Milan Wall of the Heartland Center for Leadership Development joined CommunityMatters® and the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design for an interactive webinar on community leadership. Milan shared thoughts on how we define leadership and the challenges of community leadership along with strategies for leadership recruitment and development.
Milan emphasized that leadership is not about particular personality traits, or inherent individual qualities. Instead, leadership is about the dynamic relationship between people when they work together to achieve a common objective. Sharing insights from numerous researchers who embrace the idea of shared leadership, Milan made the case that we all have a role in community change.
If community leadership means that everyone plays a part, what better way to grow leaders than to start with ourselves? To get you started, we’re sharing Milan’s recommended reading, seven books, articles and guides on community leadership to add to your reading list.
1. The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner offers five core practices of exemplary leaders. Kouzes and Posner found that great leaders model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act and encourage the heart.
2. Leadership Matters by Thomas Cronin and Michael Genovese offers a different take on how leadership plays out. They describe three acts of leadership: first, the trouble makers stir things up, they make noise, and create chaos, bringing in new ideas. In the second act, movement organizers pick through the ideas to create a manageable list of priorities. The final act involves the power brokers, those people who know how to find and leverage resources. Cronin and Genovese encourage teams to exchange these acts among individual members, so no one person gets stuck in the same role.
3. What Leaders Really Do by John Kotter makes the case that leadership is about preparing for change and helping others cope with change. In contrast to management, which is about coping with complexity, leadership involves setting direction, aligning people and providing motivation.
Read the full text of this landmark piece.
4. In The Adult Learner, A Neglected Species, Malcolm Knowles describes eight tenants of creative leadership, one of which is understanding the difference between static and innovative organizations, and working to make organizations innovative. Milan encouraged thinking about communities in this same light. Innovative communities are flexible, collaborative, people-oriented, experimental and open.
Discover all eight tenants of creative leadership.
5. The Rapids of Change by Robert Theobald emphasizes the need to prepare for what the future holds, even though it is unknown. In this work, Theobald argues that institutions are ill-prepared to face change, that what our communities need are social entrepreneurs and change agents.
Read a summary of concepts from the book.
6. In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz dedicates a whole chapter to “assassination”, the difficulty leaders face when they try to make real change. Leadership, he argues, is dangerous because leaders are always failing someone, creating real losses for people who feel they got the short end of the stick.
Start with this comprehensive book review.
7. Last but not least, Milan shared “Ten Ideas for Recruiting New Leaders”. The guide expands on ideas like looking for skills, not names and asking “who’s not here?” This publication is available for just $5 from the Heartland Center for Leadership Development.
Of course, we couldn’t leave without one final resource! Watch the full webinar recording to see Milan Wall share his thoughts on building leadership for the long haul.
