In 2020, as part of our response to unexpected leadership transitions and the arrival of COVID as an everyday fact of life, Cobscook Institute began exploring a redesign of our organizational structure. This exploration led to the decision to try an experiment–to set up a formal arrangement that would reflect the vision of community action and connection that has always driven our work. With the agreement of the full board and staff, we designed around two big ideas: Shared Governance and Distributed Leadership.
““As a team we accomplish many goals. If one team member can’t think of a way to resolve an issue, another does. It shows each employee that they hold equal value and that their voice matters.” ”
We’ve already talked about Distributed Leadership in this space over the last year: the most obvious form this takes is our executive team of three Co-Directors, each with a different area of responsibility but with overlap in our shared duty to oversee the effective function of Cobscook as a whole on behalf of the community we serve.
Shared Governance is bigger and more ambitious because it impacts every part of our organization directly, every day. At its core, it is as simple as every member of our team feeling a sense of ownership over the work that is their responsibility, and ensuring our culture honors the perspectives and contributions of all no matter the topic or area of work. Of course, the reality of making that happen and managing the unexpected in a busy organization is more complicated. So, the idea we adopted to put these values into practice is Circles.
From the beginning, Circles were imagined like a grassroots community effort: each one would be composed of members who shared a commitment to a specific kind of activity or outcome, be self-organizing, and responsible internally to each other and to the group as a whole for both the outcomes of their work and for communicating about where it might impact the work of other Circles or individuals.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve operated with circles for Facilities, Finance, Communications, Fundraising, and Programming, that all do about what you’d expect given their names, as well as convening a weekly Great Circle that gathers almost all the staff together to share updates from the smaller Circles, coordinate larger pieces of work (including strategic planning), and provide a place for shared training and professional development.
This is an experiment, and our vision of it remains exploratory. This includes a continual review of what’s bringing success (not to mention joy) and where we need to gather new tools, knowledge, skills or capacities to enhance our work. It requires an investment of time and energy in building skills and capacities that are not at all universal: soft skills connected to careful deliberation and consensus building; nonviolent communication methods; and patient, intentional inclusion of as many perspectives as we can gather.
““Shared governance is one of the things that attracted me to work here. It’s hard to imagine creating change with a diverse community where everyone’s voice is essential, without our own internal work mirroring that.” ”
As part of ongoing refinement, this year brings a major change to our Circles–in practice, the responsibility for both strategic governance and day-to-day operational management have overlapped within the domain of each circle, but this has kept us from bringing members of our Board fully into some Circle activities. As a result, we are separating out those two spheres of activity to ensure that valuable participation can happen as broadly as possible. Changes like these also support our newly-ratified strategic plan Goal Two, which aims to strengthen our efforts to advance community-driven initiatives with regional impact.
Our journey to embrace Shared Governance and Distributed Leadership has been transformative. Through Circles, we’ve empowered team members to take ownership and foster a culture of inclusion. As we refine our approach, separating strategic governance and operational management, we remain dedicated to our mission of community-driven impact. This experiment continues to shape our commitment to community action and connection, propelling us forward with enthusiasm and purpose.
