Two years ago when I started as a Public Allies Program Manager, I embraced any element of the program that featured numbers. Data driven decision-making was not only what I knew, but also what I was counting on to help me thrive in my new position.
Scouring the program components, my interest was piqued any place where I came across metrics. There were people served, volunteers recruited, members retained, and objectives achieved. Craving ways to demonstrate the tangible impact of the program on its participants and the community, I created spreadsheets to organize and analyze these numbers.
Among all of the metrics and tools for collecting them, the 360 evaluation, which assesses each Ally’s leadership on a scale of 1-7 in 17 different areas, stood out to me as the crowned jewel of demonstrating impact. With the 360 assessment on the table, my vision of the goal for each Ally coming through the program became clear: to work as hard as possible to reach a 7 in each category. My goal as a Program Manager was also quite straightforward: to support each Ally in the quest to achieve this highest level of excellence in leadership. Over the long term, after a few decades of graduating highly-rated, emerging leaders Public Allies graduates would shape non-profit leadership in this region without any problem.
Of course, as with any over-simplified understanding of a concept as multi-faceted as leadership, my perspective on the feasibility of capturing leadership development with 17 ratings began to shift. I recognized that what I held to be the universal qualities of all effective leaders were actually my individual perspectives on one version of leadership, a version that couldn’t possibly encompass the assets of 40 individuals practicing their leadership at organizations throughout the region.
One of the 17 traits that the 360 survey assesses is an individual’s ability to collaborate across boundaries in order to find common ground. When I first imagined what this trait would look like when taken to the highest level, I, naively, pictured a series of orderly community-based meetings all pertaining to a clear goal that an entire neighborhood wanted to achieve. Leading these meetings would be an energetic Ally.
Over the course of my first year, I saw so many different versions of collaborating across boundaries to find common ground, I lost track, and not a single one of them came close to my original vision, yet all of them helped me set a standard for exemplary leadership.
There was the Ally who worked month after month with the same woman, helping her to balance her budget and save a little bit of money. Eventually, this woman was able to buy her first ever pair of winter boots. The purchase meant so much to her that she wrote the Ally a letter. This was collaboration across boundaries that I couldn’t have imagined.
Also collaborating to find common ground was the Ally who at the beginning of the year approached a group of high school students with a community gardening project, only to find that these students thought that gardening was the craziest idea they had ever heard. For a few months this Ally worked to gain the trust of these students. At the end of the year, the class was working in the garden on a weekly basis to tend to what very literally became their common ground.
For each of the other 16 areas of the 360 survey, my preconceptions of what I thought the highest level of performance might look like has been challenged. What’s reassuring is that as I talk with Allies, supervisors, and colleagues, I hear that this diversity in leadership consistently challenges other’s preconceptions of what leadership looks like as well. It is through this process of challenging the status quo to set new standards for what leadership will look like that I believe makes Public Allies a great program.
D.Warner
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