Issued Quarterly

June 2004

LVD 2-12

06/04

ABSTRACT

UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP PROGRAMS

Prepared by:  Renée A. Daugherty, Ph.D.                    Sue E. Williams, Ph.D.

342 HES Building                                    333 HES Building

Oklahoma State University                      Oklahoma State University

Stillwater, OK 74078-6111                       Stillwater, OK  74078-6111

405.744.6231                                          405.744.6282

radaugh@okstate.edu                              sarahk@okstate.edu

Harwood Institute.  (2003, May).  Understanding community leadership programs:  A Harwood Institute framework.  Harwood Institute:  Bethesda, Maryland.

The Harwood Institute, through their studies, established four basic types of leadership development programs, Traditional, Deepening Awareness, Expanding Diversity, and Hidden Layer. The different types of programs are distinguished by differing assumptions concerning how change occurs in communities and who in a community holds authority for leading such change. Each type of leadership program is associated with a particular strategy for executing their work, though the strategies are not mutually exclusive. The particular strategies include Networking, Information Intake, Skills Development, and Perspective Change, and are associated with Traditional, Deepening Awareness, Expanding Diversity, and Hidden Layer leadership programs, respectively. Though many of the leadership programs talk about “improving communities,” the programs that Harwood examined showed little evidence of focus on any of the hallmarks of democratic or public forming practices as described in For Communities to Work.

TRADITIONAL Traditional leadership programs operate under the assumptions that community change happens through coordinated efforts and that established business and civic leaders hold the authority to make community change. The key strategy is networking among existing leaders. Better connected leaders produce better performing communities. These programs generally judge success by the stature and visibility of the “graduates” of the program. Democratic practice in Traditional programs is purely “trustee” democracy. Leaders act “on behalf of” the community, and the emphasis is on engaging those who are already within the existing power structure of the community.

DEEPENING AWARENESS Like Traditional ones, this program assumes that community change comes about under the direction of an established group of recognized “leaders”. Unlike traditional leadership programs, Deepening Awareness programs also see a need for up-and-coming leaders to take on responsibility for leading the community. A heavy emphasis on concepts of stewardship and community trusteeship exists in these programs. Certain individuals, because of their status, resources, or position in the community, have a responsibility to learn more about their communities would be stronger if they had better informed, socially committed leaders to make wiser decisions. Their major strategy for execution is Information Intake. This strategy seeks to increase knowledge and understanding of aspects of a community thought to be unfamiliar to the participants, hopefully to produce greater empathy and understanding of various subgroups. This groups see their purpose as broader than merely making business contacts and generally judge their success by the community activities in which their graduates are involved and by the number of graduates that go on to serve on boards and commissions. For Deepening Awareness programs, “democracy” means understanding community issues and working with other community leaders to solve problems. However, few mechanisms exist for “getting to know the community” beyond field trips to nonprofits. Leaders are already “established,” and their movement up the leadership ladder is the sign of success for program

EXPANDING DIVERSITY This leadership program promotes the idea that communities would function better with more adept leaders from backgrounds other than just the business community and the existing leadership of government and nonprofits. The point is not to alter how leadership is exercised in a community, but rather to expand the existing group of leaders to bring in people with diverse experiences and backgrounds. Since these programs tend to work with individuals who have not previously been in “leadership positions,” they emphasize the strategy of Skill Development, which involves teaching participants how to do things ranging from public speaking to conflict resolution to appreciating diversity. Success for such programs would be embodied in more diversity within existing leadership ranks. Though this program emphasizes the ideas of understanding communities and bringing people who represent the diversity of community experience into leadership ranks, community engagement and dialogue are not part of the program. Democracy here is strictly representative and one-way.

HIDDEN LAYER This leadership program asserts that the people most affected by a problem should be involved in solving the problem and that all people in a community must exert leadership. These programs want existing leaders and people in communities to view the world of leadership differently, so the strategy employed most is Perspective Change. They avoid existing “leadership” circles and try to “go deep within communities to work with people whom program directors often describe as having ‘authentic authority’ on issues that affect the community”.

Hidden Layer programs practice democracy by encouraging people from “deep within” the community to come together to find solutions to problems and then by moving those solutions through the existing system. Deliberation is not a major focus.

SUMMARY Leadership programs vary tremendously in both their implicit and explicit teaching of democratic practice and community politics. Those that Harwood examined showed little evidence of any of the hallmarks of public-forming practices (naming problems in public terms, framing issues for making choices, deliberating to decide) mentioned in For Communities to Work. If public making and community deliberation are key components of democratic practice, then leadership programs across America are quite possibly missing an important means of engaging communities.