In this series, authors will explore how individuals and communities imagine new ways to lead change, new mindsets to approach complex issues, and new strategies to align leadership theory and practice. We will share examples of how local leaders address global issues, highlighting leadership perspectives and strategic change actions.
Author N’Zoret Innocent Assoman, executive director of LEAD+AFRICA and a graduate teaching assistant in the Staley School of Leadership Studies, reveals challenges encountered as a leader of a nonprofit organization in Cote d’Ivoire. Challenges can feel like set-backs; however, in the final installment of this series, Innocent describes how the lessons learned helped his team to adjust to the new norms of the national ecosystem and move their vision forward.
The desire to bring noticeable changes in our community motivated my peers and me (Ivorian YALI Fellows) to create a non-profit organization (LEAD+AFRICA) in 2018 in Côte d’Ivoire. At the inception of our engagement in the national civil society ecosystem, I was appointed by the board (five people) as the president of the organization (see image 1). I was excited to serve in this position and for the great work we were about to do in the community. Within a few weeks, my excitement turned into anxiety and pressure. There were many unforeseen challenges on the way towards our vision of sustainable impact. These challenges were both external (in our work with the community) and internal (within our organization and within me as the leader). In this blog, I will share an example of one of our first challenges and illustrate the lessons learned, as well as how I continue to navigate challenges as the organization’s leader.
External resistance
Our planned approach to creating community change was to work with graduate students, universities, and business schools’ administration. Our first action was to submit a note to a business school’s administration in Abobo, Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Our intent was to inform the school’s administration about our upcoming seminar, Being a Student and Undertaking a Business is Possible, and ask for approval. Though my team and I were super excited about this theme and its impact on the school, things did not move further as expected.
In response to our query, we received a cold reaction from the administrators of the school. They did not accept our plans because they felt excluded at the inception, during the design. This first confrontation taught us a big lesson as an organization to reconsider our approach within the ecosystem. In fact, we cannot lead change without enabling spaces for sincere collaboration with key stakeholders.
Our firm desire to bring significant changes in the ecosystem deluded our approach to collaborate and work with the main actors of the ecosystem. Seeing ourselves as the solution-providers failed to associate the primary beneficiaries (graduate students and higher education administrators) with the cause.
Identifying the cause of an issue does not guarantee the end of the engagement process, but it should rather set the beginning of an inclusive approach.
An organization should not be static in its approach to leading changes in an ecosystem embedded in routines. Challenges are real and complex – what can be described as “adaptive challenges.” These kinds of challenges are different than technical problems, which can be solved by authority and expertise. Rather, adaptive challenges require a mindset of learning with others, building relationships, and acting experimentally in uncertainty (O’Malley and Cebula, 2015).
This delimitation of our approach surfaced some challenges that humbled our boldness. The internal growth required was to develop new thinking as an organization and develop a more adaptive, inclusive approach to our work.
Internal development
The leadership journey is full of lessons. For us, the lesson was that change cannot happen without the involvement and acceptance of the people most impacted by the problem. To build our capacity for community-engaged social change work, we looked to a framework of youth engagement from (Fletcher and Vargus, 2006. p. 5) as illustrated below:
This model suggests inherent steps for youth contribution and intervention toward social change in any type of context. Fletcher and Vargus (2006) posit that “it can be used to plan, evaluate, or challenge any activity that seeks to engage young people in social change.” It applies to our work because our organization focuses on youth empowerment and capacity building for emulating their role in community development. Reflecting on this model helps us to make meaning on the failed approach described above. Our intention was to empower students and young graduates, yet we did not actually invite them into the process. Relationship-building is very important in the process of leading change. We did not engage any other key stakeholders like professors, the Ministry of Higher Education of Côte d’Ivoire, and School Administrators. We missed the most important part of the engagement process, be WITH them and not just FOR them (Fletcher and Vargus, 2006). Our desire of making change lacked the capacity of fostering change.
As an organization, we realized that we were highly committed to our method and approach, so we thought handling the process alone and coming in like the magic bullet was the right way for us to break the status quo in our country that sustains that young people are unable to bring any significant change to development.
A leader’s perspective
As the leader of our organization, I took a step back. I tried to bring in the big picture we had while coming together to set up the organization (LEAD+AFRICA). I think what was going on in my mind is that we came far with a vision to impact young people through empowerment and capacity-building. We cannot give up unless the expected change and impact occur. Therefore, I shifted my attention to outside the box and thought about what I could bring to the system (structure of the organization) and activate the movement (machine) in the right direction rather than getting stuck on the challenges, which I thought would be recurrent as we are moving forward. It was the right time for me to realign my personal aspirations to meet our organizational vision and goals. From this experience, I can state that bearing a vision is one step, being able to keep it intact over years is another story.
Throughout my experience, I have learned how to take a break, how to navigate, and how to consider some voices even though I am not necessarily accepting what they convey as a message. My ethics, built around integrity, accountability, trust, and transparency, were at play. For example, we got to a level where, for the organization to be considered on relevant platforms in the national ecosystem, like joining the national consortium of youth-led organizations and having access to resources from the government, I would have to compromise my core value of integrity. I refused to engage in shortcuts with traps. The national ecosystem was challenging me to abandon the common vision of my team to join the voice of the majority who do not trust its youth as capable to lead change.
Key recommendations
Uncertain challenges may always surface over our leadership journey, our ability to overcome those challenges will make the difference. Below I will be sharing some recommendations in that regard:
- Collaboration and relational leadership are needed
While going through those internal and external challenges, I understood that if, as a team we can strengthen our internal ties by building on values around what we have in common and deepening our sense of belonging to the organization, we will be able to adapt to the external world and resist to all kind of external challenges and threats. Yes, we stand firm today as an organization because we used our relational and adaptive leadership approaches to mitigate the wind of division that was at stake within.
- Call for your leadership resources within
Indeed, strategic leadership is at play in our current approach. This is an invitation for us as organizations’ leaders to reflect on the following statement as we continue to exercise leadership: “While many factors may interact to cause non-linearity in organizational systems, strategic leaders are in positions to bring people, resources, and knowledge together, and thus serve as a catalyst for adaptive systems’’ (Boal and Schultz, 2007, p. 414).
References
Boal, K. B., and Schultz, P. L. (2007). Storytelling, time, and evolution: The role of strategic leadership in complex adaptive systems. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 411–428.
Fletcher, A., and Varvus, J. (2006). Guide to social change led by and with young people. University of Nebraska. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/slceguides/4/
O’Malley E., and Cebula, A. (2015). Your leadership edge: Lead anytime, anywhere. Kansas Leadership Center Press.
About the author
N’zoret Innocent Assoman is the executive director of LEAD+AFRICA and a graduate teaching assistant in the Staley School of Leadership Studies, Kansas State University, where he teaches LEAD 212: Introduction to leadership concepts. Innocent is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Leadership Communication from K-State, with an interest in the role of youth in the socio-economic development of a nation through civic engagement, especially in West Africa. Innocent is passionate about serving communities and serving youth, and he is the current president of the Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) West Africa Alumni Chapter of Côte d’Ivoire.
