Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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among diverse groups during recent years. It’s common now to hear that leadership can and should be exercised by people with many kinds of formal and informal authority and responsibility. Leadership analysts and educators in many parts of the world are preaching openness to more diverse leaders by agreeing with Marian Wright Edelman (1993) that leaders come from a multiplicity of backgrounds.

We began our original book by noting that today’s citizens live in a world where no one is in charge, where the needed resources for coping with most important public problems extend well beyond the capacity of any group or organization, and often beyond the scope of national governments. To make progress in tackling those problems, people in a variety of roles—from citizen to elected official, from business executive to nonprofit advocate, from educator to public manager—must take on the leadership challenge of building shared-power arrangements of lasting value.

What was true a decade ago is even truer now. We agree with Suzanne Morse (1991) that singular models of leadership don’t match the needs of the twenty-first century. Shared and widespread leadership is required for dealing with the effects of global complexity and interdependence, from economic shifts to climate change to terrorism. The same is true for remedying problems that might seem to be local or national: AIDS, homelessness, rural outmigration, urban brownfields, drug abuse, domestic violence, and a host of other public problems.

Many individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions have a stake in each of these problems. They are directly affected, or have some responsibility to act on the problem, or have information or other resources necessary to make improvements; yet each of these stakeholders has only some of the information, resources, and authority needed to remedy the problem. They operate in a “shared-power world,” a world in which they must share objectives, activities, resources, or authority to achieve collective gains or minimize losses (Bryson and Einsweiler, 1991; Healey, 1997; Peters, 1996a, 1996b; Bardach, 1998).

Achieving beneficial policy change in such a world requires heroic individuals, groups, and organizations (Kennedy, 2002) but also quiet or invisible leaders (Sorenson and Hickman, 2002; Badaracco, 2002; Mintzberg, 2002). To make headway, leaders and supporters have to work with great persistence, often over a long

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period of time to institute new policy regimes and often dismantle old ones. These leaders have to be what Nancy Roberts and Paula King (1996) call policy entrepreneurs.

The second edition of Leadership for the Common Good offers policy entrepreneurs a wealth of practical guidance grounded in the most recent research about leadership effectiveness. The book also highlights important new contributions of leadership and public policy theorists. We draw extensively on four new minicases of leadership for the common good, and each chapter includes exercises to help you the reader apply concepts and tools to your own leadership cases. The original single chapter on leadership capabilities has been expanded to three chapters, and we have added a substantial section (in Chapter Five) on the common good. Greater attention is given to the methods and tools of stakeholder involvement in public policy change efforts.

The minicases focus on (1) the early campaign against AIDS;

(2) the work of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; (3) the African American Men Project in Hennepin County, Minnesota; and (4) development of the Vital Aging Network, a pioneering initiative based at the University of Minnesota. Of necessity, we mention by name only a handful of the leaders connected to each case but recognize that we could have mentioned many, many more.

We concede that shared-power arrangements can be used to thwart change for the common good; indeed, we cite examples in which such arrangements slowed the fight to stop the spread of AIDS. In the face of this reality, we offer practical and ethical arguments for doing otherwise. Those who ignore the well-being of their fellow humans in today’s interdependent world risk damage to their own groups in the long run. We also think that all human endeavors, including leadership, should be judged on ethical grounds; that is, they should promote widely held principles such as human dignity and equal opportunity (Crosby, 1999).

Who Should Read This Book?

We assume you’re reading this because you want to do something about an issue, improve your organization or your community, or make the world a better place. You are seeking to match your passions and skills with significant social needs.

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This book is for people around the world who care about governance and policy change, people providing formal and informal leadership in nonprofit organizations, government agencies, elected office, businesses, schools and universities, foundations, and mass media. It is for the seasoned veteran of the world of public affairs as well as the citizen who is just getting involved in community issues. It is for those who want to be change agents and catalysts, reshapers of old arrangements and midwives for new ones. It is for those who want to operate effectively across organizational or jurisdictional boundaries, understand power and shared-power arrangements, and wrestle with public issues so the common good can be achieved.

We also present concepts, tools, and guidance that can be useful to those who educate or support community activists, public administrators, policy analysts, elected officials, and nonprofit and business executives and managers. The book should be useful as a text for university courses in leadership, public affairs, public administration, planning, and public policy. It can also be a resource for community educators, organizational consultants, and researchers.

We offer our leadership framework to people seeking to promote significant policy change and community reform in a democratic context, even as we recognize that an understanding of how policy change really occurs can at least temporarily aid those who wish to thwart democratic action. The framework offers promising possibilities for democratic citizenship and change by drawing critical attention to what often remains hidden or assumed, enumerating and naming access points for influencing policy and highlighting the moments of change in a shared-power world. Indeed, revealing the dynamics of shared power makes democratic change more likely, because wider awareness means many more people know how to join the action and forestall abuses of power. As former Vice President Hubert Humphrey observed, “Democracy is based on the premise that extraordinary things are possible from ordinary people.” We hope our leadership framework contributes to the continuous regeneration of a democratic, just, free, and sustainable world.

We acknowledge legitimate skepticism about such terms as democracy and the common good. Although we recognize that the common good necessarily embraces some moral principles, we are

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definitely not endorsing any predetermined, unified, rigid vision of the common good. We also recognize that democracy is a means as well as an end; in the hope of being relevant for diverse societies, we are not committed to a particular mode of democratic government and are well aware that any form of government can easily take on antidemocratic methods.

Can the book be useful to people living under an authoritarian government? We think it can and must be. There are always free spaces in which to work; witness the overt and covert citizen activism that contributed to the downfall of the USSR and of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Witness the recent progress, however uneven, of democratic forces in Iran.

Where Do Our Ideas Come From?

Our attempt to understand leadership in today’s shared-power world is part of a worldwide intellectual endeavor. Over the last dozen years, other authors have made valuable contributions through books exhorting and guiding ordinary citizens to act courageously, claim their power, and demand decision-making authority over policies and programs that affect them (Sirianni and Friedland, 2001; Boyte and Kari, 1996; Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks, 1996; Loeb, 1999; Roy, 2001). Several of these writers also ask professionals to use their expertise in a fashion that empowers fellow citizens rather than objectifying and alienating them.

Other authors offer new guidance for elected officials and public managers, for nonprofit groups, and for businesspeople who want to lead innovative and responsible companies—for example, Jean Lipman-Blumen’s Connective Leadership (1996), Jeff Luke’s Catalytic Leadership (1998), Kathleen Allen and Cynthia Cherrey’s Systemic Leadership (2000), Robert Terry’s Seven Zones for Leadership (2001), Donald Kettl’s Transformation of Governance (2002), and James MacGregor Burns’s Transforming Leadership (2003). A literature has developed on public deliberation and consensus building (Innes, 1994; Roberts, 2002; Susskind, McKearnan, and Thomas-Larmer, 1999); alternative dispute resolution (Thompson, 2000); governance as relationship in contrast to principal-agent theory (Feldman and Khademian, 2002); collaboration (Innes, 1994; Healey, 1997; Margarum, 2002; Ray, 2002; Huxham, 2003); and advocacy coalitions

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(Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993). Some of this new literature contributes to the notion of policy entrepreneurship (Roberts and King, 1996; Henton, Melville, and Walesh, 1997; Osborne and Plastrik, 1997; see especially Krieger, 1996). Helpful research and theory building have also been published in periodicals such as The Leadership Quarterly, the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies (formerly the Journal of Leadership Studies), and Leader to Leader as well as in proceedings of International Leadership Association conferences.

In this book we try to pull together these contributions, along with the insights we’ve gained in the last decade as we helped others use the Leadership for the Common Good framework. Since publication of the first edition of Leadership for the Common Good, we’ve used the framework in classes, workshops, and consultations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Participants in these sessions have ranged from college undergraduates to midcareer professionals from around the world. They have helped us develop and refine our ideas and methods and thus contributed indirectly to this book and others, especially Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, Third Edition (Bryson, 2004a) and Leadership for Global Citizenship (Crosby, 1999). In recent years our own research has concentrated on use of the Leadership for the Common Good framework in diverse settings, on use of specific tools and methods to help groups achieve their goals, and on leadership education.

Our main goal in writing this book is to help ordinary citizens, elected officials, business people, nonprofit activists, and public managers work with diverse stakeholder groups to develop and implement new regimes of mutual gain—that is, policy regimes serving the common good. We present the theoretical underpinnings of our framework, along with considerable guidance for putting it to use.

What Is the New Leadership for the Common Good?

Most writing about leadership, even the most recent spate, focuses on individual development and efficacy, or on organizational performance. Much of this writing deepens the understanding of how individuals develop leadership passions and capabilities, how they learn, and how they can (and sometimes fail to) serve others while