Our learning edge as a network determined to develop collective leadership

This past fall, the People First Community published a report in which researchers reviewed existing evidence and insights to understand how collective leadership can be cultivated to transform systems and catalyze sustainable development.?

Reading the report affirmed much of what I’ve come to believe through our experience across Teach For All: through intentional effort, we can support diverse people throughout ecosystems to exercise agency and leadership, and to collaborate and learn together towards a particular purpose. And this “collective leadership” is needed for system change.

But the report also highlighted for me the importance of something I’ve seen us struggle with across our network. While it called out the importance of recruiting new leaders, investing in the development of new and existing leaders, and building networks among them–all things I’ve seen our network partners do well and work to strengthen through continuous improvement–it also named the importance of a further factor, which the researchers call “process facilitation”.

By this they mean a purposeful effort to pull people up from their individual pursuits in the system and to create space for relationship building, purposeful reflection, and shared learning.

Through our work, I’ve seen firsthand how important this piece is to ensuring that we’re not developing a lot of changemakers who are simply replicating the status quo by pointing in different directions and retreating into silos defined by differing worldviews. In my experience at Teach For America for example, I saw that in communities where we’d worked for 15 or 20 years, where we were so inspired that there were many diverse leaders working throughout the ecosystem, these leaders were sometimes competing for resources for different theories of change rather than collaborating. I saw that often, they weren’t making time to connect as people committed to shared values and purpose, listen to each other, reflect together on progress and failures, and discuss how to strengthen the trajectory of progress.

While I’ve seen promising approaches to tackling this challenge, including in this recent convening orchestrated by Teach For America Oklahoma , I’ve also seen how hard it is to sustain this work. The changemakers we develop are so busy dealing with their parts of the system, and it can seem impractical to convene regularly for the purpose of thinking together about what more we can do to realize a vision that can at times seem out of reach. And, there is organizational self-doubt—who are we, relative to more established actors, to manage these convenings that consider such big questions?

For me, the evidence review on collective leadership development surfaced a big question that I believe our network must consider: How can we claim that our purpose is to develop collective leadership without assuming responsibility for this critical ingredient of collective leadership development? What more can the organizations in our network do to create intentional, meaningful spaces for the leaders they’re developing to regularly come together to reflect and look forward together towards our shared vision?

I’m excited for our global network to foster experimentation and learning about how to embrace process facilitation as a core function of our work. Many have been asking what more we should be doing to advance the impact of network alumni. Until now, much of our energy has gone into considering how we can accelerate their career pathways so they live into their potential as leaders throughout education, policy, and social innovation—and this is a critical and significant part of what we must do. The next horizon will be to determine how we can build the muscle to regularly hold the space to foster the relationships, reflection, learning, debate, and collaboration among all these changemakers so that we can materialize the collective leadership that will ultimately enable us to arrive at our destination.