ALR 3: Community Leadership

ALR 3: Community Leadership

What?

Community Leadership is one of the more complex forms of leadership in it that leadership emerges as a response to an external factor rather than through authority vested in a person by virtue of organizational hierarchy. The two case studies presented in “Leading Community and Organizational Change” chapter in the book “Leading Changes in Multiple Contexts” by G.R. Hickman identify some of these complexities.

So What?

The key aspects presented by Hickman helps me to revisit and improve upon how I engage myself in community leadership. I have been working with SHINE Charitable Trust since its inception about three years ago. Our class of 60 students from my undergraduate class in India organized a couple of social activities every semester. During our final year, we decided to continue these activities under the umbrella of a charitable trust leading to the creation of SHINE Trust. When we started the trust we neither had a clear focus nor a good organizational structure. After our graduation we ended up in different places and it is then that we felt the need for organizing ourselves better. Now the challenge was not just to re-organize the structure and get it up and running, but also to cope up with physical distance that has made communicating with each other very difficult.

The complexity of the problem itself made finding the answer easier. We reorganized ourselves into three vertical teams consisting of members that are geographically closer and three horizontal teams based on individual member strengths. Instead of having just a single project for the entire trust to work on, each vertical team was given the independence to identify projects in its own locality. As a result, raising funds and identifying volunteers also happened at team-level. The horizontal teams were entrusted with Public Relations, Finance and Event Management. We also organize trust-level meetings once every two months through teleconferencing. This new paradigm helped us overcome most of our logistical problems and also greatly improve individual involvement in Trust activities. Some of the aspects like described above fall in line with our class discussion on follower-centric leadership and more specifically shared/distributed leadership. 

Now What?

Although we were successful in executing some challenging projects, I personally feel that we are yet to fully achieve the level of community engagement that we are actually capable of. I would like to take some of the lessons from our classroom discussions and from the talk by our guest speaker to make some course corrections to our trust’s functioning, especially with regards to greater community participation.

Entry 1: Leadership Theories

Leadership is a complex phenomenon that has assumed a diverse set of perspectives and meanings. While some define leadership as a set of traits, others look at it as “excellence management” or “scientific management” or even “whole-soul(spiritual) endeavor”(Fairholm 2004). To understand what leadership is, it is important to learn these different perspectives along with their context and scope. It is in this regard that the article “Leadership: Current Theories, Research and Future Directions” helps in appreciating the various dimensions of leadership.

From http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163621?journalCode=psych

I had great opportunities to interact with leaders during my internships at General Electric Company, my studies at Virginia Tech and my schooling in India. When I think of what makes each of these great people a leader, there is no one single answer that could explain it all. The deliverable expected of a leader changes from one workplace to the other and from one country to the other. In the academe, some are leaders by virtue of their technical expertise while in the industry communication skills is the key asset for a leader. Organizations with hierarchical structures generally support top-down leadership approach while others that are non-formal allow and even encourage the emergence of bottom-up leaders. While leadership focus in India is results-driven, in the US, the process along with the results influences the leadership focus.

I think it is very important to understand the leadership needs of the environment, before considering the means by which I could contribute to the growth of the organization. The various ideas mentioned in Avolio’s article provide valuable cues in analyzing leadership styles of different leaders and learning important lessons from the success and failure of these leaders. It also helps me to keep an open mind about defining my own leadership philosophy.