Leading collaborations
The following is an excerpt from my dissertation The Ontology of Love: A Framework for Re-Indigenizing Community ©2015
Leading collaborations requires that we lead in full coordination with collaboration members. Much like a flock of geese, leadership in collaborations is the result of agreement and strategic uses of member skills, vantage points, sociopolitical leverage, and energy in light of the short or long term needs of the collaboration. Leadership in collaborations has less to do with individual leaders and more to do with the collective understanding of how to best go about living out the collaborations’ raison d’etre.
In this case, an Indigenist Leadership model applies best because it requires that leaders follow Indigenist Leadership Model principles which are essentially about the needs of the collective group and a profound awareness of the need to Re-Indigenize communities.
Most people I know think of leadership as the use of power and authority to create particular outcomes. However, and as our culture becomes increasingly aware of complexity, leadership thinkers and practitioners have begun to understand that leadership in complex settings may have to look very differently from the way it looks when leaders operate in tightly controlled environments like the military, corporate and other types of organizational settings. Suffice it to say that even those controlled environments are undergoing a profound change in the way leadership is understood, and in the way desired futures are identified. It would be an understatement on my part to not also acknowledge that this change could be happening in a quicker fashion due to the continued depletion of our natural resources and the ensuing chaos it is beginning to cause in socioeconomic structures.
Collaborations offer opportunities for experimentation with different ways of leading because leadership within collaborations does not occur as a consequence of positional authority or roles, much like in the case of Indigenist Leadership. Leaders of collaborations that rely on positional authority and roles to lead, will by and far end up leading homogenous networks and will see little change over the long term. Calton and Payne offer that, “traditional forms of control and unilateral cognition [or groupthink] must make room for collective learning strategies better attuned to coping with the messy problems that enmesh stakeholder networks” (11).
Whereas traditional management practice might make use of leadership on an occasional manner and focus primarily on the fulfillment of management tasks, leaders of collaborations must manage entire “ecosystems,” networks loosely tied together across disciplines and organizations and sharing together in the life of community. Collaborations can be understood as the expression of an ecosystem if they are diverse enough to fully embody all the complexities to be found in a community’s life. In “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems,” Carl Folke, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg offer a framework for understanding the difference between managing from a traditional standpoint and managing ecosystems. They see the need for both increased leadership and management methods in the process of managing ecosystems.
Process of managing ecosystems
Ongoing management of the complex environment created within collaborative structures requires a much higher level of engagement at the leadership and management levels. This framework is helpful when beginning to try to understand the difference between managing a program or an organization, and managing collaborations.
Ann Marie Thomson, and Ann Marie and James L. Perry acknowledge that leaders of collaborations may face unexpectedly intense experiences whether a collaboration becomes inert or creative in “Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box.” (28) Leading collaborations can be, as Thomson and Perry say, “overwhelming.” Success presents problems of its own, and so does failure. Therefore, the idea of arriving at an ideal problem-free state as a result of resounding success is an illusion that erroneously drives many into thinking that if we only work hard enough, do enough, say enough, write and engage enough, we will somehow make this miracle state of heaven on earth occur. Those of us who cling to our personal ability to create our own success may find the process of leading collaborations frightening. And yet, that is exactly the task at hand when leading in complex environments. Some may choose to try to control the environment anyway. However, such a tactic has not been proven to be effective. Sundaramurthy explains:
According to stewardship theory, controls may squelch managers’ stewardship motives and aspirations— the very leadership traits needed to propel organizations to new heights. Managers who reach the apex of organizations typically are driven by higher-order needs...achievement, and affiliation motivate these individuals to “more readily engage in cooperative, altruistic, and spontaneous unrewarded citizenship behaviors”... Rational controls stymie these proclivities by limiting social ties and emphasizing extrinsic rewards. Suppressing their aspirations pushes the steward to either (1) reduce his or her organizational commitment and engage in more self-serving behaviors to fulfill lower- order needs or (2) if unable to suppress their aspirations, become increasingly withdrawn and resistant. (403)
Given the ubiquitous use of control in management, many have experienced the need to “tone it down” and/or to “suck it up.” Many people may be so used to operating in these to ways that when they show up in collaborations they are no longer aware how they are “toning it down” and “sucking it up.” A worse case scenario is that they have become the leaders who only seek to control for the generation of the outcomes they want, and they further exacerbate members’ needs to “tone it down” and to “suck it up.” I am guilty of controlling, of “toning it down,” and of “sucking it up.” All three ways of coping with the uncertainty of complex social environments lead to a separation from my own need to stand in my full leadership, to serve, and to feel as though I am making a difference. None of these three ways of finding safety lead to learning and meaningful social change. Sundaramurthy advocates for a balanced approach to leading collaborations in which leaders use the best aspects of both control and collaboration:
A control approach helps curb human limitations through vigilance and discipline, while a collaborative approach taps individuals' aspirations via cooperation and empowerment. Yet if one approach becomes overemphasized, perils of groupthink or distrust can fuel reinforcing cycles. From a paradox perspective, however, embracing and balancing both approaches facilitates learning and adaptation... (407)
Note that Sundaramurthy echoes Folke’s observation of the balance required between management (control) and leadership (in this instance understood as a collaborative practice) in the ongoing task of maintaining collaborations. The formation and maintenance of collaborations require exactly what is most difficult to provide: careful focused attention. Everyone works hard, and most are pushed to the absolute brink of what can be delivered. The question is not how to do more. There is a need to figure out how to do our work differently, and in community. Thomson et al. observe that collaborative relationships are extremely difficult because relationships are fragile. (29) Although they do not make use of the concept of diversity tension, they cite differences in autonomy and accountability as harbingers of fragility. Leaders of collaborations must be aware and mindful about the choices they are making towards inertia or innovation as they manage diversity tension.
Thomson et al. observe that building and maintaining collaborations takes time, but they discern two different types of time required: actual and lapsed time. Actual time pertains to the actual time spent on business directly related to the collaboration you are leading and lapsed time pertains to the time spent reconciling one’s role within one’s own organizational context that is not related necessarily to one’s organization. For example, as I led a collaboration seeking to improve academic outcomes for Latin@ students, I was subsumed in the effort to build relationships and produce programming that could be easily identified and reflective of the collaborative effort. Soon enough, nasty rumors began to go around the college where my office was located claiming that I seemed to have unlimited time off. In the meantime, I was working pretty much around the clock, but just not in the way people understood work to look like. Finally, a former colleague stopped me in the hallway and asked me point blank: “How do you get the president to let you go off on vacation all the time?”
Maintaining a balance between nurturing and tending to your collaboration and nurturing and tending to the relationships embedded within your singular organization takes a lot of time. I had not been careful and aware of my responsibility to my immediate context. I thought that if my supervisor, in this case the college president, understood what I was doing, my responsibilities had been met. I was wrong. I was also accountable to my peers. As a result of that frank question, I began to build internal relationships and was able to influence the overall college’s community partnership model. As a result, then I had to answer the question of how community building programs were related to Latin@ academic achievement. When building programming with the police and sponsoring school-based teacher and police officer trainings that also involved community members, I then had to answer the question of what, if anything, the police have to do with education! At every turn, new questions emerged, and new connections needed to be made explicitly as it is difficult sometimes to see the forest and not just the trees. Leaders of collaborations must be aware and at peace with the need to manage a collaborations’ messaging on a continuous basis.
A collaboration needs to be a learning collaboration for two main reasons:
0 1. To maintain a sense of ownership and the exercise of mindful choices. One can exercise emotional, professional, intellectual, and behavioral self-discipline when one assumes a learning stance. When one learns, one is willing to consider that perhaps they may be some things to learn. When one “performs,” it is possible that one may feel pressured to demonstrate the breadth of one’s expertise and competence. If a person operates within highly competitive and political environments, it may consider a collaboration to be just another battleground that requires that it ascertains their independence and unquestioned competence. If a person looks at their work with their collaboration in this manner, they may be setting themselves, their institution, and their partners on a slippery slope towards inertia.
0 2. Maintaining a learning stance requires ongoing evaluation of efforts and course corrections. It is not realistic to think that a plan will not encounter glitches that need to be corrected. Surrendering one’s expert stance for a learning stance may very well be the actual road towards success.
Sonja A. Sackmann, Petra M. Eggenhofer-Rehart, and Martin Friesl summarize what it takes to build sustainable change through the process of building learning organizations in “Sustainable Change: Long-Term Efforts Toward Developing a Learning Organization”:
For change to be sustainable, efforts need to lead toward a learning organization that is capable of continuous self-reflection and learning, supported by a collectively shared vision and flexible structures and processes... This implies that to achieve sustainable change, change efforts need to consider and address different organizational aspects simultaneously, such as strategy, structures and processes, managerial systems and instruments, leadership, and culture... Confirming this argument, research on strategic change... and organizational failure... suggests that a major reason for unsuccessful change may be a close-minded or limited focus on one or at best some of the aspects mentioned above in addition to a short-term approach to change and time pressure. Similarly, change efforts not anchored in an organization’s culture are unlikely to last... Probst and Raisch… identified five major factors of unfavorable developments that contribute to failure: growth, change, leadership, organizational culture, and an organization’s inability to keep these factors in balance. (524-5)
The evident paradox here is that the elements that lead to success also lead to failure. The nature and quality of one’s leadership makes the difference between success and failure. Yet another paradox emerges in that while a shared model of leadership is necessary, individual leadership matters because one can only actually control what one does and how one shows up in the world.
There is not enough money in the world that would have propelled me into moving within fifty feet of a police chief when I began my work of leading collaborations. I did so as a direct result of my own need to embody the type of leadership I most desired from others. In this manner, it was my collective orientation that raised the bar for my own performance. I intuitively understood that my leadership could create changes in other people’s ways of leading change. In the end, my hunch proved correct, even with a police chief. Here is what former police chief Edward F. Cronin had to say about what he learned in the process of leading complex change collaborations through his partnership with me in his essay “Law Enforcement Through Community Engagement: From Productivity to Purpose”:
I have learned that tackling complex problems as an isolated entity, such as a police departments often are, is not likely to bring worthwhile change. I have learned that defaulting to quick and easy fixes can easily result in undesired and costly consequences. (27)
And lastly:
I believe that in the end it will be our ability to engage the broader community in ongoing dialogue and our ability to work consistently toward that goal that will help us become more effective law enforcement officers and that will lead to safer, healthier and more engaged communities. (Ibid.)
Many people tend to thinking of themselves as facing diametrically opposed challenges as those faced by police departments, the fact is that what Cronin was able to observe is the connected nature of positive and negative patterns of behavior, social control, and participatory structures and ways of thinking that bind communities together and that engender their sense of identity. My reality was that he was able to exercise more political and strategic leverage than any superintendent when it came to changing the schools: opening doors with teachers unions, making the case for building school-based, out of school time, and summer programming targeting Latin@ students, and for making inroads in the process of including more police officers and teachers in the task of looking at how their own organizations partake in the creation of Latin@ educational failure. Certainly, I am not advocating for the abandonment of ongoing and important school based education reform efforts. I am simply illustrating the power of collaboration in complex settings.
The transformative power of collaborations can build bridges of trust and understanding where there were none that could be imagined. Truly, human relationships hold the key to implementing and sustaining meaningful change. The transformative power of human connection has been a focus for Peter Block as he sees the role of leaders as conveners who are focused on building solid relationships through the work of changing contexts in which relationships and interactions occur. He illustrates in Community: The Structure of Belonging:
Community transformation requires a certain kind of leadership, one that creates conditions where context shifts:
From a place of fear and fault to one of gifts, generosity, and abundance
From a belief in more laws and oversight to a belief in social fabric and chosen accountability
From the corporation and systems as central, to associational life as central
From a focus on leaders to a focus on citizens
From problems to possibility (85)
Block understands leaders as being concerned with the tasks of facilitating contexts that give rise to desired futures, generating dialogue, and listening. (88) The first task speaks directly to the need of leaders of collaborations to intentionally and mindfully orchestrate an environment where learning is an ongoing aspect of collaboration activities alongside the more visibly pragmatic tasks of managing timelines, tracking progress, and making course corrections. The quality and meaningfulness of dialogue allow for this kind of space to be created. A listening stance enables learning, reflection, and continuous improvement in the quality of leaders’ presence, practice, and subsequently their impact.
I cannot think of a better way to end this discussion on leadership and collaboration that by including Block’s understanding of what the world needs from its leaders now:
The world does not need leaders to better define issues, or to orchestrate better planning or project management. What it needs is for the issues and the plans to have more of an impact, and that comes from citizen accountability and commitment. Engagement is the means through which there can be a shift in caring for the well-being of the whole, and the task of leader as convener is to produce that engagement. (87)
This last statement by Block connects directly to the function Indigenist Leadership plays in the ongoing conservation and evolution of community. At the end of this roundabout discussion on collaboration, Block brings us full circle to the need of a leadership model that concerns itself with the process of convening and producing community engagement. Thus far, we have seen the importance of methodologies of inclusion in the effort to build any type of collaborative structure. Organizational structures of all types, as long as they involved the need to bring different people together, ought to build into themselves such a capacity. Otherwise, the results are the constant reproduction of oppressive environments, practices, and consequently social systems that continue to reify domination and White supremacy. I have spent many years working to understand how this happens. I believe at this point that changing patterns of social oppression and nurturing thriving organizations and communities necessitates the recognition for the need for Indigenist leadership and leaders. Such an awareness can begin to usher forth in a more intentional way the process of re-Indigenization of community, which in turn can lead us into a future that is more sustainable, loving, and abundant than the one that seems to loom not too far into the future as a direct outcome of the rampant expansion of Western ways of being in the world.
