Change Is The Only Constant
From the earliest days of Impact Hub organizing, we knew that change would be a constant. New people would attend the SocEnt Breakfast each month. New topics would become interesting and relevant over time. New team members and community members would come and go. Whether or not we like it, change is inevitable. It keeps this work fresh. Progress cannot happen without it.
And here we are again. At the precipice of more change. Redefined by the many changes we’ve just lived through. Ready to open a new chapter of how we work and even how we manage change.
Impact Hub is shifting its form to follow its function. Over the next several months, we are moving to a shared model of leadership, with a trio of Directors who will be accountable to one another, to the health of the organization, and to the communities we serve.
We see this as a way to respond to a shifting landscape that has broadened our goals and created opportunities for the organization to expand its role over the past several years. Co-leadership offers a way to steward our assets and relationships with even more skill at the helm. It offers the structural capacity to think strategically, operationally, and ecologically all at once. And it opens the door for fresh perspectives, energy, and ideas to join the team and build with us.
Our origins reflected this reality–three co-founders with distinct networks, backgrounds, and motivations offering up our experience to build something bigger than ourselves. Shared values and vision were enough to propel the work forward. All around us were collaborators, friends, funders, supporters, and believers making that vision more robust, making the values more refined, and making the goals more valid by showing up, signing on, and offering their support.
The co-leadership model reflects the world as we see it–full of leadership potential, animated by relationships, and capable of engaging complexity through intentional processes that incorporate many voices. We don’t believe in saviors, lone rangers, or heroes showing up to save us. We believe in collective wisdom, diverse experience, and platforms for genuine engagement.
The solutions to society’s challenges come from the ground up–from movements, collectives, and kinship communities. It’s time to fine tune our organizational structures to mirror that reality.
Society demands leaders who can know it all and do it all. Inspiring, charismatic people who project confidence, competence, humility, genius, and empathy all at the same time. In our entrepreneurial community, we work alongside people who miraculously meet that profile every day. At the same time, not a single one would tell you that they actually can know it all, do it all, or show up as their best selves every single day. Successful leaders always have a team to lean on, advisors to confer with, and experts to enlist for sticky challenges. To reflect this in our leadership structure is a more honest depiction of what this work really takes. It takes all of us.
Impact Hub is a network. It binds together a dynamic set of people and relationships that weave solidarity into our economy and communities. Our organization, team, and space enable coordination and structural support. Our community and our city animate the work. They are our reason for being. They shape who we become each and every day.
In this new structure, a Strategy Director, Operations Director, and Network Director will co-lead the organization. Responsibilities of the Executive Director will shift to individual and shared oversight roles. We’re actively searching for amazing leaders to apply.
In August, I’ll take on the Network Director role, which carves out space to dive deeper into the Hub’s role as a network builder and steward. To consider questions around building healthy, thriving, equitable ecosystems that grow civic wealth. To delve into data that shows how entrepreneurs move through our current landscape of support and how this serves them. To design and facilitate initiatives that enable our partnership network to build new resources, and work in more coordinated ways. I’ll be tasked with translating the power of networks into stories that replace the classic tale of the hero’s journey with a narrative of collective progress.
I’ll also have the opportunity to share a decade of Impact Hub knowledge and experience to colleagues with fresh eyes and ears, who can take our work and our space into new directions. After all these years and many evolutions, I’m fully aware that change is hard. I know that the sparkling visions we hold in our heads today will look and feel different in real life just a few months or years from now. I’m also aware that the growing pains of change always bring us someplace new and worthwhile. When you’re in the business of social change, hard work is always part of the package. Thankfully, so is the wonder, magic, and possibility of whatever future is waiting on the other side.
I am in constant awe of the road we’ve traveled over the last ten years, and all the ways we’ve manifested the goals we set out to accomplish. It has always been about the people, the connections we make, and the purpose that drives us forward. It’s thrilling to imagine the people who will write this next chapter of Impact Hub with us, and the connections and purpose they will build along the way.
Want to be part of this change? Know some amazing people who could contribute? Check out our Co-Director positions: https://bit.ly/IHBjobs
