Leasdership is a key to community building

This summer I have run across a few books and articles on leadership that have been enlightening and there have been other phone conferences and blogs that have continued to underline LEADERSHIP as a crucial element to community building.

The first-year anniversary of the GoodLiving Marketplace will be celebrated in Hartsville in the next few weeks. Nancy Myers was looking for a way to make a difference and combined her thoughts with Judi Elvington, who is director of Hartsville Downtown Development, and the Saturday morning, monthly marketplace has been a great success. Nancy's leadership and an individual effort, motivated from her desire to make a difference and her willingness to take on the job. When you talk with her she will mention others who were instrumental but without her vision and willingness to take on the project it would still be, at best, a dream.

As this is written the people who have organized HARTSVILLEIDOL are doing auditions at Black Creek Arts Council. Believe this is the third week and the finalists from this afternoon will compete tonight for the chance to be among the finalists for the HartsvilleIdol designation. The word is the competition is stiff with lots of talent coming out to be part of this event. Again, individuals had an idea, they shared the idea and got the right push and this is another event making Hartsville a special place. Leadership is the crucial ingredient.

One of the authors I have read this summer is Ken Blanchard, who has made a career of leadership study and training. He has a book, written with Mark Miller, that he calls THE SECRET - WHAT GREAT LEADERS KNOW -- AND DO. A major element of that secret is summed up in the acronym - SERVE. If interested you will find it a quick nugget-filled read. SERVE stands for 'See the future;' 'Engage and Develop Others;' 'Reinvent Continuously;'Value Results and Relationships; 'Embody the Values.'

The leadership needed to help build community is most often of the "Servant Leadership" variety.

Know what to starve and what to feed

The Current edition of NON PROFIT QUARTERLY contains an interesting article about leading in community building environments by a person named Bill Traynor, executive director of the Lawrence(MA) Community Works.

As I read this article I was struck by a core message of effectiveness and efficiency that discussed knowing how to feed those activities that help your organization and community move forward and starve those activities that gobble up your time, talent and treasure but leave you where you were when you started. Traynor is discussing techniques of what he called network leadership and the framing he uses for the discussion is a superior lesson on leadership in today's community building environments. I am hoping that I will be able to link to this article, "Vertigo" so that those interested will be able to gather the wisdom he is sharing. If not, you should get the current issue of NON-PROFIT QUARTERLY because the article is important for community builders.

As he ended the article, the author talked about the importance of having a supportive network who can congratulate you when you succeed and who can help you back on track when things go awry. "Increasingly we struggle together and are intentional about supporting one another—through forgiveness and truth telling—so that we can continue to build connected environments that feed the world by feeding the best of what it is to be human," is the way Traynor concludes the article.

It is worth the read!