Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Revisiting the Core Skills of Community Leadership

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The best thing about writing a blog, I’ve come to learn, is that you sometimes surprise yourself. I’ve been writing one since February 2010, a little more than two years’ time, and I can already see small changes in my thinking about the things that interest me: how communities change, how people become leaders, how citizens figure into civic progress, and how local politics works. Don’t get me wrong; in re-reading my postings, I largely agree with the central ideas, but I see changes in how I’d put things today.

Here’s an example: the core skills of community leadership, which I wrote about in April 2010. I still believe that leaders who want to be effective in civic work have to master a set of skills, and the five I listed—empathy, facilitation, strategy, learning and motivation—are the right ones. But I’d call some of them by different names today and place them in a different order.

What has caused my thinking to evolve is the work I’ve done in how change happens. In a set of postings, beginning last August, I mapped out how deliberate change comes to communities. (Literally, I called it a map, with starting points and steps along the way, ending in adoption and implementation.) There’s a lot to the map—it took seven postings to explain it all—and one result of spending so much time studying the process was a new appreciation for what it takes to move things through it. That’s the role, of course, of leaders.

And that brought me back around to looking at those five core skill sets. Here’s briefly how I described them two years ago:

  • Empathy: These are the skills that allow leaders to understand others and work with them, “particularly those with whom you have the least in common.”
  • Facilitation: These are the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies. Think of this as putting empathy to work.”
  • Strategy: These skills “help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward.”
  • Learning: These are the skills that “help you search for, find, and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources.”
  • Motivation: These skills “help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.”

As I said earlier, I agree that these are the key skills, but I’d put them in a different order, using different words to describe them. Here’s how:

The first skill set is still empathy, but I’d call it relationship building. And, yes, empathy is still important to relationships. But the aim of civic relationships, I’ve come to know, is not to understand people but to enlist them in civic work, and it now seems to me that “relationship building” is a more purposeful and action-oriented term. I’d still put it as the first skill to be mastered because relationship building is where community leadership begins. Without a group of people to call on for assistance and advice—and, ideally, a diverse group—it’s impossible to be a civic leader.

The second skill set is the one I put as number four on the list two years ago, learning. It’s not a great name, but I’ll stick with it for the time being. These skills are about seeing community problems and finding their solutions. Why have I moved it up? Because this is the engine of community change. Change begins when people with strong community relationships meet problems they believe they can solve. So mix relationship building with learning and you have ignition. My caution is that learning is a process and not an event, and the process has two parts: seeing the problems and finding workable solutions. As I wrote in this posting, leaders sometimes get the order reversed. That is, they fall in love with a solution they’ve seen elsewhere—a river walk, say, or a streetcar line—without thinking much about the problem it’s meant to solve. If they did, they might realize that plunking a river walk or streetcar in their community may not improve things . . . and could make things worse.

The third skill set is strategy, and I think my description two years ago still works. It’s about seeing the “critical path” that the change process must follow—the necessary steps of citizen meetings, private consultations, fundraising, committee meetings, public hearings, and government approvals—and marshaling the people and resources to make the journey. If relationship building and learning starts the engine of change, then strategy gives it a map.

Facilitation is the fourth skill set. It’s not a great name, but I can’t think of a better one. I was right to say two years ago that it was the skills that “help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies” but wrong to describe it as “putting empathy to work.” It’s more focused and strategic than that. At various points in a change process, leaders have to work with groups of people who are more or less peers, and facilitation teaches you how to do that with good results. Think of the best committee chair you’ve ever seen—the one who kept the group moving forward and pulled the best from its members—and you have the idea.

The final skill set I now call persuasion, which seems a bit more hard-edged than motivation. And that’s on purpose. Change, I’ve come to learn, does not come easily to communities, especially change that requires us to make conscious choices (unlike changes that are mostly beyond our control, such as economic change due to globalization) and meaningful sacrifices. Machiavelli described the problem with change rather well in 1513:

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.

Let me paraphrase: People who might benefit from a change have trouble valuing what they don’t yet have, but those who are asked to give something up know to the penny what it will cost them. Given this “order of things,” it takes something forceful to push change forward. And that force is persuasion, done in a hundred ways.

These, then, are my new core leadership skills, in the order in which they come to bear on community change: Begin with relationship building, followed by learning. When you have ignition, you bring in strategy, and facilitation. If all goes well, they will bring you to the 20-yard line. And to get over the goal line you need that final skill, which is persuasion.

Photo by Julie Faith licensed under Creative Commons.

Discussion Phase: How Need, Relationships, and Ideas Begin the Change Process

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In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

Let’s start at the top of the map, with the discussion phase. This is where change begins, with a leader recognizing a need and using her relationships, a set of ideas and a series of discussions to find a workable solution. But don’t let the casual-sounding name fool you. The discussion phase isn’t chit-chat; it’s a structured process involving different types of conversations with different groups, each a critical step in the change process. This phase ends with a decision about the solution to take forward.

Community change map

You begin with the need—the community problem or opportunity that’s the reason for the change process. This sounds so commonsensical that I’d hesitate to mention it were it not for the fact that most community change efforts (and virtually all failed ones) begin with something else: a solution.

Look at the ideas floating around your city. If it’s anything like mine, you’ll find proposals for streetcars, parks, bike trails, changes in taxes, water conservation, redevelopment finance, road improvements, zoning regulations, and on and on. What do most of these ideas have in common? They’re solutions without context. Their proponents serve them up without first establishing the problem they’re intended to solve. As a result, they create a ripple of interest . . . before sinking out of sight.

Business consultant William Bridges knows why this doesn’t work. As he warns corporate executives:

Most managers and leaders put 10 percent of their energy into selling the problem and 90 percent into selling the solution to the problem. People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see, acknowledge, and understand. They might even come up with a better solution than yours, and then you won’t have to sell it—it will be theirs.

Right on both points: If people don’t believe a problem exists, they’re not going to buy its solution. And when they do accept the need, they’ll often come up with good solutions on their own—which ends not with your leading people but marching with them. And that’s exactly where you want to be.

The keys to introducing a successful change process, then, are to convince citizens and decision makers of the need for change and, in time, facilitate a group of people who’ll arrive at a solution. Let’s take these in turn.

Begin with the need. It can be a problem (vacant properties in a neighborhood, say, or a declining local economy) or an opportunity (a local university that could have closer ties to the community). It can be a short-term problem (say, a spike in crime) or a long-term problem (domestic violence). You might start out with a solution in mind. Let’s say you’re concerned about obesity, and it seems to you that more sidewalks and playgrounds could go a long way toward solving it. If so, put aside your solution and concentrate on the problem.

This is harder than it seems. We were all rewarded in school for having the right answers, but in leading a change process it’s better to be the quiet kid in the back of the room than the one in the front row with his hand up. Why? Because many people eye change suspiciously. You may think you’re offering helpful ideas when you volunteer solutions, but some will see a hidden agenda. It’s better to say you don’t know the answer yet—and politely ask people for their thoughts.

And then there’s what William Bridges said: If you’re successful at getting people to accept the problem and think about it, they may come up with better solutions than you had anyway. So for both reasons—it lessens resistance and opens the door to other, perhaps more creative, ideas—it’s far better to sell the problem at first than to push a solution.

But how do you sell a problem effectively? I’ll write more about this in the future, but in general leaders must do four things to move people from awareness to action. They have to convince them that:

  • The problem is a community problem; it’s not just a personal issue.
  • It’s an important need, one that affects the community’s future.
  • It is urgent; things will grow worse with delay.
  • It’s possible do something about it; the community has the ability to solve the problem or significantly reduce it. It’s not hopeless or beyond reach.

When you convince people—decision makers and citizens—of these four things, something wonderful happens: People and resources are drawn to you. If offering solutions builds resistance, convincing people of needs does the opposite: It smooths the path of acceptance. Again, the trick is to build confidence that a solution can be found while not offering up a specific one.

The next step is to gather a group of people to talk about the need, discuss a range of possible solutions and agree on one to take forward. Who should be in this group? If you’ve done a good job of talking about the need—in small meetings with decision makers, in larger forums with citizens, perhaps through the news media and social media—then you know some who should be included. These are people who’ve responded to your call for action with support and resources. If you’ve spent time building relationships in the community (see “What Glengarry Glen Ross Teaches Us about Change“), you’ll know others who should be involved.

But you should also be strategic. You are assembling what John Kotter, the Harvard business professor and expert on corporate change, calls the “guiding coalition” for the change process. The coalition will change somewhat as you move through the planning and decision phases, but basically it is the group that will be the brains and muscle behind your initiative, the strategists and doers.

And who makes up a strong guiding coalition? Kotter suggests four types (which I’ve modified slightly for community change projects):

  • People with expertise in the issue.
  • Those with power in this area.
  • People with credibility in the community.
  • Leaders who’ve shown they can get things done.

For a change effort about obesity, then, the experts might be public health officials and perhaps those who run youth sports programs. Those with power might include school system officials, city parks officials and public-works officials. The other two types are harder to suggest, but you almost certainly know those in your community with a track record of getting things done and those whose judgment is respected. For the latter type, you might want to consider leaders in your city’s ethnic communities: If there are special problems with obesity among African-American or Latino youths, who can speak credibly for, and to, these families?

When you bring the coalition together, the initial goal to arrive at a workable solution (see “What Makes a Solution Workable?“). How do you manage such a thing? Well, there’s a great deal to learn about group facilitation—far more than I can cover in this posting—but three guidelines will serve you well:

  • Be patient. You will almost certainly introduce people to one another, so allow time for members to talk and listen. Good decisions require trust and candor. You won’t get them in a single meeting or probably in several sessions . . . but you can in time.
  • Start with the need and return to it frequently. The best way to begin a group’s work is with the need: a thorough discussion of what makes the problem a community concern, why it’s important and urgent, and why members believe it can be solved. As the group gets bogged down debating solutions, bring it back to the need. It will remind members of the importance of their work and encourage them to stick with it.
  • Keep an eye on group dynamics. One dynamic to watch for is a rush to judgment by the experts or those with power. This shouldn’t be surprising. These are people who’ve been thinking about this problem for years. They may even have solutions they’ve promoted in the past that they’d like the group to endorse. You’ll need the others—those with credibility and leadership ability—to slow things down by asking questions, gently challenging assumptions and pushing for new answers. This is an important role but one that some are uncomfortable playing. So before the first meeting, you may want to ask one or two of the most confident leaders to be the questioners of assumptions.

One way to improve the group’s work is with some “market tests” along the way. With the group’s permission, take its tentative ideas and assumptions to decision makers and citizens, through private meetings, op-ed articles and forums. This has an obvious benefit: Before committing to a solution, the group needs to know what decision makers think, how citizens respond, and where the likely obstacles lay. Yes, it will slow the process, but that’s not necessarily bad. It will prevent a rush to judgment and allow members time to know each other better.

And, who knows? Someone you talk with might offer a better solution than the ones the group was considering.

Photo by Jason Diceman licensed under Creative Commons.

Consensus, Power, and the Art of Getting Things Done

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If you’re the kind of person who likes intellectual exploration, abstract concepts and learning for the sheer joy of it, I have a suggestion: Spend a few weeks learning about systems thinking.

OK, I didn’t really think you’d go for it. Civic leaders are practical people who have little patience with theories. But a little theory can sometimes be helpful, and in this case might offer some guidance and encouragement for your work. So let me offer you a thumbnail guide to systems thinking (or at least, to my layperson’s understanding of it).

To begin, it’s a way of seeing major problems as . . . well, systems, rather than isolated issues. Systems thinkers usually begin with a thorough analysis that tries to untangle the system’s elements, interconnections and functions (they tend to make elaborate charts). They look at how the system changes over time (what systems thinkers call “flow” and “stocks”). Finally, they examine the causes or drivers of change, which they represent as “feedback loops” that work either to bring the system into balance or reinforce its direction. There’s much, much more to systems thinking, but trust me, a little goes a long way. This stuff gets complicated quickly and a bit mystical . . . like taking a seminar on quantum physics.

Here’s the point, though: The best urban leaders I’ve known were, consciously or not, systems thinkers. No, they don’t use the language or draw the charts, but as they looked at problems they too searched for context, change and causes. And they knew there were no simple, one-shot answers for complex problems.

And more: They discovered in many cases that the ultimate answer did not lie in addressing the problem they began with (say, crime in an urban neighborhood, the unkempt yards of foreclosed houses in the suburbs, or pedestrian fatalities along a busy highway), but in changing the system itself in some way—the elements and interactions that were causing crime, unsightliness or dangerous conditions.

Some of these changes might be obvious (closing a neighborhood crack house), some might not (setting up after-school programs to keep children away from temptation). But these leaders learned two things through experience: First, you can’t change complex systems by doing one big thing. You change them by doing a number of smaller things in a coordinated way. Second, you can’t make these changes alone; it usually takes a team of outsiders plus the active participation of those in the system.

Let’s take a relatively simple case, the unkempt yards issue. Most suburban communities have ordinances requiring that lawns be mowed even if houses are unoccupied. But the foreclosure process creates a legal gray area as ownership moves from one party to another. During that time, it’s often impossible to tell who owns the house. Yes, the city can send out its own mowing crews and attach liens to cover the cost, but the paperwork is daunting, the process inefficient and reimbursement a long way off.  And, in truth, city governments have better things to do. It’s much, much better if the house doesn’t remain unoccupied for long, and that means speeding up the foreclosure process, making it easier to rent houses, or both. But what city controls foreclosure laws? (They’re the province of state governments.) And suburban homeowners are rarely happy about having renters next door.

To change the system so that houses don’t fall into disrepair, then, requires a lot of small solutions working together: Swifter legal processes, banks that are convinced to maintain their properties, incentives for placing renters in foreclosed houses, a neighborhood that accepts rental properties as preferable to abandoned ones, and neighborhood associations that are quick to report those who aren’t playing by the rules.

Looking over the list, you realize that no single individual or institution “owns” all these solutions. They are spread among several levels of government and independent agencies (judges, for example, have a big say in what gets priority in their courts), through the private sector (the banks must be willing to cooperate) and civil society (someone has to speak for the neighbors).

Another thought may come to you: This isn’t an exceptional problem; this is a standard-issue problem. In American communities, our problems are often complex and power is dispersed by design.

So how do you deal with systemic problems when no one’s in charge? This is the heart of modern civic leadership: It is about being the one who can create consensus among independent interests for solutions that benefit all—and then seeing that the solutions are carried out. It’s not glamorous work. It’s painstaking, “small-p” political work that involves chipping away at obstacles and bringing interests together. (Elsewhere, I’ve referred to it as “removing the boulders” and “building the wall”.)

There are rewards for this kind of work. First, it can result in actual solutions—or, at least, better bad situations—because you’ve dealt with root causes. Second, you manufacture a form of power along the way. The ability to solve problems is the most important power a civic leader can have. It’s not the province of elected officials alone; it can be done by philanthropists, business leaders, nonprofit executives, neighborhood leaders—or by institutions and organizations, like universities, foundations or chambers of commerce.

The keys are to see problems systemically, practice the art of consensus-building and focus on results. And if you like to draw charts, well, that’s a bonus.

From Provider to Partner

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There’s a vast change underway in how local governments relate to their citizens, as governments move from being providers to partners. Almost everywhere you turn, you see this shift. Here are three examples:

  • The rise of business improvement districts. I’ve heard former mayors who served in the 1960s and 1970s talk about how shocked they were to learn that businesses would voluntarily raise their taxes in order to improve their surroundings. And yet, by the 1990s the BIDs were everywhere. The original idea was to take over services that cities could no longer afford (like cleaning up graffiti and planting trees), but BIDs have grown into surprisingly effective planning organizations as well.
  • The vast expansion of public-private partnerships. Cities have been creating public-private partnerships for decades; it’s how stadiums and civic centers were built in the 1980s and economic development programs were funded. But we’re now into partnerships that couldn’t have been imagined even a decade ago, like building toll lanes on highways and privatizing downtown parking meters. Some of these ventures will prove to be bad ideas, but they demonstrate how far you can go in marrying profit motives with public purposes.
  • The arrival of philanthropy in government services. Again, this is the sort of thing that leaves former mayors shaking their heads, but cities everywhere are turning to non-profits and foundations to fund—and manage—public assets. Name a major municipal service area that touches the lives of citizens, and you’ll likely find philanthropy at work, from park conservancies and public land trusts to police and library foundations. I haven’t seen donors lining up to support solid waste, but surely it can’t be too far off.

I could go on and on—there are many examples—but the shift is undeniable and the implications are clear: Governments no longer “own” local problems; they “share” community problems with others. And as you move from owning to sharing, new skills are required of government leaders: that they be able to identify others to share the burden, and that they be able to work as partners and not directors. And for that, they must learn patience and restraint, and this is much, much harder than you might think.

I’ll talk about restraint shortly, but first a bit more about the great role shift. I ran across a good description of the change in a report by a group called PACE, which stands for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. In it, the city manager of Ventura, Calif., Rick Cole, said the difference was between a vending machine and a barn raising:

“With a vending machine, you put your money in and get services out,” says Cole, a former alternative newspaper publisher and mayor in Pasadena. “When government doesn’t deliver, they do what people do when a vending machine doesn’t deliver,” says Cole. “They kick it.”

“The more useful metaphor,” he adds, “is the barn raising. It’s not a transaction, where I pay you to do work on my behalf, but a collaborative process where we are working together. Government works better and costs less when citizens do more than simply choose or ratify representative decision makers.”

Which are the next great barns to be raised? There are two areas where governments will make great partnership strides in the future. First is in neighborhood improvements; second is in bringing volunteers inside local governments.

With neighborhoods, this means letting residents take the lead in listing and prioritizing their needs, and insisting they take a major role in providing the solutions. I know, I know. We’ve tried for decades to find a workable model for neighborhood involvement without much success. But that’s because we’ve only done the first of these two things—we’ve asked people what they want and haven’t insisted they share the burden. To use Rick Cole’s metaphor, we’ve let people describe the soft drinks they want and the price they’d like to pay (essentially nothing), and when local governments failed to deliver, we’ve watched them kick the vending machines. We need them to grab a hammer and start raising the barn.

I’ll write in the future about the idea of volunteers in government. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I would point out that we already have volunteers in a range of government work, from volunteer firefighters and parents who help out in classrooms to volunteer librarians. (Next time you’re at your public library, ask the librarian to point out who works there for free.) Governments haven’t learned to ask for volunteers, but when they do, they’ll be surprised how many step forward. Here’s the key, though: They can’t manage volunteers like employees. So add to the list of skills governments must learn things like volunteer training, motivation and coordination.

Final thought: I first saw a local government acting as partner and not provider in 1994 when I wrote a magazine article about a South Florida city called Delray Beach. (You can read the entire article here.) The key to change in Delray Beach was a mayor, Tom Lynch, and a city council that had learned to be a dependable partner without becoming a dominating presence. Here’s a glimpse of how restraint works:

When a problem becomes apparent, civic leaders help the people most affected organize themselves to study it and come up with solutions. When the citizens arrive at some solutions, the city offers to be part—but only part—of the resolution. The group that’s most affected must accept the bulk of the responsibility.

It’s in this constant tension over responsibility—is everyone doing his part to solve this problem?—that Delray Beach generates both solutions and leadership. No one looks to city hall to figure out what to do or even to do it once it’s figured out. But they do keep close watch to be sure the city, the business community and non-profits live up to their ends of the bargain.

City hall is willing to “facilitate” the problem-solving process, help find resources and take some of the responsibility when the solution is arrived at. But it won’t tell people what to do or take on the work for them. As Mayor Lynch explains, “If someone comes to us with a problem, our role isn’t to solve the problem but to connect them with other people who can help them solve their problem.”

A decade and a half ago, I was amazed by this approach and even more by its results: not only a popular and well-managed local government in a city that had turned itself around—but a much happier citizenry as well. It turned out that, in Delray Beach, people preferred being partners to constituents. Come to think of it, they probably would have enjoyed barn raisings to vending machines, too.

Photo by Load Stone licensed under Creative Commons.

Five Core Skills of Community Leadership

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As we go along, I’ll write a great deal about community leadership skills—areas of ability or expertise that community leaders can and must master if they want to be effective. But to begin, I think these skills can be connected to five “core skills.” As you look down this list, you’ll probably see that you have two or three skills but not all five. Don’t despair. Most of us are better at some things than others.  Only a few (to pick a historic figure, Abraham Lincoln) seem equally good at all five.

The key is to understand that all these skills are necessary at some point to move a community forward. So you have a choice: You can work to improve yourself in the skill areas you’re not as gifted in or you can find partners who are good at these skills. Actually, I’d encourage you to do both: Find partners, see how they do things and learn from them.

Here are the five core skills:

  1. The skills of empathy: These are the skills that allow you to understand the views and motivations of others, particularly those with whom you have the least in common—people with different life experiences, political views or ethnic backgrounds. At higher levels, empathy allows you to stand outside yourself and see how others view you, which is critical to being an effective leader.
  2. The skills of facilitation: These are the skills that help bring groups together to agree on common goals and strategies.  Think of this as putting empathy to work. Once you understand how people see things, facilitation helps you bring different types together to find common ground.
  3. The skills of strategy: These are the skills that help you see the road—sometimes the only road—that will move good ideas forward. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the ability to understand and deal effectively with power.
  4. The skills of learning: These are the skills that help you search for, find and recognize potential solutions, sometimes from unexpected sources. Think of these as the skills that great detectives use in solving their cases.
  5. The skills of motivation: These are the skills that help you engage others—and yourself—in your community’s work.

I placed motivation skills last for a reason: This is what many think of when they think about leadership. And motivating others (and, I would argue, motivating yourself) is important, but without the other four, it is not much more than a good trick. After all, once you have people riled up,  the questions begin:

  • Riled up to do what?
  • With whom?
  • Working together how?
  • Overcoming which obstacles?
  • In order to achieve which outcomes?

I don’t wish to diminish the importance of motivation, but some of the best community leaders I’ve met couldn’t make an coherent public speech if their lives depended on it. (It’s striking how many mayors fit this description.) But they compensate in other ways. Sometimes, they were the ones who knew how to bring warring factions together. Or they had an uncanny ability to find and introduce the right idea at the right time. Or they knew precisely when and how to move initiatives forward.  Or while they weren’t great at public motivation, they had an abundance of personal motivation, so their energy level never flagged.

Again, I don’t mean to diminish the importance of speech making. Obviously, Barack Obama wouldn’t be in president if he couldn’t make a good speech. (Neither for that matter would Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy have been president.) But if we are to lead our communities to good places, we have to do more than talk. We have to listen, think, find and facilitate as well.

Photo by mtsofan licensed under Creative Commons.

About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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