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An Exploration of Leadership

There was a moment this spring, mid-way through a a project about the changing nature of leadership in the field of policy concerned with work and learning (we call it “workforce”), where we began to feel a renewed sense of excitement and promise.

The last several years have been tough for leaders working to help their communities achieve greater prosperity, especially in those parts of a Europe and the US where the rise of unemployment and corresponding social ills has been fast and severe. The housing crisis, unemployment, the escalating costs of health care and education, and a public sector in fiscal crisis—it can feel like an onslaught.

For policy and community leaders, the relentless push for efficiencies, cost-cutting strategies, and evidence-based practices—each important in its own way—can inhibit deeper thinking about the most critical contributions these leaders and their organizations make to the well being of their communities.

What We Learned

But we found leaders who were thinking deeply about their communities’ most significant challenges and what they could do about them—in partnership with government and non-profit organizations, and with businesses and citizens themselves.

The goal of our project was to explore the changing nature of workforce leadership—what leaders do, in what context, and toward what end, and how these have shifted over the past decade (a more complete explanation is here).

We engaged 519 leaders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors at the federal, state and local levels, documenting our activities on the project’s website along the way. We identified a framework and set of six practices sufficiently different from a decade ago to constitute a new model of leadership—we call it WEadership, a nod to its collaborative nature.

Three Insights Worth Thinking About

Three ideas that emerged during the project that strike us as posing fundamental challenges to the way we organize, manage, and assess investments in workforce.

1. Conversation Matters.

Repeatedly, workforce leaders told us that convening conversation with partners, stakeholders, program providers, local elected officials and citizens is the most important work they do. Not just important work, the most important work.

This will not be surprising to those experienced in the art and science of innovation as it is a social process. The source of much innovation is the blending and mixing of new ideas, technologies, and methods from one sector with those of another. Workforce leaders have long been hosting (both formally and informally) conversations about how to solve the jobs, skills, and economic development challenges in their communities. These conversations inform the actions of not just policy makers and workforce leaders, but everyone around the proverbial table that employs or develops people or supports a business. Such conversations have never been more important.

The problem is that the effects of this kind of work are difficult to evidence, especially in the short term.

As one a respondent in rural Iowa put it:

“When you use networks to move an agenda, it’s influence and momentum thatmatter. Changes can be small, but they are also cumulative—one day you look up and a lot of things are really different. But we don’t always have the ability to say “A led to B.’”

This fuzziness makes some leaders uncomfortable. As a result, we do not acknowledge convening as legitimate work. This means we do not invest in our capacity to do it successfully, and we do not talk about it when we are successful for fear it will be seen as lacking in rigor. But such convening is an essential ingredient in good policy and a necessary one for implementing better solutions to our most intractable problems.

2. Connectivity is a game changer.

The second insight has to do with social technologies. The fact that hundreds of millions of people are connected to one another using technology creates whole new possibilities for engaging in work, learning, and entrepreneurship in very different ways:

The explosion of peer-learning communities in the workplace and web-based platforms like Skillshare, P2PU, and Khan Academy are challenging our ideas about the very nature of educational institutions—is Skillshare school? Workforce leaders are asking themselves how these platforms can play a role in addressing skills gaps or simply engaging people in productive activity.

Manpower and other firms in the business of connecting people to work (even if not in traditional jobs) have been joined by firms like Taskrabbit that enable people to make a living by aggregating “gigs.” In the absence of sufficient numbers of jobs—even if there were a perfect match between the skills firms need and those job-seekers can supply—workforce leaders are asking themselves how these ‘unjobs’ can offer opportunities for those who need them, and what role policy can play in realizing them.

Peer-lending, microphilanthropy, and crowdfunding are helping us reimagine what it means to launch a venture. While nearly every local workforce leader with whom we spoke indicated that job creation was a workforce issue, the linkage became more tenuous at the state level (except in the seven states that maintain self-employment programs) and almost invisible at the federal level. But social ventures of the kind typically supporting through platforms like Kickstarter are a kind of hybrid. They can enable people to make their own jobs (or ‘gigs’) by aggregating investors (“backers”) who support specific projects or initiatives. Again, workforce leaders are exploring how such platforms might connect people to opportunity in nontraditional ways.

3. Boldness wanted.

Finally, across the board, workforce leaders expressed a desire for bolder experiments. Too often, the theories of change driving what are called “innovation initiatives” are determined at the top (whether by foundations or federal agencies) with little input from the field, and reflect the risk-averse culture of their organizations. As a result, local leaders often feel like they are working very hard to improve existing programs or approaches they know should be wholly reinvented. In addition, where innovation does occur, there are few mechanisms to share it with the field.

And yet, many, many leaders we spoke with persevere, seeking to maximize their impact on the economical health and social well being of their communities. Today, leaders at all levels and across sectors need to find ways to learn together, and to better support each other in solving what are absolutely critical community problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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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 EnhancingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership

Facilitator Guide

This is the Facilitator Guide for the industry-focused simulation. It provides details on how the simulation works and a script for those leading the activity. You are welcome to download and use as is or as the basis for your own custom version.

The guide is one of four resources we used in the simulation exercise. The others include:

• The introductory video.
• The nametags/roles.
• The letter.

All are available for use/download. We hope you find them useful (and use the comment section below to let us know!)

Prosperity Prize Introductory Video

This is the video we used in the community-focused version of the Leadership Simulation. You are welcome to view it and use it for your own simulations.

The video is one of four resources we used in the simulation exercise. The others include:

• The letter.
• The nametags/roles.
• The Facilitator Guide that explains how the whole process works.

All are available for use/download. We hope you find them useful (and use the comment section below to let us know!)

Prosperity Prize Introductory Video

This is the video we used in the industry-focused version of the Leadership Simulation. You are welcome to view it and use it for your own simulations.

The video is one of four resources we used in the simulation exercise. The others include:

• The letter.
• The nametags/roles.
• The Faciliator Guide that explains how the whole process works.

All are available for use/download. We hope you find them useful (and use the comment section below to let us know!)

Letter from the Mayor of "Springfield"

This is the letter we used in the industry-focused version of the Leadership Simulation. You are welcome to download and use as is or as the basis for your own custom version.

The letter is one of four resources we used in the simulation exercise. The others include:

• The introductory video.
• The nametags/roles.
• The Faciliator Guide that explains how the whole process works.

All are available for use/download. We hope you find them useful (and use the comment section below to let us know!)

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.

Thanks to Flickr pal woodleywonderworks.

NOTE: This is a continuation of the series we warned you about a few days ago. We are summarizing several large reports for each other (members of the Community Team at CSW), but we’re doing it here so you can benefit too – you know, if you are interested (since you found your way here for some reason). You won’t find a lot of wit, but there might be some wisdom for the taking.

One thing we love about OECD reports (and international comparisons generally for that matter) is that they remind us that the challenges we face are more universal than we think – and we can learn from looking up and out. On this count, More than Just Jobs: Workforce Development in a Skills-Based Economy does not disappoint.

At its core, the paper argues that although workforce development – the ecosystem of people, policies, and organizations concerned with the intersection of people, skills, jobs, and the economy – has been primarily concerned with narrow targets, transactions, and sets of activities, the field has an increasingly important role to play in improving the prosperity of communities. Author Sylvain Giguère suggests a broader goal for workforce development than the field (on the whole) has adopted to date:

“The comprehensive management of human resources, so as to better meet the demands of a global economy at both the national and local levels, through improving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.”

The reports names governance - leadership, policy coordination, adaptation of policy and program to diverse local conditions, and community engagement – as among the most significant challenges faced by workforce organizations seeking to advance this important aim. It calls for local policy to reflect a better balance between national aims and local needs and greater experimentation throughout the system, tempered with efficiency and accountability.

Policy Recommendations

• Inject flexibility into management. Decisions about strategic priorities in the implementation of public programs and services should be made locally, using a management by objective framework negotiated with central government.
• Establish an overarching management framework that embeds local flexibility to ensure alignment while also encouraging differentiation and experimentation.
• Build strategic capacity. Local staff should have strong knowledge of local economic conditions as well as effective human resource development practices, and the analytical and strategic capacity to be able to set priorities and development methods for addressing them.
• Build up local data and intelligence. The ability to aggregate and organize data in a way that supports local strategy development is essential and could be better supported by national level efforts to develop tools that adapt to local circumstances.
• Improve governance mechanisms. Labor market and workforce organizations should collaborate with education, economic development, business, and civic organizations. There is no governance mechanism for this kind of collaboration, but networks of partnerships go a long way in increasing and extending the capacity of workforce organizations.
• Improve administrative processes. Aligning policies through institutional reform is a difficult challenge, exacerbated by the scale of larger countries. Still efforts should be made to review the cross-agency implementation of broader workforce policy with the aim of better promoting collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Other Findings

• Workforce development matters because it directly impacts four drivers of economic growth: Skills, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Social Cohesion.
• Three major obstacles impede adoption of the broader goal of workforce development: 1) speeding up education and training systems; 2) fragmentation of local decision-making and workforce resources; and 3) lack of willingness to look long term. All of these could be ameliorated though larger investments and more serious support for governance (collaboration).

Case Studies: Out of Date?

Warning: Although the paper was published in 2008, the analysis of the U.S. Workforce System is very dated. It builds from the original six Workforce Investment Act (WIA) principles (one of which was “strong boards” which was summarily eliminated from WIA implementation documents within a matter of months). Baldridge work (ancient history when I realized I’d become part of the “field” of workforce development in 2003 or so) features prominently, and some of the organizations named in the local case studies have long since been replaced, some more than once.

Having some context from my work in the UK from 2001-2003 (in economic and workforce development), I could see that the U.K. case study was also quite dated, though Departmental names, and configurations change more frequently there (often coinciding with budget reviews).

This made me somewhat suspect of the case study portions of the report, but the larger trends and recommendations identified in the content chapters seem quite sound.