(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
After completing a leadership fellowship program for women of color, a program participant accepted a position as director of citizen engagement and education at a state public health agency in the United States. The agency tasked her with restructuring outreach efforts and increasing people’s awareness and use of agency services in communities of color. To engage with the agency, people from these communities needed culturally relevant content and more-accessible programming. Relying on personal relationships, she successfully made changes within her department that improved outreach, but the agency was unwilling to invest additional budget or staff time in responding to agency-wide challenges that community members identified.
Like the fellowship program she participated in, the agency’s approach to community engagement and inclusion—hiring one person to handle all related issues and challenges—was rooted in the idea that leadership is individual and defined by positional role. But working within a model where everyone focused on strictly bounded spheres of responsibility limited the capacity for internal change; teams that might have helped address system-wide issues refused to implement processes that challenged existing siloes. By failing to make a coordinated effort to support a new leader and leadership approach, the agency isolated her. After a year of attempting to lead change, she left, and the agency lost both contacts and credibility in the communities where it had begun to connect.
This common framing of leadership, where outcomes depend solely on the abilities of individual leaders, leaves little room for the possibility that everyone in the system has valuable, relevant insights to contribute. Because systems are complex, relying on a leader to orchestrate change from a pedestal does not work. In fact, attempting to train and hire leaders from within a framework that puts people in separate boxes inevitably reinforces patterns of hierarchy and isolation that underpin existing systems.
If, instead, we see leadership as a matter of finding and following new paths in collaboration with others, then it is more about understanding interactions among people and their environments and navigating a variety of unpredictable situations along the way. Creating systems change, therefore, lies not in looking to a single person but in engaging people to connect and lead together through the unknown.
When Leadership and Limiting Systems Collide
In systems of all kinds, individuals practicing leadership often come up against the constraints of limiting, exclusionary, and unjust conditions and cultures. Organizations looking to build people’s leadership capacities—especially the capacity to catalyze social change—and the organizations or other systems where these individuals end up must therefore deepen their understanding of how systems and people interact and what conditions increase the likelihood of change. The fact is, no system changes on its own. Change occurs when people use their influence to advance it. However, systems rarely change because of one person’s choices and actions; systems change requires choices and actions from many people and an environment that supports shared leadership.
Given this, it is ineffective at best for leadership programs to hone an individual’s skills and then send that person, alone, into a system that is not ready for the kind of leadership they bring. These situations are especially egregious when a system designates a change agent without honestly assessing its own readiness for change and considering how to support them.
In the United States, for example, it is common—and became dramatically more common after police murdered George Floyd in May 2020—for organizations to hire someone to deal with the complex issues of diversity, justice, equity, and inclusion that surface in internal culture, external relationships, or both. These are often people of color, and no matter how capable and well-prepared, they are often set up to fail. In some cases, this is a matter of tokenism: the recruitment of a member of an underrepresented group to gain an advantage (such as a positive public perception) for the organization, without any real organizational commitment to diversity, justice, equity, or inclusion. Even when commitments are sincere, the people hired into these positions (like the public health director in the example above) frequently end up isolated within their organizations. No one else is expected to take responsibility for or take the risk of being vulnerable in conversations about related issues and challenges.
How, then, can leadership programs and funders, and social sector organizations in need of systems change create the conditions for these leaders to succeed and for collective leadership to flourish?
Preparing Systems for Transformative Leadership
One path forward is for organizations to assess their own readiness for systemic change. For a social sector organization or any other system to do this, it must ask: Are we prepared to make room for people to practice leadership in ways that differ from conventional management styles? Are we prepared to adapt to and embody transformative change so that individual leaders can succeed and so the whole organization can become more just, innovative, and open?
More specifically, organizations need to honestly answer several sets of questions related to change, risks, beliefs, norms, and decision-making:
- What changes do we seek? How are we currently making decisions related to these changes? To what extent are we, individually and collectively, willing to take responsibility for real change?
- What is at risk if we do or do not implement change? Can we acknowledge the tension between those risks, and accept growing pains as important and necessary? What support do we need to foster a culture of learning, risk, and mutual vulnerability?
- Are we willing to investigate others’ beliefs and narratives about us, even if they challenge our assumptions about our organization’s identity, purpose, and impact? What new narratives do we need to embrace transformative leadership?
- To what extent do we understand how privilege is embedded in our organizational norms and cultural contexts? Are we willing to increase transparency and make our decision-making processes more inclusive?
From there, organizations should consider how to support leaders of change, share accountability, and engrain practices for keeping staff connected and engaged with the problem, and working together to figure out ways forward. For example, the staff at Nexus Community Partners—a nonprofit that sees people and communities of color as experts who can help expand human, social, and financial capital—practice accountability by asking and reflecting on the question, “What support do we need?” during check-in meetings. They pause to consider whether their relationships with each other and the community are mutual, authentic, and transparent, as well as grounded in kindness, shared learning, and a commitment to holding each other accountable in supportive, compassionate ways. Leaders of systems change need to be intentional about making the risks and responsibilities associated with change collective and mutual, rather than individual.
By preparing to make room for diverse and even divergent perspectives and routinely practicing collective leadership, organizations create the conditions for new and current leaders to succeed: They can study the system’s existing patterns, strengthen and navigate relationships, build mutual trust and collective will, and introduce new ideas and ways of doing things.
Creating Conditions for Change Through Connection
Another path forward for those seeking systems change is to focus on promoting connections between people engaged in related leadership efforts, including through leadership programming, organizational infrastructure, and mentorship. Even in organizations that are not willing to assess their own readiness or rise to the challenge of embracing multiple kinds of leadership, this can help create conditions more conducive to change.
Here are five examples of how connecting people so that they can learn from and support one another helps build critical mass within and across systems.
1. Leading Together
When people lead together, they provide each other with mutual support, become willing to do things they would not have done before, and become accountable to a community larger than their specific organization.
Recognizing this, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and collaborators are in the early stages of designing a new leadership program focused on advancing health equity and dismantling structural racism. The program will convene people with diverse viewpoints to lead on these issues together, committing to each other and to shared, deeply held goals. Similarly, the Healthcare Anchor Network, a collaborative of 75 health systems, is working to transform the economic drivers of health disparities in the United States. Launched in 2017, the group has several leadership commitment programs, including one in which 13 health systems will direct more than $1.1 billion in procurement funds to low-income communities and another in which 9 systems will direct at least 1 percent of their long-term investment assets to affordable housing, minority-owned businesses, and other drivers of inclusive economic development. To build shared accountability, members report into a common data dashboard, detailing their progress against inclusive hiring, purchasing, and investing goals, and a range of programs provide peer and expert support to leaders across the network.
2. Staying Interpersonally Connected
When people in different positions across an institution are connected, they gain more or broader perspectives and can coordinate their actions to drive change.
Nexus Community Partners, for example, helps maintain connections between alumni and current participants via its Boards and Commissions Leadership Institute. This network works to collectively influence change across Minnesota, including through a nascent effort at the University of Minnesota Medical School that convenes community leaders and academic advisory boards across the university to address how the institution as a whole engages with community leaders. As a result, the university can more effectively shift decision-making patterns at multiple levels within the organization to address local challenges.
3. Connecting Groups with Similar Challenges
Many organizations establish employee resource groups that offer people who share a characteristic, such as being people of color, an opportunity to connect and support each other. They seldom come with resources to advance change, however, and thus primarily serve human resources functions like recruitment and retention. Organizations that want to improve conditions for change can better connect these groups to the organization’s mission and to each other.
In 2016, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights started convening employee resource groups and other diversity and inclusion groups across Minnesota state agencies. The process provided a structure for people from all positional levels across a complex, multi-agency, state government system to share knowledge and experiences in a way that helped them navigate state bureaucracy. It also produced a set of best practices for internal diversity and inclusion, a guide to evaluate civic engagement efforts, pilot projects that supported changes in multiple state agencies, and a summit focused on civic engagement.
4. Authorizing and Supporting Internal Change
Transformation can result when a group of people within an organization or system initiate and lead change, sometimes without being positionally mandated to do so. These intrapreneurs are creative and self-motivated. They drive change through networks and relationships, and use the power and influence that emerges.
Take the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit committed to reducing poverty and increasing economic opportunity. Starting in 2010, the CEO authorized and worked closely with the organization’s COO to prioritize racial equity, both internally and in its public policy work. A racial equity committee composed of staff members from across the entire organization did much of the ensuing work. Crucially, the CEO and board empowered the committee to recommend bold changes. Leadership also ensured that staff members dedicated time during the workday to racial equity work. In the years since, the organization has significantly diversified its staff, and transformed its external work to center racial justice and its internal organizational culture and structures to support that work.
5. Promoting Mentorship
Mentoring relationships help people navigate the systems in which they live, learn, and work. Although mentoring programs focus on building individual leadership skills long-term, their impact is often much broader, as they foster trusted relationships that connect people across an organization or system. One benefit is a flow of ideas and opportunities in more than one direction. Mentors in successful programs, for example, report that they learn from their mentees as well and often find themselves better positioned to foster organizational change.
In higher education, for example, advisors support and counsel graduate students as they progress and later seek jobs or post-doctoral positions. The University of Minnesota’s Health Equity Leadership and Mentoring Program is designed for this purpose; it supports scholars who self-identify as members of communities impacted by health inequities, and recognizes the unique circumstances and intersections of their academic, personal, and professional experiences.
It is vital for leadership programs and the social sector organizations and systems they often ultimately support to help create the conditions for systems change. The first step is to develop a holistic understanding of how people and existing systems interact. By combining honest assessments of system readiness and a deep recognition of the power of people working and leading together, organizations and programs can design and implement approaches that lead to transformation.
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Read more stories by Sida Ly-Xiong.