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.