A New Program Helps Social-Change Activists Focus on Leadership and Inner Strengths

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Heather Joslyn

After years as a front-line organizer for social-change groups, Simon Greer found himself

increasingly thrust into management roles as he climbed the career ladder. But as he sought to acquire better management skills, he found few opportunities.

This lack of leadership training, says Mr. Greer, has led to what he calls a “culture of mediocrity” in many social-change groups. “I’m 34; I’ve been doing this for 13 years. I have very few peers,” he says. “Most people don’t last 13 years. I don’t think it’s because the work is boring. I don’t think it’s because they lose their ideals. I think it’s because our organizations churn people up. They grind them, 80 hours a week, and there’s nowhere for them to go, there’s no way to develop them. Organizations don’t think of their development of their staff as crucial to the organization.”

Two years ago, while working as a program director in the national office of Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit workers-rights group in Washington, Mr. Greer attended the Art of Leadership, a training workshop run by the nonprofit Rockwood Leadership Program, whose offerings are geared toward social-change activists. Last year, after taking a position as the executive director of New York’s Jobs With Justice affiliate, Mr. Greer participated in a yearlong Rockwood leadership program. The experiences, he says, had a significant impact on his growth as a manager — among other things, teaching him to listen rather than “steamroll” when faced with a confrontation. “I learned to accomplish more with less effort,” he says.

The Rockwood Leadership Program was founded four years ago in Berkeley, Calif., by veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Together with other activists, philanthropists, and consultants who aided in Rockwood’s creation, he sought to help the employees of social-change organizations develop leadership skills. Rockwood and, in some cases, grant makers partially subsidize the training, with participants paying program fees on a sliding scale, depending on their employers’ budget sizes. (For example, participants in Rockwood’s flagship program, the Art of Leadership, may pay anywhere from $600 to $1,600 per person.)

Rockwood offered its first training program in November 2000, says Mr. Carothers, who serves as the group’s executive director. In addition to its leadership workshops, it offers management consulting and facilitates meetings, as it did in December for the high-profile Win Without War coalition.

The Art of Leadership workshop, a two-and-a-half-day training session that has thus far produced more than 400 alumni, has made a splash in the field of nonprofit social-change groups, garnering attention from the national press and praise from activists and the grant makers that support them. This month, Rockwood begins the Art of Leadership II, an advanced version of the program.

The organization’s training, says Mr. Greer, “links the more contemplative, personal-growth stuff, but it doesn’t just say, ‘We should all be touchy-feely.’ It says, ‘Here are some very sophisticated tools for functioning at the highest level we can.’”

Harriet S. Barlow, a veteran of more than 50 nonprofit boards who serves as director of the HKH Foundation, a New York grant maker that supports environmental, civil-liberties, and disarmament organizations, has seen many employees of her foundation’s grantees acquire Rockwood training — and has been impressed by the results.

She praises the Art of Leadership for its emphasis on collaboration, and she’s seen an increase in confidence among her grantees who have worked with Rockwood, a greater sense of their weaknesses and the skills they need to build. Say Ms. Barlow, “I haven’t heard as much positive feedback about anything as I have about this.”

Rockwood’s focus on linking personal strengths to management skills reflects a growing trend in the field of leadership education, says Deborah Meehan, executive director of the Leadership Learning Community, in Oakland, Calif., an umbrella group for leadership programs. Although Rockwood’s approach is not unique, she says, what sets it apart is that its training is aimed at underserved social-change activists and packaged into a single long weekend, which opens the experience to many participants who could not afford the time or financial commitment of a longer program.

The Rockwood workshop, she says, could complement more established leadership training. “They could be a resource to some of the longer-term leadership-development programs that are one to three years,” she says. “There may be opportunities for partnership, where they could use Rockwood as the curriculum component.”

A Design for Leadership

Five years ago, after 20 years spent working mostly for environmental nonprofit groups, Mr. Carothers began looking into the training offered to his peers at social-change organizations. He found it wanting, with a small and mediocre pool of trainers, in contrast to leadership training offered to for-profit audiences. Nonprofit leadership programs, he says, were “not sufficiently galvanizing.”

Part of the problem, he says, is the amount of money charities devote to employee training compared with what for-profit companies spend. “It tends to be almost a Darwinian problem,” he says. “Of course, you’re not going to get the kind of product on the nonprofit side as you would in the private sector.”

Also, he says, nonprofit workers may need training, but they don’t often demand it. “There wasn’t a training culture among nonprofit organizations,” he says. “We all self-identify as the busiest people in the world, and we don’t have a lot of patience for efforts that aren’t beautifully crafted.”

But most nonprofit activists, Mr. Carothers says, have never attended a high-quality training session, because the offerings usually fall on one of two ends of the spectrum.

“The standard nonprofit offering tends to be either very in-depth — one becomes a fellow and joins a group that spends a year meeting once every three months and travels around the world and stuff, which makes it very exclusionary — or it’s a half-day in an office downtown, with trainers who are good but not spectacular,” he says. “You don’t get a lot of depth.”

Facing all of these challenges, Mr. Carothers says, requires a program that is concise but engaging and full of practical help. “You don’t get many chances with hard-working activists,” he says, “and you’d better do a terrific job of delivering your service in a short period of time.”

‘The Inner Self’

The Art of Leadership focuses on individuals’ behavior, and what skills might make them more effective in their work lives.

The training is centered on personal interaction: exercises that help participants learn to handle difficult conversations, how to give co-workers feedback, how to deal with stress and work addiction. It also focuses on problems that Robert Gass, the training’s designer, says are endemic in the field of social activism: burnout, inadequate listening skills, and reluctance to deal with an organization’s poor performers. Only about 10 percent of the training, he says, is lecture; the rest is “structured experiences” that require participants to play specific roles and give impromptu speeches to persuade the group to accept their point of view.

Unlike other types of leadership training, Rockwood’s workshop “is focused on the inner self,” says Ann Krumboltz, executive director of the Brainerd Foundation, in Seattle, a grant maker that supports environmental groups in the Pacific Northwest. Ms. Krumboltz has taken the Art of Leadership training and serves on its advisory board. She has sent Brainerd grantees to the program as a means of spurring collaboration between them.

Getting Feedback

A key element of the Art of Leadership and other Rockwood training is the “360-degree evaluation,” in which participants evaluate their own office behavior and also receive the results from evaluations of their behavior by 10 of their colleagues. Though the tool is common in for-profit leadership training, it is only beginning to make inroads into nonprofit training, says Mr. Gass. Some former participants of Rockwood programs say it was the most useful part of their experience, opening their eyes to personal strengths and weaknesses they had previously not noticed.

John Ackerly, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, in Washington, took the training two years ago, his first-ever leadership instruction in his 18-year nonprofit career. He says he found the 360-degree evaluation particularly enlightening. “I thought I was a better listener than my employees thought I was,” he says, laughing. “That surprised me.” As a result, he says, he’s spent more time talking with employees. And he’s learned to become less defensive about criticisms, to learn from his limitations, and build better skills.

Mr. Greer, who also learned from his 360-degree evaluation that his listening skills needed polishing, says he now “watches the room” more closely during meetings, looking for the emotional content of discussions, for signs that the conversation is turning into an argument.

From her evaluation, Ms. Krumboltz says, she learned that she was “too nice.” “You’d think that would be a compliment,” she says, “but as a leader, you have to set boundaries. And sometimes being too nice is not the best way to lead a group, because a group is looking for parameters and direction. And sometimes as women, we don’t do as good a job in that area.” She realized that “sometimes my being ‘nice’ is a way to avoid conflict, and sometimes as a leader, you have to face conflict and work through it.”

Monica Rhode Buckhorn had heard about Rockwood from friends who work for her former employer, Greenpeace, and last spring she was prodded to take the training when she was revamping a national campaign on toxins that she runs for her current employer, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, in Falls Church, Va.

The training, she says, has helped her to think about the messages she gives colleagues through her frenetic work style. “Because I work at such a rapid speed, I didn’t take the time to be a good co-worker,” she says. “I was working at such a warp speed that it would have a ripple effect on my co-workers, make them feel uneasy about coming to approach me or make them get tense as well. It wasn’t really necessary or appropriate.”

Before going to work for a nonprofit group, she says, she had taken management workshops aimed at for-profit audiences. Rockwood’s approach, she says, is particularly relevant to nonprofit workers because it’s about harnessing participants’ own strengths and capacity for leadership, and teaches them to nurture those capacities in others, she says.

“As opposed to other kinds of training, where it’s all about ‘If you have your desk a certain way…, ‘ where it’s all about these outside things you can do, rather than looking deep inside yourself and changing your own patterns and habits.”

Resisting Authority

Mr. Gass, who also provides leadership training to for-profit clients, says one of the biggest obstacles Rockwood must overcome in aiding social-change activists is their ambivalence about power.

“Many of the leaders are awkward about exercising authority,” he says, “and many of the people being led give out mixed messages — in some ways they want to be given direction, and at the same time they often rebel against it. A lot of energy gets drained out of these organizations from that confusion.” This, he finds, is the opposite of what he encounters among his clients in the business world: “You’re trying to liberate people in the for-profits from oppressive hierarchy, and very often in nonprofits, you’re trying to get them to deal with hierarchy enough to be able to function.”

The mission of some social-change organizations — to champion the underdog and confront the powerful — can manifest itself in office behavior, Mr. Gass says, making it difficult for workers to collaborate or accept their leaders’ authority.

“For example, I worked with a very large nonprofit whose motto is ‘no compromise, ‘” he says. “Now, it’s ‘no compromise’ when it comes to protecting the environment — but when you have 150 people whose motto is ‘no compromise, ‘ and you try to have a group meeting, it’s hard to turn that attitude off and act differently than you do the other 40 hours a week.”

In addition, says Mr. Carothers, activists — particularly on the political left — too often value the intellectual foundations of their arguments over results. “I see an awful lot of emphasis on being right,” he says, “and not as much on being successful.”

Social-change activists can indeed be prone to self-righteousness, and that attitude can hamper their effectiveness, echoes Rick Johnson, a veteran environmental activist who currently serves as executive director of the Idaho Conservation League, an environmental group in Boise. “If you bring that attitude into management, into running a nonprofit, into running a staff, you’re in for a world of hurt,” he says.

Mr. Johnson took the Art of Leadership a year ago along with his group’s deputy director, Suki Molina. Although the two had worked together for seven years and prided themselves on a good rapport, the training helped them understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and taught them how to adjust their duties accordingly.

“We came back synergized,” he says. “We made a stronger whole.” Before the training, he says, he had seven employees who reported directly to them; afterward, he says, he paired that number to two, delegating some supervisory duties to Ms. Molina and creating a program-director position to handle the rest.

Improving the Program

Despite the positive results he’s experienced and seen other participants enjoy, Mr. Ackerly says, Rockwood’s program has room for improvement.

“A criticism I’ve heard from some people is that the training felt really good at the time, but it became kind of intangible after you left,” he says. “It relied on each of us to come back and make sure we’re really implementing stuff, but most of us are really busy, and you tend to come back and get back into your old ways. You may have more insights into yourself as a leader, but it’s hard to put them into practice.”

One way to combat that drift back into old behavior patterns, he says, would be for the entire staff of an organization, or for organizations with similar missions, to attend the training as a group. (Rockwood does offer customized training for specific types of organizations: For example, representatives of 20 groups in the Tibet movement attended a customized Art of Leadership workshop this month, an event subsidized by an $6,350 grant from the Threshold Foundation, in San Francisco.) The session he attended, he says, was made up of a variety of groups, from grass-roots charities that embraced consensus decision making to larger, more hierarchal organizations. As a result, the Rockwood trainers were “having to present this information to such an incredibly diverse group that, in certain ways, it slowed things down.”

None of Ms. Buckhorn’s colleagues have taken the Art of Leadership course, she notes, and that circumstance may have diluted her experience. “I come back, and I’ve got this whole new lingo, this whole new way to approach my job, and my co-workers are going, ‘You’re kinda weird, ‘” she says, laughing. “It can be kind of hard to reintegrate into your office. But that shouldn’t be a deterrent.”

In fact, she says, she sees Rockwood’s approach as a key to greater effectiveness for groups like hers. “If more people did this training,” she says, “we’d have a stronger movement on the left.”

What sort of leadership-skills training would be most useful to social-change activists? Share your thoughts in the Tools and Training online forum.