We moved to Mercer Island in 1996, as many people do, for the schools. My kids all went to Lakeridge Elementary and they always had an end-of-the-year musical. Just recently, my wife and I were going back through a bunch of video tapes [of these musicals] to try to save them in a digital format.
The play I remember the most was Alice in Wonderland. Seeing kids that you knew back then, and realizing that today they're management consultants, lawyers, software developers... It reminds me that I'm older than I want to be, but it's also cool to know that the community that I was a part of nurtured and guided people into the world to do bigger, better things.
I wrote “Taking Charge of Change” 5 years ago. I spent 20 years involved in social change work, largely through a philanthropic network called Social Venture Partners, and in the most recent few years as a private consultant working on social impact work.
Someone asked me what I’d learned about what makes positive social change. You know, you might wish it was a system or a process. That's part of it. But in the end, it always comes down to people. It comes down to leadership.
I thought back through the best people I'd worked with who actually created social impact. I interviewed about 100 of those people and then boiled the book down to about 38 people. I gave these folks a name. I call them “rebuilders” because there are a lot of things that needed to be rebuilt in America.
I started to think about what the attributes of those people were. There are many ways you can slice the leadership piece, but I boiled it down to these five traits:
24-7 Authenticity You must show up with integrity and authenticity from the get-go. You cannot fake it. You can't make it up. You can't hide it. You know, the world is going to pay attention to you if you're a leader, so you have got to be authentic.
Complexity Capacity The ability to process inputs that are constantly changing, and be able to not only adapt, but communicate those out to teams. I have found that women are better at this trait than men.
Data Conviction or people who are adept at using data. Our world is awash in data, and yet, people can have the ability to digest, interpret, and use data as a leadership tool.
Generosity Mindset. People with a generosity mindset change the room. They're not fluffy. They are incredibly strong. When somebody like that is in the room, they change it. They create cohesion.
Cross-Sector Fluency people who have the ability to work across sectors, public, private, and nonprofit, possess what I call “cross-sector fluency.” If you look at the problems we're trying to solve now, you cannot solve them through one step. The nonprofit sector might have the know-how, but they don't have the clout. The private sector has the money, but they don't have the know-how. The public sector has the scope, but they sometimes don't have the public goodwill. You need people who can fluently work across all those sectors. And those people are critical in making change happen.
Writing “Taking Charge of Change” made me more hopeful. Researching individuals who are positive leaders certainly reaffirms your faith in the potential of people.
Paul Shoemaker has lived on Mercer Island for 28 years. He is a consultant, and author of “Taking Charge of Change”, published by HarperCollins Leadership, and “Can’t Not Do”, published by Wiley.
Rebuilders -“There are lots of really meaningful, purposeful, authentic change leaders out there in the world. Some of them are famous, and some of them are not famous at all, but they are all trying to make a positive difference in their communities.” Paul Shoemaker as interviewed by Laura Ohata.