This post originally appeared on LeadChange. It is the third in a seven-part series summarizing the findings of a one-year study of workforce leadership in which we identified six practices next-generation leaders are using, comprising a new model of leadership we call WEadership in a nod to its collaborative nature.

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WEadership and the Crowd

The idea that leaders “control” the people, information, and resources within their organizations is no longer plausible – if it ever was. Today people use social technologies to connect, share, and collaborate with peers and colleagues who can help them get things done, regardless of position or organizational affiliation.

This shift has created new demands for “transparency” on the part of organizations in public, private, and non-profit sectors alike. Employees, customers, shareholders, citizens, doners, etc. – increasingly, all of them want to make the businesses of doing business more transparent, more visible, and ultimately, more accountable.

Leaders can adapt to these changes by opening up the way they listen, share, and engage with employees, customers, and communities to solve important problems.

Openness in the Organization

Many of the 519 leaders in our study reported that the most important thing leaders can do to open up their organizations is listen. It seems simple, but in a media-saturated environment in which customers tweet, employees blog, and people of all kinds have conversations that can be shared with millions in minutes, listening has become complicated. But listening is critical because conversations about your issues are talking place, with or without you. The insights freely available to good listeners can make a business, while ignoring them can make a business irrelevant.

Sharing, too, has taken new forms. Open leaders are discovering the difference between broadcasting and sharing, and finding the latter a more effective approach to building brands, delivering services, and delighting customers. These leaders are:

• Using social media to host conversations
• Making complex data accessible, beautiful, and easy to understand
• Sharing “drafts” of planned changes to products, services, policies,and business models so they can be improved (rather than rolling out a finished product that meets yesterday’s need).

All of these practices speak to a more iterative approach to problem solving and one that involves more than the experts.

Collaborative Networks Within and Across Organizations

The “org chart” may reflect where people in an organization sit, but rarely how they get their work done or the relative value of their contributions to the enterprise. This is more true today, as employees maintain extensive social networks outside of their organizations. Open leaders understand this. They find ways to invite broad participation in problem-solving within and outside of their organizations. For example, leaders in our study reported experimenting with:

• Social networks that made the knowledge and expertise of individual employees known to everyone;
• Crowdsourcing platforms that invite people to share ideas, knowledge, and opinions at significant scale; and
• Convening partners (who might also be competitors) to develop collaborative solutions to common problems;

Sharing Leadership

Open leaders invite others to share leadership responsibility. They understand that leadership is a role, not a title, and that leadership can come from any corner of any organization or community, not just the management tier. For traditional leaders, this is a significant change. But it also represents a tremendous opportunity to engage more people in more meaningful work toward more significant ends.

Leaders, their organizations, their boards, and their communities will all have to find the particular combination of open leadership practices that is right for them.

Openness is a matter of degree, but it is also inevitable.

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months. The entire project is documented at EnhacingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership.

Fundraising for Public Education

I'll be frank. I have mixed feelings about (seemingly endless) school fundraisers. As a policy wonk, I understand that needs exceed resources, but am perpetually frustrated when we are not transparent about the value of donations and contributions in public-school budgets, making it impossible to know what it actually costs to educate a young person. As a member of the village (no kids of my own, but aunt or god-parent of many), I do not favor buying things I don’t need in order to provide basic learning opportunities for the next generation. And as a citizen, I have a nagging suspicion that the effect of engaging hoards of parents, teachers, and children in fundraising exacerbates existing resource inequities and lets budgeteers (in state legislators, school boards, even foundations) off the hook, encouraging ever more local fundraising over deep thinking about sustainable solutions for providing high-quality public education.

Enter DonorsChoose.org.

I was prompted to try DonorsChoose while doing some fundraising research – I had not used the site before and was looking to compare its functionality and ease of use to other similar services. I logged on, set up an account, and found a request from “Mr. Tourzan”, a teacher in a rural, southern Oregon school. His request hooked me right away: stream monitoring kits to be used in the first environmental-science magnet program (also a K-5 program) to collect data with the intent of both presenting it in a public symposium, and using it to inform water policy in the community. This was something I could get behind. It’s science, civics, math, environmental stewardship, outdoor-education, and peer-learning all rolled up in one.

I made my contribution, finished up my research (loved the site by the way), and moved on with life and work.

Envelope: Courtesy of the USPS, DonorsChoose.org, Mr. Tourzan, and his Students
This week, I received a 9 X 12 envelope from DonorsChoose.org. I opened it half cringing, expecting a plea for another donation. Instead, I found hand-written, illustrated, and teacher-edited thank you notes from Chris, Vivian, Bryce, Cora, Cassia, Kazes, Julianne, Thomas, one that was unsigned, and one from Zach Walker at DonorsChoose. I read them all outloud half-laughing and half-crying. They were hilarious: heartfelt and specific about what each students liked best (e.g. going to the stream “6 times!”, talking at the symposium, adding in the poisonous chemicals, watching the “0xygen go down”, etc.).

Here are the photos and thank-yous if you’d like to take a peek. My favorite illustration is posted below.

The whole exchange was a great experience.

What’s Going on Here?

Hmmm…..Feeling a twinge of guilt. Why did I respond so positively to this experience (which benefited kids I do not know personally), compared to other recent experiences at the schools of my nieces, nephews and godsons?

Here’s what I came up with:

1. The ask was simple. I knew exactly what was needed and why, how much it cost ($490), and who would benefit. (Assuming one more of those kids adopts environmental stewardship as a lifelong practice, we may all be saved. You’re welcome. Please pay it forward).
2. The donation supported applied, interdisciplinary learning, not pencils, textbooks, or teachers. Personal preference maybe, but I am squeamish about fundraisers that aim to pay for basic classroom supplies, capital expenses, or program fundamentals (of which art, music, and physical education are a part). I want my donations to support programs that address unmet need, explore new ways to offer learning opportunities, or connect subject-matter to civic engagement. Mr. Tourzan’s program meets these criteria (heck, I would like to enroll in his program).
3. The transaction was mission-related. I can’t stand bidding on wine at a silent auction so that kids can have computers in school. There I said it. Again, I understand how we’ve come to this situation, but that does not make it right. It takes a lot of effort to organize auctions and events, and most leave me wondering how we might have invested that time differently for greater gain. Not to mention, I’m not sure what we’re teaching kids when we suggest that their ability to have a decent education depends upon the decision of a private citizen to buy a vacation weekend, massage, or fine-dining experience at an auction.
4. The scale of the request was manageable (for my budget anyway) and I really liked the crowd-sourcing aspect of contributing on DonorsChoose (I like this about Kiva.org, too):  I couldn’t shoulder the whole $490, but together, five of us could. And we could even connect with one another and Mr. Tourzan, here.
5. The approach is entrepreneurial but does not engage kids it direct selling, nor place undue burdens on teachers. It wasn’t that long ago that I sold everything from garbage bins to honey to people who did not need these things so that we could maintain a music class. Enough said.
6. The site makes visible what’s going on in classrooms that participate. This is certainly a higher level of transparency than most schools and districts offer about their special projects.
7. The thank-you notes were an unexpected, personal, and delightful surprise. They engage kids in the effort (and cultivate good writing habits). And the difference between my reaction to those letters, compared to the average polished, corporate-style appeal that arrives at my doorstep…let’s just say I’ll be giving to DonorsChoose again.

And I have not put the letters in the recycling bin.

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The Strength of Weak Ties

Mark Granovetter posited the strength of weak ties in 1973, launching a field of inquiry with a 1985 update focused on the problem of embeddedness - the idea that economic relationships are embedded inside social relationships. A follow-up in 2005 called for an interdisciplinary approach to the "black box" of social relationship so that their impact on economic behaviors and outcomes could be revealed and better understood.

The Science of Social Networks Applied

Most people understand the economic power of networks intuitively - and use them for job-hunting, learning, caring for their families and communities, and a myriad of other things.

Industry has long attempted to harness the power of networks for generating sales, recruiting talent, entering new markets, and cultivating and applying innovation - inside firms and industries, and more recently, through crowdsourcing.

And at the community level, scholars like Sean Safford have been able to show that the health of social networks have a significant impact on the ability of communities withstand economic disruption.

But social networks have been difficult and time consuming to document.

Enter technology.

Today, millions of people leave digital breadcrumbs that make their networks visible - from text messages on mobile phones to updates on Facebook or Twitter.

We are creating more efficient and effective ways to map, measure (and cultivate!) healthy networks, as evidence of their economic power continues to mount.

New Netwok Finds

Last week, these gems came across my radar:

1. Network Diversity and Economic Development (Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, Rob Claxton in Science Magazine, May 2010 - summary visible with out subscription). Researchers analyzed cell phone data (in Britain) to reveal the social networks of cell phone users. They found that communities whose residents maintain diverse networks were more prosperous than communities with less diverse networks. Conclusion?

   “On a population level, the surprisingly strong correspondence we discovered between the structure of social contacts and the economic well-being of populations highlights the potential benefit of socially targeted policies for economic development.”

   (A plain-English summary of the same study is available at Futurity here.)
2. Social Enterprise: It Takes A Network (Raj Kumar, McKinsey Digital, What Matters). The author argues that the network is (potentially) a more effective organizational structure for meeting "bottom of the pyramid" needs when the goals is to assess impact and not just commercial sales. Significantly, this changes the model for "scaling up" and implies the need for alternatives to program- or organization-based measures as the primary indicators of success.

As social network mapping and analysis becomes simpler and more accessible, more of us can invest more time and energy in network weaving - building the social networks we now know really matter.