Leading Through Partnership

Millennials are generally opposed to hierarchical structures. They work collaboratively in groups, and find their fluency in social media naturally leads to sharing information and connections across institutional (and even international) lines. The result is a side-by side style of leadership.

This approach has become a boon for causes that cut across institutional and country borders, but a challenge to older, more hierarchical organizations trying to absorb Millennials as employees and activists. It is not a trivial fact that many young people believe that traditional nonprofit organizations can “suck the life right out of a movement.” So, many causes are adopting new approaches.

Ivan Boothe, for example, says his organization’s goal is to “involve people who are active and educated about the issue who become leaders as members. Our members are not just a mailing list. GI-Net is all about giving up control … Organizations need more than a membership card. We are creating a permanent anti-genocide constituency.”

Network leadership necessarily looks and feels significantly different from hierarchical forms of leadership. Community builders Valdes Krebs and June Holley write, “Without active leaders who take responsibility for building a network, spontaneous connections between groups emerge very slowly, or not at all. We call this active leader a network weaver.”

The result of the work of successful network weavers is that “this culture of collaboration creates a state of emergence, where the outcome—a healthy community—is more than the sum of the many collaborations. The local interactions create a global outcome that no one could accomplish alone.”