While Circles is firmly rooted as an anti-poverty organization, we also know that anti-poverty movement work requires self-awareness and leadership skills. Building successful group efforts and functional organizations calls for a variety of skill sets and gifts to bring people together as one powerful force for good.
Visionary, Facilitator, Practitioner
In our Circles community of practice, we ask people to consider which role best fits them: visionary, facilitator, or practitioner. A visionary makes the impossible seem possible, a facilitator makes the possible seem probable, and a practitioner makes the probable become predictable.
In other words, the visionary has a fresh and imaginative idea that they can articulate; one which inspires others not only to believe, but to craft the necessary building blocks to manifest the vision. The facilitator can listen to what the visionary has thrown out there and translate it into infrastructure and process, serving as the “translator” between the visionary and the practitioner because the practitioner is in the weeds, boots on the ground, implementing the vision.
Practitioners and visionaries often face communication challenges when collaborating. We bring radically different perspectives in leadership style—each necessary, but needing a middle ground to translate into effective action. When I first met our visionary founder, Scott C. Miller, I was a practitioner, having just left almost 25 years of public education. While being in his presence was exciting and inspiring, it also freaked me out! He’d be tossing spaghetti to see what sticks and I’d be losing my mind, asking: “How can it be done?” or “Who will finance it?” or “Who's going to do it?”…and so on. Deep breath, precious one. I learned after a while that nothing was real until it was real, and I grew into the facilitator space. I even began to enjoy the spaghetti-tossing and the process of transforming the “best of” into a plan of action.
What’s more, I learned that most of us work on a continuum of visionary, practitioner, and facilitator throughout our lives, often wearing multiple hats. Don’t “nuts-and-bolts” practitioners conceive and nurture paradigm-shifting ideas all the time, only to be denied access by organizational hierarchies that only see top brass as the right "category" to do visioning work? Meanwhile, limited resources and support can leave visionaries working overtime to manage the facilitators while juggling logistics, hard-selling their ideas to their own teams and constituents, and implementing new policies amidst resistance from their own communities. Workers at every level must flex to manifest what we know is possible, and the one thing we all have in common is that none of us can do it alone.
I experienced this personally once our founder retired and interim executive director Jamie Haft moved on. I was promoted to executive director, which is a long way from being a school teacher and practitioner. I was thrust into the visionary role. As a skilled practitioner and newer facilitator, I struggled at first to shift into that visionary space. I had limited opportunities to articulate my visions in the past. I grew into finding my visionary voice, to speak my ideas for Circles USA with courage and conviction. Once I began to trust myself as a visionary leader, I knew exactly what my vision for Circles USA is:
We can do what we do even better, and more far-reaching, than we are now.
We can grow into organizational maturity with more infrastructure, standard operating procedures, stronger curriculum, coaching, and support, and more collaboration with our chapters. We can operationalize an organizational structure that practices what we preach: listening to those closest to the challenge, whether staff, Circle Leaders, or community members.
We also can be ready for the national spotlight in the anti-poverty arena with our new partnerships and opportunities to advocate. Perhaps we can even begin a national Big View campaign for sweeping systemic change.
What’s most exciting about this next iteration of Circles is that it is already happening, right now.
Honoring the Evolution
Just as I have grown in my skill set and how I relate to our team at Circles, I know we each have a bit of visionary, facilitator, and practitioner in us. So, how can we create a space to bring forth people’s best gifts while also nurturing those yet to be developed? How do we support the practitioners to buy into and then implement a vision? How do we listen to the vision a practitioner might have? How does your team come together in the most dynamic way possible?
At Circles, we do create the safe place for communicating, sharing gifts, taking risks, and working collaboratively. We appreciate each unique individual, knowing we each have something to give and something to learn. This is how we step out of top-down hierarchies and into the deepest expression of a Circles chapter and a beloved community, when each type of leader is seen, heard, and valued. And, when people are allowed to grow skills and shift roles, we evolve together into our greatness.
In his book Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, author Frederic Laloux writes: “Extraordinary things begin to happen when we dare to bring all of who we are to work.” Whatever pieces of your Self you bring to your role, I encourage you to shine on in your own perfect way, complementing each other’s leadership styles in our chapters as we build community to end poverty, together.
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