The Journal, Spring 2014

THE

JOURNAL

I N S P I R A T I O N

F O R

THE COMMON GOOD

VOLUME 6 - ISSUE 1 - SPRING 2014

sharpening leadership skills in any college classroom

{regardless of subject}

$10.00

THE

JOURNAL

The Journal (Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good. KLC is different in the field of leadership development with its focus on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good.

KLC MISSION To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities KLC VISION To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO)

Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Carolyn Kennett, Parsons Greg Musil, Overland Park Reggie Robinson, Topeka Consuelo Sandoval, Garden City Clayton Tatro, Fort Scott Frank York, Ashland WEB EDITION

http://issuu.com/kansasleadershipcenter SUBSCRIPTIONS:

Annual subscriptions available on Amazon.com ($34.95 for four issues). Single issues available for $10 by emailing cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

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Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. For other reprint, copying or reproduction permission contact Mike Matson at mmatson@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 316.712.4950 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org PHOTOGRAPHY

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com ARTWORK

Clare Doveton www.claredoveton.com MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org GRAPHIC DESIGN

Novella Brandhouse 816.868.9825 www.novellabrandhouse.com ©2014 Kansas Leadership Center

"Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as life." – Joseph Conrad

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contents Welcome to the Journal

By President & CEO Ed O’Malley . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Dispatches from the Kansas Leadership Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Voices of Civic Leadership

By Brad McRae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Leadership Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Breaking the Cycle: A School Funding Hypothetical

By Brian Whepley and Chris Green . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sharpening Leadership Skills in Any College Classroom

By Anne Dewvall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Getting to the We in Team

by Erin Perry O’Donnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Called to Action

By Patsy Terrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Featured Artist: Release

By Clare Doveton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Mind Readers

By Chris Green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Getting Kansans to Join the Discussion

By Dawn Bormann Novascone . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Coaching for Character Photos by Jeff Tuttle, Story by Laura Roddy . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Poem: The Last Farm on 87th Street

By Al Ortolani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 The Back Page

By Mark E. McCormick

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

LosInG tHe ‘GIFt oF GAB’ EVEN WHEN OUR STRENGTHS FAIL US, WE CAN STILL FIND A WAY TO INSPIRE OTHERS.

It started yesterday, mid-afternoon, with just an itchy throat. By 5 p.m. my voice was gone.

By 10, with no hope of my voice coming back soon, I canceled a presentation I was scheduled to give this morning at Washburn University.

I felt horrible. My throat hurt. My voice was gone. I had just given the Washburn folks all of 10 hours to develop plan B.

a background in politics or an Irish heritage.

I have both! Yikes!) How do you lead if your preferred tool/weapon/instrument is disabled?

I was also getting depressed. This morning, my voice still gone, I’ve figured out why.

This question was gnawing at me: Who am I without my voice? Without the ability to engage others verbally, to articulate key ideas succinctly, to motivate others through speaking from the heart? I’m not sure.

Last night and this morning, it was difficult to communicate with my wife and kids. Speaking takes a lot of work. I am consciously choosing not to say certain things I usually would, simply because it hurts and sounds so awful.

This voice thing strikes me a few times each year. I’ve seen various doctors, but no one has been able to help me figure out how to prevent or treat it.

I’m writing this in one of my favorite neighborhood spots – Watermark Books and Café in Wichita. A neighbor just walked in and tried to strike up a conversation. I mustered a few words, which she probably couldn’t make out.

I tried to be warm and friendly, as I usually am, but I just didn’t feel like myself.

Some people lead by writing. Others lead quietly, letting their actions make their point.

Some inspire, motivate and mobilize through art. Some of us rely on our voice. (Many times the latter individuals have either

4.

I need to remember that despite that reality, Dad still finds a way to inspire us, care about us and love us. He taught me about the power of speaking. Now, if I can stop feeling sorry for myself and open my ears and eyes a bit wider, I’m sure he can teach me new ways to lead and engage others.

While I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself, I find myself thinking about the best public speaker I know. A man who could light up any room when he was younger and whose pleasant voice and strength of public speaking I’ve seemed to inherit just a bit. I’ll never match Dad’s speaking ability, but witnessing it so often over the years – thanking his assistant coaches at the end-of-season soccer pizza party, reading at Mass, giving a toast, speaking at our wedding rehearsal dinner, etc. – taught me a lot about the power of and how to use your voice.

Onward!

Ed O’Malley President & CEO Kansas Leadership Center

I still have a lot to learn from Dad. My little voice issue is nothing compared to the 15 years Parkinson’s has been wreaking havoc with Dad’s voice. No, the words don’t roll out quite as smoothly any more from Dad. I know it bothers him. I’m sure there are times he would like to say something, but just can’t.

5.

DIsPAtcHes FROM THE KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

The initiative’s offerings allow you to customize the leadership development experience that best suits your organization’s needs. To learn more, please contact KLC President and CEO Ed O’Malley at eomalley@kansasleadershipcenter.org and let him take you out to breakfast to talk about the possibilities.

CREATE A HEALTHIER KANSAS

A new opportunity for Kansans to join the push to make Kansas the healthiest, most productive and livable state in the nation will be offered in June at the Kansas Leadership Center and Kansas Health Foundation Conference Center in Wichita.

“From Complexity to Simplicity: A Path to Health” will be the theme of the inaugural Kansas Health Foundation Symposium. It will feature such speakers as David Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Ken Segall, a marketing professional who has authored a book about how “simplicity” has powered Apple’s success.

GROWING KANSAS

Stakeholders from across the state began convening in May to develop their leadership capacity and to generate progress on increasing the ranks of minority business owners in Kansas.

A three-session program, “Growing Kansas: Increasing Minority Business Ownership Through Leadership,” brings together stakeholders who recognize the economic power behind increasing minority business ownership. Additional sessions will take place in July and September.

The symposium is open to anyone interested in and committed to a healthier Kansas but space is limited. Visit kshealthsymposium.com for more information. For questions about the event, please contact Jana Henderson at 316-878-6493 or jana.henderson@wichita.edu.

Although 1 in every 5 Kansans is a traditional minority, only about 7 percent of the businesses in Kansas are minority owned. Raising those numbers up to parity could add 70,000 jobs in the state. KLC is fostering efforts, with input from the Wichita District of the U.S. Small Business Administration, to bolster leadership on this issue and bring economic benefits for the Kansas economy.

FOR THE COMMON GOOD

You have big hopes and dreams for your business, system or organization that you’re falling short of.

It will take more leaders to bridge that gap. This is where the Kansas Leadership Center can help.

KLC’s new “For the Common Good” initiative is designed to foster a culture of greater creativity and innovation and increase the level of engagement and energy among employees. Through tools, workshops and peer-to-peer interaction, “For the Common Good” offers a language of effective leadership and proven methods to help your colleagues learn it and support their practice of it.

Please contact Keshia Ezerendu at 316-712-4961 or kezerendu@kansasleadershipcenter.org for more information about this ongoing effort.

6.

ONE PATH TO A BETTER REALITY

TRAIN THE TEACHER

Faith communities across the state, including ones in Garden City and Lyons, have been having tough conversations and exploring how to realize their congregations’ aspirations through the Genesis Event, one of the new offerings of the Leadership & Faith Transforming Communities program.

Teachers, coaches, facilitators, consultants, mentors and others providing leadership instruction have the opportunity to participate in five more Train the Teacher workshops this year. Each offering allows participants to hone in on specific knowledge and individual skill sets related to the art of teaching, coaching and facilitation.

Upcoming workshops cover various topics:

The Genesis Event provides a starting point for a church to uncover the gap between the status quo and what it wants to become. With the help of a KLC-provided facilitator, participants identify up to three specific issues in which the church plans to close the gap. The event typically unfolds over the course of a six-hour program delivered on-site in a church's fellowship hall.

Congregations can focus their energies on challenges within their church walls or how the church engages with the community and transforms it for the better.

After the event, churches have the option of choosing to explore additional opportunities through KLC to continue their progress.

•

May 19: Storytelling for Teachers and Coaches

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June 13: Teaching the Common Good Principles and Competencies

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Aug. 8: Coaching to Make Progress on Adaptive Challenges

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Sept. 25-26: Case Teaching

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Oct. 29-30: Case-in-Point

To learn more, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org/traintheteacher or contact Racquel Thiesen at 316-772-1102 or rthiesen@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

To learn more about the Genesis Event and what it could mean for your faith community, please contact Thane Chastain at 316-712-4959 or tchastain@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

Childhood poverty is on the rise in Kansas, affecting close to 1 in every 4 of the state’s youths. The Summer edition of The Journal will focus extensively on the leadership challenges surrounding childhood poverty in Kansas and how the state’s conversation on this issue might be changed for the common good.

HELPING PASTORS MAKE PROGRESS

This June, faith leaders from across the state can attend one-day regional retreat/workshops in Kansas City, Wichita, Manhattan, Pittsburg and Dodge City that can help them make progress on their own individual leadership challenges. They will also be introduced to the array of services being offered by the Leadership & Faith Transforming Communities program. The retreat day is designed to help those who spend so much of their time helping others within their faith community. This is open to all faiths.

If you are interested in receiving copies of this special issue of The Journal, please contact Chris Green at 316-712-4945 or cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

7.

voIces OF

CIVIC LEADERSHIP

THE CRITICAL 15 SECONDS

It takes an audience fewer than 15 seconds to determine whether they like you and your style, are willing to listen to what you have to say — and if you are talented enough — act on your message. In other words, you have no time to waste, and it is no accident that the time most of us are most nervous when giving a presentation is during those first 15 seconds.

assembled company blithely accepts the faintly unpleasant idea that a human being’s right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices – that we may be born equal but thereafter our lives weigh differently in the scales.

It’s only make-believe, after all. And while it may not be very nice, it does reflect how people actually think.

Harvard Business School professor John Kotter states: “Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best — and change — from hearing stories that strike a chord within us. Those...who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.”

I have now spent over a thousand days in just such a balloon; but alas, this isn’t a game.

How effective was Rushdie’s beginning? Note how he uses the parable to explain his plight, threatened as he was by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence for blasphemy.

An example of one of the most compelling stories used to begin a presentation occurred in 1991, when author Salman Rushdie came out of hiding long enough to address the assembled dignitaries at a dinner honoring the 200th anniversary of the United States’ First Amendment.

To be an effective leader, you have to tell your compelling story right from the start so you can engage and motivate those to whom you are telling your story.

There are many examples of leaders who within the first 15 seconds of listening to them we are willing to follow. As a leader, ask yourself: What is your story?

How will your story be received? What can you do in the first 15 seconds of your next presentation?

A hot-air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm, carrying several passengers. A leak develops; the balloon starts losing height. The pit, a dark yawn, comes closer. The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety; the many must be sacrificed to save the one! But who should live, who should die? And who should make such a choice?

Dr. Brad McRae is the director of the Atlantic Leadership Development Institute (ALDI) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. The institute’s mission is to help develop leaders where Leadership, Presentation, Negotiation and Decision Making competencies converge. He became familiar with KLC after meeting KLC President and CEO Ed O’Malley at the Harvard Kenney School's Art and Practice of Leadership Development program, which led to his visiting KLC. He has presented across Canada and in the United States, Australia, England, Mexico, Africa and the Caribbean and is the author of 10 books and numerous articles.

Debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms, for of course what I’ve described is the given situation of that evergreen favorite, the balloon debate, in which as the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits of the well-known figures they have placed in disaster’s mouth, the

8.

THE LEADERSHIP LIBRARY Tapping into your imagination can be a powerful tool for learning about leadership.

The following books show how novels can be a tool for learning about your character, how fiction can benefit your social skills and how working with others to devise plausible scenarios for the future can help you make progress.

Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature

By Joseph Badaracco Jr. A Harvard professor describes how his MBA students prepare for the career and life trials they’ll face through the discussion of novels, plays and short stories.

Learn how works ranging from “Death of a Salesman” to “Antigone” can help leaders prepare to face daunting tests of their character.

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction

By Keith Oatley An emeritus professor of cognitive psychology and a published novelist, Oatley explores the benefits of reading fiction and how it can improve social skills and enhance our ability to change ourselves. Anchored in psychological research, it provides a new lens for seeing the value of an ancient art form.

Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future

By Adam Kahane How do you get unstuck from a seemingly intractable problem? In this book, Kahane outlines a methodology that has been successful in South Africa and other countries. By bringing together stakeholders to develop plausible scenarios describing the future, you can create new relationships and insights that can help to change it.

9.

Breaking the

c yc l e : a school funding hypothetical

It’s a scene that plays out on repeat. Disagreements over school funding make their way to the courts and push the state to the edge of crisis. Politics come into play and tensions rise even when solutions seem near. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if a different approach could pave the path to lasting progress?

The following sTory, Tol d f r o m T h e p e r s p e c T i v e of a ficTional wesTern k a n s a s l e g i s l aTo r , imagines what that m i g h t l o o k l i k e .

10.

By Brian Whepley and Chris Green

s

“

hut the doors. switch off your phones,” the governor says intently. “nobody gets in or out of here for a while.”

As he pauses, a hush creeps over the 50 people packed into the main room of a community building in a Flint Hills town on a warm Saturday in May. Looking around, I see nearly every faction with a stake in the state’s perpetual tug-of-war over public school funding. I rub my eyes and blink twice, not quite sure I believe what I’m seeing.

“I know this must feel strange to many of you,” the governor continues. “It’s not entirely comfortable for me either. But I feel like there’s a window of opportunity here. And if we don’t take it, we’ll just start heading back down the same road we’ve been on for years.”

I exchange perplexed glances with a few members of my caucus, the Republicans in the Kansas House of Representatives. The Senate Republicans sit a few rows back from us. I spy a few Democrats from both chambers looking dubious. The patchwork of roles and ideologies watching anxiously includes school superintendents, board members, free market activists, the CEO of a large corporation, teachers’ union representatives and a few “average” citizens. The governor sports his casual look of blue jeans, boots and a plaid shirt.

As I scan the room, that Bill Murray line from “Ghostbusters” — “Dogs and cats, living together!”

— pops in my head and I chuckle aloud. Kaye Williams, a Democratic rep from Kansas City who has been a partisan sparring partner of mine since our days together at Washburn Law, gives me “the look” from the end of the row.

I shift in my chair and think about how it wasn’t that long ago that the state seemed on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Long before I showed up, the Legislature pumped a bunch of money into schools to resolve a lawsuit filed by some of the state’s school districts. Then, aid to schools got cut back significantly because of the recession. Instead of restoring funds to their high-water mark, a new governor and the Legislature enacted big tax cuts intended to grow our economy. In between, the school folks sued the state, yet again, saying that we hadn’t lived up to our constitutional duty to fund education.

11.

“i want to see if there’s some chance that we can work TogeTher for the common good.”

12.

a school funding hypothetical

I, like many of my friends in the Legislature, was ready for a fight this time around if the black-robed justices on the Kansas Supreme Court ruled against us. But the court told us we just had to fix a few things by July to make school funding equitable. Rather than ordering us to pay a king’s ransom to adequately fund schools, they sent that part of the case back to a three-judge panel for additional review. Who really knows how long that will take?

I expected us to make some tweaks in the Legislature to help poor schools and be done with it. Which we tried to do. But we also made some changes dealing with the dismissal of teachers and corporate tax breaks for private school scholarships that upset some folks. Tempers have cooled a bit, but there’s an air of bitterness and resentment that hangs over the room and some parts of the state like a western Kansas dust storm.

I thought things on the school-funding front would be quiet for a while. But then the governor came out saying that he wanted to take “one giant swing” at getting past the state’s decadeslong cycle of school-funding lawsuits — by calling for a retreat on the issue involving all of the factions, outside of Topeka, no less.

Now I sit in this room as the governor takes questions, looking at nearly as many foes as friends.

This combustible mix is a result of the governor’s decision to work with school finance advocates to whittle the factions involved down to a workable number of delegates. Not everybody’s here — a few of the people who felt the strongest about the issue refused to attend. And by the demeanor of some around the room, I’m guessing a few more might bolt before the day is out, even if they have to climb out of the windows.

“These lawsuits have been going on since I was in law school, and they don’t settle anything for very long,” the governor says. “A few months ago, I called for a truly open process to work at breaking this cycle of perpetual litigation. I believe the people assembled in the room — a group representing a full spectrum of views and ideologies in this state — can make this happen.”

The room remains silent, as if in disbelief.

“Why on earth would we do that?” I think to myself. “Shouldn’t we just sort this out among conservative Republicans in the Legislature? After all, the voters picked us to make the decisions.”

“I know this is an unusual step,” the governor says, as if he’s reading my mind. “But if you look at the history of this issue, it makes you wonder if there’s any one party or group who can solve it in the long run. It’s vexed my predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, for decades. I want to see if there’s some chance that we can work together for the common good. Or at least begin building the relationships that might make it possible someday.”

The governor exhales deeply and takes in the room.

“I’m pretty convinced that I am right about this issue right now. The people around me tell me I’m right, too. I’m sure your own people tell you the exact same thing. But when I check out my approval rating or read the newspaper editorial pages, I’m reminded that a lot of people don’t agree with me — or even particularly like what we’re doing. I want to dig a little deeper into what that’s all about, and if there’s something I can do about it. Maybe there’s not. But I think we can all benefit from taking a big enough step back to see ourselves and this issue through other people’s eyes.”

13.

a school funding hypothetical

T

he governor goes on to reiterate that he’s invested a lot of effort and political capital in cutting taxes, in hopes of creating the business climate he wants to see in this state.

But he won’t be in power forever, and he’s seen far too many governors watch their legacies get erased by changes in circumstance and time.

“If I – if any of us – want Kansas to truly grow and prosper, then we have to find a proper, long-term solution to end these school-funding controversies,” he says.

People across Kansas are in the process of developing a water plan that looks decades into the future, he says. But school finance doesn’t feel like quite so cross-cutting an issue.

That’s probably because about half of all the spending the state has control over goes to K-12 education, he continues. The sector plays a huge role in shaping our communities, the size and scope of government in Kansas and how our economy will perform now and in the future. It’s inevitable that Democrats and Republicans — whether they’re liberals, moderates or conservatives — are going to disagree strongly over how to deal with it.

“But what if we could disagree a little less? Or at least agree enough to break this insane cycle we’re in,” he says. “It may be unlikely, but I think it’s possible. I don’t believe that there’s anybody in the room who wakes up in the morning intent on mucking up Kansas. There must be a way we can fund our schools adequately, equitably and wisely.”

When the governor’s done talking, the group disperses for a short coffee break. I find myself standing next to Kaye.

“Hey, there. You look like you’d rather be at the dentist’s office. Not enjoying our retreat so much?” she teases.

I laugh and tell her that the people from my western Kansas district didn’t send me to Topeka for fun and games. They want me to fix things and put the state back on a path to prosperity. They’re tired of high taxes and government overspending, and they just want more jobs to come to our towns, which are struggling to survive. I agree with them on those things. “Stick to your guns,” they say. “I intend to,” I frequently reply. “I’m not going to compromise what I believe in.”

Anyway, the two of us get around to talking about how we both ended up here. It’s the first time we’ve really chatted since the most recent legislative blowup, in which we stood, yet again, in opposite camps.

Kaye says she was invited to help reflect the Democrat view and because she’s long been a negotiator for a teachers’ union. Because I served two terms on my local school board, I reflect

14.

a school funding hypothetical

the House GOP’s freshman caucus, which is bigger than usual. I tell Kaye that I am not sure, though, what exactly I have to offer in a room full of high-powered politicians, activists, experts and lobbyists.

“Well, at least that’s one thing we agree on, that you are not worthy,” says Kaye, jabbing me in the shoulder.

But then we turn serious and wonder together what the real story behind this event is.

“Maybe the governor’s serious about working this out, instead of just blowing smoke like he usually does,” Kaye says. “It’ll take a ton of work to convince me he’s really shifting gears.”

“I think he’s trying,” I assure her. “But when I look around the room, all I see is a whole bunch of people who are trying to annihilate us in the next election.”

“Annihilate you?” she gasps. “I think you might want to take another look at the endangered species list, buddy. Because you’re the ones who’ve been coming after us.”

My blood pressure still up a bit, I trudge back to my chair.

I hear snippets of conversation from around the room that tell me others are just as skeptical as Kaye and me. An editorial writer from one of the state’s biggest newspapers tells a school superintendent he thinks the governor is simply “grandstanding.” The superintendent wonders why anybody should even bother with the summit since the issue is moving back to the courts anyway.

The voices of my constituents from a recent public forum I held back home echo in my head.

They don’t want their income taxes to go back up. They wonder about some of the choices schools make in how they spend their dollars and where exactly all the money goes.

But it’s also the things that I didn’t expect to hear that night at the public forum that spin around in my head. The concerns about larger class sizes. The wealthier districts getting the best teachers with higher salaries. The feeling that people have of being nickel-and-dimed for school supplies and fees in ways they never did with their older kids. The steady creep of local taxes even as the state’s tax bills get smaller.

“How on earth do you reconcile those competing things?” I ask them. “Dunno,” one man says to me, “isn’t that your job?” Others suggest talking it out. “If you look for ways to trim the budget first, then maybe we’d be willing to dig a bit more into our pockets,” one woman says. “Just don’t screw things up worse,” another urges me, sparking a cascade of applause.

I squirm a bit in my chair while recollecting their comments. In fact, a whole bunch of us here seem uneasy. Because we don’t see much chance of gaining anything today but do see a big fat chance of losing something, whether it’s credibility with voters or just a fine spring weekend with our families.

15.

“if i – if any of us – want kansas to truly grow and prosper, then we have to find a proper, long-term solution to end these school-funding controversies.”

LEGISLATURE RESPONDS TO CRISIS

g

COURTS RULE FUNDING INADEQUATE/ UNEQUITABLE

g

CRISIS DISSIPATES

g

the

c yc l e :

SCHOOL DISTRICTS SUE OVER FUNDING

CHANGES ULTIMATELY FALL SHORT OF ADEQUACY/EQUITY

g

g

1972-present

a school funding hypothetical

When we reconvene, a woman named Pam takes the microphone from the governor and explains that she’s the chief facilitator from a Houston-based consulting firm and has made a career of working with community groups and businesses on conflict resolution, teamwork and overcoming mistrust. She has assembled a team of highly trained facilitators from Kansas who will guide the group through something called “transformative scenario planning.” A group of foundations interested in healthier civic collaboration have banded together to fund the exercise.

It’s a five-step process that helps groups map out plausible scenarios so they can understand the consequences of their actions and get unstuck on a tough problem by together choosing a better path. Sounds touchy-feely and hard to get my head around, but, what the heck, I’m here. And they aren’t letting us out of here anytime soon.

They break the big group into smaller ones, made up of as diverse and contentious a mix of viewpoints as they can manage — which is how Kaye ends up in my group. Our discussions are usually pretty contentious, whether it’s about due process for teachers, drug testing for welfare recipients, judge selection or income taxes.

“That’s good,” I whisper to Kaye when I learn she’s in my group. “I already know what you think — and how wrong it is.”

Others in the group include, I soon learn, a free market advocate from southeast Kansas, an official from the state teachers’ union, a K-State professor, a Methodist pastor from Wichita and two school superintendents — one from a tiny district out near me, another from a goodsized one in a rich Kansas City suburb.

They assign each smaller group a referee — excuse me, facilitator — to keep us on track, which is good, because I fear we’re just wasting our time here. Greg, our facilitator, asks each of us to take a turn telling a bit about ourselves — where we’re from, what we do, whether we have kids in school — and what we think is a good education, as well as what we expect from the state in providing one.

Views and values start flying, and the little room gets warmer.

The union leader pipes in first — big surprise — with the spiel about how the Legislature hasn’t done its constitutional duty and is now picking on teachers, blaming them for a problem legislators and the governor created. Teachers and kids deserve better and now the courts will do what lawmakers resisted doing: force an increase in school funding and taxes. The small-government activist observes that as long as he’s been around, schools keep saying they want more money no matter how much they’re getting at the time. Times have been hard in his part of the state, and everybody’s got to share the pain when the budget’s tight.

“With lower income taxes the implement dealer can hire more people,” I toss out, “and jobs like that mean kids won’t leave my town for good.”

“But when your daughter goes to K-State, the tuition will bust even your bank,” Kaye counters, which gets me thinking about how, in a decade, four years at K-State or, God forbid, KU will pinch even a somewhat successful small-town lawyer.

Hold up for a moment, Greg says, telling us that the discussion is descending into knee-jerk territory. He suggests we think carefully about the values that lie behind each of our positions.

18.

a school funding hypothetical

Soon, we’re sinking deeper into defining what a suitable education is. I share that, when I was on the school board, the administration always seemed to find money for new computers and smart screens and could pad the reserve fund, but my son’s math book is a decade old and his grade school class can’t take any field trips.

Meanwhile, our school superintendent has the highest-paying job in the entire county.

The preacher from Wichita — his wife’s a special ed teacher — says the city’s district has thousands of kids with all kinds of problems that make it difficult to learn. Helping kids in poverty is expensive, and it seems like there are more in need every day. The schools there have so many programs that parents move to the district to get its services. That’s a big challenge with money so tight, the pastor says.

On top of that, he continues, the district has a tough time filling teaching jobs in areas such as math and science, as well as in special ed. That may only get tougher with more baby-boomer teachers reaching retirement age and young people not seeing teaching as a viable, rewarding profession.

“I wonder if we’re on the verge of a crisis in terms of having enough qualified teachers to fill our classrooms,” the pastor says. “My daughter would have been a great teacher. But she found a job at Cerner, instead, and I have a hard time arguing with her choice.”

The challenges that teachers face in the classroom each day become a topic of conversation as well.

“I’d like it if my niece’s teacher didn’t have to corral 30 other 8-year-olds,” Kaye says, and I remember how my own kids’ elementary school can no longer afford an aide for that unusually big class, now fourth-graders, moving through the school.

Over the course of the next few hours, we start talking about the future and what it is we really want our school system to do for the kids of this state. Are we trying to get everyone to meet a minimum set of standards? Aim higher? What kind of education do kids really need to succeed in today’s world and how do we know if they’re getting it?

“I think what’s hard about this issue for me is that I just want someone to tell me the magic number for what we need to put in schools, whether it’s the court or some egghead’s cost study,” I say. “But I’m starting to think that magic number just doesn’t really exist.”

“And even if it did, all we’d do is argue about the number some more,” Kaye interjects. “Some people will think it’s too big, others too small. It’s always about how so-and-so didn’t figure this or account for that correctly. We fight about the number so much that we never get to the heart of the issue.”

“Or it’s just another round of the blame game,” the preacher joins in. “The Legislature failed. The schools are spending their money wrong. There are too many bad teachers. The voters can’t decide what they want — low taxes or well-funded schools. We can always turn a blind eye to how we’re adding to the mess by pinning the blame on somebody else.”

Bouncing what I’m hearing around in my own head, I’m struck by how deeply felt the opinions are, and how most of them are based on things we Kansans like to talk about — how important

19.

“i think we can all benefit from taking a big enough step back to see ourselves and this issue through other people’s eyes.”

20.

a school funding hypothetical

our cities and town are to us, how we want our kids to see a future in our communities. I remember hearing the same things from my neighbors last month when I asked about what they expected from the state, and what they’d give up, or pay, to get it. Striking, too, is that sitting and talking with these folks face to face makes it difficult to just write off their views.

It gets harder, though, when Greg tells us to consider the various plausible ways that the schoolfunding controversy may turn out and to consider the consequences. At first the scenarios sound mighty theoretical, but then Greg describes how the method has been used in situations far messier than this one, such as when South Africa ventured out of apartheid. With some guidance and questioning, we come up with a half-dozen scenarios but whittle them down to the three most likely ones.

With our scenarios in hand, the 50 of us reunite in the big room and discuss with the head facilitator what we divined. We find that nearly all the groups sketched out very similar possibilities, observing that the court ruling narrowed the possibilities a good bit. While we agree that it is still possible that the courts will decide that schools are adequately funded, we’re not willing to bank on such a decision resolving any controversy for the long haul. And we agree that we can’t simply ignore rulings of the court entirely.

We nickname Scenario No. 1 “Just Put Out the Fires.” The Legislature keeps coming up with quick fixes to resolve the constitutional imbalances found by the court. But the underlying issues — and a real discussion of the kinds of schools Kansas wants and will support — keeps getting kicked aside or down the road a year or two. We risk the possibility of another ruling in the future igniting a constitutional crisis.

A second scenario we end up calling “Protect Home Plate.” Rather than addressing school funding as a problem that we all have a stake in, we protect our home bases by fighting for what’s best for our own people, be it our political party, profession or schools. The end result is an outcome where some factions or groups absorb a disproportionate share of the loss associated with changing the system. It’s a result that sows the seeds for future conflicts.

But there’s another possibility, one we take to calling “Everybody Takes a Hit.” It is appealing for the very fact that, unlike the first two, it might put us on the path to resolving the funding fight in a more lasting way. We step forward, a group of adversaries who disagree on a lot, to begin reimagining the next era of our public education financing system and building it in a way that makes sure schools get the funding they need and the lawsuits go away, if not for good, then at least for decades. The challenge comes in the fact that each faction is likely to take a lump or two along the way to make progress possible.

On one level, it makes perfect sense. No one wins for very long under the current cycle of lawsuits.

Plus, it acknowledges that we’ll all need to pitch in to accomplish something, and that we’re all likely going to have to stomach something that isn’t appealing. That last part unnerves all of us.

No one really knows what that kind of system looks like. And it opens up all sorts of questions about how we’ll change the existing system and what it will mean for each group in the state.

21.

a school funding hypothetical

How will our funding system change? Where will we direct the money? Will some districts lose while others gain? Will there be consolidation? Whose taxes will go up? Whose taxes will go down?

Will we cut spending in other areas of government? Will we change how school districts operate?

Start more charter schools? Offer vouchers? All of a sudden, someone has emptied a bottle of bitter pills on the table, and some of them will be tough to swallow.

“I don’t know how I could possibly go back home and tell people that we’re pumping more money into government and that we might have to raise taxes,” I confess to Kaye.

“You surely don’t think I want to talk compromise with some of the teachers in my district, do you?” Kaye shoots back. “Some of them don’t want to hear of schools getting a dime less than they got back before the last round of tax cuts, just like your supporters don’t want to hear about tax hikes. And now those teachers feel like the politicians are settling a score and attacking them.”

Still, none of us think we can live with Scenarios Nos. 1 or 2 either. Just putting out the fires or protecting home plate will ultimately only lead us back to where we just left, a place of repetitive conflict and crisis.

After two surprisingly quick days in the Flint Hills, the meeting concludes and we’re preparing to head back to our various towns and jobs. We make plans to meet again in July and reassess where we are then. We haven’t agreed on a firm path to resolving the issue. There’s no real plan yet, at least none that we can hope to agree on.

The one thing that’s changed, though, is I see the world differently than I did before. I haven’t changed my mind about keeping taxes low. Or the need for smaller, more efficient government.

Kaye hasn’t flip-flopped on schools needing more money.

But I’m no longer thinking so much that it’s “us vs. them.” It’s hard, but I’m trying to see that we all share a common enemy, a less than ideal status quo that will carry on unless we do something different to address it. When it comes to that challenge, I see a wider range of options on the table for making progress than I had realized previously.

I leave thinking more about the long term. About how we fund education appropriately and sustainably and have the state have competitive taxes and be a magnet for jobs. How we can create certainty and consistency for students and employers. And how, back in Topeka and in my district, I will encourage others to work on sharing the pain rather than ignoring the bigger issues or focusing only on protecting their own interests.

And then I tell Kaye, “I don’t know how this story ends. I hope we really can break the cycle together this time. I just don’t know that it’s very realistic.”

“Stranger things have happened,” she replies. “The governor stepped up and invited us all here.

And then we actually came. Who’d have thought that possible?”

Editor’s note: This description of a hypothetical process to resolve the Kansas school funding dispute is based on interviews with experts experienced in leadership, civic collaboration, public engagement and conflict resolution. It is informed by the techniques of fiction writing and the concept of transformative scenario planning, as described by writer Adam Kahane in a 2012 book on the subject (see p. 9).

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the

s c e na r i o s : just put o ut the fires

prot e c t home p l at e

e v e ry b o dy ta k e s a h i t

Quick fixes resolve constitutional dilemmas.

But underlying issues remain unaddressed.

Factions end up fighting only for their own interests.

• May place the work of resolving deeper issues in the hands of the courts.

One faction or group ends up being a clear loser and absorbing a disproportionate share of the loss associated with changes in school funding.

Parties start reimagining the school-funding system based on the clear outcomes they want to achieve and look to fund it in ways that diminish the possibility of future lawsuits.

•

•

Risk of school funding crisis reigniting if courts rule again and the Legislature reacts in defiance

Hard feelings sow the seeds for future conflicts – and perhaps even lawsuits.

•

• May not resolve the issues of equity and adequacy.

23.

• A wider array of possibilities is put on the table, and factions carefully consider what bitter pills they are willing to swallow.

• Factions develop stronger relationships with other factions and can better empathize with the losses other factions must sustain in service of a more lasting solution.

sharpening leadership skills in any college classroom

UNIQUE EXPERIMENT SEES PROFESSORS BRING LEADERSHIP IDEAS INTO COLLEGE CLASSROOMS, REGARDLESS OF THE SUBJECT

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By Anne Dewvall

On a cold morning inside a classroom of a 1950s brick building, young men and women, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, deposit backpacks on the floor, pull out notebooks and click ballpoint pens.

Professor Gary Wyatt faces the class at 9 a.m., the white board already filled with a bulleted outline of civic leadership competencies – diagnose situation, manage self, energize others, intervene skillfully – and many students have already begun diligently copying the words.

But when Wyatt speaks, it’s not to discuss leadership, but social problems. This isn’t a leadership class, but a freshman-level sociology course.

Most of the students are enrolled to fulfill one of their general education requirements, but these particular students will get more than they bargained for.

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This class, Sociology 102, is one of a handful of experiments occurring across the campus of Emporia State University this spring embedding Kansas Leadership Center principles about exercising leadership directly into general education courses.

Wyatt alternates between course material and the challenges of exercising leadership. He never reads the outline on the board but instead uses real-life examples and hypothetical scenarios to illustrate those competencies. Overcoming the bystander effect to aid a victim, Wyatt illustrates, is one example of risk.

The engagement between the KLC and Emporia State is the first of its kind for both organizations.

Emporia State President Michael Shonrock wanted to distinguish the university by approaching higher education in a new way that is more relevant for the 21st century. His 150-year-old institution was looking for ways to reinvent itself as the university re-examines its mission for higher education, faces reaccreditation and develops a new strategic plan.

For the Kansas Leadership Center, the journey toward a school partnership started earlier, as far back as 2007 when the center was forming its strategic vision.

At the time, the KLC made a conscious decision to focus on adult educational experiences. But President and CEO Ed O’Malley never stopped thinking about the potential to work with a school like Emporia State.

As the discussion veers to the differences between authority and leadership, students stop writing and start responding. The concept resonates, and a deeper type of learning seems to be taking place. They’re not just dissecting a story in the textbook; they’re talking about handling problems in Emporia.

The KLC knew that if it could find a school interested in embedding ideas about leadership into its system, then it could connect with hundreds or thousands of young people over time, dramatically multiplying the number of Kansans it reaches each year.

For Wyatt, leadership principles are the missing piece that helps students find answers to serious social problems confronting society. “It really helps me take the curriculum out of statistical and theoretical kinds of exercises and turn them into something where when students leave, they will have the skills to [take action].”

Emporia State possessed two necessary characteristics that made a large-scale engagement with the KLC possible. The school was nimble enough to implement changes quickly and possessed the desire to create distinctiveness.

Some classes are better suited to explicitly teaching leadership concepts, Wyatt says, but even in seemingly unrelated disciplines like mathematics and science, leadership competencies can be taught implicitly.

O’Malley had occasionally pitched the idea of a partnership to other school administrators, but when he was introduced to Shonrock by KLC alum Tyler Curtis, Shonrock immediately saw promise.

Shonrock invited Wyatt into the conversation to brainstorm what a leadership engagement at Emporia State would look like.

A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND EXPERIMENT Across the campus, similar experiments are occurring as faculty members adapt leadership principles to meet the needs of their own courses.

Those discussions led to a volunteer group attending an intense three-day workshop at the KLC in August and returning to Emporia with lots of ideas for experiments.

Some, like Wyatt, rewrote their curriculum to fit; others are trying a less formal approach. All are experimenting outside their comfort zone, and no one knows quite what to expect.

26.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A view of Emporia State’s mascot, Corky the Hornet, from in front of Plumb Hall. ESU officials hope to use leadership to benefit students and staff by developing a culture that builds capacity to make progress on difficult issues; Gary Wyatt, associate dean of the school of liberal arts, teaches a sociology class. Wyatt has used leadership principles to help students find answers to serious social problems confronting society. Each instructor has the freedom to choose how to integrate leadership into his or her curriculum; Nathan Woolard, Emporia State’s director of leadership studies, teaches a class on campus. He credits ESU’s passion for leadership and its emerging partnership with the KLC with attracting him to Emporia.

TOP: Emporia State University President Michael Shonrock looked at embedding leadership ideas into the classroom as a way to distinguish the university in the realm of higher education.

LEFT: Emporia State, a 150-year-old institution, has been looking for ways to reinvent itself as it re-examines its mission, faces accreditation and develops a new strategic plan.

Some classes are better suited to explicitly teaching leadership concepts, but even in seemingly unrelated disciplines like mathematics and science, leadership competencies can be taught implicitly.

IN THE HANDS OF THE FACULTY

“We never envisioned that every single general education course and every program would participate,” Wyatt says. “We’d really be making a mistake if we imposed it on everyone.”

Some faculty have already incorporated leadership teaching into their syllabi – even using “For the Common Good: Redefining Civic Leadership,” a book by O’Malley and KLC Senior Fellow David D. Chrislip, as required reading. Each instructor has the freedom to choose how to integrate leadership into his or her curriculum. Participation feels organic, more like a movement than a pilot program.

CREATING A SYSTEM Shonrock has let the staff guide the effort – demonstrating the competency of “intervene skillfully” by giving the work back. Instead of commanding from the president’s office, Shonrock has tried to energize the group.

“Sometimes it’s seamless; sometimes it’s very purposeful,” Shonrock says. “I can’t think of any discipline that couldn’t incorporate some or all of the KLC competencies — even science.” After all, he points out, scientists must diagnose situations.

“You can’t mandate a shared purpose,” O’Malley emphasizes. “You must inspire a shared purpose.

Commitment to this idea is growing, but it won’t work if it’s forced. It’s important to give faculty the freedom to take this into their work in their own way.”

Experimentation is perhaps a brave step for academics rooted in tradition. An uncertain outcome is risky in any organization but may be especially uncomfortable in higher education. For many faculty members, teaching a new way has made them vulnerable. Participating in “mini-teaches” in front of a committee for feedback was particularly uncharacteristic for professors but provided them an opportunity to “manage self.”

The theme of the spring semester has been “act experimentally,” but experimentation poses challenges.

Busy schedules, heavy workloads and budget cuts strain even the most enthusiastic faculty. Finding ways to support this effort is one of the challenges the group faces.

It’s this sort of willingness to sacrifice personal comfort that shows just how much Emporia State faculty are invested in the pursuit of improving students’ educations and making Emporia State better, O’Malley says. “This experiment will succeed or fail based on [the faculty].”

“We need to make sure people have the support they need, to help people develop perspective and insight,” Wyatt says.

There are still tough questions to answer and they weigh on Shonrock’s mind. “What things can we do programmatically? How does this become a system, become the fiber of what we do, the bigger picture?”

While faculty members have expressed a healthy amount of scholarly inquiry, the effort hasn’t met any opposition, partly because teaching leadership is not mandatory.

In spite of challenges, those on the Emporia State

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Deborah Gerish, associate professor of history, participates in a workshop at the Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita. A volunteer group of professors has attended workshops at KLC to develop approaches integrating leadership into their curriculums; Nathaniel Terrell, associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Crime and Delinquency Studies, attends a workshop for ESU faculty at KLC; Marissa Germann, student government vice president, and student government president Rachael Countryman talk in the student union about plans for events and issues on the campus each week. Both students have participated on the ESU team learning with KLC.

The feeling on campus is that leadership development could become Emporia State’s defining feature – and perhaps even be a model for other universities. team are cautiously optimistic and already discussing plans to expand the leadership experience beyond general education.

Incorporating leadership teaching into cocurricular and extracurricular activities is a logical next step, says Shonrock, who stresses the importance of integrating leadership training into the university holistically, starting with faculty and staff development.

Marissa Germann, student government vice president, who is participating on the team with student government president Racheal Countryman, found learning about exercising leadership through the KLC to be a transformative experience that she wants to share with other student organizations.

Nathan Woolard, Emporia State’s director of leadership studies, credits the emerging KLC partnership and Emporia State’s passion for leadership with attracting him to Emporia.

At a January retreat for student government senators, Germann helped facilitate a 30-minute introduction to KLC competencies. “I wanted the takeaway to be that being a senator wasn’t in itself an act of leadership,” she says.

Woolard is the first person at Emporia State to fill a full-time role teaching leadership and is charged with helping advance leadership concepts throughout the university. “I believe that the university’s commitment to the ‘common good’ as an institutional framework has the potential to be very beneficial to the Emporia community at large.”

Awareness about the general education leadership experiments is growing; Shonrock mentioned it in his general assembly and on a local radio show, and excitement is spreading on campus. But these are concepts students must experience to understand, Germann emphasizes.

Shonrock hopes that the leadership competencies can become a shared language that opens the university to the community.

Ultimately, the vision is to benefit students and staff members by creating a culture that builds capacity to make progress on difficult issues.

Germann’s time on campus will end in May, but she hopes others, including her younger brother, who is a freshman, will be a part of the transformational change she sees beginning.

While the KLC currently works with about 1,000 Kansans a year, working with an entire university could dramatically increase the KLC’s impact, O’Malley says.

“I think it will be an awesome statement piece and tool for [student] retention,” she says.

For now, it’s important to keep people focused on why we are doing this, Shonrock says. The goal is to make Emporia State – and Kansas – better. Teaching leadership is not just a way to stay competitive in a changing higher education landscape, but an organizational imperative for the civic-minded school.

In the short term, JoLanna Kord, Emporia State’s director of assessment, is developing an assessment strategy to evaluate the teaching of leadership competencies and skills.

The feeling on campus is that leadership development could become Emporia State’s defining feature – and perhaps even be a model for other universities. General education is only the starting point.

“Civic leadership is a form of civic rent – you do these things because you’re paying back your community,” Shonrock says.

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T WE A M

GETTING TO THE

WE I N TEAM

Effective teams can increase the scale on which progress occurs. Yet working with others can be difficult. Explore the delicate balance required to meaningfully contribute to a team without entirely losing yourself.

By Er i n P e r r y O’Donnell

27.

“team”

Has the word been drained of all meaning? The joke in some large companies is that any four people in an elevator are automatically a team.

As leadership consultant Robert J. Thomas points out, “You can’t not say you’re a team.” But some citizens and organizations are reclaiming the core concept of what it means to be a team making progress on daunting challenges.

In the corporate world, executive leadership teams are relearning roles and breaking down walls between departments and creating a culture that fosters creativity and innovation. In civic life, leadership teams tend to form around issues, drawing people from different backgrounds into a collaborative group that strives to speak with one voice.

As a research fellow at Accenture Institute for High Performance, a “think and act tank” based in Cambridge, Mass., Thomas has studied and consulted with teams in all shapes and sizes: international banks, small municipalities and even the United Nations.

What he’s found is that some team problems are universal. Teams often lack clarity about roles, about how they make decisions and about their unique responsibilities.

“That became something of great interest to me: why teams at the top don’t behave like teams, and why so many of them complain of the same challenges,” Thomas says.

He says a successful leadership team must be able to: • Make joint decisions and keep them decided.

• Speak with one voice.

• Model the behaviors it wants others to emulate — especially collaborative ones.

Thomas Stanley, who has managed Kansas Leadership Center partnerships that utilize teams to create measurable changes, agrees that teams must be clear about their purpose. Successful teams spend far more time – up to 20 percent of their meeting time – talking about their purpose, Stanley says.

They also check in with one another about what’s going well, what they could be doing better and what issues they may be avoiding.

“It can be pretty uncomfortable,” Stanley says.

“But it’s helpful for effective teams.”

    At The Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Wichita, the parish and school staff devote a segment of their weekly meeting to reviewing the principles they learned through KLC’s Leadership & Faith program.

C.Y. Suellentrop, new evangelization coordinator and bookkeeper, says the staff has become more collaborative, especially because their pastor, the Rev. John Jirak, encourages it. “Father’s really been good about throwing back the decision making,” she says. “He’ll speak to the input that’s in the room and let the decision evolve that way.”

Even with the traditional power structure in place, Suellentrop says, staff members feel empowered to take more initiative. They also seek more feedback from parishioners than in the past, she says. A few years ago, Suellentrop says, some members were deeply upset when the church remodeled its adoration chapel without asking for input. More recently, when the church received a donation of artwork, Jirak polled the congregation about whether to take on the cost of restoring and installing the piece with better results.

Although churches can have strong authority

34.

Cornelia Stevens helped lead a coalition team writing a grant to obtain funding for the state’s first crisis nursery in Wichita.

The center provides emergency child care for families who might otherwise leave children at home or with unfit caregivers.

35.

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: C.Y. Suellentrop, evangelization coordinator and bookkeeper at The Church of the Blessed Sacrament, and Brandon Martin, business manager, read the Bible during the weekly meeting. Members of the Blessed Sacrament staff meet each week for prayer and to review the principles they learned through KLC’s Leadership & Faith program.

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structures, they’re one of the most common places to find authority figures leading as a team, often alongside ordinary church members. “There is a lot of respect and deference to those different roles, and understandably so,” says Allie Denning, who has helped coordinate team-based programs for KLC.

That meant, if push came to shove, prizing progress over total agreement.

“One of the members looked at me once and said, ‘What if we don’t agree? Do we stop the process or keep going?’ Stevens says. “I had to get to a place where I might not be able to please everyone 100 percent, and be OK with that.”

Unlike a corporate management team made up of senior staff, Denning says an issue-focused team should include representatives from all levels of the organization. It’s important for the members to see one another as equals and to leverage each of their unique strengths.

Seeking consensus meant the process took longer.

Stevens would write a draft and email it to the rest of the team. Feedback was not just requested; it was required. No decisions about the grant or the nursery were made without input from everyone. And her teammates weren’t afraid to give it, she says.

  “If it didn’t feel right, they said it. That was important, that transparency,” she says. “Good, bad or ugly, we’d say it, and it wasn’t viewed as a slam against somebody. We felt safe enough to say it and resilient enough to hear it.”

For that to happen, team members have to spend a great deal of time building trust. It helps when they are committed to a shared purpose.

When the Coalition for Child Abuse Prevention in Wichita sought funding for the state’s first crisis nursery, members of a coalition team wrote the grant together. A crisis nursery provides emergency child care for families who might otherwise leave children alone or with unfit caregivers.

Originally, the group wanted to open a 24-hour facility.

But only one-fourth of the amount needed for that was available from a grant through the state’s Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund. Together, the team decided to scale back their plans rather than seek the full amount elsewhere.

The coalition itself was formed after eight Wichita children died in 2008 from abuse or neglect, most often at the hands of someone other than a parent.

Most years, that number is zero to two.

“Getting everyone in agreement on changing the model didn’t mean we were giving up on the dream.

It’s just a baby step,” says Stevens, who has since become executive director of TOP Early Learning Centers, an early childhood program for low-income children in the Wichita area.

In writing the grant, an eight-person team sought unanimity in every decision, says Cornelia Stevens, who then worked for the Kansas Children’s Service League. Stevens, who served as the team’s convener, agreed to write the grant, but she didn’t want it to come across as a KCSL project. The group wanted the proposal to be made in the voice of the coalition, which has representatives from 30 agencies in law enforcement, health care and social services.

“I was very sensitive to making sure everybody was in agreement,” Stevens says. Despite the team’s goal of unanimity, Stevens prepared herself to push the group forward even if there was disagreement.

In October, the nursery opened within Adventure Planet, an existing child care facility on West 13th Street. It’s in one of the 10 ZIP codes where the coalition had previously identified the greatest need for abuse intervention because of poverty levels, past reports of abuse and other risk factors. Long term, the coalition would still like to provide emergency child care in all of those neighborhoods. “But in the end, I think everyone was happy,”Stevens says.

37.

part of that, we understand,’” Denning says. “It can be hard to deal with because it can be hard to leave someone behind. There can be some hurt feelings and hurt relationships if you have some of those people on your team.”

  Robert J. Thomas of the Accenture Institute says that kind of unanimity is one of four ways a team can handle decision-making. But it’s the most rare. The other forms are minority rule (the person in charge calls the shots), majority rule (the group takes a vote), and consensus-based, where there is more of an effort for everyone to feel some ownership in decisions.

In a church setting, outside pressures can weigh on a leadership team, too. Denning says some church leaders have a hard time not taking it personally when people object to a change, or when rumors fly in a congregation over a misunderstanding. That’s when team members must remember to support one another.

Whichever way your team goes, it’s important that everyone knows what to expect. If people come into a meeting expecting to give input and a decision has already been made, Thomas says, it undermines their support and their sense of worth to the team.

  That also illustrates why team members should all be able to speak the group’s message with consistency, across the board.

Leading as a team doesn’t necessarily mean there is no authority figure, says KLC’s Thomas Stanley.

Sometimes it’s important to know who has the final say or simply whose role it is to keep the team on track.

Speaking with one voice isn’t the same as issuing talking points, Thomas says. It happens naturally when everyone on the team has internalized the team’s purpose and checks in with one another for understanding.

“Authority is incredibly helpful, but it has its place, and it’s easy to be too reliant on it,” Stanley says. “Someone needs to set the agenda and stop the rabbit trails when they happen. That’s an authority dynamic.”

“In the absence of your ability to speak with one voice, chances are, people are going to hear very different things,” Thomas says. “Think about the implications of what that’s going to be.”

The challenge, Stanley says, is how to encourage everyone to engage in acts of leadership when there is also someone who holds the decision-making power.

At Blessed Sacrament, Suellentrop says, the parish and school staff have thrived in an atmosphere that is more collaborative even with a strong authority figure in place. “The big thing for us is that it has increased the openness and our ability to raise the heat.”

Getting in sync takes practice. Thomas has coached corporate teams through “aha” moments by asking individuals to articulate the decision they just made as a group. Inevitably, someone pops up with an objection or a correction.

If a team desires consensus, but one or two people just aren’t on board, says KLC’s Denning, it’s worthwhile to slow down and speak to the loss they may be feeling. Consensus may come over time, but then again, it might not.

“At some level, the team has got to be good at conversation, debate and self-monitoring – quite literally the ability to periodically step out of role and say, is this the way we want to talk about it to the rest of the organization?” or to the public.

“Some people might make a decision that, ‘This is how we’re going to move, so if you don’t want to be

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Mikkel Parker, Orlando Hernandez, Maddox Hemberger, Riley Thompson, Liam Cook, Mallory Harvey and Ariel Cruz watch a movie before lunch at Adventure Planet; Amy Ivy of Adventure Planet, a child care facility in west Wichita, rocks Brayden Smith. Last October, the state’s first crisis nursery opened inside Adventure Planet, which sits in one of the 10 ZIP codes in Wichita with the greatest need for abuse intervention because of poverty levels, past reports of abuse and other risk factors. The crisis center effort sprang from the work of the Coalition for Child Abuse Prevention in Wichita; Adventure Planet’s Emily Kilgore reads to Ariel Cruz, Ethan Cotton, Isaac Soloranzo, Sophie Threet and Mikkel Parker.

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agreement

“Getting everyone in on changing the model didn’t mean we were giving up on the

D R E A M

”

Zariah Bailey, Jackson Gier, Anareli Soloranzo and Isabella Johnson laugh as they play at Adventure Planet, which includes a crisis nursery. Long term, the coalition to prevent child abuse would like to provide emergency child care in all the Wichita neighborhoods with the biggest risks factors for child abuse.

The Good of the Group Team members must see themselves as partners working for the common good, leadership consultant Robert J. Thomas says.

Most people will naturally advocate for their constituents, but they must make the larger agenda their priority.

A Little Structure Helps Even a loose authority structure helps rein in tangents and keep the group focused. A convener can make the technical decisions efficiently to free up the group for more adaptive, difficult work.

5

Reach Across the Aisle Each person on the team should make the effort to understand what everyone else’s roles and goals are.

Learn how their parts contribute to and depend upon your own.

STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL TEAM

Listen for the Unusual Voices Does everyone on your team have a position of authority?

Try to include others who don’t – for instance, a regular church member, a community volunteer, a client of the organization.

Try to get several different perspectives.

Heat is Good When things are getting uncomfortable, it may mean you’re on to something. If it’s creating heat for you, it’s probably creating heat for others. Push your group to work through those difficult conversations and address the elephants in the room directly.

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Listen as much as you speak, and give the process the time it needs.

CORNELIA STEVENS Executive Director, TOP Early Learning Centers

important to mobilize people to make progress than to simply make progress yourself, no matter how much you can accomplish alone.

     At First Christian Church of Pittsburg, the Rev. Kevin Arensman discovered the value of a strong message when he decided to start an arts program for neighborhood children.

As a result, he says, more leaders are turned loose in the community. “When I started programs on my own and hoped that others would follow my lead, I was disappointed with the results,” Arensman says.

“When I purposefully brought others on board where they could experience not only the accomplishment, but also an understanding of what it took to achieve it, then people were more likely to take on leadership and even allow me to turn over the reins.”

Arensman, a musician himself who hosted open mic nights in town, had always wanted to use arts and music to extend the church’s community outreach. A longtime church member, Chuck Peterson, suggested they use the church for a community arts program.

They began shopping the idea around to other church members. “Every time we brought people in, we would let Chuck paint the vision,” Arensman says.

The people at the Pittsburg church may also find it easier to take a risk on a worthwhile project sometime in the future because of this experience, he added. It takes a foundation of trust and a lot of practice to share leadership. It doesn’t feel natural.

Likewise, the results may not be typical. A team can often be better positioned to foster change of a larger scale than an individual can.

A team formed around the ASAP, or After School Arts Program, and the group found a director who agreed to stay for at least one year. When registration opened in January 2013, the response was overwhelming – 50 kids from the nearby elementary school signed on in less than a week.

Cornelia Stevens of the Wichita child abuse prevention coalition encourages teams to be open, especially when it feels risky, and not to let the elephant in the room take over. Listen as much as you speak, and give the process the time it needs, she says.

“The kids were saying things like, ‘Wow, this is finally something for me.’ There was no question that it really met a niche.”

But in the summer, Arensman left Pittsburg to become pastor of a church in Sayre, Pa. The program director also moved on. In their absence, ASAP was discontinued. Arensman said that was a disappointment, but his hope, and his belief, is that he helped plant seeds in the church and the community that will bear future fruit. Chief among them is the idea that it’s more

“Be willing to point out that woolly mammoth.

Develop the trust with the group to be able to do that,” Stevens says. “As people are willing to be honest, you’ll find out that you can leave unscathed and think, ‘That wasn’t too bad.’”

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CALLED TO

ACTION 44.

FACED WITH THE TRAGIC DEATH OF THEIR DAUGHTER, ACADEMICS TURNED ACTIVISTS HOPE TO USE HER STORY TO CHANGE SOCIETY FOR THE BETTER By Pat sy Terrell

Does telling the story of a loss have the power to save the lives of others?

LIVING A DISCIPLINE Civic leadership has been at the heart of the work Curt and Christie have done for years. He is a professor and the executive director of the Center for Civic Leadership at Fort Hays State and specializes in political leadership, social change and community organizing. She is a senior fellow in the same department and her areas of expertise include women and leadership and women’s studies.

Curt and Christie Brungardt, a pair of leadership scholars at Fort Hays State University turned activists against domestic violence after the murder of their daughter, seek to make the answer to that question ultimately be an unequivocal “yes.”

Nearly six years ago, Jana Mackey, a 25-year-old University of Kansas law student and advocate for women’s and domestic violence issues, was murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

That leadership work has taken on a new dimension as the couple now spend a considerable amount of their time on Jana’s Campaign, in addition to their full-time jobs at Fort Hays State. Very soon after Jana’s death, Curt knew he and Christie had a mission to carry on her work. “It was time to leave my ivory tower and go to the streets and live my discipline.”

Christie, Jana’s mother, and Curt, her stepfather, have taken up Jana’s work of bringing equality, love and justice to the world through Jana’s Campaign, which focuses on education and prevention of gender and relationship violence.

It has not been without struggle. “Emotionally, you have a wound and you keep scratching the scab off.

You never let it heal,” Christie says.

But the road to progress is not easy when harnessing deeply personal pain to action for the benefit of the common good. Having suffered a traumatic loss, they work to mobilize many others with Jana’s story, deal with factions both friendly to and skeptical of their efforts, and preserve their own marriage and family life amid their activism.

“It has cost us in our marriage,” she says. They’ve fought over what to do and how to do it.

They have begun to realize why it is that when most couples face a similar situation, one does the advocacy work and the other continues daily life. Because they work together at Fort Hays State and also on Jana’s Campaign, Christie says they talk leadership or Jana what seems like almost 24-7.

It can be overwhelming at times.

“There have been many days I’ve said, ‘I wish we hadn’t started this. I wish we hadn’t done this,’” says Curt. But despite the challenges, they feel compelled to continue the work. “Society lost a great advocate for women when Jana was killed, and it’s the responsibility of those who knew her to make up that difference for humankind,” Curt says.

In addition to the obvious grief of losing a child, they’ve also lost the idea of the life they were planning together.

“As Jana’s mom, it feels like she would be so mad if I didn’t,” Christie says. “She would expect me to.”

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“I’VE OFTEN ASKED, ‘IS THE REASON CHRISTIE AND I WERE TRAINED TO BE CIVIC LEADERSHIP SCHOLARS WAS TO BE JANA MACKEY’S PARENTS? IS THAT THE REAL MEANING? IS THAT THE SPIRIT OF HISTORY?’” CURT BRUNGARDT

“One day you’ve got a life you like going on. You’ve got a good job, you’ve got a great family, you’ve got a lake house and a boat, and then all of a sudden you have two full-time jobs and you’re sad all the time.

It’s not something I had envisioned,” Curt says.

THE POWER OF A STORY The beginnings of their effort also started at Jana’s funeral, where Curt encouraged the 1,100 people attending to take up Jana’s torch and make a difference. Although it wasn’t formally planned, 1100torches.org was born when a former student asked if she could create a website. In less than a year the website catalogued 1,100 acts done in memory of Jana.

But the couple find solace in their ability to step back from conflict when it occurs. When they disagree, Curt says, they take a timeout. “It’s time to reflect, time to think, listen to the other side, the other perspective and find the middle ground,” he says.

That year also gave Curt and Christie some time to learn about a field their daughter cared about.

Although Jana had been a lobbyist at the Statehouse for three years and volunteered at the domestic violence safe house in Lawrence for six years, her parents were not experts on the matter.

They also share a belief that this is the work they are called to do even through difficulties.

At Jana’s funeral, Curt held up a book he had given Jana when she was graduating from high school, “Walking with the Wind” by John Lewis, an inspirational account of the civil rights movement. It’s a book Curt loves and has taught for years. Curt and Christie believe in Lewis’ concept of the spirit of history.

“We were third-graders among graduate students,” Curt says. But they believed they had to move forward. “If you wait until you know everything you need to do it, it will never happen. You have to learn and adapt,” Christie says.

“Circumstances in life put certain people in certain places to do certain things, and Lewis calls it the ‘spirit of history,’“ says Curt. “I've often asked, ‘Is the reason Christie and I were trained to be civic leadership scholars was to be Jana Mackey's parents? Is that the real meaning? Is that the spirit of history?’”

They realized many of the people working in the field were doing it separate from a story. “We knew we had a powerful story,” Christie says. After very careful consideration, they decided to make Jana’s story central to their work, and created Jana’s Campaign (janascampaign.org). “All great social movements are led and encouraged by a single story or a series of stories,” Curt says.

That sense of destiny drives them. “There was never a question we would do something,” Christie says.

“The question was how that would look.”

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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Prior to her death in 2008, Jana Mackey served as an advocate for women’s and domestic violence issues.

Her work included serving as a lobbyist for the Kansas National Organization for Women for three years and a volunteer advocate at a center for victims of sexual violence; Jana graduated from Hays High School in 2000 and received an undergraduate degree in women’s studies in 2004 from the University of Kansas. Her talents included being a singer and actress; Curt and Christie Brungardt now share the story of Jana’s life with dozens of groups each year. Here they stand next to a painting made by Lawrence artist Jordan Tarrant that uses words that best described Jana; Curt Brungardt talks during a meeting with campus police officers at Johnson County Community College; Jana Mackey’s gravesite sits in a Harper County cemetery in south-central Kansas. At Jana’s funeral, Curt Brungardt encouraged the 1,100 people attending to take up Jana’s torch and make a difference. That led to creation of a website that catalogued 1,100 acts done in her memory.

The campaign puts energy into five areas: public awareness and community action; education, prevention and intervention; public policy advocacy; campus action; and engaging men and boys to reduce gender violence. The Brungardts do a lot of public speaking and try to build partnerships with others working in the field.

The Brungardts share the story of Jana’s life and death with dozens of groups a year. They speak to middle-school-age kids, to domestic violence offenders, to college students and many others.

The approach of using Jana’s story as vehicle for reaching others is powerful, says Darrell Hamlin, a colleague at Fort Hays State who has interviewed Curt and Christie about the experience of losing Jana.

“I’ve seen the power of the narrative, the power of storytelling,” Hamlin says. “That’s how they make people understand.”

Annette Lynch, director of the Center for Violence Prevention at the University of Northern Iowa, says bringing Jana’s story to life for others is an important way of making the issue of gender and relationship violence more understandable to a broader array of people.

approach,” Lynch says. “It is very brave of them to continue to go back to that story. Their bravery has translated into a form of leadership.”

One example of their efforts was a recent conference sponsored by Jana’s Campaign in Kansas City that included 42 colleges and universities from a multistate area for training in gender violence prevention. Lynch helped organize the conference and says the Brungardts have made an important transition that speaks toward the long-term sustainability of their effort.

“I think transcending personal pain and thinking about what can create change is where Curt and Christie are at, and not all parents or loved ones associated with a victim are able to do that,” she says. “They used an event that could destroy a marriage and a family and turned it into something their daughter would be very proud of.”

Stephanie Mott, a close friend of Jana, agrees.

“Jana, being an advocate, had seen people face tragedy and, while trying to build policy out of that tragedy, it was counter-productive to work others had been doing,” she says. “I was a little nervous it would head that direction, and I knew she wouldn’t want that. I’m very pleased it has been so productive.”

“It makes this issue not abstract anymore. It turns it into a real story of real people,” Lynch says.

But it’s not just the personal nature of the story that matters; it’s also the “organizational tenacity” that the Brungardts bring toward using the story to make broader impact on the world.

They started Jana’s Campaign in their home and raised $6,000 the first year. When they finished the Jana’s Story video in December 2011, they had $21 left in the bank. Their budget now is about $100,000 a year, and they have one full-time person, two parttime people and two interns working in their offices.

They do 40-60 presentations a year. Curt and Christie do many of them, but they also rely on board members and their staff.

“I’ve done a lot of this kind of work. I haven’t seen a lot of that personal story turn into a systematic

SMALL VICTORIES One place where Jana’s Campaign is having an impact is in the Brungardts’ own backyard. Jana’s Campaign is promoting a program called “Coaching Boys into Men,” which is also used in Iowa by Lynch’s group. Athletes are often representing their schools and communities, and this program encourages them to stand up if they see violence, and to speak up.

Thomas More Prep in Hays is the Jana’s Campaign pilot for the program, and its football coach is John Montgomery, a former student in the FHSU leadership program. Montgomery has set aside time for the program with his football players each week, just like he would to have them work on football fundamentals.

Montgomery says he believes that teachers and coaches have a responsibility to prepare students to be the best versions of themselves and that a conversation about gender and relationship violence shouldn’t be left to chance.

“The whole idea of private grief to public action is what this is about,” Hamlin says. “It’s a story of how private grief can be transformed into a leadership challenge for public change.”

But the fact that the Brungardts’ efforts have sprung forth from their personal grief has been greeted with skepticism by some working in the field. Their focus on education and prevention isn't shared by everyone who works on the issue. And for some existing groups, the prospect of having a new organization working on their own issue represented additional competition for support and resources.

When Montgomery learned about the program, he approached the administration and other coaches about doing it. He was pleased at their willingness to participate.

“My job as a football coach is not all about winning football games, but about teaching life lessons,” Montgomery says. “We have an opportunity at this point in a young man’s life to have an impact and make a difference. We have to create good men.

It’s about molding these boys into great men.”

“When you get involved in social work, the enemies are not necessarily who you think they will be,” Curt says.

One football season into the program and Montgomery says he’s aware not everyone is 100 percent invested in it. But he can see players being more cautious with words they use and how they treat their girlfriends.

When they first began, the Brungardts expected the nonprofits doing advocacy work and victims’ service providers to be their natural allies. Although that was the case for some of the groups, others were not receptive to working with them.

He also knows that statistically, when he looks at a room of 40 players who have mothers and sisters, there’s a high likelihood that someone in their life will be impacted by gender violence. “We’re talking about impacting a generation. If you want to change a culture, you really have to start back in these foundational years,” Montgomery says.

“I think some of them have had negative experiences in the past in working with victims’ families or the victims themselves,” says Curt. “We come to this out of a crisis. They don’t see that we bring any value to their work.”

They also realize they made some mistakes early on that may have been off-putting to some groups.

In the first year after Jana’s death, they were learning the field, but felt they couldn’t wait to begin until they knew everything or they’d never start. So, they began Jana’s Campaign with the idea that they would learn and adapt. However, they now realize that others who had been working in the field for a long time may have found that troubling, seeing them as amateurs.

Small victories like these, which come one person at a time, are what Curt and Christie are counting on.

“Generations are shaped by lots of people making small victories that equal transformational change,” Curt says. Those people will interact with others, which will have long-term impact.

‘UNEXPECTED CONFLICTS’

“Reaching out to some of these organizations before we were prepared probably hurt us,” Curt says. They also got involved in some public policy work and were often speaking to the media. “We allowed people to use us, with our permission, before we knew what a lot of this was about,” Curt says. Some people may have been resentful about that.

But ultimately they want to see Jana’s Campaign be an organization that can continue on without their input – another long-term goal. Their leadership background certainly helps them move beyond the personal to see the bigger picture.

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“WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THE END RESULT WILL BE. WE CAN’T ARTICULATE OUR END GOAL. THAT’S COUNTER TO EVERYTHING I’VE TAUGHT AND BELIEVED.” CHRISTIE BRUNGARDT

Another issue was that most of the groups that were not receptive initially are nonprofits, and nonprofits with shared missions sometimes see one another as competitors instead of collaborators. “Collaboration in a civic leadership context is difficult,” Curt says. “We were naïve in not realizing how difficult it would be.”

Christie: “They’re willing to collaborate, but this is new to them.”

They’ve learned it can’t be forced either.

“Collaboration only works if both parties want it to work,” Christie says. This has been one of the biggest eye-openers for them. “We teach collaboration, and it sounds so good in the classroom,” she says.

But the Brungardts say they believe that perceptions of their work have changed over time, and some people who didn’t want to partner with them early on are now open to it. “We’re showing we’re going to have staying power,” Curt says. “We’re slowly building something here, and it’s something that goes beyond Curt and Christie. As that continues, I hope some of the doors that were shut early on will reopen.”

It’s just another instance where living out leadership in real life has been more complex than it sometimes sounds like it should be. Another change they’ve had to make is to accept that they don’t know where they’re going in the long run. “We don’t know what the end result will be,” Christie says.

“We can’t articulate our end goal. That’s counter to everything I’ve taught and believed.”

Meanwhile, they have discovered unexpected allies.

Government, the state attorney general’s office, law enforcement as well as business and education officials have been welcoming. “Although we know and teach the theories of collaboration, this real-life learning experience taught us we weren’t talking enough about how wide to throw the net,” Christie says. Adds Curt: “Don’t prejudge who your natural allies are.”

But they are trying to find the programs that really resonate, where they think they can make a big difference. Until they figure out what those are, they want to remain a smaller, more nimble organization.

Balancing their civic passion with everything they want to do personally and professionally remains a constant struggle that raises deep, emotional questions. “When you spend more time with your dead daughter than your other four kids, it doesn’t make you feel better,” Curt says.

Curt and Christie focus on education and prevention because they believe that is the way to break the cycle. “Direct services for victims are needed, and they'll be needed for a long time,” Curt says “But if that's all we ever do, we'll always need that service.

I truly believe that within a generation we can make a substantial impact in this issue.”

But both Curt and Christie believe in the mission.

“After about a year, it shifted from being about my daughter to being about everyone else’s daughter,” she says. That includes their granddaughters. “We want Jana’s work and her story to have a positive impact on the human condition,” Christie says.

IMPACTING THE HUMAN CONDITION The Brungardts haven’t given up on collaboration and hope to build up more trust over time. “There are some in the social justice world who have very little experience with collaboration,” Curt says. Adds

“We have this blind faith,” Curt says. “We’ve given ourselves to the spirit of history.”

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Curt Brungardt speaks to campus police officers at Johnson County Community College; the Brungardts have found unexpected allies in government, law enforcement and the state attorney general’s office, as well as business and education officials; Curt Brungardt speaks to a group of high school and middle school coaches in the Coaching Boys into Men program recently in Hays; Curt and his wife, Christie, started Jana’s Campaign in their home but now do 40 to 60 presentations a year on their own or by relying on staff and board members; Thomas More Prep High School head football coach John Montgomery helped start the Coaching Boys into Men program at the Hays school.

FEATURED ARTIST

release By cLARe Doveton

Clare Doveton studied painting at Parsons School of Art and Design in New York City, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1994.

She moved her studio to Kansas in 2005, where she currently works in the Warehouse Arts District of Lawrence. She lives just outside the city on a farm with her husband and two children.

My family lives on a farm where we plod after small organic gardens and pasture a flock of chickens. The trees are few and far between, as home is smack dab in the middle of miles and miles of corn and soybean fields. The landscape around us can appear quite barren at times – particularly in the winter. But there is such beauty to this overwhelming sense of endlessness out here. We see the earth’s curve on the horizon.

The children cheer when the corn is harvested, and the fields are shorn back to dark earth. We howl after the coyotes in the distance and are able to find the pond to fish once again. Out here in the fields, one can see the moon rise and the sun set at the same time. The land and sky go on and on farther than the eye can see, and the sunrise is so spectacular that I could seriously charge for seats.

Each day I carry these memories of home to the studio.

Fluid patterns of light and dark create a dialogue between heavenly and earthly elements. Painting is spontaneous and unplanned — an attempt to reflect the light that pours out of each one of us when one bears true witness to the land. Kansas has such amazing light, distances, stars, colors. In spring, the fields scream green and call to the rain. Summer here casts a deep orange heat. Winter grasses turn auburn, straw-yellow, umber. Oil-pigment documents an experience that changes with the sacred light of each new day.

mind readers IF YOU WA N T TO IM PR OVE YOU R A B ILITY TO U N D ER STA N D OTH ER S A N D LEA D M OR E EFFEC TIVELY, D ON ’T SKIM PA ST TH E B EN EFITS OF R EA D IN G FIC TION

By Chris Green

Having grown up immersed in books, particularly novels, I started to feel a bit embarrassed a few years ago when I realized just how little I read outside of work as an adult. I decided to issue a challenge to myself: I would read at least one book to completion each month.

With the Web, email and social media beginning to consume so much of my time, I hoped that dedicating a few minutes each day for some unplugged reading time would help me recapture some of that sense of exploration and curiosity that propelled my love of reading when I was younger.

I loved the idea of being able to immerse myself in printed words, feel the crispness of the paper in my hands and experience the sense of anticipation that comes with the crackle of turning each new page.

What I didn’t return to very much, at first, was novels.

With all the books out there about leadership, politics, government, travel and business, fiction felt like a frivolous luxury in a world awash with so many great stories and practical information straight from the real world. Reading made-up stories about made-up people represented a diversion that I would turn to just a couple of times a year, if I was lucky.

Over the past year, however, I’ve begun to challenge my previous assumptions about fiction and the potential it has to improve my ability to exercise leadership in both my organization and my community. Beyond offering sheer enjoyment, I’ve come to understand that making time for reading fiction – at least some of the time – is important to furthering one’s development as a leader and human being.

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If you’re like me, exercising leadership effectively will likely require you to become continually more adept at understanding how others think, get more comfortable with embracing ambiguity and gain the wisdom needed to navigate the most daunting tests of your character. There’s a growing body of evidence underscoring that these are exactly the skills and attributes that fiction can play a role in helping you develop and hone.

Why would fiction affect our social skills and openness so much? In an interview, Oatley explained that to our brains, reading functions as a simulation of real life.

Much as pilots use simulators to help themselves prepare to fly, fiction can help us encounter many more situations than we might in everyday life and allow us to more fully understand them.

“Nearly all fiction is about what people are up to in the social world,” Oatley says. “When you use a flight simulator, you get better at flying. With fiction, you get better at understanding what people are up to with each other.”

a social experience My journey toward understanding fiction as a resource for learning about leadership came mostly by accident.

Last year, I felt the desire to commit myself to reading more fiction as a measure of personal growth after novels represented just a tiny fraction of what I had read the year before. But I didn’t begin exploring the links between fiction reading and leadership until I stumbled upon a blog for the Harvard Business Review

by Anne Kreamer, the wife of a novelist herself, titled “The Business Case for Reading Novels.”

Researcher David Comer Kidd at the New School for Social Research in New York City took that idea a step further in comments to The Guardian newspaper last year. He and colleague Emanuele Castano found that literary fiction enhanced the ability to detect and understand people’s emotions. Because “the same psychological processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships. Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience,” he says.

Her piece introduced me to the work of Dr. Keith Oatley, now an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology, and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, whose research has helped show that reading fiction builds empathy, improves one’s ability to take another person’s point of view and “can even change your personality.”

Another aspect of fiction is that it develops our ability to take on the perspectives of other people and see how they have beliefs that are different from our own, a concept known as “theory of mind.” A wellestablished principle in cognitive psychology, Oatley says, is that we think about ourselves differently than we do other people.

For instance, in a 2006 study of 94 adults, Oatley and his colleagues found that the more fiction people read, the better they were at perceiving emotion in photographs of people’s eyes and, to a lesser extent, correctly interpreting social cues in short video clips.

Another study by Raymond Mar, now an associate professor at Canada’s York University, showed people who read a short story before taking a social reasoning test scored better than those who read a nonfiction essay. Yet both groups scored similarly on analytical reasoning tests.

When facing an obstacle, Oatley says, we tend to think about ourselves as trying to solve the problem and believing that we didn’t put the obstacle in our own way. But when we see someone else tripping up on something, we tend to attribute it to a flaw in personality.

Researchers have also identified how reading fiction can essentially pry open people’s minds. Another University of Toronto study showed that people who have just read a short story have less need for “cognitive closure” than peers who just read an essay, meaning that they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty.

As a result, reading fiction tends to foster what Oatley’s colleagues in the faculty of management call “integrative thinking,” where individuals consider a wide set of inputs as they try to determine where people get stuck when they’re trying to make progress on a complex problem.

“If you think about our relationship with the protagonist (in fiction), you can start to understand other people from the inside in the same way we think about ourselves,” Oatley says.

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f

iction

can help us encounter many more situations than we might in everyday life and allow us to more

fully understand them.

Bluebird Books, in Hutchinson, hosts the Cocktail Book Club on one Friday each month for local readers to discuss the scheduled reading for the month.

They are discussing Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

“

the best stories are really

compelling,

they get under people’s skins, and that’s why some of them have been around for hundreds or thousands of years.”

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The implication seems to be that reading fiction can help your brain fine-tune its ability to imagine what other people are thinking, feeling and experiencing and to do so in deeper, more complex and nuanced ways.

Of course, there’s also the danger that reading fiction might be an effect rather than a cause, and that people with really strong social skills simply read more novels.

But when Oatley and his colleagues tried to account for this possibility in 2009, the relationship between reading fiction and strong social skills persisted.

the stories tend to be engrossing and memorable, and we get swept up in them.

“The best stories are really compelling,” Badaracco says. “They get under people’s skins, and that’s why some of them have been around for hundreds or thousands of years.”

Although Badaracco says it’s sometimes possible for nonfiction stories to be told in a similarly compelling manner (such as an in-depth magazine profile), novels, short stories and plays allow us to share the inner thoughts of a character rather than just hear what they say.

Still, Oatley says that most of the studies so far have either been correlations or short term and that longterm studies could aid our understanding, as would studying the effects of reading fiction vs. the effects of persuasion.

“They really get inside the head of the leader or decision maker,” Badaracco says. “Since the characters are fictional, the authors have imagined what goes on in the minds of someone making hard decisions.”

discovering complexity Cognitive psychology aside, it’s important to remember that long before it could be explained through the lens of research, human beings have known something of the benefits of reading fiction.

Literature has long been a vehicle to help us understand and sort through some of the most daunting, timeless questions of identity and character we face as we attempt to achieve success, happiness and spiritual fulfillment.

The opportunity to discuss the stories is another beneficial dimension to learning from fiction. Badaracco says that students often come into his class with clear convictions about who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys” in a story, only to be confronted by a discussion that exposes differing views among their peers.

“If you do this repeatedly, then they get a sense that things are more complicated than their initial instincts tell them they are,” Badaracco says. “They get a little more practice and little more skill at discovering complexity. They also get a sense of what some of their blind spots might be and what they’re inclined to miss because other students see things they don’t.”

In hopes of helping students better answer these questions, Joseph L. Badaracco, a professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School, has taught an unusual class to MBA students for most of the past 15 years. Rather than study business school cases, his students read serious works of fiction and discuss them as a means of gaining better understanding of who they are and to better prepare for the tests they are likely to face in their lives and careers.

harnessing the benefits of fiction As compelling as the benefits of fiction might be, simply knowing them is one thing. Figuring out how to harness them in our daily lives is something else entirely. After all, even the most avid readers only have a limited amount of time to spend reading each day.

It’s probably all too easy for reading fiction to become crowded out by everything else we have to do.

The stories that students consider aren’t typically about the business world specifically (in fiction about the business world, executives too often become one-dimensional archetypes of greed or ambition, Badaracco notes). Instead, they focus on characters who face pivotal tests, such as the man who makes a set of risky decisions during his first voyage as a ship’s captain in a short story by Joseph Conrad.

One of the benefits of reading good fiction is that

The good news is that the research suggests that the very act of reading a little fiction as individuals can help us improve our skills at testing multiple

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interpretations and points of view and help make us more tolerant of ambiguity. We are, in a sense, practicing leadership skills without even thinking about it when we are reading. Just carving out a little bit more time to read fiction will be of benefit, although it’s as yet unclear how long those benefits may last.

deep, daunting issue like childhood poverty, you might study all the data available about that issue and compile stories from advocates and families. But you also might pick up a novel to live out the experience of someone in poverty in a vicarious way, allowing you to empathize more easily with people in a tough situation outside the scope of your own experiences.

We can also enhance the leadership value of our reading by spending more time with fiction that challenges us a bit and focuses on people and how they interact with each other. Research findings have shown that reading literary fiction – in which characters face serious dilemmas and the author leaves more blanks for the reader to fill in – is what improves social empathy.

Or, let’s say you’re stuck in a frustrating position where one individual seems to be stubbornly impeding your progress. What if you tried to imagine how that situation looked from that person’s perspective by writing your own brief fictional account of the situation with your nemesis serving as the narrator? You might not be right about what’s going on in his or her head, but it would allow you to tease out some of your own assumptions about what’s going on, which could be tested in real life. It might even force you to see yourself and your behavior in a different light.

Discussing the leadership questions raised by fiction with someone else or groups of people, such as in classes or book clubs, adds an additional benefit to reading fiction. After immersing ourselves in a character’s mind, we get to see how people experienced the same text and make very different interpretations about what happened. It allows us to practice our “theory of mind” skills in an interactive way.

All of this isn’t to say that our leadership libraries should be crammed with only fiction. Far from it.

I myself will continue to read plenty of nonfiction and value the learning that I can gain from reading books specifically about leadership and civic engagement. And whether it is fiction or nonfiction, it’s not like I spend all of my waking hours reading, either.

But I’ll also always remember that leadership is ultimately about mobilizing other people, and you can’t do that effectively without some degree of understanding about how others think, discerning what their hopes and fears are and speaking to their hearts, as well as their minds.

Most importantly, reading fiction reminds us about our own blind spots in exercising leadership. It’s terribly difficult work to get outside of our heads. In fact, as Oatley suggests, our instincts may deter us from fully comprehending the complexity of what other people think and experience. But through a vehicle – a story – we can momentarily forget ourselves and inhabit the minds of others.

Seen in that light, another step toward enhancing our empathy and becoming wiser at making progress may be only an open novel away.

But it’s interesting to think about how we could use fiction to help us make actual progress. For instance, if you wanted to gain a better understanding of a

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developing your own ‘leadership’ reading list One of the biggest challenges of reading fiction with an eye on improving one’s leadership is that it’s kind of a guessing game. Most libraries and bookstores have a section filled with nonfiction books about leadership and management. But it doesn’t seem there are many novels being explicitly written with leadership and civic engagement in mind. That’s also what can make the enterprise intriguing and fun. Melanie Green, owner of Bluebird Books in Hutchinson, says just about any engrossing novel can open deep questions about leadership and the choices people make. While there’s no “leadership lessons from fiction” book club at Bluebird – yet – a club’s recent discussion of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal beauty, sparked a deep dialogue about individual choices and society. Below are a handful of suggestions for novels, plays and short stories that might provoke meaningful thinking and conversation about leadership.

“A RAISIN IN THE SUN”

by Lorraine Hansberry

“THE SECRET SHARER” by Joseph Conrad You think you are ready to lead? You may not really

This classic play raises questions about choosing among dreams while following members of an African American family as they aspire to improve their lives.

know until you are put to the test, as the man on his first voyage as a ship’s captain discovers all too quickly.

“TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD” by Harper Lee “THE CONFERENCE OF BIRDS”

by Peter Sis

You’ve likely already read it. Now visit it anew by looking at it through the lens of the competencies and principles of civic leadership.

When you look for leadership, are you looking inside or outside of yourself? This adaptation of a Persian poem follows a flock of birds in search of their true king.

“THE WINDS OF WAR” and “WAR AND REMEMBRANCE” by Herman Wouk

“THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT”

by Sloan Wilson

These sweeping historical novels about World War II provide a riveting way to see how the same events unfold differently depending on your vantage point.

How do we respond to authority? This classic book set in the business world is about finding your own purpose amid conformity.

“THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST”

by Moshin Hamid Why would someone turn against us? This provocative novel makes us think about how systemic pressures, as well as identity, influence the creation of adversaries.

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want to get kansans invested in addressing racial inequality?

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invite them to the discussion.

By Dawn Bormann Novascone

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tough talk, real progress GROUP PURSUES PATH TO GREATER SOCIAL EQUITY THROUGH DIALOGUE

baselines for improvement

Inviting people to the discussion is exactly what Mildred Edwards, executive director of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission based in Topeka, did.

When Edwards began her job at the commission in 2010, she set her goals high. Until then the commission had focused primarily on policy changes by working directly with the Kansas Legislature.

Edwards has traveled across the state for the past several years helping energize community members and government officials to start frank conversations about racial disparities. It’s weighty material that could easily turn explosive. Yet Edwards has found the opposite by simply opening community dialogue and letting people speak their minds.

But the economic downturn meant every organization had to drastically rethink strategy. Edwards, who has a doctorate in community psychology and a strong background in public outreach, wanted to work more with communities and let them help work on the problems.

She’s found many law enforcement agencies want and need the community’s help to make real change in the criminal justice system. She’s found that schools want to examine statistics about adolescents who end up in detention centers instead of college. And she’s found that community members want to help be part of a solution.

Legislation might be the most impactful way to enact change, but it’s not the only tool she had.

“So while we’re doing that (legislative work), the community could be working also,” she says.

Edwards immediately went to work assembling information to quantify racial disparities in Kansas.

The process took precious time, but when she finished the document, “The State of African Americans in Kansas,” it would give her solid facts to present to lawmakers and community members.

But many agencies and community members don’t know where to start that dialogue. So for the past several years, Edwards has tried to help. The African American Affairs Commission, whose members are appointed by the governor and legislative leaders, has provided a framework for community members, government officials, business leaders and others to come together to talk honestly about change.

“We wanted to make sure that we had at least a baseline of data to know where improvements need to be made,” Edwards says. “It was initially a document that would help us start conversation in the communities.”

“If we work together, we’re far more successful than if we continue to work alone,” says Edwards, an alumna of the Kansas Leadership Center’s Context and Competencies program in 2010.

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Mildred Edwards, executive director of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission, speaks during a celebration of the Dockum sit-in at the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita.

Edwards has traveled the state over the past several years to help start frank conversations about racial disparities.

‘ready to work’

As part of the change, Edwards pulled together statistics in five main areas: schools and educational opportunities; criminalization and social justice; economic opportunities and asset building; safe and healthy communities; and civic leadership and advocacy. Then Edwards asked key stakeholders across the state to focus on an area.

Edwards has high hopes for the Kansas City group and for good reason. The first community dialogue meeting started at 5 p.m., and the participants remained engaged in conversation until after 9 p.m.

Facilitators from Wichita State University led the discussion to make sure no one group appeared to be in charge.

building capacity

The community, Edwards says, came to the “table ready to work – ready to work with others to get the job done.”

The target has looked different across the state.

Juvenile justice was the focus in Kansas City, where about 140 people representing schools, mental health, law enforcement, faith communities and many other organizations from Wyandotte, Johnson and Miami counties came together last year to talk honestly about juvenile justice reform for African Americans.

One of the participants, Wyandotte County Sheriff Don Ash, says he was impressed and inspired by those who spoke. More importantly, he says, it didn’t feel like a one-time event. “I believe they’ll follow through,” he says.

Those gathered didn’t need Edwards to explain that African-American teens are at greatest risk of ending up in a detention center. It keeps some of them awake at night. They already know that a disproportionate number of those same children come from impoverished, single-parent households.

The timing was key, Ash says. Several area law enforcement agencies were already working on a separate initiative to change the juvenile justice program. But they can’t do it alone, he says. To make changes, law enforcement will need community groups to step up and provide extra support services.

“It has to be a real collaborative effort,” he says.

But they needed help. How could religious figures, law enforcement officers, mental health counselors, school teachers and citizens effectively work together, let alone tackle one of the country’s biggest criminal justice inequities?

The commission was able to pull in a broader audience that added to that conversation. And, he noted, it wasn’t law enforcement leading the discussion. “I think they tagged all of the right people,” he says.

Yet he and others says they would have liked to have heard from more teenagers. But that’s not a simple task. “The ones we’re going to hear from are probably not going to end up in the juvenile justice system,” Ash says.

Examining the data and understanding how they all perceive the problem is step one, Edwards says.

Then the real work begins to design and develop a plan. Creating the solution isn’t up to her. It’s up to each community to become invested in the outcome for the greater common good.

beyond ‘photo ops’

Edwards tells community members repeatedly to dream about the possibilities, and she urges them to think big just as Martin Luther King Jr. once did.

This work, she emphasizes, builds on King’s dream.

“We will be going back out every month to help to build the coalition that develops this,” Edwards says about the Kansas City plan. “We are building their capacity to address their own issues and helping them to leverage the resources that they already have and bring them together.”

The work of the commission isn’t exactly easy.

As the only full-time employee charged with impacting an entire state, Edwards wanted to leverage every penny of her $130,000 operating budget. The commission’s board of directors and two AmeriCorps Vista volunteers have rolled up their sleeves as well.

They rely on grants that expire, making steady progress sometimes difficult.

The Bowersock Dam on the Kansas River in downtown Lawrence.

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social equity challenges in kansas Some key indicators show African Americans trailing white Kansans in well-being. In the following chart, 100% equals full equity. The further equity falls below 100%, the more inequity exists in a given category.

SOURCE: THE STATE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN KANSAS 2013.

income

63% equity

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

African American: $32,018 / White: $50,566

civic engagement

63% equity

REGISTERED VOTERS WHO ACTUALLY VOTED

African American: 32.3%/ White: 48.8%

unemployment rate

43% equity

2011

African American: 14 percent / White: 6 percent

health

39% equity

INFANT DEATHS (PER 1,000 BIRTHS)

African American: 14.7 / White: 5.8

graduation rate

85% equity

FIVE YEAR COHORT

African American: 74.6 percent / White: 87.3 percent

poverty

41% equity

POPULATION LIVING BELOW THE POVERTY LINE

African American: 29.1 percent / White: 11.9 percent

33% equity

CHILDREN (UNDER 18) LIVING BELOW THE POVERTY LINE

African American: 46.2 percent / White: 15.2 percent

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The only full-time commission employee charged with impacting the entire state, Edwards has tried to leverage every penny of her $130,000 operating budget.

“if we work together, we’re far more successful than if we continue to work alone.”

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Back in 2010, the work appeared daunting and much more risky. Even commission board members weren’t sure how to proceed. At least one commissioner shifted uncomfortably when Edwards said she was going to share the “State of African Americans” report with Kansans. The data wasn’t exactly a chamber of commerce press release.

“I can’t take credit for it,” Edwards says. Kansans did the work, she explains. The commission provided the material to get the discussion started, but the day-to-day work came from Kansans invested in the outcome.

doing the work

Edwards will never forget one commissioner’s words: “Mildred, the last thing I signed up to do was to go out and tell people more bad news.”

To take the discussion beyond community dialogue, Edwards has enlisted the help of experts and advisers across the state. She wants to encourage reliance on existing resources within the state rather than going to far-flung locales to find an expert who knows nothing about Kansas.

But that anxiety has changed with time. The commission has branched out to do work that includes statewide reading initiatives and fair and impartial police training.

There are racial profiling researchers, civic dialogue specialists and well-known academics in Kansas who are already invested in the outcome, she says.

The commission’s success might seem less tangible in the short term, says Patrick Woods, commission vice chairman. But they moved their idea of what constitutes success. Engaging people and mobilizing Kansans became more important than a photo op at a bill-signing ceremony.

A big part of her role has been linking local businesses and government officials with specialists at places such as Kansas State University, the Kansas Leadership Center and elsewhere. The local connections give everyone more incentive to work harder, Edwards believes.

“The hardest part is really starting to dig down deep and engage the community to where they understand their role to participate and carry out what objective we’re trying to achieve,” Woods says.

The work at the African American Affairs Commission continues to evolve. Edwards is set to release updated statistics on social equity and let community members know what’s changed.

Edwards has also learned to narrow her data.

She originally collected so much data that it could easily overwhelm, thereby accomplishing little.

She’s also had to be strategic about where and how to engage Kansans.

“The community is doing the work so we want to give some feedback,” she says. “We want them to know how they’re doing – if we’ve been successful.”

It’s important to prove her work has effected change, she says. But it’s not the only way she describes success when state lawmakers ask.

Many communities are not ready for the discussion that happened in Wyandotte County. Not every community is facing the same disparity, so a onesize-fits-all approach wouldn’t change hearts and minds. That’s why Edwards encourages communities to pick their focus.

“We measure our effectiveness by the number of people who are at the table to make it happen,” she says.

In western Kansas, minority business owners wanted to learn how they could partner to go after large government and industrial contracts. In Wichita, minority business owners discussed a modern-day, online bartering system called Time Bank. It’s an organized way for small businesses to swap services that allow their businesses to grow.

Edwards constantly reminds Kansans that Martin Luther King Jr. created profound change. Building on that dream is up to the next generation.

“What are you doing to make it happen? He gave his life for his dream,” she tells community members.

“What are you doing?”

Topeka focused its efforts on improving the infant mortality rate. It’s already saving lives, she says.

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Steve Dickie, character coach for the Wichita State men’s basketball team, talks with freshman John Robert Simon after Simon arrived at a home game late after attending a friend’s funeral in Oklahoma City earlier in the day.

COACHING FOR

CHARACTER BEHIND THE SCENES, A VO LU N T E E R T E A C H E S P L AY E R S L E A D E R S H I P F O R L I F E AFTER BASKETBALL

Photos By Jeff Tuttle Story By Laura Roddy

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Dickie huddles with the Wichita State team and head coach Gregg Marshall before a home game Wichita; Dickie attended almost every Shocker and provided support to the team during games; Players Darius Carter, Fred Van Vleet, John Robert Simon, Zach Bush and Evan Wessel pray with Steve Dickie after a Wichita State home game.

Throughout the history-making 35-1 season of Wichita State University’s men’s basketball team, you could find Steve Dickie standing back on the sidelines and watching the team run plays in practice. He wasn’t there to offer pointers or to pontificate. As the team’s volunteer character coach, sometimes the most important thing he offered was simply his presence.

Dickie attended almost every Shocker practice. At every home game, he was there, too, occasionally in a front-row arena seat but more often standing behind the team’s bench. Dickie also went on the road with the Shockers, which he says can provide some of the best “hangout time” with the team.

Dickie says the players like to kid about his “Dickieisms,” but he believes the mantras he teaches help ingrain and embed his leadership lessons.

Dickie just finished his third season with the team.

He also served as chaplain, leading prayers before and after games. That chaplain role is often the most visible to outsiders, but it is actually only a small portion of what Dickie did for the team. Dickie formally taught leadership principles to the players in what he calls character sessions.

The players sought Dickie out when they wanted advice or counsel, via text as often as in person.

“It’s not a token thing,” Dickie says. “We invest in who the guys are on the inside.”

Every week or two, the team gathered for a character session. Dickie tries to make his lessons visual, using drawings or video clips where he can. Oftentimes, he threads together a series of stories to make his point.

Sessions have focused on such concepts as service, fortitude, integrity and thankfulness.

In Dickie’s view, teaching character is teaching leadership. Dickie often speaks about self-leadership, similar to the Kansas Leadership Center’s concept of managing self. He believes that leadership is 10 percent skills and 90 percent character. To illustrate the concept, he draws an iceberg; character is the great mass below the surface.

“What’s on the inside matters,” Dickie says. “I believe we’re transformed from the inside out.”

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FEATURED POET

The lasT farm on 87Th sTreeT

By AL oRtoLAnI

A few head of Black Angus stare dumbly at traffic.

At dusk, as the twilight drains behind Taco Bell, a woman jogs in a reflective suit. The cattle become silhouettes. Gradually, the night slips between the house and the barn like cold, dark silk. Cattails, clumped at the pond’s edge, are swept by the lights of a semi on the interstate.

This is loneliness—the empty seat of the tractor, the shed’s open door, the winter air in deepening darkness—nothing levees the flood of change. A bucket hangs on the water pump.

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AL ORTOLANI has been teaching in Kansas for 40 years. His poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Word Riot and the New York Quarterly. He has four books of poetry, The Last Hippie of Camp 50 and Finding the Edge, published by Woodley Press at Washburn University; Wren's House, published by Coal City Press in Lawrence; and Cooking Chili on the Day of the Dead from Aldrich Press in Torrance, Calif. He is on the board of directors of the Kansas City Writers Place.

THE BACK PAGE LeADeRsHIP BeGIns wItH A conscIous DecIsIon As a small boy at the drive-in on a warm summer night, Dan Catlin saw a reflection of his future self when he saw Peter Fonda in the lead role as biker “Heavenly Blues” in the 1960s classic “The Wild Angels.” Catlin saw the bikes and the leather and the life, and knew immediately what he wanted to be. He was just that for much of his adult life – “an outlaw biker.”

But mirrors reverse images and send them back as opposites. So when Catlin came face to face with his purpose, he learned how brazenly celluloid can lie, and how his calling wasn’t to raise hell but rather how the hell of homelessness would become his mission field as a pastor.

“I didn’t recognize myself,” he says of the day he backed out of his driveway and caught a glimpse of himself in his rearview mirror. “I didn’t see a good person. I broke people’s legs. I beat people up. I wasn’t raised to be that kind of person. I was a bad reflection of that person.

“They feel more comfortable,” he says. “They’ll ask for advice or gripe about an agency.”

Catlin says he doesn’t treat the people he serves as though he’s running an agency, as though the people are turf he needs to protect. He estimates that each month he will see every one of the nearly 550 homeless people in Wichita at his day shelter, but he doesn’t record their visits.

“We don’t count people,” he says. “We count plates.”

Counting people has led to an ugly bureaucracy in homeless services.

Catlin says some agencies reduce suffering people to mounds of paper and reports and bitterly compete against other agencies for the right to tend to homeless people’s miseries.

He says people share these stories with him because they find him authentic. They can see themselves and their experiences in him and in his dispossessed past.

“That’s when God spoke to me.”

That’s also when he made a conscious decision to change his life, and the lives of others.

Since that moment, on Tuesdays and Fridays for 15 years, Catlin drives from his Marion County home into Wichita where he founded his Messiah’s Branch ministry.

The people he helps today reflect his better angels and he praises God for every one of them.

“I knew it was wrong,” he says of his former life.

“I always felt I was a good person. We’re born with specific, spiritual gifts. In a sense, yes, I still had to make that decision.”

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum in Wichita.

He feeds the people egg sandwich lunches and full dinners. He stitches their wounds. He treats their gangrene and frostbite. He gives them over-the-counter cold medicine and painkillers for headaches and toothaches.

“When I started, I didn’t know what to do except to do the best I could,” Catlin says. “People walked in, they’re bleeding, they need a doctor, so you help them. I don’t know, just a natural thing.”

Listening also has come naturally.

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Dan Catlin, of Messiah’s Branch ministry.

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