Week 11: Leadership Reflection and Development Plan

This quarter deepened my understanding that leadership is not defined by a title, personality, or ability to carry the most responsibility. Leadership is the ongoing practice of aligning values, relationships, decisions, and organizational structures. Before this course, I often understood leadership primarily through service, advocacy, and the ability to respond when something needed to be done. I still believe those qualities are important, but I now recognize that leadership also requires building systems that allow the work to continue without depending on one person’s constant availability, memory, or emotional labor.

Much of my learning this quarter connected directly to my leadership of SweetGrass Wellness Collective. SweetGrass was built through relationships, shared values, and responsiveness to the needs of families and community members. However, values alone are not enough to sustain an organization. This course helped me understand that accountability, documentation, role clarity, communication systems, evaluation, and succession planning are not separate from community care. They are some of the ways care becomes dependable.

Kouzes and Posner’s five practices of exemplary leadership gave me a useful framework for reflecting on both my strengths and areas for growth. I identify strongly with inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, and encouraging the heart. I am comfortable helping people understand why the work matters, questioning practices that cause harm, and recognizing the contributions of others. I also strive to model the way by grounding my work in reproductive justice, cultural humility, Black feminist thought, and service to community.

The practice I need to strengthen most is enabling others to act. At times, my commitment to the work has resulted in holding too many responsibilities myself. This may ensure that something is completed in the short term, but it can limit collective ownership and reinforce an organizational structure in which too much knowledge and responsibility remain with one leader. Enabling others to act requires more than inviting participation. It requires clear roles, access to information, appropriate training, shared decision-making authority, and accountability that is both supportive and consistent.

The course also strengthened my understanding of collaborative leadership. The Leadership Learning Community (2015) explains that large-scale change depends on relationships, shared learning, and the ability to adapt strategies as new information becomes available. The collaborative leadership competency of data, learning, and adaptation was especially relevant to my work. Data should not be collected only for funders or annual reports. It should help leaders and organizations understand whether their efforts are working, who is being reached, who may be excluded, and when a strategy needs to change.

In community-based work, meaningful data may include more than numerical outcomes. Attendance, participant feedback, member experiences, community stories, partnership development, accessibility concerns, and patterns in who returns or does not return can all support learning. The challenge is to create evaluation practices that are useful without becoming extractive. Community members should not be treated only as sources of information. They should have opportunities to influence what is measured, how findings are interpreted, and how programs change in response.

Another important lesson from this quarter was that leadership sustainability requires boundaries and realistic distribution of labor. I have often associated strong leadership with being able to respond, solve problems, and hold multiple roles. However, leadership that depends on overextension is not sustainable. Burnout cannot always be prevented through individual self-care, particularly when leaders are navigating structural inequities, limited resources, and multiple personal and professional responsibilities. Still, I have a responsibility to build practices that reduce unnecessary overload and make room for rest, reflection, and long-term decision-making.

Leadership Development Priority One: Delegation and Organizational Accountability

My first priority is to strengthen my ability to delegate responsibility while maintaining clear expectations and accountability. Over the next three months, I will continue refining SweetGrass’s membership handbook, role descriptions, onboarding process, and rededication procedures. Each leadership or advisory role should have clearly documented responsibilities, communication expectations, decision-making authority, and timelines.

Within the next month, I will identify at least two responsibilities that I currently hold and transition them to other members with the appropriate interest or skill. Rather than transferring tasks without support, I will create written instructions, provide access to necessary materials, and schedule an initial check-in.

Within two months, I will establish a consistent accountability process that includes regular progress updates, opportunities to identify barriers, and clear procedures when responsibilities are not completed. My goal is to move away from either carrying the work myself or waiting until frustration builds. Accountability should be timely, transparent, and connected to shared commitments.

Potential resources for this priority include continued study of Kouzes and Posner’s work, workshops on nonprofit board development and team management, and leadership coaching focused on delegation, difficult conversations, and organizational systems. I would also benefit from mentorship from a leader who has successfully transitioned a grassroots organization from founder-centered leadership to shared governance.

Leadership Development Priority Two: Data, Evaluation, and Adaptive Learning

My second priority is to develop a practical evaluation system for SweetGrass that supports learning and adaptation. Within the next three months, I will identify a small set of measures connected to program reach, participant experience, partnerships, member engagement, and accessibility. These measures should be simple enough to collect consistently and meaningful enough to influence decisions.

Within four months, I will create or revise participant feedback tools so that they include both quantitative and qualitative information. I will also develop a process for reviewing feedback after programs rather than allowing information to accumulate without discussion.

Within six months, I will use this information to produce a brief community impact report or other form of grey literature. The report will document activities, participation, partnerships, lessons learned, and planned changes. It should not present the organization as perfect. Instead, it should demonstrate accountability by showing what SweetGrass attempted, what worked, what did not work as expected, and how the organization plans to adapt.

Potential resources include training in community-based participatory evaluation, Results-Based Leadership, program evaluation, and ethical storytelling. The Leadership Learning Community report will remain useful because it frames data as a tool for shared urgency, motivation, and strategic change rather than simply measurement (Leadership Learning Community, 2015). I would also like to explore workshops on accessible data communication so that findings can be shared with community members in ways that are understandable and useful.

Continuing Leadership Development

Over the next six months, I also plan to read at least two leadership or management books, participate in one workshop or training, and seek either a coach or mentor who can support my development as an organizational leader. I will review my progress at the end of each month and complete a more formal reflection at the three-month and six-month points.

My goal is not to become a leader who can carry more. It is to become a leader who can build structures that allow more people to participate, contribute, and lead. This course reinforced that effective leadership is relational, reflective, and accountable. It requires vision, but it also requires infrastructure. It requires service, but service should not become self-erasure. It requires listening, but listening must lead to adaptation.

Moving forward, I want my leadership to be measured not only by what I personally accomplish, but also by whether the people around me have the clarity, support, authority, and resources they need to succeed. I want to continue developing a leadership practice that is grounded in community wisdom, shared responsibility, cultural responsiveness, and the belief that sustainable change must be built collectively.

Reference

Leadership Learning Community. (2015, June). Leadership and large-scale change: How to accelerate learning and deepen impact. https://leadershiplearning.org/publications/leadership-large-scale-change/