Skills for 21st Century Leaders
A process of change for people, their teams, their organizations and their communities, from Leadership Evansville and the Indiana Leadership Initiative.

I. Essential Attitudes
Servant-Leadership is widely acknowledged as the appropriate leadership model for the 21st century. Sometimes misunderstood, servant-leadership is about identity and motive as well as about action. Servant-leaders care about the people they lead and the processes they use, as well as about getting the work done. They choose to lead collaboratively, and their ways develop or increase the skills and capacities of their “followers”, enabling them to become "healthier, freer, wiser, more autonomous, more likely themselves to be servants." (Robert K. Greenleaf) Servant-leaders model this attitude and teach others to become servant-leaders.

Community Trusteeship expands servant-leadership to a broader collaborative scale - making a commitment to, and taking responsibility, for organization-wide or community-wide improvement without regard to “what’s in it for me?”

II. Essential Skills
Gifts and Talents focuses on the importance of discovering the unique skills and qualities each person brings to the group, building an inventory of "assets" so the individual, group, or organization can fully develop and/or benefit from the talents available. The use of "learning partners" in the discovery process introduces the concept of "co-learning", feedback, and coaching.

Learning Preferences (Styles) demonstrates that individuals learn in different ways and that their "preferences" affect group interaction. The group can benefit from recognizing the learning preferences of its members as gifts and using them to strengthen group work. Failure to recognize, accept, and use the differences in learning styles effectively can manifest as "personality conflicts" or lack of teamwork.

Cycle of Change teaches individuals and groups to view every experience, success or failure, as a vehicle for reflection, learning, and improvement. In effective groups, this learning is a collaborative process. The Cycle interacts with Learning Styles and results in better quality individual and group performance.

Stages of a Learning Community focuses on how groups learn to work together collaboratively: their relationships and behaviors as well as their tasks. Strategies are identified to help the group progress effectively through each stage as it strives to reach "high performance" and avoid being stuck in less productive modes.

III. Essential Processes
Visioning a Preferred Future begins a person's, team's, or organization's journey of moving "from where we are to where we want to be." Participants develop and communicate a shared meaning of what the community or organization should be like or look like when it’s working well, and they identify the goals they need to pursue, and improvements they want to make, as they strive for their ideal.

Collaboration is the process by which organizations and communities will operate in the 21st Century when they want and need mutual benefits that are not achievable or satisfactory through separate efforts. Successful collaborators begin by learning new ways of working together - new attitudes, agreements, and facilitation skills, including recognition of and input from all "stakeholders."

Dialogue & Consensus Decision-Making avoid destructive "solution wars" and create situations that are “win-win.” The goal is not to find the one “right” decision nor one “that we can live with,” but to gain unity and agreement to a decision that will work and will create a broad group commitment that eases implementation. There are various models for reaching consensus; all of them take time & practice!

IV. Supporting Attitudes/Skills/Components
New Leadership examines new understanding about the nature of leadership, why it is changing, and what it will need to be like in the 21st Century.

Timeline is often the first step of a personal or institutional visioning process.
It provides perspective on "where we’ve been and where we want to go" and identifies values/behaviors that have worked and should be carried forward in a new climate, and values/behaviors that have had their day and need to be left behind. Through timelines people share stories and develop common meaning.

Multiple Lenses (Understanding Differences) examines a situation from the other perspectives that are important but may be missing from the table or at the table with less ability to be heard. This process reveals overlooked information and leads to a more complete understanding of a vision, issue or problem.

Active Listening is essential to dialogue, aids in discovering and understanding the real meaning of what is being communicated, and helps the listener respond appropriately and constructively to the speaker and the situation.

Communication and Conflict Resolution skills are keys to understanding one another and working together. They demand conscious awareness of our own behaviors and habits and recognition of and appropriate response to those of others. Since we must communicate, and we can’t – and wouldn’t want to --eliminate conflicting ideas, the best action is not reaction, but the development
and practice of interpersonal skills.

Problem/Solution Identification distinguishes problems according to their symptoms and prescribes the effective leadership response appropriate for each.

“Six Thinking Hats” for creativity and decision-making (from Edward de Bono) is an effective way of reaching decisions using six types of thinking or "thinking hats" to thoroughly examine a problem or proposal, consider all the facts, feelings, and "angles", and arrive at a conclusion that makes sense. "Six thinking hats" techniques can be used to stimulate creativity in problem-solving and/or to lead a group to a consensus decision.

“Hard Talk” is a dialogue structure that provides a triple-whammy: group members build trust and learn the communication and collaborative skills that enable them to work together more effectively as they tackle "real work".

Facilitation Training equips a leader or group member to use the Skills for 21st Century Leaders to help a group or team move from where it is to where it wants to be, whether facilitating from "inside" or "outside" the group.

Open Space (adapted from Harrison Owen) is a facilitation method that encourages the group to take responsibility for setting the agenda, discovering its own wisdom, doing the necessary research/ teaching, defining and implementing the goals, evaluating results, and planning future actions.

Creating a Leader-full Community answers the questions "What is a leader-full community, why is it desirable, and how is one created?"