Leadership Beyond Boundaries

Over the past year, CCL has engaged with Grameen Foundation, CoCoon and Continuum to address a critical need – the development of talent in microfinance organizations. As microfinance organizations have emerged as a solution to addressing poverty, the sector has boomed in countries like India. With growth has come the awareness of the lack of organizational capacity especially at the middle manager ranks. These managers represent the backbone of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and are the point where microfinance’s lofty mission must be translated into a sustainable and scalable operation. The middle managers are often poorly equipped to deal with this challenge. They are often young and have modest educational backgrounds. The pace of change and the complexity of their work requires high level of leadership skills. In addressing this challenge, we decided that what may be the most important capability we could develop in these managers was not a set of technical skills but mindfulness. This would enable them to pause in the face of unfamiliar challenges and. Rather than feel helpless or react automatically, they might consider their options including reaching out to others for alternate perspectives.

Working with CoCoon, a HR consultancy in Bangalore, we used the design thinking process of rapid prototyping to experiment with a series of interventions that coupled classroom learning with a mobile app, developmental assignments and peer mentoring, workbooks and a simulation. Over the course of three months we moved the group of participants from Ujjivan (a microfinance organization recently named as India’s best MFI) through a sequenced leadership experience that flowed across the dimensions of leading self, leading others, and leading the organization. We used a process that challenged them to learn, apply the learning, and teach others what they’d learned.

When we wrapped up the program in December, we had the participants interview each-other about their learning and the impact. Here’s some of what we heard:

“I feel enriched.  Usually we have training programs for only 2-3 days, but this one covered over 3 months and allowed me to learn concepts and then go back and try them in the field.”

“I could definitely a change in my personality.  My team is looking differently at me, but it’s too early to say. They’ve said I’m giving more feedback. And I have encouraged my team to use these techniques. I’ve helped them to see how they can better present changes to the teams in the field.”

“Most of what I’ve learned here is very new to me because I’m a new leader. Earlier, I would assume that I knew the situation, but now I spend time with my people to listen and really try to understand the situation.”

“When someone didn’t accomplish the work in the past and I got angry and shouted at them. Now, I call them and explain why it’s important and listen to them.”

“At every meeting we start with a new idea. Initially people start with “sir, it’s not possible”. But I challenged them to have a broader mindset.”

“Our way of thinking is now totally different.  Instead of focusing on what went wrong, we approach things differently. We ask people rather than tell.”

Overall, participants indicated that they felt more confident and now approach challenges in a more collaborative way. This has eased the pressure for the managers to have the answers from the get-go and bear the sole burden for results. Their teams also increasingly operate with a “growth mindset” – focusing on how they can solve problems versus the reasons why the problem is hard to solve.   The outcomes from the 3-month program also included impact on financial metrics. This is heartening as it encourages organizations to invest in development.

As we look to the future and scaling out the program, we will focus on out how to reduce training costs. Our next round of experimentation will explore using a mobile app as a primary delivery platform. The growing use of smart phones in developing countries allows rich media transfer as well as portable and bite-sized learning options.

Microfinance has pioneered a scalable path to financial inclusion. Through this work with microfinance managers, we hope we might also develop a way to scale leadership development to those who haven’t been traditionally served.

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As we head into the New Year, one thing that is certain is that things will continue to change in unexpected ways. Learning agility is a key competence for us all, especially in many developing countries where the pace of change is especially dramatic. Lyndon Rego wrote about how we can increase our ability to learn in Businessworld, an Indian business magazine:

http://businessworld.in/businessworld/businessworld/content/Expanding-Learning-Curve.html

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Leadership Beyond Boundaries aims to get leadership development to many more people in the world, especially those who aren’t traditionally developed as leaders. We use train-the-trainer programs to transfer learning to grassroots trainers who can cascade out the learning. In this post, LBB volunteer Hannah Smith, who attended a train-the-trainer program, describes how she quickly extended the training to an organization serving street children in Ethiopia.  

By Hannah Smith

In the LBB training I attended, I made myself a goal to sit down and have a feedback session with one of the youth at Onesimas Children Development Association, a center for street kids.  At 19 years old, he is the oldest kid there.  I have watched him be a mentor to the younger kids in the program.  I think he has fantastic potential for youth leadership and I let him know this. He told me that he doesn’t know how to lead himself, and that he needs to get his life into order before he can be a good leader.  I whipped out the Tree of Life, a tool I had learned, right then and there.  We went through it, and he had a hard time looking 1-5 years in the future.  He then asked me how to protect himself from threats.  We spent an hour going through his threats, examining the source and how it affects him.  After we did this, he was able to make a Life Tree with goals set at the 1, 4, 7, and 10 year marks. I turned around and went through it with one of the social workers at OCDA.

I showed Mesfin (a social worker) and Esayas the Life Tree on Friday afternoon.  On Saturday, Mesfin used it in a class he teaches to 11-12 year old students, and assigned it as homework.

Attached are some of the results!

I am amazed to see this kind of tool mushroom and be effective so quickly.  In one weekend, 10 street kids were able to go through the Life Tree and identify threats, needs, support systems, as well as set goals to do better in school, one semester at a time.

So, IT WORKS! Huzzah!

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By Philomena Rego

CCL was invited by Vertical to facilitate a Creative Leadership Conversation  (CLC) program for 23 staff, consultants and coaches. Vertical is a multi-faceted entity that is part expedition company, part training and development organization, and part foundation for the social good. Vertical believes that these agendas as interlinked. In its work, Vertical guides people on journeys that generate new insights and learning and trace paths to greater social contribution.

For the program, Vertical wanted to convene its staff and partners so they could get to know each-other better and forge a shared vision for the organization moving forward. The CLC model uses conversation as a means for co-creation. Beginning with an exploration of identity and values, the process flows towards envisioning new futures. Participants learn and use the core coaching skills of listening, inquiry, and feedback along with a set of tools that can be used to anchor conversation. It helps to deepen the awareness of oneself, creates deeper bond among participants and provides knowledge, practices and tools.

The 2.5 day program was facilitated by Philomena Rego, Janet Carlson, and Lyndon Rego and delivered – thanks to simultaneous translation – in Spanish. We started the program by setting intentions for our time together. We used memento activity to introduce ourselves to each-other. This brought forth much emotion as people spoke of family connections and loss from the Chilean earthquake and tsunami. This kind of open sharing, we learned, is not so common as there is a wariness about being open. There is a Chilean expression known as chaquetero that means pulling another person down by their coat tails. It is manifest in a tendency to be critical. The CLC program was a process that took the participants in the other direction. It is about appreciation, support and abundance. It is about dreaming about possibilities and exploring how to bring them to life.

By the end of the program we heard that experience was powerful. Participants said it helped them to reconnect with themselves and each other. They had a greater appreciation for what it was to be a part of an organization like Vertical that values people. They felt that together they can make a difference. They expressed how this methodology could be used more broadly in Chile, in government, in communities, and with youth.

Chile is undergoing a period of volatility as young people take to the streets in protest about the cost and quality of education. The CLC model, we heard, can give people a voice and help enable constructive social engagement.  There is much need to democratize leadership in Chile, a country that is affluent but with pervasive social inequity. With Vertical we are exploring a number of ways to carry this agenda forward in Chile.

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Caroline Spira offers this report on using the Creative Leadership Conversations model in Cameroon. A full report can be accessed here

When I headed to Cameroon in 2009 on a two-year CUSO-VSO (now CUSO International) volunteer placement, I had only hoped that my knowledge and passion for coaching might be an opening for creating positive change.  As an executive coach and local economic development professional, I was committed to capacity building with the local grassroots organization I was placed with.  As it were, I was to find many such openings, but one of them stands out above the rest.

I had connected to Coaching the Global Village early on to see how we might be able to work together to achieve our shared vision of bringing coaching into grassroots efforts. When Integrated Development Foundation (IDF), a local VSO partner in Cameroon, asked me how coaching training might be made available to them, Coaching the Global Village and Leadership Beyond Boundaries were ready to roll out the Creative Leadership Conversations toolkit.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  The training with IDF took place in a three-part series between May and September 2011.

My role as coach trainer, besides coordinating and leading the training, also included adapting the materials to the local cultural context and ensuring the applicability of the concepts to the participants using the few resources we had available.  The participants, a cross section of IDF staff, board members and volunteers, had differing education and literacy levels, and as expected, would look to use coaching in different ways for themselves, with the organization and their community.  This meant different applications of the CCL toolkit and created an interesting challenge.

The final report presented to Coaching the Global Village and Leadership Beyond Boundaries was written not only as an account of the entire coaching training project, but also as a learning tool in how the toolkit applied in this real world context.  It is rich with anecdotes, lessons learned and an appreciation for the value of coaching as a tool for personal and community development.  Wherever possible, I also included suggestions for further adaptations, whether cultural or practical, and ways to increase long-term impact and sustainability.

I have written twice about the experience on my personal blog – first discussing the initial training itself, and then a second time as we were closing out face-to-face portion of the project.  But neither these nor the final report can fully express the true value of the CCL toolkit in opening the doors for social change at the grassroots level. This small group of people is now engaging in a depth of conversation they have not utilized before, opening a new avenue to bring about development from the grassroots by the grassroots, while also developing their own leadership and that of others around them.

While I cherish the two years of my time in Cameroon, this particular project – connecting IDF with Coaching the Global Village and bringing coaching approaches within their reach – remains highlight of my experiences, and is one I would wish to repeat again and again.

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How do you define leadership?  Around the world we have heard many different definitions and expressions about what leadership means.  Here’s a recent video where Steadman Harrison, Regional Director – Africa, shares CCL’s framework for leadership at the International Leadership Association conference in England.  Click on the link below…

Steadman talks about Direction, Alignment & Committment

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During Summer 2010, Leadership Beyond Boundaries partnered with the Centre for Transformational Leadership on a USAID/Kenya-funded project to support young people in inter-ethnic civic engagement projects in the Rift Valley.  Through these projects, students learned leadership and conflict mitigation skills and ultimately reached over 2000 youth.

To learn more about this project – what we learned, what worked, and what challenges we faced – please check out the attached case study!

http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/KenyaYouthLeadershipDevelopment.pdf

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During the close of the school year, Philomena Rego and Laura Weber conducted a one-day leadership program for 47  5^th graders at an arts-based elementary school in Winston-Salem, NC. The program was designed to bring closure for these students as they moved forward to middle school and create an opportunity to appreciate what they gained from elementary school while identifying their leadership skills which will help them adapt to middle school.

The focus of the morning was creating greater awareness of how experience shapes identity and how their school had played a major role in these experiences.  These experiences are some of the building blocks for their leadership development.  The training design was learner-center and experiential.  Throughout the day we wove in artistic concepts to align with the schools’ mission.  Following the traditional Leadership Beyond Boundaries Leadership format, we started with o Social Identity mapping  (SI) for the students to begin understanding themselves at a deeper level.  The SI map has three components, the “Core” which represents who we are at our truest self, “Given’, which represents unchangeable aspects of ourselves, and then the “Chosen” component represents what we what to have in our lives.. We were amazed by what the students  put in their ore – to help others, be an authentic leader, to be a good friend, etc. They were asked what Social Identity has to do with leadership.  The responses we received got at the  essence of what we hear from adults, the 1)the need to know ourselves so we  cannot understand others , and 2) knowing our values and what is at our core we can better connect with others. We closed out the morning with a memory walk. The students walked around the school and identified something they wanted to remember that influence their Social Identity and that they wanted to take with them from the school. Self portrait?

After lunch we focused on how they want to be in the middle school and what would help them in this transition. The students were asked to pick a Visual Explorer image card that represented the leadership qualities that will help them to make their first middle school year the best year. The key ideas presented by the students were developing listening skills, having the courage to stand up for their values, and understanding others. This activity helped them think how they can take responsibility to make it a great year for themselves. We also wanted to help them voice concerns they might have.  The students were asked to come up with the skit regarding their concerns or fears about middle school and how they would use their leadership to overcome these fears or concerns. It was interesting that most of the students came up with the skits that represented bullying, not being understood by the teacher, or being pressured to do something they didn’t want to do. At the end of each skit we explored what could help them create a positive outcome.

Finally we had a closing circle where each student  shared a learning they got and how they were going to apply it. Some spoke about their understanding of their Social Identity and how that will help them in their new school, others spoke about their memory walk and what they want to keep, and some shared the learning from their skit and about not to allowing others to bully them.

What we found was that elementary school is not too early to help young people think about themselves as leaders through exploring their identity, what they stand for, what they hope to become, how to relate to others, and  to see life as a journey marked by passages that offer experiences and learning. It was a great learning experience for us as well and fun to engage this thoughtful and energetic group.

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By Divya Chaturvedi

Congratulations to Nobel Peace Laureates Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman!

Last week, two women leaders from Liberia and one from Yemen were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their tireless work towards women’s empowerment and the realization of women’s rights to fully participate in peace-building work.  In a press release, the Nobel Committee expressed hope that the Prize awarded to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman “will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realize the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.”

The connection between CCL and Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner goes back to CCL’s participation in President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s initiative – the International Colloquium on Women’s Empowerment, Leadership Development, International Peace and Security in 2008, and is very consistent with CCL’s commitment to provide new, innovative, and transformative models and resources for developing the leadership capacity of women and other leaders throughout the world.

Since then, CCL, under its Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) initiative, has developed a ‘Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Program’ (WELP), that works with the fundamental assumption that ‘leadership development is key to capacity building and empowerment of women’, and the goal of making leadership development affordable and accessible to women around the globe. This assumption has been confirmed time and again as more than hundreds of women have participated in WELP workshops in Africa, Asia, and North America.  The relevance of CCL’s work with women can be gauged from the fact that WELP is being used to empower women in Yemen for peace-building and conflict-resolution, to affect women’s agenda in the government and society in Mexico and Jordan, to build capacity and leadership of healthcare workers working with HIV+ women in Ethiopia, enabling women entrepreneurs to become effective leaders in Nigeria and more.

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October 2011, Greensboro NC

As I was reflecting on our training last week, I felt a special satisfaction with the spirit and tone of our time together. We shared trials and tribulations—and through it all we supported one another. Some of you might say, “But you designed the sessions so that would happen.”  And to some degree that is accurate. Building connection was the first goal on our list. But there is an important detail we shouldn’t overlook—we can create a design, but participants are responsible for creating the moment.

There were far too many moments to recount each one, but a few have continued floating in my mind. What an amazing atmosphere for a dinner!  Steve—you and your students graced us with your musical gifts and it made our dinner so memorable. (And how cool was it that at a moment’s notice a piano magically “poofed” into the room?  Thanks CCL staff!

As a high school youth group member, I always valued the sharing time we had at our retreats. After a weekend of introspection and fellowship, I appreciated the chance to acknowledge those who created special moments of connection. And it was nice to be acknowledged every now and then, too. Deep down, I think those feelings and memories lie at the core of why I do the work I do. When I share experiences with groups like yours, it reinforces my love for my work, your work, and the great things we’ll be able to accomplish together.

Let’s keep our community united and inspired by sharing our thoughts and experiences. Some of us will shine and others might experience failure, but let’s remember that “failure” can be an option (provided we learn from it).

Let us know how we can be of service and we look forward to hearing more about your facilitation experiences with the toolkit.

Sincerely,

Preston

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