Leadership Networks

Defining field-policy leadership

Field-policy leadership is the capacity to influence how problems are framed and solutions envisioned, to mobilize people to take action around a shared vision, to develop and enact innovative solutions to complex problems, and to participate actively in policy decision-making. According to a PolicyLink report (2003), "policy determines the way society organizes its resources, conducts its business, and expresses its values."

The field can be understood as the cultural and political landscape within which policies are made and implemented. Fields produce frames, approaches, norms, standards, and methods that guide practitioners and shape how problems are defined and researched, and what solutions are developed. We combine field and policy to emphasize both the cultural and political work of leadership that is required to influence policy decisions and transform systems. An increasing number of organizations and foundations are supporting programs and initiatives to develop field-policy leaders because they recognize that systems change requires bridging and working across boundaries of community, culture, and sector.

The value of field-policy leadership networks

Field-policy leadership networks enable leaders to work across boundaries more effectively. They have the capacity to mobilize large numbers of people around a common cause, influence the cultural and political discourse, and bring diverse perspectives into the policymaking process. Well-developed field-policy networks can influence systems change by better aligning frames, interests, and people across sectors, cultures, and communities in ways that have the potential to produce large scale effects.

Examples of field-policy leadership networks

CAYL Schott Fellowship for Early Care and Education

The CAYL Schott Fellowship for Early Care and Education is building a cadre of public policy leaders from diverse communities who are committed to working for policy changes that improve the quality and availability of early education and care for all young children and families in communities across Massachusetts. The fellowship takes 12 leaders each year through a process of identifying policy problems, researching and proposing policy solutions, writing policy papers, and advocating for policy change. Through this process, participants develop relationships with leaders who work in different regions of the state, different racial and ethnic communities, different levels of governance (city and state), different fields (e.g. education, public health) and different sectors (e.g., academic, government, and nonprofits).

The CAYL Schott Fellowship Network is more than a peer support network because its purpose is to influence early childhood policy and practice in Massachusetts. The Network meets formally three times a year to focus collectively on how to work together more effectively to produce positive policy results that improve access to and the quality of early care and education. While the network is still in its early phases of becoming a field-policy leadership network, there is growing awareness among leaders about the power of weaving their professional networks together, identifying influential actors outside the fellowship (e.g., state and local officials, advocates, service providers, funders, those in the media and business), and intentionally building relationships with them.

National Public Health Leadership Network

The National Public Health Leadership Network brings together 7,000 graduates from statewide, regional, national, and international leadership programs that seek to strengthen the public health infrastructure around the world. These efforts were initially begun by the Center for Disease Control in 1990 in response to an Institute of Medicine report calling for increased leadership skills among the nation's (and the world's) public health leaders. The initial leadership program enrolled senior leaders from local, state and federal levels of public health, as well as public health academia, health care organizations and national health organizations. A number of the 800 leaders that this program trained went on to establish state and regional leadership programs around the country, providing a multiplier effect (Umble et al., 2007)

The network first formed among state and regional leaders who had graduated from the program and who offered each other "plenty of advice and support from those who had already walked the road." These are the characteristic qualities of peer leadership networks. Over time, however, the network began to weave independent state and regional strands together "into a common 'rope' or movement that could pull the field forward together." (Umble et al., 2007). Network members took up a number of initiatives to benefit the field of public health. They developed documents on ethical practice in public health that were officially adopted by the American Public Health Association in 2002. They issued white papers on the public health workforce, workforce development, and leadership. The Network has also developed a "Public Health Leadership Competency Framework" that includes transformational, political, trans-organizational, and team building competencies. All of these activities have strengthened the leadership of the public health field.

MomsRising.org

Momrising.org is a national on-line network of over 150,000 citizen members who are concerned about building a more family-friendly America. MomsRising.org uses the power of on-line organizing to mobilize citizen advocates around motherhood and family issues. Two recent successes included the passage of a paid family leave bill in Washington in 2007 and the prevention of the Consumer Product Safety Commission from requiring toxic chemicals to be sprayed on furniture to make it flame-retardant. MomsRising.org wants to change the culture that tolerates workplaces, policies, and social priorities that do not support families.

One of MomsRising.org's core strategies is partnering with aligned organizations on joint campaigns and getting the word out on breaking issues to members who can take rapid action. They currently have 85 partner organizations who work together to enact family-friendly policies by mobilizing their vast grassroots networks. The partnerships enable each organization to accomplish much more with the resources they have and to more effectively promote a full-range of motherhood and family policy initiatives.

In a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article about MomsRising.org (Gehl, 2008), featured in the magazine's "What Works" section, the author summarizes what works to mobilize moms.

• Identify issues common to all mothers
• Make it easy for members to take action
• Use existing social networks for viral marketing
• Combine forces with like-minded nonprofits

Key characteristics of field-policy leadership networks

Successful field-policy leadership networks help members find common cause with unexpected allies. They rely on bridgers who reach out and connect across diverse communities, cultures, sectors, and disciplines. Building alliances often starts slowly. Leaders first need to learn each other's language and stories, find common ground, and establish trust. Field-policy networks usually start as peer leadership networks. Once trust is established, leaders are better positioned to tap into and mobilize their networks around a common cause.

Evaluating field-policy leadership networks

Some of the questions that can be asked in an evaluation of field-policy leadership networks include:
Is there evidence of greater sharing and collaborating across communities and sectors, at national, state, and local levels?

• Who are the bridgers in the network?
• Is the network expanding to include likely and unlikely alliances?
• Are diverse leaders aligning their priorities and working together towards common goals?
• Do people across the network share common frames (e.g., language and metaphors they use to describe problems, explain why they exist, and ways to address them)?
• Do members of the network coordinate their efforts to mobilize large numbers of citizens to engage in policy activism?
• Do members gain access to policy and field leaders through the network?
• Do networks contribute to positive policy changes? Do they contribute to creating more coherent fields of practice?

Using social network analysis to evaluate field-policy leadership networks

When using SNA to evaluate the influencing capabilities of a field-policy leadership network, it is especially helpful to expand the boundaries of the network analysis beyond the formal membership of the leadership network. One straightforward way to expand the network analysis is to conduct a two-phase survey. In the first phase, members of the leadership network report who are key external players (outside the membership). The second phase is a network survey; this survey asks network members to report not only their relationships with each other but also their relationships with key external players identified during the first phase. Even without any input from the key external players, this two-phase approach still provides a useful measure of how outside actors connect to the network membership.

The map below shows members of the CAYL Schott Fellowship as circles (labeled with numbers) and key external players as unlabeled small squares. Links represent professional collaboration between people; links between Fellows have been removed to focus attention only on which Fellows have working relationships with which key external players.An evaluation based on the above map would of course include the names of all the external actors. The evaluative information provided by such a map includes (1) the key bridging role of network member 22, at left, who is the only member connected to four external key players, and (2) the extent to which some external actors (i.e., the small squares in the center of the map) are already woven informally into the Fellowship Network, while other external players are accessible to only one Fellow. This kind of network information can help Fellows to access key external players who have connections to other members in the network.

Another way to link Fellows to external key players is presented in Figure 9. Each external key player in Figure 8 was categorized by the CAYL Schott Fellowship program staff into one of eight sectors. A new map was created (Figure 9), with each link indicating that a network member has worked with at least one external key player in that sector.The layout of the map uses structural equivalence to help the CAYL Schott Fellowship Program to evaluate which people in its leadership network have similar network assets and similar network weaknesses. For instance, the leftmost grouping in the map has strong connections to early education and care services, advocacy organizations, and statewide elected and appointed officials. They are likely key players in mobilizing early care and education resources to influence the policy agenda and how policies get implemented through state agencies. This group does not, however, have contacts with city government and public schools and so may be unaware of policy ramifications at the local level. The grouping in the middle of the map would be useful allies in understanding local impact and mobilizing local resources.

In reviewing this map, Fellowship staff observed that little attention had been given to developing relationships with the media to help spread the network's policy messages. Identifying key media people and adding their names to future network surveys may be used as a catalyst for network members to focus on developing those relationships.

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