was no piped water or electricity except generators anywhere in the country for 14 years). Liberia's "control of corruption" index, as measured by the World Bank, registered the second-largest improvement of any country in the world this year."

The change in Liberia is cause for great hope. It signals the dramatic role that leadership can play even in the most fragile of states.

Transformation and the Twenty-Something

2007-10-15T14:25:00.001-04:00

By Joel Wright

The Center has been exploring at ways to develop young leaders. New research, by Jeffery Arnett at Clark University in Worchester, MA, indicates that there is greater potential for transformation in lives of the average twenty-something today.

Dr. Arnett is a pioneer in studying and proposing that there is a new developmental time of ones life occurring between adolescence and young adulthood. According to Arnett, in the past half century what most people experience between the ages of 18 – 29 has changed significantly in industrialized societies. One major change is with marriage and parenthood. In the past, most in this group would start this phase of their life in the early twenties but now it is being pushed off until the late twenties. Arnett claims that the period from the late teens through the mid twenties is now a time of self-focused exploration trying different possibilities with work and love. Some during this period even claim a “quarter-life crisis”.

Based on interviewing 300 “emerging adults,” Arnett describes the five key stages of Emerging Adulthood which distinguish it from the periods of Adolescence & Young Adulthood:

1.) Age of identity explorations – exploring love & work which helps them understand more about who they are and what they want out of life.
2.) Age of instability – because of the exploration, their life/work/love plan is constantly changing as new decisions and explorations reveal new insights.
3.) Self-focused age – with so many decisions occurring during this time, only the individual can truly decide what they want.
4.) Age of feeling in–between – a “gradual” change from adolescents to adulthood which can last between 7 – 10 years.
5.) Age of possibilities – high hopes and great expectations, a time of transformation

Aspects of these five areas were first noticed and classified as part of “Generation X”; however they are now becoming more mainstream with subsequent generations.

Age of Identity Explorations:
While typically identity formation is associated with beginning in adolescence, Emerging Adults are still exploring and are much closer to achieving their identity. During this period they are able to try out different ways of living and different options for love and work.

Age of Instability:
While Emerging Adults know they need a plan, it is often one constantly being revisited. Thus, this period can lead to anxiety about where to go and what to do for the next day, week, month or year. Some Emerging Adults will even look back on high-school years fondly because at least they knew where they were going and what they would be doing next. Moving, typifies this transient time period because with so many choices and changes occurring, each one could direct them to a new place to live and with new people.

Self-focused Age:
“There is no time of life that is more self-focused than Emerging Adulthood.” With so many choices occurring: what college, what major, what love, what occupation, when to come home, when to eat … the only one who truly knows these answers is the individual. This self-focus is healthy and Emerging Adults see it as necessary before they make big relationship commitments in work, love & life.

Age of Feeling In-Between:
When Emerging Adults were asked to describe this period the most used word was “gradual”. “Gradual” could be a great summary word for the key criteria that most regions in the U.S. and in most ethnic groups see as the three distinguishers of adulthood:

1.) Accept Responsibility for yourself
2.) Make Independent Decisions
3.) Become Financially Independent

All three of these take on a “gradual” and incremental process rather than all at once. Interestingly, when polled by Arnett, 60% of those from the age of 18 – mid twenties responded that they did not quite feel like adults yet.

Age of Possibilities:
Without having truly been tested by the “fires” of life or being tied down to certain networks, responsibilities and commitments, opportunity abounds. Since many of this group does not live at home, personal transformation is a huge part of this period. Their ability to depart from their past – whether positive or challenging – and the many choices and explorations that take place can be extremely formative. This period can last for about 7 – 10 years.

For more information on this topic visit Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s website:
http://www.jeffreyarnett.com/
Or consider reading his new book, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties.

Other resources:
http://www.parenthood.com/articles.html?article_id=9153
http://www.ssea.org/
http://www.s-r-a.org/easig.html

Improving Leadership in Fragile States

2007-10-09T16:22:00.000-04:00

Leadership in fragile states continues to be a significant concern around the globe. Back in 2006, the Center partnered with CHF International to convene a dialogue on Capitol Hill to discuss critical issues and approaches.

The panel discussion in Washington, D.C. was titled "Leadership in Fragile States: Building Stable Societies through Local Leadership." The half-day event on Capitol Hill brought together an array of international experts to explore best practices for supporting local leadership in fragile states such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. To view video clips of the opening statements made by each panelist, including CCL President John Alexander and CCL faculty member George Houston, please visit the appropriate video links from CCL's website: A Capital Hill Panel Discussion

Here's a direct link to a statement by Robert Jenkins of the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives.

Leadership Tools for Grassroots Trainers

2007-10-07T14:37:00.000-04:00

One of the fronts in our exploration is the creation of leadership development tools that can be used by grassroots leadership trainers. In India we tested whether the CCL tool Visual Explorer – a set of pictures used to facilitate creative thinking and group dialogue – could be used by trainers who work with youth and community organizations. Philomena Rego observed two tests with Adrian Rosario, a leadership trainer who had only been provided Visual Explorer tool along with simple written instructions. She reports:

We used Visual Explorer with a group of 185 college and working youth in South Bombay, India. The facilitator used Visual Explorer with the framing question: where are you in the bigger picture? These youth were asked to consider where they see themselves playing a role at the present how they could become more involved in playing a leadership role. It was amazing to see them in small groups talking about their role in schools and at work and how they are able to make a difference in their own small ways. Some of these young students felt that they had the responsibility to make this world a better place for everyone.

Jeevan Dhara is an NGO based in Cheetah Camp, Mumbai. This is Asia's second largest slum. Jeevan Dhara operates pre-school classes for children, adult literacy classes and study classes. It also works on HIV/AIDS issues and drug & alcohol rehabilitation. Visual Explorer was used with the teachers of the above programs. The framing question used was "how do you see your work/role in this community?" The session was conducted in Hindi, as the teachers are mostly Muslim, and Hindi is the most understood language in Mumbai slums. The teachers enjoyed the session which was aimed at improving their ability to work together and stay committed, inspite of the difficulties. VE helped them to express themselves more freely since they were speaking about the picture they had picked. The pictures do not have any language barriers.

Another Visual Explorer session was held with a small group of Young Christian Workers in Mumbai on August 24th. This group wanted to help each other see the importance of belonging to the group and sharing their thoughts. The group felt the pictures made it easy for them to talk about themselves and what each of them contributes to make the group strong and meaningful.

The success of Visual Explorer in field tests such as this has encouraged us to pursue the development of a broader range of inexpensive tools that can be used by grassroots trainers, teachers, and community workers. These tools work best when they are simple to use and flexible in their range of application. More on Visual Explorer at: http://cclve.blogspot.com/.

Transforming Society and Self

2007-09-29T15:05:00.000-04:00

CCL’s Jeffrey Yip recently interviewed Sam Voorhies of World Vision for an upcoming issue of the Leadership in Action journal. Sam spoke about the role leadership development has to play in accomplishing the organization's mission.

“World Vision globally is growing very rapidly. We’ve doubled in the last five years, and we project this growth to double again. Human talent and developing leadership capacity is our biggest challenge. We can raise all the money we want, but if we don’t have capable people to design programs and deliver them locally, it won’t happen. Our strategy is to identify and develop local leaders and not rely on expatriates.

Most of my work has been at the national and global level in the area of program development, leadership, and evaluation. The cross cutting theme of my work is in developing leadership capacities across all levels – indigenous leadership, national and global leadership. This work has been a tremendous education for me enriching me in ways I never thought possible. If we are going to facilitate transformational development in the communities of need, we have to be transformed ourselves. I would say our biggest challenge is growing our own leaders.”

Voorhies' words echo the wisdom of the greatest change agents of the 20th Century:

Mandela: “One of the most difficult things is not to change society, but to change yourself.”
Gandhi: "As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves."

To address the great problems of our time we should take note that change must take place within people to enable the greater transformation we seek in the world.

Give One, Get One or Got One, Give One?

2007-09-26T10:30:00.001-04:00

You may have heard about a recent initiative entitled One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The mission of this non-profit association is to develop a low-cost laptop that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. Our friends at Continuum, a Boston-based design firm, helped create the actual laptop. Recent articles in Newsweek have shared a marketing strategy called, “Give One, Get One”. The idea is that when someone purchases a $188 laptop for a child in a developing country living in a community that represents the base of the economic pyramid, you are also able to purchase another machine for someone in your own household or community for the same $188 price. What a wonderful idea!

The Center for Creative Leadership is considering a similar idea. CCL has the privilege of training some 20,000 leaders each year. These individuals are given the incredible opportunity to step out of their work roles for as much as a week to focus on developing their own leadership potential. This is quite an investment on behalf of their organizations. We believe that many of these individuals and possibly the organizations they work for would be willing to ‘pay it forward’. Some call it moving from success to significance, others talk about giving something back. Would you be willing to sponsor a leader in a developing country? Would you be willing to provide resources, tools, or workshops for our global neighbors to help them on their leadership journey? Perhaps there will be a CCL-sponsored opportunity in the near future for those in the leadership development community who Got One, to Give One!

FUTURE GENERATION FOUNDATION (FGF)

2007-09-24T11:01:00.000-04:00

By Don Prince

CCL entered into an alliance with an Egyptian foundation, the Future Generation Foundation (FGF) in 2006. In this arrangement, the partner promotes CCL’s leadership development programs in their region, and CCL delivers the programs.

FGF is a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by a number of leaders in Egypt’s private sector. The Chairman of the Board is Mr. Gamal Mubarak, son of Mohamed Mubarak, President of Egypt. FGF’s mission is to transform the business culture of Egypt and to reorient it to international norms of excellence and achievement. FGF targets human resources at all levels, from recent university graduates to executives. A key area of emphasis is in developing the youth of the country. One of their phrases is “Working for a Better Tomorrow”. Their primary emphasis is on Egypt, but they have the goal to reach the entire Middle East region.

CCL conducted its first 5-day Women’s Leadership Program in January 2007. Attended by 22 women executives from the public and private sector from multiple countries, it was a great success. CCL and FGF are planning 2 additional programs in 2007. These are: WLP (November) and LDP (December).

As an outgrowth of the first program, the Egyptian government is discussing with CCL the possibility of further leadership training of government leaders.

Developing NGO Leaders with TISS

2007-09-23T07:59:00.000-04:00

By Philomena Rego

India has an estimated 1.2 million NGOs. They work with the poor, exploited, and disadvantaged populations. Many NGOs serve their constituents through developing their empowerment and skills. Their own employees on the other hand do not get much by way of training. On our immersion last year we met with over 50 NGOs who expressed the need for leadership development. NGOs work in difficult environments and cant't pay people as much as corporations. The lack of development and support reduces their ability to acquire and retain talent and impedes their impact in advancing their mission. This is a critical issue as many NGOs seek to deal with complex challenges and scale up operations to serve more people.

To address the needs of NGOs in India, CCL in collaboration with TISS -- a highly-regarded university in Mumbai focused on social work, HR and other human services professions -- has begun to create a leadership development program for senior NGO executives. TISS is doing impressive work to scale up education and skills development (more on TISS in a future post). We found that we saw a common need to build NGO capacity through leadership development.

To inform program design work, in August 2007, we did a three day demonstration program led by Karen Dyer with 25 participants from various NGOs from Mumbai. The program was based on the Center's assessment, challenge and support model. We used assessment instruments, experiential activities, and rounded it up with a deep debrief. Karen also facilitated a half-day leadership program for some 20 school principals.

The NGO program will couple hard and soft skills development and be offered by TISS. As second stage will be to offer the program through other deemed universities in India (and beyond), and develop parallel offerings for government administrators and SMEs.

Leadership Beyond Boundaries - Colloquium at CCL on Work in East Africa

2007-09-21T17:55:00.000-04:00

Dou Fall and Steadman Harrison hosted an update on the progress of the Global Voice of Leadership initiative on Thursday, September 20 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The colloquium focused on the work of a CCL team in Kenya and Uganda, East Africa during the month of July, 2007. Pictures were used as prompts for story-telling from the team’s recent experiences working with NGOs in Nakuru and Nairobi, Kenya as well as Jinja and Kampala, Uganda.

The initial work in 2006 included immersions aimed at providing an anthropological perspective as well as a rapid prototyping opportunity to test initial ideas. The team (including Patricia O’Connor, David Day, Dou Fall, and Steadman Harrison) returned in 2007 for additional concept testing with partners including CHF International, ERMIS Africa, and Global Outreach International.

Colloquium attendees included visitors from Boston University and the Archives of the History of American Psychology. The group of 24 attendees generated several innovative ideas (such as a hand-held tool for generating 360 degree feedback for leadership workshops in regions with low or no bandwidth). One attendee pointed out that CCL’s Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort in regions like East Africa, India, and Central and Eastern Europe represents a major differentiator between the work of CCL as a non-profit and many of the other consulting firms and business schools that have added leadership development to their portfolios in recent years.

We need your help to make leadership development accessible and affordable to our friends and global neighbors working in communities that represent the base of the economic pyramid. If you know of potential funding opportunities, organizations that you believe would be good partners in this effort, or you have an idea of how you can be a part of this work, please let us know! Start now by posting a comment here on this blog…

Leadership Development is Not Wasted on the Young

2007-09-20T22:20:00.000-04:00

B. Muthuraman, Managing Director of Tata Steel and mastermind behind the Corus acquisition, states in an interview that soft skills constitute a major portion of a manager’s success, but are not well developed even in the best b-schools. “80 percent of good management,” he says, “is based on what I call the behavioral traits of a person – it is the mindset and attitudinal make up of a person that makes him or her a successful executive and leader.”

In India, soft skills get short shrift at educational institutions that reward students for performance on exams. As we reported earlier, the economic boom in the country needs professionals who can hit the ground running, yet companies have to spend significant time – sometimes yearlong immersions – prepping new hires for the job.

What can be done to remedy this? Muthuraman suggests that binding reflection to action may be a key to helping young people mature more quickly as leaders: “…much of the development of a human being happens through self-reflection and follow-up action. Students and executives should spend organized time with themselves – reflect on their thinking process, aspirations, strengths… ‘Reflection and action’ is the mantra for personal and professional growth.”

The Center is developing a series of offerings to accelerate and support experiential leadership development for students and young professionals. These offerings for young people have relevance not only in India, but also in many emerging economies where the talent gap is a key concern.

Good to “Go Do”

2007-09-18T21:46:00.000-04:00

GOOD Magazine asked IDEO (a firm we worked with on the CCL GVOL initiative) to create a way to capture the ideas in a special issue on design solutions. IDEO, as always, did a creative and masterful job, overlaying a sidewalk café photograph with handwritten notes about everything in the picture – from the potted plant (“help reduce greenhouse emissions”) to the billboards (“doubled as climbing walls?”). What most caught my eye, however, was IDEO’s re-representation of the magazine name “GOOD” as “Go Do.”

For the longest time I’ve pondered the seemingly opposing ideas of being prudent vs. proactive. This is sharply contrasted in Stephen Covey’s admonition to “measure twice and cut once” and Tom Peters’ hyperactive “ready, fire! aim.”

I’ve become more partial to Peters of late, understanding that “learning by doing” is a way to be both prudent and proactive. On our GVOL project we shelved traditional market research (surveys and such) for on the ground immersions that helped us understand the lives of the people we hoped to serve. We postponed business planning (a traditional precursor to action) to push forward with rapid prototyping and experimentation as a way of understanding what works rather than presupposing what the strategy needed to be.

It seems to me the change agents in our world are not busy drafting elaborate business plans, but are out there actively trying things, learning, and adapting their approach. IDEO’s mantra of “fail often to succeed sooner” echoes the words of one of the world's greatest social innovators, Gandhi, who promoted action and acknowledged the failure that comes with it: “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching” and “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

Sometimes in April is Something to Remember

2007-09-16T20:24:00.000-04:00

I watched Sometimes in April, a movie that focuses on the desperate and tragic story of a Hutu-Tutsi family in Rwanda when the ethnic genocide broke out in April, 1994. What the film indicates is that terrible events don’t emerge overnight. In this case, the seeds were sown by colonialists who divided to conquer, as well as by the subsequent waves of ethnic discrimination. So too, as the genocide unfolded, cascading to the murder of nearly a million people, the world stood aside, because of the lack of strategic interest present in Rwanda, and because stopping the violence once it was unleashed required more than political statements or diplomatic pressure.

From a leadership perspective, the situation was enormously complex and difficult. No one was able to initiate, orchestrate, or stop the killings. The family in the film is well educated, affluent, and has connections to the military supporting the killings, as well as the movement that is enacting the violence. But all this proves insufficient to ensure their safety.

The film suggests that the time to act is before the time of war and killings start. We can act to increase social equity, to reduce poverty, stimulate economic growth, to improve education, to build civil society, and establish international networks that can act swiftly when needed. And who must do this? We all must.

The film opens with an eloquent quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Action and inaction are both choices that are ours to make.

Leadership Essentials for Youth

2007-09-16T17:07:00.000-04:00

A group of youth leaders / camp counselors came together on August 18th for the first local YMCA-sponsored prototype of a CCL Leadership Essentials for Youth Workshop. We are calling this the Lead Now! workshop design with the intention of creating one-day, two-day, and three-day curriculum for youth leaders with a detailed facilitators guide and tool kit. Joel Wright, Paula Morrow, Matt Hall, Dou Fall, Tim Burress, and Steadman Harrison facilitated the design that included an Introduction to CCL, Leadership 101, D-A-C, S-B-I, MBTI, Experiential Exercises, and Visual Explorer. The youth that attended each shared how this workshop design impacted their understanding and practice of leadership. These youth represented late high school and early college age students. They were all current employees of the YMCA and selected on the basis of their positive leadership over the 2007 summer term of work. This was an exciting step in the exploration of youth leadership models at CCL. We appreciate the YMCA's partnership and funding.

When the participants first arrived (teenagers from 15-19 years in age), some of us were feeling a bit skeptical about what we would be able to accomplish with them. They seemed too laid back, reserved, a little too ‘cool’… these were a few of our first impressions. However, the CCL modules that we used are so engaging that soon we all found the room full of energy. The quiet and reserved kids came out of the shells and took on the leadership roles time and time again. The young women in the room really surprised us the most. One of these women was one of the younger counselors in the group and she stepped up to articulate the needs and initiated a plan of action on behalf of the group several times during the course of the day. The mix of experiential exercises and a ‘lessons from life’ type overview connected with these youth. They rated their appreciation for S-B-I and the MBTI overviews close to the top of their list along with Visual Explorer and the experiential exercises.

The workshop close really caught some of us off guard. We were remembering our first impressions and trying to figure out where these kids came from as they went around the room receiving their certificates and sharing their ‘take-aways’ from the day. Each of them described important lessons of impact like how they had a new vision of leadership, or how they were prepared to give feedback to the kids that came to their camp, or how they understood personality preferences for the first time, or how they planned to step up to opportunities in the future. We were really blown away by how far they came in the course of 1 day… it reminded us of the same sort of impact we experienced with the 1-day workshop in Jinja, Uganda.

The goal of this GVOL youth work is to create a workshop design and toolkit that we can put in the hands of youth leaders around the world. Our prototype from this initial design will be going to South Africa later in September and on to Singapore in October.

Eastern Africa Leadership Exploration

2007-09-16T16:40:00.000-04:00

In November and December of 2006, CCL sent a team of five to Uganda and Kenya to conduct interviews, prototype new leadership development models and test preliminary concepts that were aligned with the design considerations guiding an initiative entitled, Global Voice of Leadership (GVOL). A second visit took place in July 2007. Our initial work was to translate the Center for Creative Leadership's content and knowledge base into meaningful tools for leaders working in a diverse African context. The team used story-based interviews to hear from local NGOs, CBOs, and FBOs how work was accomplished at its best and what the challenges organizations, teams, and individuals faced day-to-day. Our team developed what we now call a CCL "Leadership Essentials" workshop.

Workshops were hosted in Jinja (Uganda), Nakuru (Kenya), and Nairobi (Kenya) with groups of 20 to 40 participants attending each workshop. Experiential exercises were tailored to the language and context of East Africa. Hand-score assessments were chosen to provide participants with information about their personality styles when approaching change. CCL feedback models (Situation-Behavior-Impact) and leadership models (Direction-Alignment-Commitment) as well as our approach to development (Assessment-Challenge-Support) were utilized and tested at each of these workshops. The workshop was led by one trainer with no power-point screen shows, limited handouts, and no assessment pre-work. While CCL typically delivers a high-tech, five-day program, the CCL team delivered a high-touch, one-day workshop with similar impact.

One participant shared the following comment at the conclusion of our first workshop in Uganda.

“This training is very important and you need to understand why we say to you, you need to come back. You hear us saying come back soon and it is for a reason. Where you come from this leadership teaching may result in better management, better business practices. But here, here in Uganda this teaching has the ability to save lives. This region, these governments have been at war for many years. If they heard today what you were teaching us I believe we could end many of these conflicts. We could see an end to these wars.”

In July 2007, CCL returned to East Africa to train a group of 50 NGO partners for CHF International and to assist ERMIS Africa with the launch of the Eastern Africa Leadership Forum. CCL returned to East Africa at the request of these NGOs who provided a small amount of seed money to partially offset the expenses of the CCL team.

We invited LEAP Africa to co-train these workshops with us and they accepted the invitation. We want to explore a formal affiliated partnership with LEAP through which they may continue delivering CCL content and materials for a royalty fee. In July, we worked with a LEAP trainer and with very limited ramp-up in order to test the “Grassroots trainer kit” providing the appropriate materials and instructions for the delivery and facilitation of CCL workshop modules. This concept test was tested with the safety net of having CCL there to support the work. Based on our 2007 experience in East Africa we believe that it will be possible to create a training of trainers workshop through which we will can increase the training capacity of multiple organizations and extend the reach of our program content and materials.

The Eastern Africa Leadership Forum is a non-profit entity stemming from a synergistic joint initiative between CCL and Environmental Research, Mapping and Information Systems in Africa [ERMIS Africa] that focuses on promoting leadership and leadership development within the region. It draws from shared principles and experiences by the two organizations on the need to create partnerships, networks, and communication mechanisms towards development of leadership skills and resources. The forum envisions individuals and organizations within the Eastern Africa region applying creative leadership tools to solve complex leadership challenges towards sustained development within the region. The mission of the Forum is to advance the understanding, practice and development of good leadership practice for the benefit of society within the Eastern Africa region. This concept came about as a direct result of requests from the participants of the leadership workshop hosted in Nakuru, Kenya in 2006. The 2006 work included participants from diverse backgrounds representing NGOs (n=10), government offices (n=4), educational organizations (n=5), and businesses (n=6).

We are actively seeking opportunities to extend these initial field tests to further illustrate how the Center for Creative Leadership can create and sustain viable models and tools to bring affordable and accessible leadership development and organizational capacity to base of the pyramid economies. Please comment on this blog entry if you have creative ideas or suggestions for how we can extend this work further.

Of Scale and Substance

2007-09-15T22:28:00.000-04:00

I recently attended the BOP 2007 conference at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The “base of the pyramid” thinking has been quite instrumental in helping the Center understand that it was possible to serve low-income markets sustainably. The idea centers on the need to create business models that are affordable and accessible.

At the conference I had a chance to hear how the field had evolved since the seminal works by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart had been published. Two big ideas were expounded. The first was the need to consider environmental impacts of enterprise. The poor, said Prahalad, are often the ones most impacted by pollution. Job creation at the expense of environmental damage could generate short-term income but ultimately further marginalize the poor. The second was the idea that many corporations that had adopted BOP principles had largely focused simply on creating affordability and access for existing offerings, but had not pushed the envelope of innovation. A new wave, which Stu Hart labeled as BOP 2.0, was focused on co-creation with people at the BOP. This offered the potential of greater impact and scaleabily, as well as the potential for disruptive innovation.

I came away from the conference impressed by how much the field had progressed. The academics, corporations, NGOs, and governmental organizations present were all working together – leading together – to chart a new course that I believe in time will lift billions out of poverty … by enabling corporations to think more innovatively about markets they’ve failed to serve, and by unleashing the potential of social entrepreneurs to birth socially-motivated businesses that can scale up to span the world.

Laos Leadership Forum

2007-09-15T09:40:00.001-04:00

Post by Patricia O'Connor

CCL Singapore was contacted by SNV, a Swedish-based capacity building NGO, with a request to participate in a one-day leadership forum involving senior public sector ministry officials in Vientiane, Laos. SNV asked the Singapore Embassy for assistance in linking up CCL and SNV. SNV had heard that

Singapore

“had” a Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL) that promotes similar principles of leadership development and explored the possibility of involving CCL in a project. The Singapore Embassy contacted Roger Byrne who passed the request to Chris Ernst, who proceeded by conducting the initial intake. He identified a link between SNV’s request and GVOL objectives, bringing Patricia O’Connor into the conversation. Patricia saw this request as an opportunity to test a mini-version of “CCL Essentials” while exploring the potential of targeting senior government officials initially as participants and later as sponsors for future leadership development support focused on less privileged populations in their country. Patricia & Chris proceeded as a team to qualify the request, work with the SNV contact, design the modules, and facilitate the delivery. This opportunity required a very fast turn-around -- initial contact to Roger was 5 May 2007 and delivery took place 11 June 2007.

See the Laos Leadership Forum Newsletter for Details:

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLAOPRD/Resources/WBNewsletterLeadershipForum2007.pdf

Enabling Young Professionals in India to Reach their Potential

2007-02-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

By Joel Wright

This project grew out of the work of the Global Voice of Leadership (GVOL) effort at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) to examine opportunities for “democratizing leadership development”. Through this goal, CCL seeks to make leadership development available to more people. The GVOL effort is exploring two areas of relevance to this report – Young Professionals, and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in India. Early research and conversations with Indian executives suggest that these two groups may be underserved in regards to professional and leadership development. We thus began a series of activities to answer three key questions:

1. To what extent do corporations and young professionals perceive a need for young professional leadership development?
2. Would new leadership initiatives be beneficial for young professionals, businesses and NGOs in India?
3. What are the specific needs for young professional leadership development and what strategies would be most acceptable and effective?

In an effort to understand these complexities, CCL sent a team of professionals to India and hired a leading design and innovation firm for this project.

Our Approach

When we arrived we were overwhelmed by the amazing culture, food and welcoming hospitality. The start of our visit coincided with the Ganesh Chaturthi which we learned was a festival of good omens, prosperity and luck. Perhaps a good sign for what the future would bring.

In no time we found ourselves talking with a broad spectrum of people. Our exploration took us into the educational backgrounds and developmental foundations of young professionals. We explored the choices they made as they navigated their way through schooling and into the early years of work. We spoke with educational institutions, corporate executives, HR managers, independent trainers, young professionals, NGOs and foundations that fund grants for learning, development and leadership. Each establishment provided us with a great deal of information.

Between the two projects we met with 43 organizations and about 200 people. Of the sectors visited, 42% were NGOs, 37% were corporations, and 21% were educational institutions, and training centers. (Fig. 1)

Challenge, Change and Opportunity

We heard that for young professionals, corporations, and educational institutions in India this is a time of significant change, adaptation and growth.

The overall picture that emerged from our conversations across the nation was:

· The high growth in India has generated a tremendous demand for young professionals
· Many organization are struggling to attract, develop, and retain talent
· A key factor is that the overall educational system is doing a poor job of preparing people with soft skills (versus book knowledge)
· Companies are working hard to develop training programs to address this need

We note three areas that would increase young professional staff retention, their overall development and performance, and the overall strength of the organizations.

1.) Preparation – do as much as possible to prepare young people before they land in the work world.
2.) Transition – enhance the transition into their place of employment where mentoring, coaching continued learning, training, and career guidance become a common practice.
3.) Support – continue to prepare this group to become effective team players and managers.

Preparation

“Something needs to be done about that.” This is what one corporate trainer said referring to how young professionals are not being prepared with the skills needed for the work environment. While many young professionals and leaders in organizations expressed the need for better preparation, our findings show that a piece of the problem is young professionals have false expectations about the work world. Many describe the transition as “shocking”, or “what you think of the work world is very different than the way it is”. Others elaborated by saying, “the sort of mindset you get in the MBA is that you have these theories and this is how organizations work and if you apply this you can do whatever you want. But that…just doesn’t happen…it doesn’t work…it comes down to practical human interaction”. “Practical human interaction” is one way many express the recognition and need to develop soft skills, team work and interpersonal understanding prior to the work world.

Although soft skills are seen as essential in the work world, college students in India see classes in leadership and soft skills as of little importance. “During education, even when doing teamwork exercises, I didn’t understand the importance, [there was] no context or introduction”. Additionally, it was shared that classroom based team building projects could not compare with work place team dynamics, diversity of people, and challenges.

Some schools, however, are rising to the challenge by incorporating team assignments, field work and internships into their curriculum. These institutions won much praise from employers for the quality of their graduates. While some students at top schools are beginning to receive better preparation and training, there are many more who attend more traditional schools. For them, their preparation offers very little exposure to industry, leadership development or team building. Overall, nearly everyone expressed the need for less theory and more practical experience. With this in mind, it is not surprising to hear a lead executive say “only 20% of the graduates are employable.”
Transition

While better preparation for the work world and the development of “soft skills” are one demand of the day, the next is to address the transition of young professionals (from their university and into their first few years in the work world) and the need to accelerate their learning to meet the fast paced growth taking place in India.

“In our culture…we do not emphasize identity from childhood; a child can never say that I believe this, I like this”. In fact, until the start of their careers, many young professionals describe their situation as being on a “railroad track” or “always in queue” and rarely having to make life directing decisions. A VP of HR expressed how, “self awareness is not in management institutes” and that he needs “people who can think.” As a result, this lack of self-awareness is carried into the work world leading to time and “energy that is just getting wasted here and there” until the young professional “sits back and thinks about what it is they want from a job and if they’re getting it or not.” It’s not until this happens that young professionals will align themselves with the proper position and be able to be clear about their goals and what they want from career and life.

Some young professionals talked about how their “fresher” year-long exposure program had an impact in helping them align their potential with career prospects. They explain how the program was designed to introduce them to different departments within the organization, share ideas with managers and develop relationships that would allow for future cross departmental collaborations. As a result, young professionals are able to better understand the individual departments and the organization as a whole. Moreover, they are able to observe and learn about potential career paths they might choose.

Some organizations even blend exposure experiences with international immersions. One training director describes the impact of an international experience on young professionals as, “they come back a changed person, exuding with confidence”. One young professional stated that, “I got the big picture when I visited the U.S. [Prior to that I] was just doing coding, just [doing] a piece of the puzzle. Once I saw the end product and received feedback from customers I realized I was doing something important”.

Several individuals we met who didn’t receive these immersion experiences felt neglected and more inclined to jump ship for better advancement opportunities and pay. Others, who worked hard to get ahead of the pack and be noticed, hinted that stress and pressure was taking a toll. Almost all spoke of the importance of good managers as role models and mentors who made a great difference in their lives.

Support – Coaching for Capacity

As young professionals transition into the work world, support from within the organization becomes crucial to their ongoing development and success. Many organizations are recognizing the need for a heightened developmental approach for young professionals and are designing valuable programs that enhance self-awareness, professional growth and the sustainability of both. One way organizations are beginning to do this is by institutionalizing coaching.

While ideally the immediate managers of these young professionals should play the role of a coach, many are young professionals themselves and are still learning basic managerial skills. One expressed how he was, “not experienced to facilitate difficult situations in the office” and that "initially it was difficult to disassociate personal ambition and views from the situation at hand”. Young managers are often “prepared to manage process but not people” and need to “learn how to communicate, how to get people to do their work, how to develop support, and convince/negotiate with people.” Most young professionals do not have this type of experience and thus are learning on the job.

Not only are young managers not reaching their potential, they are also not able to support those they supervise. For one VP of HR, his biggest fear is that a young manager might “kill” unidentified talent and drive them out of the organization. Because of the potential impact on the organization and the challenges young professionals face, many indicate an immense need for support and coaching.

One intriguing approach adopted by a leading business school was to pair fresh graduates with senior alumni mentors. These mentors were helpful in guiding these graduates as they encountered difficult challenges of new jobs.

Convergence of the Social and Corporate Sectors

In addition to our work with young professionals in the corporate world, we were also exploring the need for NGO leadership development. What we found was that skills learned within the social sector were applicable and highly effective in the corporate sector. This convergence of the social and corporate sector is seen by some as not only a way to give back but also a way for both sides to learn and grow. These professionals described their experiences within NGOs as life changing, challenging, and very different than the corporate world, causing them to think in different ways.

One NGO we visited specializes in recruiting students for extended assignments in rural India. Participants in these programs described the experience as powerful learning opportunities that expanded their abilities, self-awareness, and confidence.

Could the social sector be a training ground for more young professionals? Evidence from both the NGO sector and the corporate sectors, leads us to believe that both could benefit greatly from the convergence of the two.

Observations

There is little doubt that India is booming with opportunity. Those with whom we met were excited and optimistic about the challenges and changes confronting India. Most were aware of the situations connected to preparation, transition and support and were either already responding to them or were eager to help address them.

We noticed a significant role for educational institutions to do more in preparing young adults with soft skills and real-life experiences. Our sense is that colleges and universities are a critical point at which to help young professionals reach their potential and thus should be an area of focus. In addition, we observed the need to accelerate learning and experience for young professionals as they transition from educational institutions and into the workplace. It’s here where corporations need to provide more support and coaching to facilitate the development of future managers.

The Center for Creative Leadership is in the process of working to help address the leadership development needs we encountered.

Understanding NGO Leadership Development Needs in India

2006-12-01T13:24:00.000-05:00

By Philomena Rego

Over the course of two months, we visited a range of NGOs across India: urban and rural, large and small. They included educational institutions providing professional degrees, training facilities and independent trainers providing non-formal education, grant-making organizations, community development organizations, microfinance associations, self-help groups, and organization addressing public health. These conversations with more than 100 NGO representatives touched on key challenges for the sector and the need for leadership development. The following is some of what we heard.

A Time of Challenge and Opportunity

We heard that the 1 million NGOs had a significant role to play in India. The economic growth in India has created new opportunities for disadvantaged populations but also exposes them to the threat of greater exploitation and displacement.

Many NGOs were working to ensure that India’s poor were not further marginalized and were able to take advantage of the forces of growth and globalization. In many cases, organizations had begun to leverage the talents and power of rural populations and the poor to transform their situations. We heard that the poor should not be looked at as hapless recipients of aid but as people with skills, influence, land and other resources. The approaches adopted by NGOs were participatory and inclusive of the knowledge and creativity the poor had acquired. The efforts were geared to help unlock the economic potential and collective power of these populations and make them partners in development.

The organizations we visited had almost without exception developed effective models and aspired to scale their operations to serve more people and communities. The core challenges they faced were financial and human resources for sustaining growth.

NGO Capacity

Many NGOs are having difficulty attracting educated professionals, especially those willing to work in rural areas. Trained MSWs have lucrative opportunities working abroad and it is also becoming increasing difficult to retain talent in the face of fast growth in the corporate sector. BPOs, banks and other growing sectors are able to poach employees away with offers of much higher salaries and advancement opportunities.

NGOs have adopted a couple of strategies in this regard. Some institutions have begun hiring recent graduates and providing them a year-long training with the expectation that they would stay on. Another approach is recruiting talent from rural communities and providing training to enable them to work in the field. This strategy is effective in that rural recruits are familiar with local communities and are more likely to stay on the job. The limitation, however, is that these local recruits lack confidence (to interact with government officials and funders) and managerial skills.

We heard about a degree of tension within established NGOs between older employees and educated recruits. The lack of readiness to change by senior people in the organization is a source of frustration for increasingly impatient younger employees and in some cases the key reason for their departure.

A concern is that many NGOs had not substantially enhanced their ability to embed and share leadership within the organization. In some cases founders and senior leaders hold a tight grip over shaping the course of the organization.

One large NGO that we encountered had achieved a strong culture of inclusive leadership. We found their staff to extremely engaged, satisfied, and committed – “here there are bosses but no bossism” a staff person declared. This was the result of years of dedicated effort in building an inclusive culture through the development of staff throughout the organization.

Training and Development

Many NGOs recognize the need for enhancing technical skills in the area of management. In our encounters, the need for leadership development of NGO staff was not often a priority. Organizations were committed first to the constituents they served and seemed far less focused on the development of their staff. Learning occurred primarily on the job and most training was focused on job-related skills. Few organizations appear to focus much on “self actualization” for staff. This lack of personal development, stated one educator, was a factor in the high burnout rates and stagnation present in the sector. “People need rejuvenation” observed the president of a large NGO.

In some cases there was skepticism that leadership could be developed and needed to be available for staff at large. A foundation representative stated that there needs to be better validation of the value of leadership development at lower levels. Other institutions, however, voiced the perspective that leadership development had broad value based on the premise that one could enact leadership “without being in a position of authority.” The skills identified for training included: identity development, self-confidence, motivation, perspective development, articulation of thoughts and public speaking, risk taking, team building and relationship development, conflict management, and building consensus.

With regard to training there is also the expressed tension between being able to afford time for staff to attend programs (“only people who have no work can attend training”) and the realization that self study or online programs are not adequate for learning. One individual put it this way “you can’t learn leadership from a book; it is akin to reading a menu and feeling full.”

The existing training programs we encountered were usually delivered by independent trainers and used dialogue, role play, and group exercises to help individuals assess strengths and weaknesses, and build skills and abilities. These programs were often delivered at very low cost with basic amenities and residential options to make them affordable.

A number of educational and training institutions we visited were working to do more for NGO professionals. They are planning to ramp up new offerings to provide NGO staff with ongoing professional development. Even so, these institutions admitted that it was hard to scale their operations enough to address the vast need for training in adequate measure.

Collective Capacity

The NGOs we visited had established effective models for addressing social needs and had plans for expansion. Many of the organizations, however, saw the scope of need in India to far exceed their present reach of activities. This was related to the shortage of human resources – “we need a lot more qualified people in the field” – as well as their ability to address the vast challenges alone. In many cases organizations expansion plans were linked to forming alliances with other NGO, corporate, and governmental entities.

The need for collective effort was emphasized by several people with whom we spoke. We heard that there is a critical need to work constructively with governmental agencies, corporations, and funding bodies. Embedded in this was the recognition that these entities had differing agendas that were not always seen to be in the interest of the poor. Concern was expressed about corporate social responsibility being primarily about public relations than creating change. A founder of a rural NGO also voiced dissatisfaction that large NGOs had a tendency to become big bureaucracies that simply subcontracted work and did so with short attention spans – “you can’t subcontract vision or passion.”

We nevertheless heard expressed the need for NGOs to work together more effectively to align efforts, share learning and best practices, and consolidate their power. An older NGO mentioned that with maturity they were now less concerned that partnering with another NGO would enable the other to “steal their funding.”

Some educational institutions saw a role for them to play in enhancing NGO networks and the cross-sector sharing of knowledge.

Observations

There is clearly much pressure on the NGO sector to address significant challenges in India related to deep rooted poverty and rapid change. The commitment, achievements, and vision of the people at the NGOs we met were inspirational and provide much hope.

Our sense is that leadership development –understood as enhancing the ability of individuals and organization to work together to envision and enact change – has a significant role to play in helping NGOs achieve their objectives.

We observe the need to do more to train staff to enhance skills and help them deal creatively with the immense challenge and opportunity that they must tackle. Furthermore this investment in individual employee development and growth will help enhance retention and reduce stagnation and frustration. The response by educational and training institutions to address this need is promising and must be further extended and supported by funders. At the same time, there is need to demonstrate the effectiveness and value of these investments in leadership development for funders.

At a macro-level, it appears that a broadly recognized issue is working across sectors and boundaries in alliances and networks. There appears to be interest among corporations and NGOs to engage constructively, though the scope of these activities appears limited at present.

We see that higher education in India represents a key point at which a greater exposure to and engagement with the social sector can be established. This could serve the dual purpose of helping young people build soft skills, by taking on real challenges out of the classroom, as well helping spark interest among more individuals in choosing the NGO sector as their career path.

The Center for Creative Leadership is working to explore ways in which we can be a resource for leadership development for the NGO sector in India and beyond. As our work evolves, we look forward to reconnecting with NGOs in India to develop, test, and offer tangible approaches to address these needs.