9 Lessons of Positive Leadership: Lesson 9 - Building Change

Positive Leadership starts with yourself and moves outwards in a ripple effect, building momentum and driving change as it goes.

In the final lesson of the 9 Powers of Positive Leadership series, JP considers the point where the ripple is at its widest, and your actions impact the greatest number of people. Featuring insights from Bill Drayton, Paul Polman, and Rana Dajani, this episode is about building change at scale.

If this is your first time joining, head back to Lesson 1 and work your way from there! And you can catch up on the conversations with the guests referenced in this episode here:

• Being a changemaker with Bill Drayton: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/10470937-being-a-changemaker-with-bill-drayton-ashoka-founder-and-ceo
• Becoming a courageous leader with Paul Polman: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/10311167-becoming-a-courageous-leader-with-paul-polman-ex-unilever-ceo-and-imagine-co-founder
• Thriving Through Reading with Rana Dajani: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/12161222-thriving-through-reading-with-rana-dajani

Subscribe now to JP's free monthly newsletter "Positive Leadership and You" on LinkedIn to transform your positive impact today: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

Transcript

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Hi, listeners   Jean-Philippe here. So, this is the last lesson in the Nine Powers of Positive Leadership series. If this is your first time joining, can I suggest that you go back to lesson one and work your way through in chronological order.  If you've already done that, thank you and stay with me. 

Positive Leadership starts with yourself and moves outwards in a ripple effect, building momentum and driving change as it goes. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at what happens when the ripple effect is at its widest, impacting the greatest number of people. It's all about positive change at scale. 

Bill Drayton: That means changing the system. It's not direct service. We need teachers in classrooms. We need someone running the local restaurant. That's not what we're talking about. It's a big idea in the hands of an entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton has spent the past 40 plus years building and nurturing the world's largest network of leading social entrepreneurs. 

Bill Drayton: The word social means the human being. The entrepreneur is from deep within and driven to serve the good of all. And that is profoundly different. It's also an advantage because if you're there to serve the good of all, you're looking at the impacts of all. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Change that is fundamental and impacts how an entire system functions requires system thinking. So first you need to understand the related issues and relationships that play a role in the system. Then you need to organize your people so they can respond flexibly and nimbly to change and move out of specialization silos. 

Bill Drayton: Over the last seven years, we have learnt how to develop what we call jujitsu partners. With the most powerful mega forces around the framework changes we're trying to bring. Education unions, Ed schools, general publishers, specialized publishers, in a carefully selected city or province.  And all five of those feed one another.  

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Ashoka implements a "Team of Teams" approach, an approach that promotes dynamic collaboration. 

Bill Drayton: If I take you through you very concrete example in a for profit company. Santillana is the world's largest education publisher in Spanish and Portuguese. We have helped them and they now market materials that are very different for 6 to12 year olds and for three years of high school. When you're dealing with a group of people trying to change the Amazon, you've got free schools, they send letters to their alumni, that's virtually all teachers, and they can say, well, you know, Santillana materials are available. And the syndicate supports this. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: The real work of change in today's world happens not through isolated acts of visionary entrepreneurship, but within teams of people who each have a critical contribution to make. So instead of maintaining a traditional structure in which people work in hierarchies based on function or formal business unit, think about organizing people into a constellation of teams that come together around specific goals. At the center of the constellation is a coordinating executive team, but the composition of each project team can shift as needed. 

Paul Polman: The world doesn't function if we don't work differently together, or if we don't share our common values, and if we don't fight for each and every human being's right to have dignity and respect or equity. And and if we don't show the needed compassion. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Paul Polman the former chief executive of Unilever, sat on a high-level United Nations panel which originally developed the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Today, he works at the intersection of global business, government and society where he tries to accelerate action on our shared global challenges. 

Paul Polman: This world has overshot its planetary boundaries enormously. In many cases, were close to negative tipping points. It's not a good position to find ourselves in.  So we need to get businesses to think in terms of regenerative, restorative reparative, and that is net positive. And that requires that courage, and that's probably the most important thing. Once you are there and set these targets that are absolutely needed, you have to focus on putting the capabilities in place. If you get 20 to 25% of an industry sector together, you can actually create tipping points, and actually across the value chain. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: System challenge requires you to build broad partnerships and to accept that sometimes you also need to let go of a solution and give others the opportunity to own it themselves. 

Rana Dajani: So, it's not about scaling. And if we want to talk about scaling, I would say scaling the mindset change, not scaling a program or a particular, set of knowledge, nom you need to make sure that you're scaling the mindset and then you let it go right. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: Rana Dajani is the founder of We Love Reading, an initiative aimed at empowering young people as empathetic leaders by encouraging a love of reading and sparking the development of locally run libraries around the world. 

Rana Dajani: If every person becomes a changemaker, then you've solved all the problems because the problems are always going to happen. It's not that you solve all the problems today, you're going to all go home and we're done. Tomorrow there's going to be a whole new set. So then how do you keep solving? And as a scientist, I always like to develop solutions that are sustainable, that do not need my inputs continuously because I am finite. Right. And so instead of me propagating the solution, I shift that. That's a system change to every human being around the world. 

Jean-Philippe Courtois: If you like to hear more from any of the incredible positive leaders featured in this episode, just follow the links in the program description to their full- length interviews.  In our archive you'll find some amazing systems change entrepreneurs like Jeroo Billimoria and Jacqueline Novogratz, corporates and investors like Jesper Broden and Ronald Cohen. Do check them out. 
 
 I'm Jean-Philippe Courtois, if you've found this lesson useful, then please leave us a comment or a rating, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast and recommend it to many friends. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye.