Integrative Leadership: The Growing Importance of Tri-sector Experience
The most successful leaders of the future may be those with career paths through all three sectors, either migrating through business, government, and the civil sectors during their careers, or serving on boards of organizations in other sectors.
This past June, as gasoline prices soared above four dollars a gallon, a remarkable consortium of leaders from government, business and nonprofit groups came together in Washington to discuss how to make the widespread adoption of plug-in hybrid vehicles a reality. "People saw we were taking an innovative approach in moving these vehicles into greater use, involving people who come at this from an advocacy standpoint, from a technology standpoint and a finance standpoint," says Dan Reicher, Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google, who spearheaded the Plug-In Conference with David Sandalow of the Brookings Institution. Increasingly, solving complex problems in this era of rapid globalization and interconnectedness demands this kind of “megacommunity™” approach: a tri-sector effort in which leaders from government, business and nonprofit groups come together across national, organizational and sectoral boundaries to reach goals they cannot achieve alone.
As Reicher points out, “Making hybrid cars a reality is not just about the cars themselves but making sure the electric grid can accommodate them. A big chunk of that is policy at the federal and state level and private and public sector investment in the infrastructure and technology. My sense was that if we could engage a pretty diverse community in Washington, we could accelerate getting changes made."
Although it's too early to tell if the Plug-In Conference will result in the kind of ongoing commitment that characterizes these megacommunities, attendees took the first steps in acknowledging that solving the energy crisis is going to require them to set aside an "us versus them" attitude and embark on an "us and them" strategy.
But getting such a diverse group of people to realize they have common goals and work together requires a special kind of leader with a unique set of skills.
A great megacommunity leader needs to embrace, not just accept, the challenge of working in a larger, more complex sphere of influence. For this reason, the most successful leaders of the future may be those with career paths through all three sectors, either migrating through business, government, and the civil sectors during their careers, or serving on boards of organizations in other sectors.
Before Reicher came to Google, for example, he served as an Undersecretary of Energy in the Clinton Administration, spent seven and a half years at the environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council and also spent a number of years in the investment community. And Reicher is just one example of an increasing number of "multiparty" or "integrative" leaders, whose careers have taken them through all three sectors. Other leaders who fall into this ever-burgeoning category include mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who was the founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P., and a board member of Johns Hopkins University; Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF (who was the first woman to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and before that practiced corporate law); Richard Parsons, CEO of Time-Warner (who worked in the Gerald Ford Administration and chaired the Apollo Theater Foundation); and Renato Ruggiero (who served as Italy’s minister of foreign affairs and World Trade Organization director-general, and is currently the chairman of Citigroup in Switzerland).
Integrative Leaders Develop Contacts and Make Invaluable Connections
A multi-sector career path gives integrative leaders the ability to come in contact with a diverse group of people and facilitate cooperation between them. "My background and my contacts definitely were helpful not just in bringing the people together but also shaping conversation at the Plug-In Conference," says Reicher. Reicher and the Brookings Institution’s David Sandalow, a former Assistant Secretary of State and Executive Vice President of the Wildlife Fund, were able to draw on their extensive Rolodexes to attract top talent to the Plug-In Conference from each sector, including U.S. Senators and senior officials from the Energy Department, CEOs of major corporations and leaders from environmental groups. Their backgrounds gave them credibility with the members of groups who are sometimes suspicious of each other and helped persuade them to seek out ways they can work together.
Working across sectors gives integrative leaders a unique ability to bring people together. “Only if you move among them do you meet the people and learn the culture of all three sectors. And only then can you bring all three groups together to work on these issues," says Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Integrative Leaders Develop Essential Skills and Knowledge
With a career path weaving through all three sectors, integrative leaders also have the opportunity to develop a wider array of specific skills and tools: business acumen, a keen sense of civic issues, and a balanced view of bureaucracy. Jacques Gansler’s experience working at a number of defense electronics firms proved invaluable when he joined the Defense Department. He then returned to the private sector before going back into the government as Undersecretary of Defense. “My career has been one of changing back and forth from public to private and I think increasingly that will be the model,” says Gansler. “Having been in the public sector, I learned a lot about how bureaucracy works. I then went back into the private sector so I understood more about how the government worked because they were my customers. Then when I went back to the government as Undersecretary of Defense, I was responsible for monitoring government contracts and I had a good handle on what questions to ask: How many drawings have you done? How much testing? What kinds of levels of risk are we assuming?"
After leaving the Defense Department, Gansler became the chairman of The Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise at the University of Maryland, which was founded in 2001 to study the relationships among government, business, and nonprofit sectors and educate future leaders how to address complex public policy problems by fostering cooperation between these sectors. At the Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise Gansler is giving students the education and skills they will need in an increasingly integrated world where the longstanding 30-year, one-job career of the typical government leader or business leader is beginning to change.
Tri-sector Experience Leads to the Development of Multiple Perspectives
Perhaps the most important skill one develops working in different sectors is the ability to see from more than one perspective and “put yourself in other person’s shoes,” according to Dov Zakheim. Zakheim has served in various posts in the Defense Department, was the CEO of a high technology analytical firm and is on the board of Search for Common Ground, a nongovernmental organization that works on conflict resolution around the world. According to Zakheim, “Having been in the Department of Defense, I was able to use that experience as we mapped out strategies on the board of Search for Common Ground. At the same time having been in an NGO, I was able to give some advice to our commanders in Afghanistan that I probably couldn't have if I had not been in an NGO.”
“If you want to build up any kind of society in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Zakheim, “you have to know how the private sector works. It doesn't hurt to know how to work with NGOs because they're all over the place and you better understand the U.S. government and the U.S. military because they're there. So having more than one perspective is critical.”
Tri-sector Experience Fosters Understanding of the Beliefs and Motives of People from Different Sectors and Cultures
Integrative leaders develop a richer sense of empathy and understanding of the beliefs and motives of people from different sectors and cultures. “Discovering that the other guy is not all evil is a major victory,” says Zakheim. “I remember in Afghanistan a meeting between our command and a whole bunch of NGOs and they were caught in a dilemma because they wanted to be under the umbrella of the military's security but they didn't want to be seen as somehow told of the military so what you have to do is come up with a vehicle of giving people their own sense of independence but at the same helping them realize that no one is completely independent. It was essentially a matter of talking to people and working out compromises.”
Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a member of a number of national security and environmental think tanks and has written extensively about the problems of global warming and the dependence on Middle Eastern oil from both an environmental and security standpoint. His experience has led him to believe that these groups have common ground. “I just wrote something about global warming and the last third of it is a dialogue between the ghost of [environmentalist] John Muir and the ghost of General Patton and they keep being surprised about the number of things they can cooperate on even though their objectives are different,” says Woolsey.
Tri-sector Experience Helps Develop Indispensable Communications Skills
The key to fostering cooperation between sectors and understanding different perspectives is communication. “The most important thing is just to get people to talk, says Zakheim. “Its ironic that when you're dealing with a conflict resolution organization they're good at resolving conflicts with other folks but they don't realize that the same techniques apply to themselves.”
Working in different sectors helps integrative leaders learn how to speak the language of each sector’s members and effectively communicate in a way they can understand. “Frequently one of the best ways to communicate culture is through stories,” says Gansler. “You will tell a story that they can identify with and they can understand better why they do the things they do in each sector. If you have people who have had experience in the three sectors they are in a much better position to be able to bring their lifestyles, stories and experiences to bear on decision making. They know what questions to ask and they have a feeling for what kind of culture they are dealing with."
An Integrative Leadership Approach Allows You To Commit To an Issue Rather Than a Specific Sector, Which Is An Expanding Career Model for the Future
"One of the first things I tell our master in public affairs (MPA) students," says Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton, "is that the career path in government has changed. Most of them will hold multiple jobs. They should think about the issues they're interested in—whether human rights, the environment, HIV/AIDS, energy, or geopolitics—and then pursue those issues in the private sector, the government sector, and the nonprofit sector, with maybe 10 or 15 years in each sector.”
"Now," says Dean Slaughter, "the U.S. State Department has a hard time getting the people they want because our best students don't want to work in one organization for 30 years, and they have spouses with careers, who aren't going to follow them around the world. Instead, you have people like one of my star students [who] worked under Richard Holbrooke at the U.S. Embassy to the United Nations. She then worked for Dow Jones, and is now the chief of operations at Human Rights Watch. Both government and nonprofits now want people like her, with experience, skills, and contacts in all three areas. This type of multifaceted career fits with the sort of dynamic movement that these students see for themselves, and with the networks that they want to build.”
"My students are very interested in the idea of moving from position to position and how you go about doing it so that you don't fall back, you move ahead," says Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise’s Gansler. "I explained that if you do a good job, you're more valuable when you move."
Integrative Leadership Is Essential To Solving the Problems of the 21st Century
Given the nature of the problems we face, the development of integrative leadership may provide the only solution. "I think of the whole area of sustainable energy with a triangle in mind of technology, policy and finance," says Google’s Reicher. "It ultimately is going to take working at all three points of that triangle to advance sustainable energy."
According to Reicher, "We've got to be educating students who are coming into this area and we've got to have people who are comfortable in working at all three sectors. That's really what I focused my career on, spending some years in investment community a number of years in policy and also in technology, and that's what we tried to infuse the Plug-In Conference with."
Although such a career path is still an exception rather than the rule, it is fast becoming a necessity as a megacommunity approach becomes critical to solving once intractable problems. Our experience has shown that intregrative tri-sector leaders are more likely to be able to foster a spirit of inclusiveness, guide constituents to create solutions, and easily adapt to changing circumstances. All those skills are essential to successful leadership going forward—especially in this era of globalization. According to Dov Zakheim: “With globalization you're dealing with different cultures, different nations, all kinds of different people and you're trying to relate to them in a somewhat uniform way. And I don't know how you do that without having a sense of what the differences are."
story posted January 23, 2009
