Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

A unique task of leadership is to initiate a future that is distinct from the past.  Leaders who know how to convene, question, and listen are more effective at affecting change. They realize that real change is dependent on creating strong communities.

In this month’s article, adapted from his book Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block asserts that, “When we train leaders we should get off the vision and style wagon, and help them learn about convening, questioning and listening. This allows us to de-glamorize individualized leadership and consider it simply the capacity to create community.”

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Reconstructing Our Idea of Leadership by Peter Block

Link & Learn Newsletter - Linkage, Inc. - May 2008

Highlights from the article:

• A distinct future can only be achieved through high engagement. We can say then that the essence of leadership is about convening, valuing relatedness, and decentralizing its own role. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have. Leadership is a capacity that can be learned by all of us, with a small amount of teaching, and an agreement to practice.
    

• An alternative future occurs when a community of people chooses to come together and be accountable for something larger than themselves. All we know about learning, exceptional performance and creativity indicate that the existence of a supportive community is what makes the difference. Leadership in these terms becomes about building community.
    

• This is very different from the conventional belief that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it, and hold people accountable through measurements and reward. When we elevate leaders as an elite group, singularly worthy of special development and incentives, there are unintended consequences. These include isolation, entitlement, and passivity which our institutions and communities can no longer afford.
    

• A better approach is to believe that the task of leadership is to provide context and produce engagement, i.e. to tend to our social fabric. Convening leaders put people in small groups and use questions to create the social space within which citizens get deeply engaged. Through this engagement, citizens discover that it is in their power to resolve something or at least move the action forward. This is what triggers the choice to be accountable for those things over which they can have influence, even though they may have no control.
    

• Listening may be the single most powerful action the leader can take. Leaders will always be under pressure to speak, but if building social fabric is important, and sustained transformation is the goal, then listening becomes the greater service.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.linkageinc.com/company/news_events/link_learn_enewsletter/
archive/2008/0805_Idea-of-Leadership.aspx?CC=Link

   
The Convening Role of Elected Officials

With the November ballot coming up, Peter Block provides a thought provoking perspective on the role of elected officials ( see the article for some specific examples of what he’s talking about).

Elected officials are a special case of how we think about leadership and the art of convening. We have put elected officials in a difficult role. We distort them into service providers and suppliers. We relate to them as if we are consumers, not citizens. We want them to solve for us those issues that we should be solving for ourselves. The customer model, where elected officials exist to satisfy citizen demands, is a disservice to community, even though citizens love it.  

 
Leadership and the Importance of the Small Group

To initiate a future that is distinct from the past, we need to recognize the power of the small group and see that real change is more dependent on creating strong communities than on providing more clarity and better blueprints concerning that future. The common belief that you can change a culture by implementing clearer goals, better controls, better measures, more training, and new incentives, is a comfortable illusion.

From a July 2008 article in T+D Magazine, here are the conditions that allow sustainable change to occur:

• The capacity of leaders to build a strong sense of community is dependent on understanding the importance of small groups. The small group is that structure in which employees and citizens become intimately connected with each other and in which the business becomes personal. Regardless of the number of people in a room, when people are configured into small groups, real change is created.
    

• The way we structure the assembly of peers is as critical as the issue or new organizational possibility that we come together to address. Large scale shifts occur only after a long period of small steps, organized around small groups that are patient enough to learn and experiment, and learn again. The role of leaders is not to be better role models or drive change. Their role is to create the structures and experiences that bring citizens and employees together to identify and solve their own issues. Transformative action is always local, customized, unfolding, and emergent.
    

• Depth should be chosen over speed, and relatedness over scale. Depth takes time and willingness to engage. Belonging requires the courage to set aside our usual notions of action and of measuring success by the numbers affected. It also means that while we keep our own points of view, we leave our self-interest at the door and show up to learn rather than to advocate.

Creating a new future, which hinges on widespread accountability and connectedness requires leaders who convene people in new ways. Bosses, if they saw themselves as conveners, would view their employees as a community waiting to be engaged,

  
Next Month

Today’s leaders are seeking to adopt new ways of thinking and to apply new models of organization in the workplace. Sometimes new insights are found in unexpected places. One symphony orchestra - New York City-based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra - has become a model for a new kind of loose and flexible organization.

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