Strategies for Leading in a Network Environment

• Community Networks require leaders who have a genuine understanding that employing personal power is different from using positional power.
• Many positional power forms or ‘levers’ that exist in traditional organizations are elusive in network-centric environments. 
• Power in Networks can found in spaces rather than forms. Spaces for nudging, influencing, locating, guiding, narrating, reinforcing, and synthesizing. 
• Networks aren’t agnostic about leadership or anti-leader, they require leadership that recognizes and is committed to moving into pivotal space with influence 

For over a dozen years I served as the Executive Director of Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW) – a traditional CDC that over time morphed into a kind of hybrid community network. We had many successes in that time but I had no lack of hard painful lessons to teach me that a different style of leadership was required. It was a process that challenged me – as a person – more than any other time of my life. The principal lesson? That to be successful I needed to genuinely check my ego, my compulsion to control, and my instinct to pick the shortest straightest route between two places. I wasn’t always successful, but the lesson at least was clear.
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If you had been with us last Saturday evening at the 10th Anniversary of Neighborhood Connections in Cleveland, Ohio, you would have been impressed by the extremely diverse crowd of over 400, the courageous stories of community innovation, the soulful expressions of hope and the clear indications of institutional and neighborhood commitment to change.
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 The Q Campaign at The Community Builders                    
Mel Rush, TCB PM at St. Stephen’s Terrace “I have seen that residents ….people who I don’t expect to come out will come out and share a lot. Now, because we have done it a lot and always the same way, residents come and they know what to do and they come with an idea about what they want share or to talk about.”
Over the past 6 months, TSP has been working closely wiht The Community Builders (TCB) - a national Non-Profit Affordable Housing Developer with 10,000 units across the country - to integrate a Q Campaign into some of their housing communities.

In our blog post on "Marketplaces"  we  described our firm conviction that  poor communities need new kinds of marketplaces in order to reveal, generate and exchange the hidden value and capacity that already exists in people and place, and to connect those people and places to mainstream economic life.
Our daily work  at Trusted Space Partners is to bring this conviction to life  in partnership with community institutions and the private sector. Most efforts by foundations and non profits are programmatic or strategic "interventions" focused on a place, an issue or a population. These are - in many cases - wonderful "new seeds of change". The problem is that these seeds can be the wrong ones for the ground they fall on and often - as it says in the Bible - those seeds fall on on rocky soil - in communities where there is such disconnection and distrust that well designed and intentioned interventions die or yield minimal change.

Marketplace - 'The varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations 
and infrastructures where parties engage in exchange.'

One of the best kept secrets in the United States is the hidden wealth and value embedded in every community, even the ones considered to be “poor.”  We treat struggling neighborhoods, and the people who live there, as one of our societies’ social ills that need to be fixed.


 

How many kids do you know by name in your neighborhood?
In early August of this year, in the Dorchester area of Boston, 4 young women sitting in a parked car were shot. Three of them died. At a funeral for one of the victims, Sharrice Perkins, Bishop John Borders of Morning Star church said this.."Violent Criminals are not afraid of police, of politicians, of jail. They are afraid of only one thing..the light. We have to expose the darkness. We must call names!"
The "light" that Bishop Borders refers to is about more than reporting criminals to authorities. It is about a community acting like a community. 

In at least 90% of the meetings I participate in - be they community gatherings, task forces or staff teams - the dominate feeling in the room is fear.  The fear ranges in levels of intensity and types for sure  and includes fear of rejection, fear of losing, fear of domination, fear of looking stupid, fear of boredom, fear of losing control, fear of not understanding someone different than me. The list goes on and on.
But one result is common to all rooms filled with fear.  They do not produce an abundance of creative ideas or spur on collaborative problem solving or joint action towards a shared goal. For most of my 30 year career in community development,  I have been on a search for small, practical ways - ways that do not require a paid consultant or expert -  to reduce the fear in rooms in order to support the development of a shared vision and action plan, one that sticks when the going gets rough.
While there is never a silver bullet strategy that works in every context, I do believe I have found a practical, simple way for sparking a shift in a fear-based social dynamic.