Description
Strong, effective leadership is essential to bringing ideas and people together for community and economic development.
In The Community Leadership Handbook, author James F. Krile provides the tools every community leader needs, no matter what their formal title or training.
Based on the Blandin Foundation’s 20-years of experience in developing community leaders, it focuses on the three core competencies of successful leadership: Framing ideas, Building social capital, and Mobilizing resources.
Krile explains the importance of each of the competencies and provides a toolkit for action.
- The section on framing ideas presents tools to define opportunities, challenges, and strategies. It covers techniques to help your community develop compelling vision statements, select clear priorities, and set challenging but achievable goals.
- The section on social capital provides the tools to build on individual skills and group processes in ways that create positive, productive relationships over the long term.
- The third section focuses on identifying key stakeholders, discovering potential partners, and aligning diverse groups around a common purpose.
Case studies based on real leadership issues, dozens of worksheets, and examples will help you put the material in the book into action.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Getting the Most from This Book
- Insights from the Bandin Community Leadership Program
- What you’ll find in this book
- Who can benefit from using this book
- How to use this book
- Three Core Competencies for Community Leadership
- Framing ideas
- Building and using social capital
- Mobilizing resources
- Combining the competencies
- Tools for Framing Ideas
- Identifying community assets
- Analyzing community problems
- Accessing community data
- Doing appreciative inquiry
- Visioning
- Translating vision into action
- Tools for Building and Using Social Capital
- Building social capital through effective communication
- Managing interpersonal conflict
- Building social capital across cultures
- Mapping your social capital
- Tools for Mobilizing Resources
- Analyzing stakeholders
- Building coalitions
- Building effective community teams
- Recruiting and sustaining volunteers
- Appendixes
- Getting the most from your meeting, a primer for facilitating community groups
- Additional resources
- Worksheets
- Community talent inventory
- Neighborhood asset inventory
- Who is involved in this community problem
- Questions for appreciative inquiry
- Community characteristics to preserve for the future
- Appreciative inquiry timeline
- Imagine your community’s future
- Rate tasks
- Indicators of success
- Smart goals checklist
- Checklist for creating shared meaning
- Evaluate your communication skills
- Conflict styles checklist
- Scoring the conflict styles checklist
- Managing interpersonal conflict
- Social capital map
- Social capital analysis
- Stakeholders map
- Power and attitude grid
- Is a coalition necessary?
- Potential coalition members
- What is our purpose?
- Talent audit
- Who decides
- Communication ground rules
- Team communication climate
- Team assessment survey
- Feedback report for team assessment survey
- Volunteer job description
About the Author
James F. Krile is the director of the Blandin Community Leadership Program. The foundation’s core strategy is to develop leaders and focus communities to identify, align, and mobilize their assets and opportunities.