When I walk into a community, I am looking for "those people."
They are the ones who can send an email and people show up. Who offer an idea and the group follows. They know how the local system actually works, and their relationships with the power centers are so familiar you would think the elected officials hang out in their backyards for Saturday BBQs. I am, honestly, in awe of these people. This is the kind of leadership that made me become a social worker.
But if these remarkable people are the glue holding a coalition together, then we are screwed. Leadership that rests in the one or the few does not last. The moment they leave, finish their term, or retire, the structure they were holding comes apart.
So look more deeply, because what is on display does not belong only to them. Coalition leadership rests with anyone who shows up as a leader, regardless of position or title. I learned this in a single conversation.
I had pulled coalition allies together to strategize for the legislative session. It felt productive. We left with commitments and a next date. Afterward I asked my counterpart how I had shown up as a facilitator. He thought, and spoke.
"Well, I didn't see you leading at all. You sat off to the side, forcing us to figure out next steps. You didn't bring an agenda, and you didn't facilitate."
I was horrified. Embarrassed. And immediately emboldened. Because he had not come to be facilitated. He came because I asked, and he left disappointed because he expected me to lead. You do not hold someone to a leader's standard unless you already see them as a leader. He recognized in me the very thing I kept looking for in other people. I just had not claimed it.
That is where this leadership starts: with identity. You decide you are a leader, and you show up as one. It is available to anyone willing to claim it.
But identity is the foundation, not the finish. On top of it sit approaches anyone can learn. You lead in three directions at once, sideways to your peers, up to the decision-makers who can say no, and inward to your own organization. You manage conflict instead of smoothing it over, staying in it long enough to learn what it is really about. You create the psychological safety that keeps people at a table they are free to leave. These are the practices that carry a coalition through the long middle, the turnover and the slow stretches and the Friday afternoon meeting when everyone is tired and no one wants to stay. That is where most promising collaborations quietly come undone, and it is why leadership cannot live in one charismatic person. It has to be grown in everyone at the table.
Underneath all of it is one conviction I will not move off of. Everyone was born to lead, and everyone at the table holds the capacity to make a coalition sing. The work is not to install that capacity. It is to call it forward.
So here is what I am excited about. I am opening training for exactly this kind of leadership, for coalition leaders, cross-system and cross-agency teams, and boards. Anyone moving a group toward a shared goal with no authority to make anyone do anything. It is not a lecture. We work the practices, hold the mirror up with humor and honesty, and you leave with a clearer sense of who you are when you lead and the confidence to do your own high wire act of leadership.
I still look for "those people" in every community. I have just stopped believing there are only a few of them. Cross-sector leadership is a high wire: no authority to hold you up, no net, every step in front of people free to walk away. The surprise is that you already know how to make the walk. You only have to decide you are the kind of person who does.
Because, whether you like it or not, you are that person. Let that sink in.