Leading Effectively e-Newsletter - June 2008 Issue

CCL Takes Leadership Essentials to Emerging Countries

The Center for Creative Leadership works with some 20,000 people each year. But what would it take to bring leadership development to 2 million or 20 million people? And what if CCL expanded beyond developing senior-level executives and sought to develop young people? And what could CCL do to reach out to develop leaders in emerging economies such as Africa, India and China?

These were some of the questions that we started to ask two years ago. Today, the questions remain front and center of CCL's Global Voices of Leadership (GVOL) initiative to make leadership development more accessible and affordable to more people.

Through GVOL, CCL is looking to serve "base of the pyramid" populations, where it is estimated that four billion people -- two-thirds of the world's population -- live on less than $4 a day.

"There's a lot of need in the world -- from addressing social ills and disease to actualizing human and economic potential," says Lyndon Rego, Manager of Innovation at CCL and GVOL team member. "CCL, with what we know about developing creative leadership, has a great role to play in enabling people to work effectively together to address the great challenges of our time. We are exploring ways to share our intellectual property, working with other education and training entities to build global scale and local access."

The journey to address questions of scope and scale led the GVOL team, in collaboration with innovation consulting firms IDEO and Continuum, to East Africa, India, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Laos. The team conducted deep immersions to learn about these regions' challenges and experiment with new approaches. From this emerged new models that the Center is now prototyping.

One model is a "CCL Essentials" leadership workshop that starts with an individual leader focus and quickly broadens to an organizational leadership development lens. Participants learn the value of building clear direction, alignment and commitment through their leadership influence and the power of CCL's development framework of assessment, challenge and support.

"Through experiential exercises and appreciative inquiry tools, participants absorb an enormous amount of knowledge and make powerful connections to their everyday work," says Steadman Harrison. "In a short time, they gain a new understanding of the impact they have on others and a greater appreciation for the complex cultural context within which they work."

In addition to the Leadership Essentials workshop, outcomes from CCL's GVOL initiative include:

• A Leadership Beyond Boundaries Train-the-Trainer Program for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and educational institutions. Participants traveled from Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, the Caribbean, India and North America to attend the two-week pilot program in Greensboro, NC. The Center plans to offer future workshops in Africa and India.
• Trainer toolkits and resources for use by grassroots organizations and educational institutions.
• A low-tech, high-touch program in Kenya for CHF and a broader network of 50 NGO partners working to advance public health.
• Prototyping model curriculum and resources for youth leadership development.
• A coaching model that is geared to younger level professionals.

For more information about CCL's Global Voices of Leadership work, go to www.leadbeyond.org. To support this effort, go to www.ccl.org/gvol.