Leadership & Collective Impact: A Guide for Strengthening the Impact of Your Leadership Development Work

Sep 01, 2012
  • Description

It is time to ask ourselves if the countless dollars and tremendous effort on the part of dedicated nonprofit leaders are getting us where we need to be. Many would agree that we are falling short of the mark and are not seeing the progress that is sorely needed on any number of serious, complex social problems. In their seminal article, "Collective Impact," John Kania and Mark Kramer suggest that no single individual or organization can tackle persistent social issues such as the early childhood health outcomes, lowering global carbon emissions or pervasive poverty alone. We need a new way of working together and a new kind of leadership to transcend hierarchical belief systems to bring about a change in how we treat each other as well as our greater global communities and ecosystems. In 2010 the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) produced the publication, "A New Leadership Mindset for Scaling Social Change," an article describing the need for a new leadership mindset that understands leadership as a process in which change agents align their purpose and actions to have a large scale impact on critical issues like community well-being and the sustainability of the planet. The article offers compelling evidence of leadership programs that are achieving impressive results in education, the environment, and community development, to show what happens when people come together across boundaries to connect their ideas and resources in ways that transform our future in a positive direction.