Competency 3: Energize Others
This adaptive leadership competency pushes you to adopt a shared leadership approach as you address your challenge. Sharing leadership means you must reimagine how power is distributed so that communities most impacted are at the center of the work. Expand the circle of individuals who need to be included in exploring possible solutions to the challenge. Move beyond engaging just those who typically have influence on those closest to the problem and who are less often asked to share their perspective. As people who have diverse perspectives discuss the challenge, pay attention to who seems engaged in solving the problem and who resists the challenge and why that might be. Use these observations to help you see the contours of the factions, people who share common values and beliefs, on an issue. This will help you begin to map the various faction across the voices and give you valuable information about the ways the larger system of people will feel about the issue/problem, which is important to how you understand, explain, and work on your challenge. This will also help you see where there is common ground and possible new ways forward. Mobilizing all the voices toward a common purpose is not easy and tends to slow the work down. The following skills may help you navigate the process of engaging others and bring progress to your collective challenge.