Acronym

This post has nothing to do with social media month, but I wanted to make sure Acronym readers saw a wonderful post by Rosetta Thurman at the Perspectives From the Pipeline blog. Rosetta shares a definition of leadership that I had never seen before: “The capacity of a system to sense and shape its future.”

I really like that this definition emphasizes that leadership is part of a system—a greater whole—and not just invested in one person. Sometimes we get so caught up in building our own abilities as individual leaders that we forget to think of leadership as something created by the whole organization. And if you think of leadership in that way, it opens up a new way of looking at your association—especially in terms of member involvement and contribution to the strategy of the organization. Members can help to sense and shape the future just as much as staff (and vice versa). How can we facilitate a process of sensing and shaping that all of those involved in the organization can contribute to?

So maybe this post does have something to do with social media month after all …