Taking an Equity Lens to Leveraged Impact
Image courtesy of 100 Million Healthier Lives
How easy is it to take your hands off the wheel? For leaders who love to achieve, one of the hardest challenges can be learning to achieve through people, rather than doing the job yourself. But once you lead at a certain level, you simply cannot do it yourself. Leveraged impact, or driving results through your people, becomes a critical skill for success.
For leaders doing diversity, equity and inclusion work, your people are even more of a critical resource. Top executives tend to be white men, with diversity growing as you move down through a company. If a leader wants to address an issue of equity or inclusion, they are unlikely to have experienced it personally; they have to start by learning, collaborating, and inviting people to the table, whose lived experience makes them critical resources and potential partners in shaping a hoped-for outcome.
We’re delighted to share this toolkit, Engaging People With Lived Experience, edited by Ziva Mann, Ascent’s Director of Learning and Development. Drawing on research into highly effective teams, organizational readiness [1], change leadership [2], design thinking and so much more, this toolkit is for those looking to make change, or co-design with the people most affected by an issue.
A note from Ziva: this toolkit came from an initiative [3] in which we had asked 24 communities to engage people with lived experience with inequity, as part of their coalition’s leadership team. People living in generational poverty, homeless teens, refugees, drug users, people experiencing food insecurity, and so much more joined these communities. The results, they told us, were transformative. When we went to write our report, the team leads and community members with lived experience gave us such incredible, practical tips and resources that we just had to collect them in this toolkit.
Whether you are in the corporate conference room or in a soup kitchen, I’m continually struck by how critical it is to use effective team building in order to achieve results. We’ve all sat in too many meetings where everyone just waited for the boss to tell us what to do. All too often, power is the elephant in the room, keeping members of the team from being able to engage and contribute as fully as possible. Leveraged impact requires a leader to engage their team. Leveraged, equitable impact requires a developmental, equitable approach. That means seeing each person as an individual, and adapting to make it possible for them to contribute fully. Seeing the elephant in the room, and responding.
This toolkit is for all of you who want sustain strong, impactful collaborations with a power differential. The recommendations translate for a range of settings, and a range of organizational readiness [1]. It was a joyful piece of work, and I’m delighted to be able to share it with you all.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4676714/
[2] http://www.ihi.org/education/WebTraining/Webinars/Leadership-Organizing/Pages/default.aspx