Good afternoon from a sunny Vancouver afternoon! I hope that this edition of Leadership Notes finds you well!

I had an all too brief conversation with my friend Olivia McIvor  http://www.oliviamcivor.com/ this morning. We were touching base on some compassion in communities work we’re involved in together, and she raised a very interesting question about the role of business in communities. A huge subject, inspired by the Walk for Reconciliation yesterday here in Vancouver. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/thousands-walk-for-reconciliation-in-vancouver-1.1864051 This amazing event was driven by Reconciliation Canada http://reconciliationcanada.ca/welcome/ , an amazing association of people bringing peace and reconciliation to Canadians in the wake of the tragedy of the Residential Schools here. Olivia’s comments were in part raised by the number of speakers from the podium yesterday who were thanking businesses and organizations without whom the event would not have been successful. This lead us into a very cool conversation about the place of the competencies found in leadership in businesses and how often associations and community groups are starved for those competencies. Another way of exploring this question might be, what is my role as a leader in my organization and in my community? Do they merge? Are they discrete? 

So, how is my role as a leader in an organization to engage with my role as a citizen in a community? Of course, that will largely be a subjective question, and I think that the skills we develop about how to manage and organize people and resources towards a particular goal are absolutely vital for most community groups. Planning, organizing, leading and influencing, and evaluation are tools of the manager’s trade, and we’re often well practiced. These tools can be as important as funding for community groups. If there is a community group that can use your management skills, go for it! However, remember that it is in the fluidity, the chaos even of a community of people that creativity and possibility are conceived, born and initially nurtured. Very little will stifle creativity faster than assigning a GL code to it! Consider a rock band in relation to a record company, back in the day. Out of the chaos of practicing in garages and basements and playing in bars, a group of musicians build an album’s worth of songs; that’s kind of like a community group with a great idea. The record company are the managers who come in and produce marketing plans, organize the tour, ensure that the buses get to the gigs on time, and that everyone gets paid, ideally. The problems however kick in when the album sells really well and the record company want the band to produce another record that sounds like the first one! We know that might sell, but it loses its creative edge, and the brains behind the original ideas, so fueled by their association and working together for the fun of it, start to leave in frustration. The moral of the story is serve your community and community groups with your competencies, but do not make the mistake of assuming that a business model is the only effective one. In fact, it can stifle and drown creativity; the very thinking a community often needs the most.

And this discussion raises the important observation that creativity and possibility in your organization will not be found in a policy manual. Businesses need to learn from community groups, and associations of people about service, about ideas and creativity that come from the margins, or from outside the norm. Create space for people to collaborate and have fun together, without worrying about whether the idea will make money and who‘s going to manage it. Those questions do need to come, but later on, after the idea has been given some life by a small group of people who are working together for the fun of it, like a garage band.

Let’s see what garage bands we might enable this week!