When we enter a new community, we come with assumptions. Assumptions are not bad; they are truths that we walk with. Yet when we feel someone does something very offensive in our own community, we often forget to unearth their assumptions and we don’t decipher between their intent and impact.

I recently had a conversation with Jawole Zollar, dancer and founder of Urban Bush women, who uses dance to bring untold stories and histories of marginalized communities to light. We discussed her lessons from movement about the intent and impact when entering new communities to create change

Jawole articulated that the best situations are when intent and impact for change in a community meet together. Bad situations are when there is great intent but the impact is not so good. Ugly situations are when a person entering a community never had a good intention or that the impact was so bad, it doesn’t matter what the intention is.

The Brad Pitt houses in New Orleans depict the difference between intent and impact. After Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt formed the Make it Right foundation that built homes in the Lower Ninth. Architects designed beautiful, energy-friendly homes, but people from the lower Nine had no input regarding the ‘spaceship like’ houses that were being built for them. Brad Pitt’s intent was great, but without the neighborhood input, the overall impact made it hard to foster a community around these houses.

As leaders, when you enter new communities, how do you decipher between your intent and impact?

Coaching is a core leadership practice that enables others in a variety of contexts from companies and nonprofits to campaigns and trainings.

A good coach doesn’t take over.

A good coach waits for the question. The coachee first needs to own his situation and once they do, a good coach asks the right questions, helps them take action and holds them accountable to take action.

On Saturday,  I facilitated a Strong Women Strong Girls leadership coaching session for 40 professional women. Strong Women Strong Girls is a nonprofit that utilizes the lessons learned from strong women throughout history to encourage girls and young women to become strong women themselves through mentoring and coaching programs.

Since February, I have been doing leadership development workshops for SWSG college women at Tufts University. This time, I got to work with 40 professional women across companies in Boston who will now serve as “Leadership Coaches” for SWSG college women on 5 university campuses in Boston.

Using roleplay and coaching in pairs, we had the group learn coaching by practicing asking probing questions that both supported and challenged the person they were coaching. One woman in the session had a great definition of coaching:  “coaching is about helping someone answer something where they already know what to do, they just haven’t realized it yet.” I thought this was a great description, coaching is almost like being a mirror for someone to see themselves.

Marshall Ganz, professor at Harvard University, describes that the first step in the coaching process is to observe and diagnose what type of coaching is needed. He describes three types of coaching below:

–        Motivational (heart) coaching is aimed at enhancing effort.

–        Strategic (head) coaching is aimed at helping the team or individual plan, evaluate, or think about its strategic or structural approach

–        Educational (hands) coaching is aimed at helping the team or individual execute with skill (and learn from execution).

Once you have diagnosed the challenge, a good coach intervenes by asking questions to help the coachee to find the answer on their own. Then, a good coach will step back and observe the coachee trying the intervention in action. Lastly, a good coach always debriefs with the coachee to help them reflect on the experience: What went well? What were you challenged by? What are your goals/next steps?

I’ve recently joined a Collective Presencing Circle, a holding space for deep, generative listening. What has amazed me is how this holding space is created through a process of storytelling and context sharing.

 

The shift in this circle is that we have power over the place versus the place having power over us.  It is though our practices of intentional silence and generative dialogue that we actually transform our place into a holding space.

This quote from Theory U best describes the feeling when I leave circle practice:

“What happens is that you leave that conversation as a different being-a  different person-from the one who entered the conversation a few hours earlier. You are no longer the same. You are (a tiny bit) more who you really are. Sometimes that tiny bit can be quite profound. I remember that in one instance I had a physical sensation of a wound when I left a particularly profound conversation. Why? Because that conversation created a generative social field that connected me with a deeper aspect of my journey and Self” (Theory U, Scharmer).

“It’s not about women being better than men, it’s about women being different than men. ” -Halla Tomasdottir

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How do you turn your passion into your life’s work? Start-ups are a great way to figure out what you love, what you hate, and they can also bring you closer to living out your passion.

This semester,  I worked with two of my brilliant colleagues, Shayna Harris and Adah Chan, on two social ventures: SupplyChange and Mujer a Mujer (see MaM video in my last blog post and more info here). In this post, I want to give a short update on SupplyChange, our upcoming plans, and some of my personal goals for the future.

SupplyChange, which came out of our Development Ventures class, is a venture that seeks to address the global problem of post-harvest loss. We are investigating processing produce that is traditionally wasted in developing countries and turning it into valuable ingredients for large US food companies. In January, we’re spending a month in Paraguay to identify ways to address supply chain inefficiencies:  post harvest loss, logistics, coordination, etc.

As part of SupplyChange,  I worked with two computer programmers to develop the first prototype of Mobile Information Aggregator (MIA), a mobile application to help farmers gain access to global markets. Though a text message on a simple cell phone, the MIA tracks the crop type, quantity of production, and quantity that farmers sell via a text message, which then links into a central database system.   The MIA provides historical and real-time data to farming cooperatives so that they can make better business decisions, and will help cooperatives understand what they are producing and help farmers aggregate demand, connect with markets and increase their income. This idea originated out of a meeting with farmers and was incubated in NCIIA’s VentureLab in March 2009. If you know farming cooperatives in India or around the world that may be interested in pilot testing the MIA over a 1-2 month period this summer, please reach out to me.

My passion: SupplyChange has brought me closer to my deepest passion: to enable women through economic, social, and technological opportunities. Providing women with opportunity yields equal rights and helps entire nations, families are more likely to be healthy, and children are more likely to survive. According to Women to Women International, “women’s agricultural empowerment is the next frontier of the global women’s movement. Currently, women produce the majority of the world’s food but own less than 2% of the land, it’s an issue of economic as well as gender justice.” As part of my agricultural development work, I’m very keen to work and partner with groups focused on enabling women, who make up 70% of the world’s farmers and produce 90% of the world’s staple crops whether through technology and investments.

In January, I plan to blog about my trip to Latin America, especially my lessons learned, my passion, and next steps for the future!

Mujer a Mujer is an amazing project I have been working on with my two Sloan colleagues, Shayna Harris and Adah Chan. Check out our video!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJnGnMRZ4Ys]

This quote so clearly describes my past few months  on my startups:

“Realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over.”

– Marc Andreessen

The end of the semester is always challenging: finals, cold weather, saying goodbye to friends, classes, and projects. But right now, I’m just grateful for all the experiences I’ve had this semester, for the people to came into my life and for the people I got closer to, and for the mentors and professors I learned from.

I am overdue for a long reflection on the semester. For now, check out my blog post about launch of Mujer a Mujer on MIT’s Community Innovators blog and videos on MIT Sloan’s site from the Agricultural Study Tour in India I co-led in March 2010.

Lastly, my TA, Nizar Farkash, pulled up three quotes in my last Public Narrative class that highlight lessons learned from the semester:

·         “It is harder to be kind than clever. Cleverness is gift, kindness is a choice.” -Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon.com

·         “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted”

·         “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand” -Chinese Proverb