Sports and Leadership Part I

What does it mean to be a dynamic leader in sports? What lessons from sports leadership can be translated into our own leadership journeys?

As soon as these questions were introduced, our hands were reflexively in the air. Sports and leadership, leadership in sports….sports and leadership……leadership in sports! Tossing modesty out the window for a moment, who better could answer these questions than Alea Gage and Zach Blume: two passionate sports fans and players and two Fellows in the deep throes of leadership training here at the Coro Center of Civic Leadership? Well, here’s our best shot. . .

For a perspective on sports and leadership, we (Zach and Alea) decided to draw from our experience as Coro Fellows. Tuesday evening, November 13th, we had the pleasure of interviewing Lori Shannon, founder and owner of See Jane Run, a chain of running stores focused on empowering women to engage in physical activity. While we appreciate expanding our knowledge of innovation and creativity in the business sector, we identified very strongly with the relationship Lori articulated between integrating sports into her life and embodying the confidence, skills and vision to emerge as a self-aware force in the professional realm and in the community.

Lori recalled the experience of announcing her commitment to running her first marathon. Describing herself as “your average woman but not your average runner,” she acknowledges that for some, like a particular running shoe salesperson she encountered, running a marathon seemed beyond the realm of possibility, given her physical stature. Lori implored us to be bold, to display the confidence to express our dreams to the world in order to make them a reality.

Furthermore, in a sport dominated by images of thin and sculpted bodies, many women who are raising families and establishing careers are left out of this equation. Lori posits that the purpose of sport is not achievement in the traditional sense, but accomplishment in a very personal way. With this thinking, she opened her first running store in San Francisco to not only redefine who an athlete is and what an athlete looks like, but what a winner looks like within the framework of self-accomplishment. Lori shared with us the sense of strength and focus she feels after running, a sense of strength she has internalized and translated into the other realms of her life, both personal and professional.

Lori’s story emphasizes that the traits developed through sports correlate to the qualities of strong leadership: strength, will, focus, sense of self, sense of the possible, a desire to push the boundaries, challenge the status quo and re-envision oneself and one’s surroundings. For Lori, running marathons has taught her that life’s endeavors are endurance events. We heard this same rationale from Larissa Roesch and John Iannuccillio during an interview at Dodge & Cox, who argued that sound investments consider a company’s performance in perpetuity and feeling a sense of ownership in one’s investment leads to conscious and measured risk-taking. Likewise, Lori believes that risk taking in sports translates to increased faith in oneself and one’s abilities as well as fosters a spirit of determination and perseverance.

Drawing from our own experiences of hands-on leadership and personal development in sports as well as the learned knowledge gained through our interviews with achievers in various sectors, our definitions of leadership are expanding to include the interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, inner confidence and the ability to act on it, personal inspiration that translates into our work in the world.

LEADERSHIP 2.0?

Coro Center Executive Director Jeff Sosnaud and Finance and Development Director Patrick O'Heffernan met recently with Steve Wright, Director of Innovation for the Salesforce.com Foundation. Salesforce.com sells the world's most popular customer relations management service (CRM), service, used by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Jeff and Patrick visited to discuss ideas for the Fellows Program in Public Affairs Innovation Week scheduled for February 2008. The conversation quickly turned to what is civic engagement in a Web 2.0 world – "Web 2.0" in this case standing for the combination of web-based social-networking sites, wikis and other host services which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users, and rich media sites like podcasts and RSS feeds and online video posting and editing.

Web 2.0 has impacted electoral politics, through "gotcha" videos such as the "Macaca Moment" video on YouTube and other sites that ended Senator George Allen's career, online small donor fund raising that now rivals money from lobbyists and "fat cats", and online organizations such as the environmental site, Care2.org, which enables 7.7 million people - over 2% of the U.S. population – to organize social and political campaigns on behalf of the environment.

Wright pointed out that for the daily civic engagement of citizens in their community, whether they perceive it to be their school district or the global environment, three things are important:

- data transparency: that the peoples' data are transparent and accessible -- except for some exceptions in national security and personal privacy areas --what the government does and the records it keeps should be readily available online to the citizenry

- data accessibility: that not only is the data available, but that it is in standard formats that enable any citizen to download it, analyze and use it.

- information literacy: that all citizens have basic knowledge in how to find, access and download the peoples' data.

When asked about the custom of most citizens relying on experts who understand the topic and how to read and use the data, Steve agreed that experts and their expertise are important. But he added, so is the wisdom of the crowd. If you make the peoples data available only to experts, you will miss out on the creative power of ordinary people who can bring new insights and understandings that experts, because they are focused, cannot see. He argued for a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and expertise.

If Wright is right that civic engagement in a 21^st century Web 2.0 world is trending toward a combination of the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of experts, is there a Leadership 2.0 requirement emerging and what does it mean for the qualities and skills that make up a leader?

Does a Web 2.0 world mean that a leader needs to be proficient not only with the tools of analytic thinking, research, presentation, public speaking, negotiation, but with a whole new set of tools ranging from social entrepreneurship to posting YouTube videos? How does a leader in a Web 2.0 World use the "wisdom of the crowd" while still creating a coherent vision for people to follow? How does a Web 2.0 leader foster open decision making and decentralized authority and inspire people to a common goal? And, finally, what does this mean for Coro and the skills it teaches?

The conversation at Salesforce.com's conference room that day ranged from the need to keep the leadership tools of the past because they are still necessary and still have impact, to how to add new ones that embrace an online and open source world. Wright argued that leaders need the kinds of tools Coro teaches, plus an understanding of the laws governing information, an understanding of the technologies of open source and social networking, plus how to get things done in this environment.

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