Introduction
The Testing Change project was a multi-year collaboration of civil society organizations to (1) develop and test new ways of operating and evaluate and (2) share the learning as widely as possible in the global civil society community.
Our research and a roundtable of some of those involved in this field validated that although there are many excellent leadership programs that help leaders to strengthen their skills and broaden their approaches, few have a peer group go through the process together of applying these approaches directly to their leadership of their current organization and particular changes they may be trying to implement.
A global working group of five executive directors looked at the question of what new leadership approach they might want to test in their organization.
Some of our learning after the multi-year testing period was as follows:
- One needs to learn and relearn how much a leader’s own actions, reactions and perspectives influence the team, especially during a change process.
- The importance of process ownership to successful change.
- The advantages of participatory decision making. For a leader, not having all of the responsibility can actually be uplifting.
- External factors (eg pandemic, elections, economy, civil unrest, etc..) play an important role in often disrupting the best of plans. The tests evolved and changed over the multi-year testing process depending on what was happening externally. Agility and resilience approaches are important to have and practice.
- In change processes, things can feel worse before they are better. This is where peer support can be very helpful.
Access Resources
- Leadership Development Roundtable Summary
- Civil Society and Testing Change Project Summary (PDF 9 pgs)
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