Leadership and organizational effectiveness require norms and conditions that help leaders stay accountable to their commitments, goals, and mission. Without them, the day-to-day demands and pressure of nonprofit work can pull even the most well-intentioned leaders off course. In the context of change management, this often means that a change vision isn’t backed by meaningful shifts in leadership behavior.

The purpose of this session is to look at leadership accountability as essentially an information exchange—and to explore the factors that get in the way of the transmission and receipt of that information. Together we’ll work through both positions in this exchange: what leaders can do to ensure that this information is reaching them, and what’s possible for staff who have insights or feedback that they haven’t found a way to share.

In service of this purpose, together we will…

• Reframe leadership accountability as a problem of information flow, and identify what it looks like, and what it costs, when that information moves sideways instead of upward;
• Examine the conditions that determine whether honest information travels — including safety, precedent, and the assumptions people carry about how their input will be received; and
• Identify practices for both sides of the exchange: what leaders can build and sustain to ensure honest information reaches them, and what’s available to people with less positional power who need to surface this kind of information.