Collaborative Leadership & the Food System
“The more you appreciate each other’s differences, the more creative your solutions can be.” Lili King, an esteemed career coach, visited the FEED Collaborative earlier this month and challenged our summer fellows to understand their own personalities — especially as it relates to their teammates — as a way to take advantage of the unique strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds and experiences that exist within their teams. By having a keen understanding of how to adapt to another person’s style you can “get more done faster… and with more creativity” King noted.
Expanding our capacity for collaborative leadership is just one of our goals for the summer fellows in FEED’s Leadership and Innovation Program (FLIP). FLIP seeks to connect students’ academic experience with real-world experiences by developing their practice as a designer and hone their craft of storytelling. This summer, FEED is working with students in 2 ways — connecting students with organizations that are doing “good” work in the food system and by hosting projects in an “incubator”, where students can explore their budding ideas with a supportive network of mentors. Within these two contexts, FLIP is supporting 9 students working on 4 different projects.
Much like the global food system, the projects range in range in scope, geographic regions, issues, and kinds of organizations that are looking to impact the Food System. They encompass complex networks of processes and relationships to do with production and distribution. We see the distinct value of the FLIP experience in the opportunity to understand their project in context of each other’s. Experiences in the classroom have taught us that having contextual awareness allows a wider solution set in a way that both respects existing models and challenges assumptions. Since the food system seems to harbor a distinctly large set of perspectives, understanding how they are related to each other and what we can learn from seemingly different models could be one of the greatest assets that we have yet to effectively understand.
With the help of tools like the personality assessment, the summer feels ripe with potential. Follow the journey of our fellows here or on our website.
