CCL is hosting a special program for the ANDE network. Organizations focused on capacity building/technical assistance in the small and growing business (SGB) sector in developing countries may be eligible to attend.
This five-day intensive program and follow-on 3-day delivery session in the field is designed to provide participants with core facilitation skills and content knowledge to deliver leadership development programs around the globe. The program will build the internal capacity of ANDE organizations and enable them to incorporate leadership development into their operations using methods from the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leadership Beyond Boundaries initiative. Please see the program flyer for more information.
Location/Dates/Registration
WHO:This program is for ANDE members/representatives who want to deliver leadership training to entrepreneurs in their portfolios and programs. Attendees do not need to have a training background.
WHERE: The 5-day program will be held at the Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina USA.
WHEN:October 25-29, 2010
DEADLINE: September 17th. Enrollment is on a first come basis with a program capacity of 24.
Steadman Harrison and Philomena Rego delivered a pilot of the Coaching Essentials program in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in August 2010. The program was attended by participants from Ethiopia, Holland, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and the US. A few participants were executive coaches who wanted to learn alternate methods for working in the social sector.
The methodology used the Creative Leadership Conversations Toolkit to help participants learn essential coaching skills, key leadership principles, and half-a-dozen simple but powerful assessment tools. The two-day program included multiple opportunities for the participants to apply the skills learned in a cascading series of coaching sessions conducted in learning teams.
The participants found the tightly woven experience powerful and forged strong bonds with their learning partners. Some of what they shared at the conclusion reflected both personal and professional learning:
“I am feeling I learned both professionally and personally that I have everything I need. It has been two powerful days for me. I had a big breakthrough in my group and make a commitment to hold and be held accountable by my group.”
“I feel I am turning in a new direction. The experience was great and moving, powerful. I need to open my heart and let the change in. I never thought about me in the same light before and it became very clear to me. I feel I found my direction.”
“Good energy! I learned that human beings can apply the coach approach in so many ways.”
The last comment speaks to the intention of the Creative Leadership Conversations methodology that coaching techniques can be used to develop others and also to foster greater understanding and collaboration between individuals. The participants in the program expressed a intent to apply the learning to work with school teachers, to initiate coaching through their training organizations, and make changes in their personal lives.
“ Both the mentorship and T.O.T. training were of great help to me as an individual and as a member of society. Before the training, I was not aware of the fact that I could do a lot in my position as a student and as an upcoming leader. Previously I only thought all I could do was wait until [I] am out of school and probably working for me to initiate the change I desire to see in my society…I discovered that I am a leader beyond boundaries and limitation that I had accepted as part of my reality…A lot has changed since; my thinking has been broadened and is no longer just thinking of completing my studies and getting a job, but am also now looking at myself as a resource to my peers and the society as a whole. Am looking forward to training more young people to become leaders not tomorrow but today because I chose to adopt the ‘slogan’- LEAD NOW.”
This past May, CCL had the wonderful opportunity to work with the Center for Transformational Leadership in Kenya to train 80 university students in mentoring and leadership development facilitation. These 80 university students were then tasked to work with 200 high school students in the Rift Valley to implement civic engagement projects that would ultimately reach 1,000 young people.
The program was funded by USAID as part of a larger Youth Leadership Development for Reforms initiative to empower young people to take part in the recent constitutional referendum and reform agenda process and engage in civic service projects to improve their communities.
Set in the Rift Valley, the program was also focused on improving inter-tribal relations between groups of young people to increase collaboration and decrease tension in an area that had seen much violence during the 2007 elections.
Mentor Training
Eighty Egerton University students were selected as mentors and went through several planning and training sessions during the semester before coming together in May for a two day mentor training. This training focused on helping students develop good mentoring practices. Some of the topics we talked about were:
Active listening
Building relationships
Social Identity
Mental models and stereotypes
Teamwork
Conflict resolution
After the training and working with some of the high school students, one mentor said, “ I learnt the importance of social identity….and how we can use it to embracediversity. [I] also got to learn about myself as an ambivert…After knowing this also learnt that being an extrovert or introvert does not make anyone a better leader than the other. Also learnt that not all mental models we have are true, therefore there is need to dismantle them. The reform agenda and its implication in Kenya is very important, if Kenya is to really move forward.”
Mentor training in conflict resolution, Egerton University
Early Leadership Toolkit Train the Trainer
Twenty of these mentors then went through a 3 day Train the Trainer program on the Early Leadership Toolkit. In this training, they focused on:
Developing facilitation skills
Practice in public speaking
Learning and teaching leadership concepts
Creating a safe learning environment
Working with a co-facilitator
Giving and receiving feedback
Each student had the opportunity to deliver a leadership lesson plan from the Early Leadership Toolkit with a co-facilitator and receive feedback to hone their facilitation and delivery skills.
Trainers in training!
Here is what our newly minted trainers have to say about their Train the Trainer program…
“…it has really changed my confidence. I can now talk in front of many people which I have never done before. During the facilitation process, I realized that the teacher learns more than the students in that they can give answers to questions asked that the teacher had no idea of them…I gained a lot of confidence…[on] how to give the feedback during the process by which the situation, behavior, and impact [are discussed]…The training and facilitation was so rewarding in that the way I see myself and my abilities has really changed event the perception of other people. I am now [more] comfortable with diversity than I used to be.”
“From the T.O.T. training the most significant memory is when we were introduced to the leadership toolkit. The kit must have been the best thing in the training. This is because its content is relevant and helpful to the youth…the module on conflict. I was able to understand that it is good to deal with the problem itself not the symptoms of a conflict.”
“I believe in myself more. I am also more comfortable with diversity as I realized that the people I had mental models about were quite different than I though before. I have improved quite well in my self reflection skills and self awareness. My self-confidence has also increased. I believe in me so much. A leader was once a controller and head of anything and everything he/she is entitled to, but after the training I learnt that a leader is one who in as much as he/she has power can stand at the level of the people being led…In a nutshell my whole perception about life and achievement has improved a lot.”
After this training, these university students went out to local high schools and trained 200 high school students in leadership concepts, conflict resolution, and the reforms agenda. One major theme that came up was increasing awareness and comfort with diversity. About this topic, one trainer observed that,
“unlike in other places I had attended, here the participants were from different ethnic groups but gender balanced. At first some were like sitting/crowding according to the places they came from, tribe or gender but at the end/in between the session , they started mingling and talking freely i.e. after going through social identity modules and leadership.”
Another trainer explained that after their session, “the students left with an impulsion to make a difference by improving the quality of life in their local community.” This motivation led to civic engagement projects focused on communicating the reforms agenda and how to embrace diversity in creative ways like skits, music, poems, and dance. Another group held a procession to mobilize youth to participate in the reform process.
This program ultimately reached over 800 youth and helped them become more aware of themselves, the reform agenda, how to live peacefully among diversity, and to lead now. As one student trainer put it, “The task of promoting good African leadership is more important to Africa than ever – Good governance is crucial if African people are to share strong economic, social, and political growth…The leadership training helped the students and more so us to increase there (our) wit, intellect, and capacity to explain complex issues in the society.”
The Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort has launched a prototype of the Creative Leadership Conversations toolkit. This is a resource to help individuals use “the Coach Approach” to engage in purposeful conversations that may be about developing leadership capacity (coaching and mentoring) or enacting leadership (collaboration, co-creation, and conflict resolution). The toolkit offers knowledge, practices, and tools that can be used to transform how we engage. The process begins with relationship building and developing an understanding and appreciation of the perspectives and needs of others through deep listening, inquiry, and feedback. It then flows into engagement to envision and enact a course of action that is energizing and empowering to all involved. The toolkit is the product of a collaboration by a team of CCL coaches, Tzipi Radonsky and Philomena Rego, and Pat Williams of Coaching the Global Village. Philomena recently tested the toolkit with a group of nuns in India. She filed this report.
“I had the opportunity to run the first test of the toolkit on two different groups of nuns in India. These religious workers surrender personal lives to be of service to others. They are tasked with great demands and limited resources. I recognized that leadership development could help them reconnect with their purpose and gain skills to be more effective in their work. While I had interacted with this population before I had never done any leadership development and was not sure how it would be received.
The first group I worked with was a team of nuns running a HIV/AIDs treatment center in Goa, India. This group of nuns had spent over 25 years in religious life. I started by setting an intention for us to have an open mind as we stepped into unfamiliar territory. Initially they found the coaching methods difficult and challenging. Yet I was encouraged to observe that they were open to be vulnerable as they struggled with new concepts. As the program unfolded, there was deep sharing of personal identity and struggles and the openness to receiving insights and feedback from others. At the conclusion of the program, the group made a commitment to develop an approach of engaging others in a different way — to suspend judgment and be curious about alternative perspectives. A week or so later, I heard from the person in-charge that she has noticed a difference in how the nuns had been using this new practices in changing how they were interacting with each other, the other staff, patients and children. Some of the participants who were least expected to change had changed the most. As the toolkit methods are designed to be shared with others, one of the nuns planned to do a short program for others who hadn’t been able to attend.
The second session I did was over a day in Bangalore, India with a group who were involved in education and development for marginalized women and youth. These nuns had been in religious life between 5 – 11 years. The material transferred really well and they got a chance to practice the skills with each other. Even though the participants felt that it was not enough time, they felt comfortable to take the practices to the groups they work with. Their superior said that the participants had gained a different perspective on how they could work and this would help them become more effective leaders in the community. I am encouraged by the power this tool to shift the nature of engagement and enhance the lives of people so dedicated to improving the lives of others.”
Next, we take the Creative Leadership Conversations toolkit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where we will be running a Coaching Essentials workshop for a group of professionals who intend to bring coaching to the social sector.
The CCL Africa team delivered Early Leadership Essentials for a group of 150 plus YWCA interns preparing for their summer work with local high schools. It was an exciting program that shared Social Identity, Values Explorer, DAC, Visual Explorer, Tree of Life, goal setting, and some highlights from Life Entrepreneurs.
CCL teamed up with Grameen Foundation, Continuum, and CoCoon on an initiative to address the leadership gap in the microfinance sector. Following an initial exploration in 2009 (link), we conducted a deeper dive to better understand the contours of need, specifically at the middle manager level where the talent gap is the greatest. Through this endeavor we wanted to understand in fine-grained detail the leadership challenges middle managers face, how they learn, and the skills they need for the future.
Microfinance organizations are growing at approximately 100 percent annually in India. The growth is supported by demand for loans – the sector is only meeting an estimated 10 percent of demand — and well as the influx of capital attracted by the financial returns and social impact the sector has been able to deliver. The potential for growth is hindered by the lack of adequate numbers of capable middle managers. The best talent is poached by commercial banks and other microfinance entities willing to pay more. In attracting talent to the sector – people willing to work harder for less – requires recruiting young talent from second and third tier institutions and growing their skills and keeping them committed. This is no easy task. The challenges these managers face are significant. In our conversations we heard them described as crisis leaders and the backbone of their organizations. They deal with much change and great complexity. Leading large teams they have to be always on, nimble in making good decisions quickly, all the while negotiating the fine line between social mission and profitability. Mistakes are easy to make and potentially costly.
The managers must learn quickly on the job, often learning from bosses. They receive little formal development and their organizations are at a loss for effective approaches to develop needed leadership skills. All this calls for innovation. The shape of needed solutions must address large numbers of busy and dispersed managers who have little access to internet and little time for formal learning. Learning on the job, therefore, is key.
Our team will focus on developing solutions for the sector. In many ways the challenges of microfinance organizations mirror the larger talent needs in the social sector, but the sector is the tip of the spear – the place where the need is sharpest. In addressing the challenges for the microfinance sector, we stand to birth approaches that can serve the broader social sector. That’s an attractive proposition. Stay tuned for more as the work evolves.
Q: What do a college sophomore and a retired corporate executive have in common? Especially when they are participants in the same training program?
A: A serious commitment to helping younger people develop their leadership skills and create lives of meaning and purpose!
Last week, the Leadership Beyond Boundaries team had the pleasure and privilege to work with 24 amazing youth development practioners, including two college students and two retired corporate executives, for the pilot Early Leadership Toolkit Train the Trainer. Coming from as far afield as Chile and Ethiopia to as close to home as local YMCAs, each participant brought a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to the classroom. Some of the programs our participants work with include conflict resolution and peace building in Burma, high school entrepreneurship in Kenya, in-school-suspension alternatives in North Carolina, and experiential education expeditions in Chile. It was an extremely diverse and rich classroom!
The Early Leadership Toolkit is an LBB initiative created to make leadership development opportunities more affordable and accessible worldwide. Designed to be flexible and dynamic, the Toolkit, composed of 20-some modules focused on various leadership and life skills competencies and related tools, enables youth development practioners to create leadership programs that fit their audience’s needs and context.
The Train the Trainer program focused on:
introducing participants to CCL leadership and learning philosophies,
providing guided practice in using the Toolkit materials – modules and conversation-creating tools,
developing and honing participants’ facilitation skills through practice facilitation sessions and peer feedback sessions,
exploring ways to use and apply the toolkit and other program content to each participant’s context,
and creating a community of practice amongst the 24 participants and CCL trainers.
We spent an engaging and inspiring two and a half days together and I know that, as one of the program facilitators, I learned an immense amount from our participants, particularly when watching participants adapt toolkit curriculum and make it their own during their facilitation practice sessions.
Another highlight occurred on our last day together when participants began to imagine how they would use the toolkit when they returned to their home organizations. Participants created plans for everything from a day-long curriculum to use with at-risk high school students to working with teacher internationally.
We were honored to host these incredible youth development practioners for our first Early Leadership Toolkit Train the Trainer program and we look forward to continuing to grow this community of practice as part of the movement to democratize leadership development and support young people around the world in learning to lead now.
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Some of the organizations represented at the training program include: Y-USA, the Greater Greensboro YMCA, Vertical, Cherokee Fund, LifeWise, Muddy Sneakers, Boomerang, Cornell, the Center for Global Leadership, Hope Runs, Dustin’s Greenhouse, and Continuum.
While there are many, many, many people who helped make this first Train the Trainer a success, we would particularly like to thank Continuum for all of their assistance in bolstering the toolkit’s design and usability. They donated countless staff hours and resources and we greatly appreciate their contribution.
For more information on the Early Leadership Toolkit, please contact Sarah Miller at millers@ccl.org.
Coaching has long been a means for enhancing the capabilities of the world’s elite. Increasingly, coaching is becoming a leadership tool for engaging more constructively with others to co-create solutions. Pat Williams has created Coaching the Global Village, a new nonprofit that envisions using “professional coaching techniques to empower communities around the world to develop sustainable solutions for pressing human and societal needs.”
The effort was profiled on the Coaching Commons newsletter which also spotlighted the Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort to make leadership development more affordable and accessible to more people. We are jointly exploring the creation of a toolkit that can be used to develop coaching skills in a more scaleable way. In the article, Pat states:
“Using coaching skills, we think, in a purposeful way, would make it more likely that people could come up with solutions for themselves that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise, whether the problem is drought, conflict, or disease.”
This potential for creating shared leadership through coaching is underscored by a compelling perspective from Margaret Wheatley on the Coaching the Global Village Web site:
“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals who can go it alone. I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again — simple, honest, human conversation. Not mediation, negotiation, problem solving, debate, or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversations where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we each listen well.“
Notes from the Field: Joel Wright and Sarah Miller worked with Global Citizen Year Fellows on developing their authentic leadership styles during the GCY fall training institute…
Global Citizen Year (GCY) is an innovative new program that creates a “transformative bridge-year” experience for students between high school and college. Incorporating intensive training, an immersive international experience, and a domestic capstone project, GCY aims to empower American youth with the understanding that, across the globe, we are all connected. With this understanding comes empathy, a service ethic, and an important set of leadership skills including cross-cultural communication, innovative thinking, and a conviction to act.
We spent a thought-provoking day with this year’s inaugural set of GCY Fellows, deepening our self-awareness and understanding ourselves as authentic leaders. The content we covered included social identity, values, personality, and action planning. We chose these topics to empower Fellows to create their definition of authentic leadership, anticipate some of the challenges they would face in their new communities, and strategize methods for working through these challenges using their leadership strengths and networks of support. Alec Yeh captured some of his thoughts on the day here….Center for Creative Leadership
We also spent time thinking through the process of using images to create meaning-making and learningful conversations. Fellows created a Touchstone Collage as a way to synthesize their strengths and challenges as leaders, using their new self-knowledge from our discussions on personality preferences, values, and social identity. Here, you can see several Fellows explaining their Touchstone Collages…
Finally, Visual Explorer was one of the tools we explored; each Fellow left with a small deck to use as they engaged in their seven month service and cultural immersion experience.
Currently, CGY Fellows are living in host communities in Senegal and Guatemala. In this blog post, Ananda Day discusses how she used Visual Explorer to process her new surroundings and experiences….Metaphor My Life
Lyndon Rego from the Center for Creative Leadership, Peg Ross from the Grameen Foundation, and Anna Muoio and Chris Hosmer from Continuum began an effort to explore the talent gap in the microfinance sector. The findings from a brief immersion conducted in 2009 are the subject of a new report: No Footprints to Follow — The talent gap in the development finance sector in India
Report Summary
Among the most significant challenges facing the booming microfinance sector is a need that is pervasive and invisible. It is the lack of adequate human capital—people who can manage and effectively scale microfinance organizations in an industry that is experiencing meteoric growth.
In 2009, Grameen Foundation and ShoreCap Exchange, along with the Center for Creative Leadership and Continuum, set out to better understand the need to develop greater human capital capacity to support the scaling up of development finance organizations to achieve the goal of poverty alleviation. The team brought together expertise from backgrounds in international development finance, non-profit leadership development, human resources and change management, and innovation and human-centered design.
This report shares insights and learning from an initial field immersion conducted in India with a focus on microfinance institutions (MFIs). India is a leading region for development finance activity and home to many of the largest and fastest growing MFIs.
Our visits took us from hotel conference rooms to corporate MFI offices to villages where loan officers interacted with borrowers. We interviewed executives, middle managers and field officers at three prominent microfinance institutions – SKS, BASIX, and Mimo — as well as visited Sa-Dhan, a community finance industry network based in Delhi. This learning was supplemented by facilitated discussions with attendees at a ShoreCap Exchange leadership development program conducted in collaboration with the Center for Creative Leadership and regional banking experts for 30 senior microfinance and small business finance leaders from eight countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Cambodia, India, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These conversations surfaced a number of perspectives and issues, including:
MFI leaders are challenged to balance multiple agendas: profit, growth and social mission. The weight of profit, growth, and mission weigh heavily on MFIs. With an agenda of serving the poor, MFI practice is closely scrutinized by the media and political actors, especially given the fact that interest rates can be higher than in standard financial services. There is both political pressure to keep interest rates low as well as competitive pressures to capture market share as multiple MFIs and mainstream banks enter the market. MFI leaders are tasked to deliver on multiple fronts and balance these (sometimes conflicting) agendas.
Growth of the microfinance sector is outpacing its human capital capacity. The sector is growing dramatically—roughly at 100% per year. This growth has outpaced the ability of organizations to attract and retain qualified staff (especially in the face of stiff competition), as well as adequately equip them for the leadership challenges they face. This challenge is often aggravated by the sourcing issue – higher education institutions may or may not provide graduates that are adequately trained to become effective entry-level officers. At the same time, with the entry of mainstream financial institutions in the social sector, players are finding it difficult to retain trained staff.
The talent challenges are most acute at the middle manager level. In our conversations, we heard that middle management leadership development is a critical need. Within each organization, this level of management has significant responsibility for field operations.
Standardization and personalization are twin challenges. There are dual demands for MFIs to standardize operations as they scale, yet maintain a high degree of flexibility at the local level. The rural and decentralized nature of this work demands adaptability and a degree of autonomy in decision making at the grassroots.
Training and development is hindered by the lack of resources. The sheer numbers of those needing development is compounded by the lack of appropriate and accessible resources for development. The absence of development impacts performance, customer service, and employee retention.
CCL, Grameen Foundation, and Continuum have now begun the next phase of work to develop approaches to address these needs.
Grameen Foundation helps the world’s poorest, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty through access to microfinance and technology. www.grameenfoundation.org
ShoreCap Exchange helps banks working to serve small business and microfinance markets overcome the substantial operational challenges they face in dealing with clients not reached by traditional financial markets. www.shorecapexchange.org
The Center for Creative Leadership is a nonprofit, educational institution focused on leadership development. www.ccl.org
Continuum is a global innovation and design consultancy. www.dcontinuum.com
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