Creating Effective Social Impact Leaders (or, Leaders!)

Leadership: is "Social" Leadership really that different? I submit it isn't and this guest post is by Robin Pendoley is Founder & CEO of Thinking Beyond Borders, should make you think. See Robin's bio below - after you read this great post!  

The social impact sector does a lot of harm. Often, our victims are those who we set out to support -- the people and communities that are already vulnerable in our society. This is not something we like to talk about. As practitioners, funders, and do-gooders we want to believe our good intentions and good technical skills have prepared us to do good. But, examples from history and the present day show this isn’t the case. While there are many things we can do to reduce harm and increase meaningful impact from our collective work, there is one step we can take that represents our most important leverage point: create more effective social impact leaders.

The Core Competencies of Highly Effective Social Impact Leaders

As this question is core to our mission at Thinking Beyond Borders, we examined some historical examples of exceptional social impact leadership: Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Prof. Muhammad Yunus. By reading about the movements and change efforts they led, and reading their personal writings, we noticed two key areas in which they all excelled: critical consciousness of themselves and the world, and building and leading institutions that were truly mission-centered.

Impact through Critical Consciousness

These leaders each pursued critical consciousness of the world and themselves as a fundamental part of their social impact work. To do this, they each developed key capacities: 1) They rooted their purpose and direction in a constant critical examination of their values and beliefs; 2) They were humble but powerful learners who valued questions over answers; 3) They strived for higher order empathy. While I’ve written about these capacities elsewhere (here and here), it’s important to note that on a daily basis, each of these leaders used these skills in working with stakeholders and in maintaining their own personal and professional focus to create a more just society.

It is these capacities that ensured that the Indian Independence movement did not become a violent revolution against the British. These capacities resulted in Black communities of the US Deep South finding love in their hearts and actions in the face of violent and vicious racism during the Civil Rights Movement. It was leadership of this sort that spurred creative protest and a reordering of society, not simply an inversion of power. None of their respective movements were without flaws, nor were they complete. But, their approaches to social impact resulted in that rare and exceptional impact that brought greater equity and justice to society.

Mission-Centered Institution Building

Generating meaningful social impact and building the institutions that will sustain that process are two related but different practices. Knowing how to build an organization effectively is important. What was exceptional about the great leaders we examined was how they combined business and funding models in a manner that allowed the organization to operate and evolve based on the need of the impact work rather than the organization’s bottom line. They established management and leadership structures that encouraged their teams to be responsive the impact work. They developed communications that inspired stakeholders to engage in creating social change rather than simply build brand loyalty.

It was this type of leadership that led to peer to peer ride-sharing to sustain the Montgomery Bus Boycott, long before Uber gained a multi-billion dollar valuation. This leadership led Grameen to establish lending circles that created spaces of mutual financial and personal empowerment for women in their home communities, long before the banking industry pursued micro-lending profits in large scale. As these movements evolved, and as equity and justice advanced, the institutions these leaders created fell victim to changing politics. But, the impact they created remained because the communities they worked in solidarity with had not been encouraged to become dependent upon them.

Lessons for Developing New Leaders  

While it’s easy to hold Dr. King, President Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Prof. Yunus up as superheroes of social impact, it’s important to note that they were (are) mortals like the rest of us. If we focus on developing the skills that made them exceptional, we can generate a uniquely qualified cadre of aspiring social impact leaders.

As educators, we’ve identified a set of principles for developing leaders of this calibre:

• Focus on Impact - Aspiring leaders need support in thinking critically about how to define equity and justice, how an effective and ethical pathway is shaped, and what the impact leader’s role in the process should be. These are dynamic and challenging topics. Unfortunately, the social impact sector rewards those who pursue large scale, brand recognition, and specific business models. Teach aspiring leaders how to handle these tensions and maintain their focus on the impact that will lead to greater equity and justice.
• Value Questions Over Answers - Asking good questions that illuminate dynamic topics is a crucial skill. Disappointingly, most education systems generate students who believe they are successful learners when they can present a convincing answer rather than a well refined set of questions. Create learning environments that place value in asking questions and pursuing greater understanding that can be translated into even better questions. Require learning to center around identifying and questioning the core assumptions of arguments and one’s self.
•  Instill Humility - Great leaders are great listeners who reflect constantly on their potential and limitations. They admit their mistakes, provide space for others to lead, and are the first people to applaud the successes of their peers. However, great leaders are often driven and ambitious, determined to achieve their goal and overcome obstacles. Support aspiring leaders with learning environments that provide opportunities to wrestle with this tension as teams and individuals. Provide mentors who can support them in their highest and lowest moments. Identify heroes whose struggle with the tension between ambition and humility is made plain and relatable.

The social impact sector invests countless resources in working toward equity and justice. Our global society and local communities reflect the passion and commitment of so many who have shaped their lives in this pursuit. Yet, our present day and all our days past also reflect efforts wasted, misdirected, and many that inadvertently caused harm. As a sector, we can be more effective. It starts by being more intentional in how we create our leaders.

You can learn more about how Thinking Beyond Borders is working to create highly effective social impact leaders by reviewing our programs. Our high school summer abroad and gap year programs help students begin the pursuit of critical consciousness related to creating social impact. Our college study abroad programs teach the skills to lead mission-centered and mission-effective institutions. 

Robin Pendoley is Founder & CEO of Thinking Beyond Borders, an educational institution helping students develop the skills and capacities to lead highly effective social impact careers. Born and raised through his early childhood in a working class community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Robin learned that equity and justice are complex but worthy pursuits. Through study, travel, and work in urban and suburban public education, he concluded that meaningful social impact is difficult to create and requires a rare combination of skills and capacities. In 2007, Robin co-founded Thinking Beyond Borders with the vision to create an educational institution that develops highly effective social impact leaders. Robin earned a B.A. in International Development Studies from UCLA and an EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His blog posts on education and social change have been featured on Forbes, Ashoka, and Innovation Excellence. 

I Don't Know

Mike Cohea / Brown University

The freedom to ask questions and admit when you don't know is one we take for granted and our society tends to shun as a sign of weakness, yet it is how we learn, grow, create and have impact.  Michelle Bailhe's commencement address is one we need to read, re-read and live.  Please read this and be grateful for her generation that will help make this world better.  Thank you, Michelle.
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Our first week at Brown, 500 of us packed Salomon lecture hall for Introduction to Neuroscience. As the professors concluded their opening lecture, a student asked what seemed like a simple question: “Is it true we only use 10 percent of our brains?” Without hesitation, Professor Paradiso answered, “I don’t know.” Our professor, renowned neuroscientist, didn’t know. He said, “New research suggests we don’t really know what Salomon Hallpercent of our brains we use for neural processes like thinking. The field doesn’t know yet so I don’t know.”

The room went quiet. Students sat up straighter. Ears perked up. The only sound was of the mental gears in 500 Brown student minds — churning. I heard whispers of: “How could you measure that on a cellular level? Could you stain brain tissue or create a computer program?” Our collective curiosity galvanized us. Unimpressed by knowledge alone, by facts already discovered, we were ignited by what we didn’t know.

For the next four years, seeking out these “I don’t know” moments became our daily challenge, our intellectual regimen. Brown made our attraction to the unknown, the undiscovered, the unresolved — magnetic. Even before we arrived on campus, Brown dared us in our admissions essays to answer the question: What don’t you know? And our open curriculum is the University trusting in us saying “we don’t know every course you’ll need to make your impact on the world. Only you can discover that.” A Brown education is being challenged to discern exactly what you don’t know. This is Brown’s most distinguishing strength and its greatest adventure.

We probe visiting dignitaries, testing resolutions to global conflicts as if they could be solved Right There in the lecture hall. We cherish controversies yet unsettled, problems yet unresolved, doctrines long unchallenged. We don’t just embrace the unknown, we ask it out to fair-trade coffee with its enthusiastic consent. If author John Fowles is right that an answer is a form of death, saying “I don’t know” breathes life into our restless minds.

When we asked “whose stories are missing from the history of the civil rights movement?” Our “I don’t know” sent members of our class and faculty to Tougaloo Mississippi searching for silenced voices. When we asked “What was Brown’s relationship to slavery?” Our “I don’t know” launched investigations that rewrote our university’s history. “Does the Higgs Boson exist?” The curiosity of Brown physicists hurls them into experiments at CERN’s particle accelerator week after week after week. Apparently, people at CERN say “I don’t know” a lot.

But beyond the Brown bubble, it can be hard to say “I don’t know.” In our Information Age, we’re rewarded for absorbing knowledge, for being excellent sponges. We’re conditioned to fear moments when we don’t know, moments of vulnerability. Last summer, I worked for a non-profit law firm. One client was facing deportation back to Ghana but required thrice weekly dialysis for kidney failure. Dialysis in Ghana is scarce and expensive, but we needed proof that deporting her was tantamount to a death sentence. I suggested a Ghanaian doctor’s testimony to the lack of access. “Great,” said my boss, “how can we get that?” “I don’t know, but I will find out.” I started by contacting Brown professors who had done field work in Ghana. They directed me to the largest hospital. And then a friend in the Class of 2015, Yao Lui, was visiting Ghana with a Brown-founded medical nonprofit. He directed me to another member of our class, Nia Campinha-Bacote, who was conducting research at that main hospital. She then tracked down the chief dialysis physician, got her testimony and sent it back to us — across the Atlantic — for our client’s case. I was in awe of the power of the Brown community operating not just beyond these gates, but half-way around the world. “I don’t know” wasn’t a dead end in the conversation. It was a beginning.

But “I don’t know” is not only the first step on the path to discovery. It’s also a critical step on the path to human connection. Researchers have demonstrated the power of unconscious bias. When we meet someone new, we’re conditioned to think we already know them. To borrow Nietzsche’s term, there is no “immaculate perception.” Socially-constructed stereotypes seep into our subconscious. They sow assumptions about our fellow citizens, our fellow human beings. Preconceptions and misconceptions about race, class, gender, language, religion, sexuality, nationality and ability profoundly shape our world. They structure our institutions and delimit our possibilities. Their reverberations are felt from France to Ferguson, from Birmingham to Baghdad, from Baltimore to Brown.

Bias is dangerous precisely because it is false knowledge. Because the truth is we don’tknow. We cannot know how someone thinks from a weak data set of appearances and social constructions. We as Humans are too Complex, too Dynamic, too Surprising, and too Magnificent. To know what someone thinks, we have to ask them what they think. This is the first step toward what President Paxson calls “transformative conversation.” Throughout our time at Brown, we’ve thrown ourselves into transformative conversations that have been both uncomfortable and powerful. We’ve used what we’ve learned from each other to strengthen our academic and personal lives. “I don’t know” is thus not only an intellectual mantra, it’s also a project of humanization.

Anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston wrote “there are years that ask questions, and there are years that answer them.” Even though she went to Columbia, she’s right. This is a year that asks questions. Some of them personal: Where will we take our lives after graduation? How will we stay connected to the life-long friends and mentors that we’ve made here? Some questions are vast: How will we combat climate change and end mass incarceration? How will we alleviate income inequality and improve education? And some of our questions are deeply reflective: Am I enough? Am I brave enough to confront my own biases? Am I driven enough to persevere in solving the issues I care about?

These questions push us into uncomfortable places. To many of them, our answer may be — today and often — “I don’t know.” But Brown has given us every tool and every reason to Venture Boldly into our discomfort. This is how we’ve grown. Every day, we’ve challenged each other to take no observation, no dominant narrative, no established truth at face value. Every day, we’ve challenged each other to hold self-evident only that nothing is self-evident. Brown has shown us that the very engine of discovery and insight, of progress and justice, of our future and the world's is our fearless, relentless questioning. This is our greatest power. Brown has taught us that in this community, within these gates and far beyond, “I don’t know” merely means “I don’t know yet.”

Michelle Bailhe recently graduated from Brown University with honors as a Human Biology concentrator focusing on health disparities in the US prison system and criminal justice-involved populations. She is a recipient of the Arthur H. Joslin Award for service to the Brown University community and the Gaspee Prize for top scholarship in American history in her class. Bailhe is an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow through the Liman program at Yale Law School and worked with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest on health justice legal issues and community organizing. She is also an avid dancer and activist, having organized a March for Marriage Equality in Rhode Island. A California native, she will move to New York to work for McKinsey & Company and plans to pursue a career in public service.

15 Hours: A Common Sense Action Blueprint for Congress

What if our youth started to take government back? Well, it's happening. SamGilman and Andrew Kaplan, college juniors started Common Sense Action in 2012 with one chapter.  Now they have over 20 chapters in 15 states with AGE, The Agenda for Generational Equity to get their voice impacting policy.  Read on, be proud of our next generation and get on board! See why I love learning from these guys? 
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15 Hours: A Common Sense Action Blueprint for Congress

Don’t you wish that we sometimes forced Republicans and Democrats in Congress to sit in a room until they agreed on how to move the country forward? Unless you’re one of the 9% of people who view Congress favorably, you probably do. 

A generation ago, politicians saw eye to eye – literally.  Our Democratic and Republican members of Congress lived side-by-side in the nation’s capital, linking their professional lives with their personal ones.  They ate and drank together; their families were friendly; they stood on the sidelines of their children’s baseball games together.  So when it came time to negotiate and make a deal, they trusted each other, knowing they would have to see each other the next day. Today, most members live in their home states and travel to Washington for three days for a whirlwind of legislating, interest-group meetings, and fundraisers – quickly returning to their home states on Thursdays whether business is finished or not.

At one event last summer, we spent half-an-hour listening to a Representative professing to make an enormous effort to get to know members of the opposite party. Seconds after the Representative finished talking, the former chair of the member’s committee walked in.  This former chair was from the opposite party.  They introduced themselves to each other for the first time. They had never met.  This kind of disconnect is unacceptable, especially when the political gridlock we face can only be broken by the power of relationships. Without time to get to know each other, how can we expect the Senator from Michigan to trust her counterpart from Georgia?

But what if Congress followed the old model today?  What if Congress used a Common Sense Action blueprint?

On Sunday, January 6, delegates from Common Sense Action (@CSAction) chapters across the nation gathered at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington to finalize the Agenda for Generational Equity, CSA’s foundational policy agenda.  The setting?  A single conference room.  The goal? Don’t leave until it’s finished.

At 9:00am, we came to that table, all 40 of us, strong in our own beliefs and ready to fight for them – principled partisans in short.  Before beginning debate, we set community norms that allowed us to create a safe space. In particular, our discussion was guided by three principles:

• “Trust intent, name impact.”
• “Safe space, honest space.”
• “Make space take space.”

In other words, we trusted that people have good intentions, but were not afraid to call out hurtful or wrong speech; we created an honest space; and we established a structure for everyone to participate in discussion.  How else could leaders from rural Mississippi, inner-city Baltimore, and suburban Iowa all feel comfortable sharing their experiences?

At first, our debates were cautious.  We did not know each other very well and we were not familiar with each other’s policy beliefs and political ideologies.  It took awhile to get comfortable. We spent two hours discussing the first of 12 potential policy areas – Social Security reform proposals. After finally settling on a policy position for Social Security, we were exhausted.  The discourse, which had started cautious, had turned contentious. Having accomplished little by 11:00am, it was time for a short break.

When we returned to the table, the mood shifted.  During the break, we had hung out with each other, got coffee, and ate breakfast together, sharing a little bit of ourselves with our neighbors.  As the day went on, the conversation grew more and more productive.  At times, we disagreed passionately on ideological grounds. And we honor that disagreement as a necessary part of a responsibly partisan process. However, we were able to build trust through discussion. We tried to live the example that we wished Congress followed: we had made a commitment to ourselves, to each other, and to our chapters to craft an agenda by working together across difference. Of course, the norms helped, as our chapter leaders would consistently bring the group back to the norms before making a critical point or if debate began to get disrespectful.

Ultimately what emerged from this process was an Agenda for Generational Equity that plays between the 40 yard-lines. No Democrats or Republicans got everything they wanted in the Agenda, but everyone proudly endorsed the Agenda as a whole.

15 hours, 3 meals, 3 pillars, and 53 policies later, we had finished.  We finalized the Agenda for Generational Equity as the midnight bell tolled and Monday arrived.

The Agenda for Generational Equity will only have as much life as Common Sense Action members breathe into it.  CSA is building a movement across the country to organize around it. We invite you to endorse AGE to begin building political pressure on Congress to solve our nation’s problems.

Hey Congress – take a page out of Common Sense Action’s book. We have the humility to know when we are not the policy experts, to know that negotiating policy on a federal level requires time, patience, and courage.  But spend some time together.  Get to know each other.  Maybe stay in a room for 15 hours.  It isn’t too much to ask.  By starting with the basics, Congress can get back to good governance, do away with the political football, and start solving the nation’s problems.

Sam Gilman - Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam is a junior at Brown University, pursuing a Bachelors degree in public policy. He is a C.V. Starr Social Innovation Fellow for his work on Common Sense Action. Sam is currently student body Vice President at Brown and previously served as Treasurer and Communications Director. In the summer of 2012, he interned at the Bipartisan Policy Center where he did research for a book on the causes and implications of gridlock in American politics. When he's not working at CSA, Sam is an avid runner, New York Yankees fan, and Civil War buff.  Sam can be reached at Sam@commonsenseaction.org.  

Andrew Kaplan - Co-Founder and Chief Action Officer (CAO) Andrew is a junior at Brown University where he is pursuing a Bachelors Degree in Political Science and Literary Arts. He was selected as a 2013 C.V. Starr Social Innovation Fellow for Common Sense Action. In the past, Andrew worked at the Port Authority of NY/NJ and the Queens Long Island Medical Group. When he isn't working on CSA, Andrew likes to read historical fiction, play baseball and soccer, and occasionally strum the guitar. He is a proud member of the Brown Taekwondo club, the two-time defending national collegiate champions, and he also welcomes anyone to challenge him in Lord of the Rings trivia and/or a cook-off.