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Here's an article we wrote a while back about a powerful "Leadership Learning" experience we designed and facilitated for a client in New York City. Given Cleveland's current movement toward reinvention, it seems like there are some exciting opportunities for corporate-community partnerships in our Northeast Ohio region.
Reaching Out: Corporate-Community Partnerships as Organizational Learning Opportunities
By Miriam Ricketts and Jim Willis
Miriam and Jim explore the concepts of leadership around the following: Thinking holistically means shifting the valuing process to an ever-widening context of relationships, for example, valuinghow the organization is related to the world outside its doors. A large consulting firm takes to the streets of New York expanding leadership knowledge through experiential practices.
Introduction
Executives, researchers and practitioners are seeing a shift toward leadership as collaborative participation, a more appreciative mode of leadership. As noted in The Appreciative Organization, it is through this collaboration that relationship are born. In this article we will explore these concepts as we share the story of a journey into organizational collaborative leadership.
With this new way of working together, there are mindful decisions being made to move beyond the boundaries of organizational walls to seek external community partnerships. The effort is to generate opportunities to bridge the boundary definition of what the language of inside vs. outside of the organization means, while demonstrating the value the organization places on external community relationships. That which is valued most by the organization, grows.
The following case story shares how a corporate-community partnership added value for the Organization Development function of a large consulting firm that wanted its newly hired senior executives to experience “inspirational community service” in order to live the firm’s core leadership values.
The New York City Leadership Challenge
At the time of this program, the Management Consulting arm of Ernst & Young LLP had been experiencing rapid growth (adding approximately 45% new employees per year, including executives) and turnover (almost 20%) for several years. Given the turnover, EY leadership felt they had not been able to satisfactorily inculcate new executives with the core leadership values and skills important to retaining top talent and ultimately the sustained success of the firm.
The leadership in the firm's New York City offices identified senior management as the group who could influence a new direction by establishing a more positive and inspirational leadership culture. And since community service was one of the firm’s core values, they also saw an opportunity to reinforce this value within the surrounding New York City community by having community service as an integral component of a leadership-learning program.
The head of HR for the firm came to us asking that we develop a leadership learning experience that included a 24-hour community service challenge for 80 selected managers. We design a 2-day program where the executives used appreciative interviewing techniques and experiential learning to explore the topic of leadership that inspires positive community change”— both within the firm and in the New York City community— and set goals and identified action steps for improving their individual leadership skills.
The experience for the New York City Leadership Challenge was to feed and clothe 2,000 people in New York City within 24 hours—all while conducting appreciative interviews of the leaders, volunteers, employees and beneficiaries of the service organizations contacted during the challenge. The experience represented a challenge to the senior mangers to discover “ the best leadership that exists,” both regarding current capacities and future potentials, and to bring said capacities and potentials to life over a 2-day period (one day for the experience and one day to debrief).
During the first morning the participants interviewed each other about personal and organizational experiences around extraordinary leadership. In teams of 8-10, they then were presented with three tasks:
- Feed and/or clothe 2,000 people in need within the next 24 hours
- Interview community stakeholders—community service organization leaders, volunteers, workers and recipients about their personal experiences with “Leadership that Inspires Positive Community Change”’ and
- Follow and complete the Self-Facilitated Learning Journals (designed to guide learning for remote teams) at the designated time milestones during the challenge
At this introductory point, while we deeply believed that the challenge would be transformational, it was not immediately apparent to the participants. For many of them, the initial response to the challenge was fear, concern and outright refusal. We had a totally unexpected mutiny on our hands! Several of the participants argued that this was an unsafe and even unethical activity (to ask employees to perform community service as part of a work training exercise). Many, naturally, were also concerned about traveling to areas of the city they had been told to avoid all of their lives.
As the discussion progressed, leaders emerged who argued both sides— to pursue the challenge and to protest the challenge. Finally, they asked all facilitators and EY partners to leave the room so they could speak openly and candidly among themselves. Many of the protesters were uncomfortable openly expressing their concerns in front of their bosses. They also perceived ulterior motives in the people who were on the side of proceeding with the challenge namely, You are only saying this in order to get promoted. If the partners weren't in the room I think you would take a different line.
To this day we don’t know what was said in the room during the 45 minutes we were not present. However, we can tell you what we saw when they invited the facilitators and partners to return to the room.
The tenor in the room had changed entirely. The interpersonal tension was noticeably reduced. New leaders had emerged and were being supported by the earlier leaders and the rest of the senior management group. It was apparent that the high level of collaboration and cooperation amongst the group was contributing to their new enthusiasm for the project. They had just spent 45 minutes developing the trust and relationships to tackle a challenge that before had seemed daunting. They had come to value the differences in the room and through this valuing, were now able to make a positive contribution to the task at hand. During their brief time together,
- The group had divided into separate teams whose purpose was to explore various opportunities for accomplishing the challenge.
- Each group had been established based on personal interests, concerns and core values,
- Empathy for one another had prevailed over personal interests.
- It was obvious that interpersonal rapport had been established.
Within the first hour of the program, it appeared that the executives were well on their way toward meeting the leadership program’s learning objectives. Even before the actual 24-hour service challenge had begun, the initial group dynamics encouraged the best existing leadership qualities” to emerge, to be acknowledged and to be applied. The entire group exhibited incredible leadership, such as carefully considering the concerns, values and goals of each person, while identifying the potential benefits of proceeding with the challenge, and choosing the best course of action for satisfying individual needs while meeting the objectives of the firm. They created a compressed time learning experience in which everyone had an opportunity to observe and practice extraordinary leadership.
In order to address individual interests and concerns, the group divided into task teams. Some of their tasks included:
- Moving goods (clothes, food and medicine) to Honduras for hurricane relief.
- Volunteering as cooks, dishwashers and servers at the Bowery Mission's soup kitchen.
- Creating a new foundation, supported by the firm and run by junior executives, to provide just-in-time resources for community organizations in need.
- Packaging, transporting and delivering frozen food and clothing from Harvest for Hunger to homeless and impoverished families.
- Canvassing neighborhoods, family and friends for clothing and food donations, locating people in need of the donations and distributing the donations to them.
Upon returning from the community service leadership challenge (the group far exceeded the goal of feeding and clothing 2000 people in less than a day), the executives came together to reflect on their experiences, many of which included real time; collaborative leadership moments, and to share the output from the completed interviews. Each person then created a personal plan with 6-month and 12-month goals for developing leadership skills, to be reviewed by their mentor and included in their annual performance review. To close the program, and as a follow up for continued learning, the firm sponsored a Habitat for Humanity house building project to be completed with the firm's New York counseling families (basically a vertical slice of the organization) as a means for cascading the lessons to others in the organization.
The experience of working together not only to restructure the terms of the learning (much to the surprise of the external facilitators!) but also to complete the community service challenge itself generated peak moments for discovering the most effective leadership that inspires positive community change. As a result, the executives were able to experience firsthand how collaborative processes (like inclusion and coordination with others) help to construct an organization's leadership culture.
Through dialogue about peak leadership moments and experiencing those peak moments of leadership excellence the participants were able to identify strategies for improving long-term leadership skills. While this initiative focused on a small population within a very large organization, the combination of appreciative dialogue and storytelling, along with a challenging learning experience that incorporated the outside community, all contributed toward the increased awareness, deliberate reframing, and co-construction of leadership excellence.
Looking back on the experience, what is most provocative is how the corporate-community relationship itself provided unexpected “learning moments” both for the participants and those in the community. For example, the team of efficiency experts who approached the Honduran embassy was able to quadruple the rate that clothing and medical supplies left the warehouse for Honduras. Through the experience they also learned that if they identified what was in each box (by efficiently listing the contents on the outside), chances were the content list on each box would draw the attention of street-wise opportunists in the Black Market, and therefore the boxes wouldn't reach their final destination.
The relational exchange between Ernst & Young and the surrounding New York City community also lived on after the Leadership Challenge. Not only did the firm adopt and complete a Habitat for Humanity house-building project, but it also initiated a mentoring program through which junior consultants offered firm services to key non profit community agencies—both to add business value for the agency and to provide client face-time; for effectively training the firm's newer consultants.
The New York City Leadership challenge story demonstrates one potential when a corporate organization embraces its external community through a structured learning experience. By choosing to value the New York City community-at-large as an inspirational leadership learning community”, Ernst & Young put into motion the possibility of new dialogic relationship and generative moments for “meaning making” in partnership with its surrounding community. The combination of appreciative dialogue and storytelling, along with a challenging learning experience that coordinated with the outside community, all contributed toward the increased awareness, deliberate reframing, and co-construction of leadership excellence for a small, influential group within a very large organization. For this group, the firm’s leadership story was reinforced and even rewritten in the context of a powerful learning experience that reached beyond organizational boundaries in order to discover leadership that inspires positive community change.
This article is explored more fully in the Taos Institute Focus Book— Experience AI: A Practitioner’s Guide to Integrating Appreciative Inquiry and Experiential Learning by Miriam Ricketts and Jim Willis (2001).