On Saturday of this year’s annual meeting, I facilitated a session on leadership for the Young Association Executive Committee. My main leadership message was that leadership is a SYSTEM capacity, not only a set of individual skills. I figured the rest of the sessions at the annual meeting would focus on individual competencies like emotional intelligence, communication skills, visioning, cultural competence etc.

But I wanted them to look at their “system†: the YAE Committee. What could they do to enable this system to better shape its future? I had them work in small groups to talk about the following four things:

Connection. How can this group build stronger connections and stronger relationships, because that will enable more effective and quicker action?

Clarity. How can this group achieve a deeper level of clarity and shared understanding about what it wants and why it wants it, because settling for vague agreement results in diffused action?

Commitment. How can this group translate the diverse passions of the group members into coordinated action, because randomly assigning tasks to people rarely works?

Learning (no, I did NOT do the “four Cs of leadership†). How can this group learn continuously, because waiting until the end of the year to talk about it is too late?

I think these themes for leadership development work particularly well for the “social organization,†which is the focus of my column here on SocialFish. While they incorporate individual skill building (those communication skills will come in handy when building connections, for instance), the ultimate focus is on the system. Leadership development assumes a distributed, networked environment. It assumes decentralization. This is the way of the social organization.

This presented me with an interesting lens for the rest of the Annual Meeting. I am going to write a more personal, reflective post on Get Me Jamie Notter about my experience there, but here I wanted to talk about this year’s meeting in terms of this “social leadership†lens.

I think this year’s meeting missed the boat in the context of social leadership, specifically connections and commitment. In terms of connections, the venue was not great for connecting and building relationships. It was too spread out, both in terms of the urban “downtown†area that had absolutely no energy (or people most of the time), and a convention center where the traffic flow ended up completely ruling out the Online Engagement Lounge or other places to hang out and build relationships. There also seemed to be far fewer slots for concurrent sessions. This meant I literally had less to talk about, either with new people I was meeting or my regular circle of friends. I skipped the general sessions (so that was my fault), but they seemed to miss the mark for many. The end result was fewer opportunities to connect with other people.

Another area that fell short for me was around commitment. That is, what was this meeting doing to help me take action based on something that I’m passionate about? There was something about this annual meeting that made it feel like the whole meeting was about ASAE, and not about the members and the attendees. I seem to have hit the wall with my own patience with all the over-produced parts of the general sessions where “brands†are introduced, and Boards dance, and songs or videos are produced. It’s like we are subjected to this because it’s important to the people at the top, or they think we will be entertained, but it doesn’t tap into my passion.

So what if we blew up the general sessions and started over? Here are some ideas:

John Graham or the volunteer leader starts it off and presents a theme for the conference. ASAE now has a tagline “the center for association leadership,†so let’s start off the meeting by hearing from the leaders about what aspect(s) of association leadership we want to explore in this meeting. Then bring in the keynoter who not only does a 45 minute talk (related to the themes of course!), but the audience also has a discussion at their tables about it in terms of application, (and then to keep the learning going, one of the rooms at each concurrent session is devoted to further exploration of that theme in an open space format).

Then the Board (or some other group!the fellows? Leadership Academy Graduates? A staff cross-section? DELP Scholars?) stays up on the stage and has an open discussion in front of everyone about it. You want to showcase your new board? Then give me a glimpse of how they think and what matters to them, but for the sake of humanity don’t make them dance across the stage. If you’re going to cram two thousand people into a room for a general session, then please give us something we can talk about during the rest of the conference (other than how uncomfortable it was to watch the video with the laugh track).

That would facilitate connection, clarity, and commitment. By giving us a theme (or themes), you give us a bit of an event-based “social object†we can toss around with our colleagues in many other contexts throughout the meeting. It helps facilitate connections with others as we dig into it, and it also pushes us as a community to work towards more shared understanding and clarity. In the process, we each begin to understand how these things connect to what we are passionate about in our work, and that can generate new action. That sounds like leadership for the social organization. These are just some brainstorms, of course. You don’t have to do it like that. But I think whatever we do should keep in mind connections, clarity, commitment, and learning.

The ASAE Annual Meeting is a big deal, not just because of it’s size and complexity, but because it is a unique opportunity to have thousands of members of our diverse and extended community in the same place at the same time. As such, it is a unique opportunity for leadership development—to enhance our community’s collective capacity to shape our future. If we all remember that (the staff and volunteers when they design it, and the attendees when they choose how to operate during the meeting), then we advance our mission and have good evaluation scores at the same time. That’s social leadership in action.

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