Reflections on the American Express Leadership Academy
In May 2019, three members of our team had the privilege to attend the American Express Leadership Academy at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. Incorporating the guidance and lessons of an amazing team of Thunderbird educators, we were able to work through a strategic organizational challenge. The week’s leadership curriculum — along with thoughtful brainstorming and visioning — culminated in a presentation of a solution for how GlobeMed can support a leadership development pipeline through our programs. The following is a reflection of our team’s experience.
Over the past year, GlobeMed’s Headquarters has been through significant leadership and resource transitions. From a transformed staffing model that saw a team of seven full-time employees become a team of four full-time and six part-time, remote staff members, to the pilot of a coaching model for student leaders across the network, last year was full of learning. Amidst all of this change emerged an exciting vision for the future of our organization. In order to achieve this vision, we saw the need for our core team of emerging leaders to build the capacity to be globally-minded people who can bring their whole selves and experiences to our work and vision for the future. Being selected as one of ten organizations to benefit from the American Express Leadership Academy’s rigorous curriculum this year provided us with a pathway to reach this goal.
A core component of the Academy was a team project that was addressed by our three-member team. Prior to arriving at the Academy, we were asked to consider a challenge for which we would be able to begin creating a solution. The challenge we chose to address was the creation of structured professional development for the chapter coach model to support our new strategic direction as a learning organization. As we strive to build a leadership pipeline from our larger community into our Headquarters office, our part-time chapter coaches, who are all GlobeMed alumni, serve a vital role: coaching leaders in our community; upholding expectations and accountability across the network; and connecting the students, alumni, and grassroots partners for peer-learning and community building. They are both part of our program delivery model and-as we see our Headquarters as an incubator for young leadership talent-part of our impact.
The amazing network of educators at Thunderbird provided us with numerous tools and strategies to help us create a solution to this challenge and elevate these three aspects. We also had the opportunity to collaborate with teams from nine other social sector organizations spanning the United States, Haiti, Ghana, India, Guatemala, Canada, Cambodia, Kenya, Colombia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Throughout our conversations with peers working across the globe, we gained powerful insight about how we can grow as an organization that creates impact though training globally-minded leaders.
A theme echoed throughout the week of programming was the power of using our own gifts, experiences, and values in service to our community and organizational vision. One brainstorming session, facilitated by Lee Ann Del Carpio of Inner Power International, led us through a conversation of what values and practices an ideal coach embodies.
As a team, we landed on a global perspective of what an ideal coach looks like:
- They assume the best of people, both in behavior and in potential.
- They give opportunities and create a space for learning, failure, and growth.
- They support and work alongside team members when appropriate.
- They give timely, specific, and relevant feedback.
- They are willing to share their knowledge and resources.
- They are willing to build personal relationships.
- They are able to recognize strengths and weaknesses.
- They push other to use their strengths.
- They are willing to listen, learn, and adapt.
- They hold themselves and others accountable.
- They foster an enabling environment.
- They model the way.
- They welcome others into their network.
- They encourage questions and expansion of thinking.
- They practice empathy.
At the end of the Academy, each team presented on their organization’s values, challenge, and solution. Each presentation ended with a timeline for implementation and metrics for how solutions could be evaluated. The solution our team proposed included creating professional development training, onboarding, and evaluation material for chapter coaches and their supervisors.
The professional development materials would:
- Be mutually reinforcing by tracking the leadership behaviors we wanted to see mirrored in chapter leaders;
- Help coaches put their experience in the context of their overarching professional goals;
- Strengthen coaches’ skills while supporting organizational needs/projects; and
- Be guided by GlobeMed leadership practices, including curiosity and learning, celebrating work-life balance and whole humanness.
The first phase of our implementation began at our first ever Staff Transition Retreat in early July with a coaching survey and preliminary leadership discussions. Currently, coaches are working our two program managers to create their own personalized Leadership Development plans, with the hope being that by the end of their roles in 2020, they will have gained skills relevant to their role at GlobeMed and their future career goals at large. We also included a 80-minute session at our annual Leadership Institute entitled “Leading with Vision,” which trained chapter co-presidents in horizontal, strengths-based leadership and led them through discussions on their own leadership styles. We look forward to incorporating our learning continually throughout our coaching model and network-wide convenings.
All of us at GlobeMed would like to give a hearty thanks to everyone behind the American Express Leadership Academy who warmly welcomed us into their network. We would be remiss to not also thank our wonderful peers from Food for the Hungry, Haitian Education & Leadership Program, Childrens’ Heartlink, The Hunger Project, World Vision, Landesa, Save the Children, Atma Connect, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. A special thanks is warranted for all of the amazing speakers and leaders, including Mary Sully De Luque, Lee Ann Del Carpio, Hamidah Poplus, Mary Teagarden, Debisu Hyde, Dr. Sanjeev Khagram, and many more. The conversations, resources, and knowledge shared over the week have served to both enrich us personally as leaders and empower our organization to support future GlobeMed leadership. We cannot wait to see where this journey takes us.
Originally published at https://www.globemed.org on November 1, 2019.
