[Week 2 02/27/08] People have asked me why I care so much and why I volunteer to lead so often. To answer, I can’t blame it all to the years of classic leadership trainings; even though now I can see where relying on just prescriptive and generalized “good” traits of a leader have sometimes failed me. I might attribute some of it to my misused “drum major instinct” energy or to the severe bonding of my personal identity with my organizing and work.
In the end, I think I keep doing this work to because I get so much out of facilitating OTHERS to be leaders. In the past week, I’ve had two concrete experiences of this circumstance, both in my work with YouthBuild Lawrence and also with a team of graduate students at MIT.
Despite the snow, I did get an hour and half of solid time with the full group of twenty YouthBuild young adult members. A big theme of our discussion revolved around their frustration with the authority of their local government and representatives, which revealed to me that these authorities lacked shared goals or meaningful relationships with this group of youth. So to begin to foster authentic, meaningful leaders from within this group, we first needed to come to some shared understandings of the issues at hand and attempt to narrow the focus. I tried to quickly learn the norms of the group around making decisions (“Should we vote?”) and decided to see what would come out of a little debate. We allowed the youth to self-select which group to create and what issue to argue for, but to pick one representative to speak. Two-thirds of the group clustered around the loudest males and chose police corruption. A smaller group formed around a more soft-spoken but very articulate member and chose pollution. And one lone, older male member stood alone and wrote his own treatise on Section 8 housing selection procedures. But none of the three succeeded in gaining a majority of the group, regardless of their volume, popularity, or dedication. The leadership of this group, which will be both self selected and recommended by staff, will have to work more on building relationships in order to energize both the immediate YouthBuild constituents as well as other youth in Lawrence. Yet, I think we launched this team well, according to Heifetz and Hackman advised, we didn’t start with a job description of a manager, but rather framed leadership as “adaptive work” activities we all could possibly share before assigning individuals or creating roles. Hopefully this process will create some team bonding around shared responsibilities and boundaries and combat the tendency for some of the group to say “I don’t care…I just want somebody to lead us.” So to rephrase Stan Lee, with great leadership power, comes great shared responsibility, like it or not.
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