Probably no skill is as central to multi-stakeholder networks as the ability to connect across differences.  For Global Action Networks (GANs), this means connecting between individuals and organizations with diverse cultures and ways of perceiving the world.  And it brings up difficult-to-talk-about topics like “love” and “the spiritual”.

Cobus de Swardt, Managing Director for Transparency International, describes this on a very personal level that he experienced when he was in prison in South Africa for his opposition to apartheid.  He was 18, and facing the prospect of being raped.

“I don’t think you can engage violence with someone you truly love…and so I ask ‘what does this mean?’  That if there’s a true bond with these people, I won’t get raped…so I’ll have to really work to act on this bond.

You can’t act out that you have a bond with somebody…if you think that they’re a total jerk, racist, then this will fail.  I had to overcome something within myself.  You have to seek out the common humanity with someone who you dislike, you might disrespect and have very negative feelings towards…you can’t “act out” that you have positive feelings.  You need to truly believe it.  For me that was my own biggest achievement because I had to overcome all my own prejudices.  The process to social justice is in many ways more challenging to overcoming your own prejudices than the big social justice issues you fight on a big stage.”

This might seem very distant from the tension that comes with connecting between organizational sectors (government-business-civil society).  However, many of the same leadership challenges arise.  There is strong tendency to exaggerate, create stereo-types, and even vilify others in contrast to one’s own position and organization.

A Human Dynamics and Multi-Sector Perspective

One powerful insight that has helped me overcome this tendency arises from my work on identifying distinct attributes of these organizational sectors. When I matched this to the Human Dynamics work of Sandra Seagal and David Horne on individual learning styles, I understood that the sectors tend to be aggregations of different learning styles – physically-centered for business, mentally-centered for government and emotionally-centered for civil society.  This insight provides an invaluable way for people to understand their differences so they can meaningfully work together.

From this perspective, people in business tend to simply “make sense of the world” (learn) in a very different way than people in the other sectors – no one sense-making approach is “right”;  rather, they are complementary and collectively represent a whole-world perspective.  However, these different sense-making approaches create enormous conflict, and GANs need to develop their competency to create collaboration across these learning styles to realize success.  Seagal’s work has actually been integrated into the Swedish education system, with children being taught how to communicate across these learning styles.

This connecting also has a spiritual component that is brought out by another GAN leader and good friend, Sam Daley-Harris.  Sam transformed himself from an orchestra musician into an organizer of what is one of the most important global networks addressing poverty:  the Microcredit Summit Campaign.  He and Muhammad (Grameen Bank) Yunus began working closely together 18 years before Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I commend to you an inspirational 18-minute You-Tube video Poverty, Purpose, Pitfalls, and Redemption.  Sam speaks of bringing meaning and purpose to one’s life by connecting with others and “taking action when you see something needs to be done.”  He describes original micro-credit motivations involving “redemption”, as defined as “restoring (finding) one’s honor and worth, and setting one free.”

An on-going challenge for GANs is to maintain these love and spiritual components that are necessary for the critical work of GANs to create deep connections across difference.  How can they cultivate these qualities and bring together  bureaucratic, profit-maximizing and self-righteousness orientations…and realize effectiveness in their global change drives?  Some of the answers lie with Human Dynamics and leadership that reflects love and spirit.

Some great new work finally gives a comprehensive framework for network leadership.  It takes us from the heroic and hierarchical models of leadership that do not work for networks. But it not only brings out the dispersed, visionary, collaborative, and entrepreneurial qualities and skills critical for network leadership.  It also distinguishes the types of network leadership capacities by individuals, teams, organizations, communities and fields of practice.  The latter is particularly relevant for large change strategies, since a field of practice refers to a change issue such as corruption, water, finance and fisheries.

Knowledge for Network Leadership

In 2009 a colleague, Grady McGonagill, led an in-depth review of leadership development programs for the Bertelsmann Foundation. “The following perspectives,” he writes in his report, “illustrate the redefinition of leadership to emphasize the importance of shared, collective leadership:

• Leadership is an activity, not a role. It can be enacted by anyone in a system, independent of their role (Heifetz 1994)
• ‘Heroic’ leadership leads to ‘over-management,’ defense of turf rather than concern with shared goals, and weak teamwork and coordination; by contrast, shared “post-heroic leadership” releases the potential power of everyone (Bradford and Cohen 1998)
• Leadership arises within communities of practice whenever people work together and make meaning of their experiences and when people participate in collaborative forms of action across the dividing lines of perspective, values, beliefs, and cultures (Drath and Palus 1994; Drath 2001)”  (McGonagill and Reinelt Forthcoming, p.4)

This led Grady and Claire Reinelt of the Leadership Learning Community to develop an insightful way to summarize the knowledge relevant to leadership for Global Action Networks.  To give greater definition to “collective leadership,” they created a matrix that emphasizes distinct capacities are needed at different “levels” of the system and different levels of capacity development.

This matrix is reproduced in the Table with two lines shaded to indicate the parts particularly relevant to GANs.  (Click on the Table to enlarge it.) Of course GANs have to have capacity in the other boxes as well, but the ones shaded are where GANs should focus on excelling.  The bottom row refers to the issue arena that the GAN is working in.

The Table helps GANs ask themselves how they are doing with respect to the shaded leadership development challenges in particular, and then set strategies for addressing them.  Currently most GANs are “doing” the shaded activities, but without a capacity development strategy to make sure they excel at them.

Another wonderful thing about the matrix is that it suggests interventions that GANs have been working on, but without being as explicit about how their work is distinctive.  It emphasizes that “leadership” is not just a characteristic possessed by individuals, but that the GAN itself has leadership and a role in developing leadership.

Outstanding Network Leadership Challenges

How can these capacities be nurtured and developed with the diverse stakeholders and experts that networks engage? What are cultural challenges of leaders in a global world that values diversity, and how can the challenges be addressed? How can ambiguity, dilemmas, and paradoxes inherent in much of networks work be addressed while maintaining visionary direction?

These sorts of question have been at the heart of an innovative leadership program called Leadership for Change that I had the fortune to initiate.  The decade with a wonderful Boston College faculty and my decade of work with GANs have made an enormous contribution to my own appreciation of a new approach to leadership that is particularly relevant to GANs.  The network leadership knowledge as well as the capacities are still developing, and Grady’s and Claire’s framework helps us move that agenda forward in a much more disciplined way.

References

Bradford, D. L. and A. R. Cohen (1998). Power up : transforming organizations through shared leadership. New York, J. Wiley.

Drath, W. H. (2001). The deep blue sea : rethinking the source of leadership. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Drath, W. H. and C. J. Palus (1994). Making common sense : leadership as meaning-making in a community of practice. Greensboro, N.C., Center for Creative Leadership.

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

McGonagill, G. and P. W. Pruyn (2010). Leadership Development in the U.S.: Principles and Patterns of Best Practice. Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series. S. Vopel. Berlin, Germany, Bertelsmann Stiftung,.

McGonagill, G. and C. Reinelt (Forthcoming). Supporting Leadership Development in the Social Sector:   How Foundations Can Make Strategic Investments.

Last week I spoke with Ger Berkamp, Director General of the World Water Council (WWC) and later with Peter van Tuijl, Director  of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC).  Each conversation turned to the question “What knowledge, skills and capabilities does your network need to be really successful?”

In both cases, we turned to the competencies framework in Figure 1.  And in both cases when the question arose about what may be missing in this framework, Ger and Peter brought up power and politics.

“The political management of the network…it needs taken care of as a political process,” said Ger.

“Capacity to deal with power differences,” said Peter.  “It misses the political edge – for the network both internally and externally.”

Daily both Ger and Peter deal with diverse demands and interests to move the network towards its vision.  In their positions they have leadership responsibility with their Boards, major stakeholder groups, and particularly influential individuals.

With “politics and power” they are talking about the ability to mobilize support for and/or opposition to policies, values and goals. Internally, they are talking about the ability to work with power differences inherent with the array of constituencies in a global multi-stakeholder network. Externally, they are talking about the ability of the network to influence organizations that are not active participants in the network.

However, in a network like WWC and GPPAC, there is a huge gray area of internal-external.  Even if an organization is a participant in the networks, the organization does not automatically agree with the network decisions, move to implement them or even know how to implement them.

Sociologist Amatai Etzioni categorizes power into three types.  As voluntary associations the networks have little coercive power generally associated with governments.  They have little remunerative power generally associated with business – they simply don’t have the financial or other resources to allocate.  They must depend upon normative power:  peer pressure, persuasion of logic and moral assertion of what’s right and just.

However, others have coercive and remunerative power that they may apply to influence the direction of the network – either in support of the network’s goals or to undermine them.  This is always particularly worrisome vis-à-vis funders.  Transparency International is currently facing the coercive power with intimidation by the Government of Sri Lanka against its Chapter there.

Power and politics is a topic of the Leadership competency:  how can individuals, groups and the network share leadership to create a leaderful^[1] culture and way of working together?  And how do we address power-play leadership?

Power and politics is a topic for the Network Development competency where the question becomes how to create strategies, structures and processes to manage power in the interests of the larger network.  This involves ensuring and balancing diverse stakeholders’ voice and influence.

Power and politics is also a big topic of the Generative Change competency.  Transformational change of the type that Global Action Networks (GANs) like WWC and GPPAC aim for, involves a fundamental change in power and political arrangements. The core work of GANs is to realize a “tipping point” where the values and standards promoted by the GAN become “the norm”.

Of course there is lots of overlap among the competencies. Generative Change, Network Development and Leadership competencies are all needed to clarify, address and create accountability for contributing to two sets of goals:  those of individual participants (organizations, Board members) that are conditions for being active in the network, and also for the network’s goals to realize its vision.

One goal of the competencies framework is to suggest how to organize capacity-building programs for GANs.  Business schools are organized around core functional divisions like Marketing and Finance;  schools of government are organized around divisions reflected in Ministries such as justice (law),  health and international relations.

We are still a bit unclear about how to think of core functions of GANs and the key competencies, since they are a relatively young type of organization.  The suggestion here is that GANs will often develop a department for Network Development (seen with GPPAC’s Network Building Programme and titles such as Transparency International’s “Governance Manager”).  The Generative Change competency is probably the most under-recognized one of all, but one that I feel particularly strongly about.  GANs are strategies for global change, and yet in general they make little use of leading change knowledge and have not built capacity for dialogic change skills, for example.

What competencies do you think are particularly important?  Join a webinar next Wednesday to further discuss the competencies and key frameworks to support their development.  For more information click here.

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[1] I’m indebted to my colleague Joe Raelin for development of this concept.