The 21-page report, Leaders or Leaderfulness? Lessons from High-Achieving Communities (2016), was written by David Mathews and supported by the Cousins Research Group of the Kettering Foundation. The report discusses how communities become stronger and more resilient through more “leaderfulness” of its community members, as opposed to having just a few of active leaders. What Mathews means by “leaderfulness”, is that people are engaged within a community and show leaderfulness by taking initiative to participate. Through years of research, Kettering has found that the serious […] (continue)

This five-page activity from Everyday Democracy titled, Leadership Compass Activity, was published January 2015 and helps to determine the leadership styles of participants within an action group. The activity is meant to be done with an organizing or action group on its first or second meeting. The group individually answers 27 questions to determine whether their leadership style is that of a: Nurturer, Teacher, Mobilizer, or Visionary. After finding out your personal leadership style, the group breaks into smaller groups to discuss positive aspects of […] (continue)

The 230-page book, Leading Great Meetings: How to Structure Yours for Success, by Dr. Richard Lent was published June 2015. This book discusses how providing structure to meetings can help to create more productive meetings and offers 32 tools to conduct better meetings. More about the book… Recent advances in helping groups talk together to provide new ways to run effective meetings naturally…a structural approach. All meetings come with structures that affect how we behave in them. Structure includes how leaders frame a task, include different views, support […] (continue)

A Conversation on the Nature of Leadership, was published on the Kettering Foundation blog in December 2014 and is the transcribed conversation with Jack Becker, Tina Nabatchi, Martín Carcasson, and Jeffrey Nielson.  The conversation between the four discusses the nature of leadership, what are some of the roles of a leader and what it takes to be a successful leader. Read the full conversation below or check out the original on Kettering’s blog here. From Kettering… As a topic of inquiry and self-help, leadership has been covered from […] (continue)