Letting go of leadership
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
Letting go of leadership
Goals
- Making it possible to replace yourself
Notes
- What do you do that cannot be done by the community, then remove that
- Make your job enabling people to get stuff done, not doing it for them
- Look for people who are acting like leaders and make them so
- Good to identify sub-leaders
- But don't let it be taken from the community
- What to do
- Make leadership modular
- Don't divide community into sections for no reason
- Unbundle roles
- Separate leadership - community essay writer & technical
- Better succesion planning; can collapse to one without losing direction, then resplit
- Two heads are better than one
- True leaders v. parade leaders
- Give parade leaders dirty jobs
- Facilitator, janitor
- Give parade leaders dirty jobs
- Put a vacuum in front of people, not trying to cram them in
- Get a new thing moving to attract a leader to it
- Activity begets activity
- Get in, get it moving, get out of the way
- Create a "collaborative craftsman" attitude
- Result needs to be grander than what is done alone
- Wild reactive leaders v. apathetic leaders
- Which is worse?
- For the community ...
- For the sponsoring org ...
- Which is worse?
- How do you get the sponsoring org. to recognize the value of letting go?
- Internal advocacy
- Proof in actual events - "we gave up control here, better result"
- Show money is better if let go
- You use this project that you don't own, and it costs less
- You use and own this project, does it work to follow the same method?
- Hard when low revenues from non-"owned" products
- Show how technology decisions are smarter from the community
- Helpful to have examples that prove your point! (Learning by failure.)
