Why is Backbone Leadership Different?

What are the skills and mindsets necessary to be a backbone leader for a collaborative?

In this new podcast discussion, we talk with Paul Schmitz and Dominique Samari, authors of the recent report, “Backbone Leadership Is Different.” We explore how backbone leadership is unique and why It differs from traditional, more hierarchical leadership styles. In the discussion, we dive into:

• The specific mindset shifts required in backbone leadership;
• The skill sets that are crucial for effective backbone leadership;
• The importance of building relationships as a vital aspect of backbone leadership(and why it’s necessary that relationship-building be specified as part of the backbone’s work, and not considered an add-on or “on the side”.)
• Advice and insights on how backbone leaders can effective support collaboratives.

Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.

Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.

Resources and Footnotes

• Report: Backbone Leadership Is Different
• Webinar: The Skills and Mindset Shifts Backbones Need for Collective Impact
• Resource: Racial Equity Toolkit
• Online Platform: Kin Universe
• Article: Centering Equity in Collective Impact
• Blog: Making Meetings Work
• Podcast: What Makes an Effective Backbone Leader

More on Collective Impact

• Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
• Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact

Music

The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.

The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.

Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.

The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.

In this episode we’re happy to have back Dominique Samari and Paul Schmitz. Longtime listeners may remember Dominique and Paul joining us on an earlier episode to discuss their work on the Collective Impact Forum’s Racial Equity Toolkit.

Most recently Dominique and Paul authored a report titled Backbone Leadership Is Different, which is available for free download in the Forum resource library. The report draws from their observations partnering with and supporting dozens of collaboratives over the past 10 years, and shares what they’ve learned about the unique leadership skills necessary to lead a backbone effort.

In this conversation, we go over why backbone leadership differs from traditional, more hierarchical leadership styles. We also discuss the specific mindset shifts and skill sets that are crucial to effectively lead a backbone, and why building relationships are a vital aspect of the backbone’s role.

Serving as interviewer today is the Collective Impact Forum’s Executive Director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I’m Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Today we’re going to explore a topic that is incredibly important, why backbone leadership is different. Many folks listening are likely familiar with the term backbone in the context of collective impact work, and I don’t mean the part of one’s body. When we’re talking about a backbone we’re talking about leaders in collaborative work, collective impact work, whose role it is to guide, to facilitate the work of the collaborative. Folks playing this role are one of the key conditions to collaboratives making progress because while haven’t we all been part of collaborative work where we go to meetings and go home and then nothing happens in between because it isn’t anybody’s job to prioritize the work of the collaborative or to lead connections across participants or to encourage partners to be accountable for following through on the commitments they make and so forth.

While having a backbone in place is really one of the keys to making collective efforts move forward, and the skills for doing this type of work are often different than leadership roles people have held in the past.

So to explore this I’m so happy to have Dominique Samari and Paul Schmitz with us today. They are recent authors of a paper called, Backbone Leadership is Different: The Skills and Mindset Shifts Needed for Collective Impact.

So Paul and Dominque, welcome. I would love to start by having you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current work. I’m handing it to you first, Dominique.

Dominique Samari: Good afternoon, Jennifer. Dominique Samari. I am currently a partner at P3 Development Group, which is a consulting firm based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where we focus on strategy and capacity building, especially around issues related to equity and inclusion and also the creator of Kin Universe which is an online platform designed to help people connect across differences.

I have a bit of a winding path to my current work. I describe myself as a recovering attorney. I practiced law for about a decade and transitioned from the practice of law to working on a State Department contract overseas in Afghanistan where I designed and implemented programs for the justice sector, and it was that work that eventually led me to my work with P3 and even wanting to start a firm because I just saw how we were doing the work there and was having conversations with other consultants that were stateside and thought that we could develop a different approach to strategy and to capacity building that actually considered the whole human and how to move whole humans kind of in support of a strategy and how to move whole humans in support of the leaders that they wanted to be. So here now I found myself at this for about the past 15 or so years.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: We are very grateful that that winding path led us to meet you and work with you, Dominique, so thank you. And Paul.

Paul Schmitz: So I have been now with the Forum for 10 years and have worked with dozens and dozens of collectives. I came to this work, for 21 years led a national organization that worked at the grassroots in multiple communities called Public Allies where we did grassroots leadership development really trying to identify and build a very diverse next generation of leaders among those who were resident in the communities they wanted to change. So we focus on leaders of color and young people of low-income backgrounds and people who wanted to change the communities they were in and help them through full-time apprenticeships and leadership training begin careers in social change.

We partnered with—in every community and we were in 23 communities at the end, 20 to 40 nonprofits a year in each city that we partnered with. What we constantly saw was how all these organizations were not working together that should be.

I was a person called the White House Council on Community Solutions in 2012 and was really frustrated that the social innovation framework that everyone was talking about was all about replicating and scaling individual programs but no one was talking about moving population change. And right as I began exploring that through the White House Council the original article came out and I wrote a white paper or co-authored a white paper on needle-moving change or collective impact for the White House with Michele Jolin from Results for America and Willa Seldon from the Bridgespan group.

It was from that where I got invited to get involved with the Collective Impact Forum as it was getting started. So that’s for the last 10 years I shifted from doing grassroots leadership development to really working with coalitions to practice a lot of things I learned from collaborating with lots of community organizations all over the country on a variety of issues. That’s kind of the journey that brought me here was from doing the work on the ground and supporting the work on the ground to actually being able to bring what I learned to consulting.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Paul, and glad to have you with us today also. As I mentioned upfront you both co-authored the paper, Backbone Leadership is Different: The Skills and Mindset Shifts Needed for Collective Impact. Tell us a little bit more about what motivated you to write this piece.

Dominique Samari: This paper is really the result of several years of observations and conversations between Paul and I. So I joined Paul and his work probably about seven or eight years ago supporting collective impacts across the country, and just began to observe through, at that time, a fairly new lens what components were in place for collective impacts that were working really well and then we were doing a lot of work collective impact repair. We call it where we would come back in after a collective impact had started but maybe was having some difficulty and observing what was going wrong, why it was going wrong, and we started to see themes across the challenges that networks were having, that we were coming in to do a repair route and also themes around the networks, or collective impacts or networks that were doing really well, kind of themes across what they had in place that was helping them do a good job. And so we started to unpack this in conversation just over many years and it resulted eventually in the creation of this paper.

Paul Schmitz: Yeah, we actually outlined the paper two years before we wrote it, and then kept testing the core ideas. We were super, super busy for a while and just didn’t have the time to sit down and actually like get it down. So we realized we just had to build in the time and do it. We were actually in a hotel and we brought flipchart paper and actually created the mindset shifts and the skills and then over the last two years in trainings, workshops, and consulting with groups basically reinforced the list. The list really never changed over that time. That was the key thing and I think that when we started writing it, we realized that it would be most helpful if we reached out to some of those we thought that did it really well. There were five collective impacts we reached out to who we felt were ones that really practice this stuff well and we interviewed them and really had them help us reinforce these points. First, look at our list and make sure it resonated with them and then had them share their stories around these practices and that’s what allowed us to build the paper. So their stories are woven throughout each of the elements of the paper.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, thank you. For those who haven’t yet read the paper we will be talking about it, but I encourage you to read it and there are so many gems and words of wisdom from the folks who you were mentioning here, from the backbone leaders themselves woven throughout the paper. I’ve really appreciated that on my review of the paper. Dominique. Paul and you both have already mentioned that you do talk about six skillsets but before that you talk about some mindset shifts that people need to embrace that really shows how to work differently than some other forms of leadership. And you talk about three essential mindset shifts. So before we talk about the skills, can you tell us about the mindset shifts and why they’re so essential?

Dominique Samari: Absolutely, and I believe the conversations that Paul and I had that led to the creation of this paper actually started with a mindset shift. The skills were a follow-on but we started to notice like, what are these kind of mental barriers that people have to doing work in a new way? So the first one is from independently setting a vision.

So having a leader that is—and this is typical in an organizational setting that casts a vision and kind of creates marching orders towards that vision, to stewarding the network to agree on a common agenda and build a common agenda, outcome and result and build a common agenda to achieve it.

So what we saw was that folks would do a huge process in the beginning where they would convene people across sectors, and across geographies on the issue. They would build an agenda and then bring in a leader and the leader would cast their own vision. So they would like, OK, this is great that you all created this, but like this is the direction we’re headed. Or they would have a small group of people that were casting a vision that kind of fit the people at the table.

So that first mindset shift is all about kind of moving away from this individual leader casting a vision to actually using the network or broader perspectives in order to create a vision and then build an agenda around that vision. I think the thinking behind that is there’s a lot behind it but if you’re trying to move population change you know you need more than one or two or three organizations. You need a broad network. You have to identify a result and a common agenda that has the various perspectives, ideas, contributions, etc., from the folks across that landscape or else you can’t get buy-in and actually move the thing. The fewer the people tends to be the smaller the scope and it’s not inclusive of like all these pieces, usually pieces that you’re not even aware that you’re missing that are going to be necessary in order to move your agenda.

Paul Schmitz: The metaphor that we often use when we talk about this is Marriott versus Airbnb, and it’s not an endorsement of either company or their product but it’s just the notion that most of us have worked our entire lives in organizations. Organizations are hierarchies. There’s good reasons for that. There’s—we’re used to the idea that the leader sets the vision, the board oversees the leader, people are accountable up the chain, we control the work, we do the work, and maybe we bring in people to collaborate or advise us.

I use the Marriott metaphor just to say like if you think of the Marriott someone essentially decides what shampoo is in all the bathrooms, what the thread count on the sheets are, what TV screens are on the wall. You can go to them all over the country and they kind of look alike and you kind of know what you’re getting because it’s the same. I know that you know that’s the same shampoo they had in Grand Rapids that’s in Santa Fe, right? Airbnb is a network, right? And it works differently because all they can do is create a platform and a set of standards that everyone agrees to and then support people to achieve those standards together. The notion is that when we have a network, we can’t control what the network does. What we have to do is create a platform that supports them to work together which is actually the five practices of collective impact. And then we can support those who agree to work together on a common agenda we’ve agreed to to succeed in doing that. But we don’t manage them. We don’t control them. And the practices and skillsets are different.

So I think that so many groups we see just fall back into the steering committees, the board, and the board starts making decisions without the network and the staff start doing all the work instead of facilitating the network to do the work. We see people fall back. It’s such a common pattern for people to fall back into organizational behavior and not sit in the network behavior which the key kind of thing that these three mindset shifts define, the difference between living with a network mindset versus an organizational mindset. And I think that’s just really hard to sustain and has to be reinforced constantly to hold.

Dominique Samari: I think part of the challenge is that it requires letting go of control and having trust. That is not something that comes naturally for most people. So when they think about letting go of control and like just supporting a larger network, they start to drill down into like all these pieces that they would normally control if they ran an organizational structure. That, of course, you know, starts to erode trust, it starts to decrease engagement, like all of these things that actually erode the validity of the network to achieve their actual goal. It does require a large amount of trust, but it requires a large amount of trust that could be supported by a really strong and clear container if people could get the strong clear container right.

Paul Schmitz: I just have to share this quickly and you’ll remember this, Dominique. We had a client once and it was the last meeting we ever had with that client where the backbone leader effectively said they were frustrated with everyone’s work and we’re like explaining that you have to kind of give the work back to the people, and they were like I can’t let them hold my baby or something like that. They were like I can’t—and we’re like that– we were done. We were like that’s never going to work. They were holding on to their vision and the work so tightly and they didn’t trust anyone to do it, and it’s like, well, at that point there’s nothing we can do but that made me think of that example. I can’t let them hold my baby. It’s like it’s not your baby. It’s a collective vision.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, and I want to just go back to one thing, Dominique, that you said about but they do set the clear container within which the work is going to happen. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by that in this context? What is the container?

Dominique Samari: The leader is responsible for the platform so they’re responsible for management and communication and facilitation and actually keeping folks on track, and so if you build a really strong container where the communication is clear, and we talk about this in the skillsets and people feel included and you’re actually managing the task effectively. That container, I think, allows folks to have this mindset shift that increases their ability to let go of the work and actually trust the network to get it done. But without that, if you don’t have a strong container, then it is true that people may go off the rails and you may not all be rowing in the same direction but that’s the work. The work is building and holding a strong container.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: So, Dominique, you dove in on the first mindset shift but I also know there are three mindset shifts. Can you speak to the other two as well?

Dominique Samari: The second mindset shift is from focusing on program-level results to pursuing population-level outcomes. Again, defaulting back to kind of this organizational mindset, organizations are so used to running programs and they typically come together and try to form a collective because that’s not working to achieve the population-level outcomes that they want to achieve but they often take kind of this program mindset and just place it right on top of their collective impact strategy and that’s just not how it works. So there of course still needs to be programs and quick wins but you also need to have population-level outcomes that point to and strategies that support those outcomes, the point of the reason you came together as a collective, that you’re actually coming together because you need to move a population and you haven’t been able to do that individually.

Then the third mindset shift is from centering the backbone organization to aligning, motivating, and managing the network to act together. We talked a little bit about that one in the first. That really is the clear container, and so moving from like the backbone is the be-all of the collective impact to the backbone’s role is really about making sure the activities are aligned and working to achieve the result, motivating all of the actors and players involved, and then managing the network so that they can actually work together. We talk about how to do that in the skillsets.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, let’s go there, the skillsets. You name six specific skillsets in the paper and I’ll name them and then would love for you all to elaborate so you set number one being results based; two, equity focused; three, political savvy; four, project management; five, inclusive culture; and six, adaptive leadership.

Paul Schmitz: When we started the paper, this is the list we kept putting on the wall and thinking about, and used in workshops with other groups and started to see people resonating with it and it was connecting, and so we do feel like this is the set. We’ve seen other more complicated examples of peoples but I think this kind of boils it down.

The results-based to us is really about how the leader holds a bold, ambitious goal but to us it’s the idea that everyone in a collective, if everyone can name what the goal is, I mean what’s the result we’re trying to move and where we are, if people are like our job is to get 300 more kids to grade-level reading or our job is to get 10,000 more affordable housing units or our job is to double the number of kids who are college-career ready. When everyone owns that result and holds that result, that’s when you know that you’ve got people in that, and so holding that result in front of people all the time. We see so many groups slip back into activities and program outcomes and lose sight of the focus of keeping everyone with a line of sight from their work to the ultimate result. That’s something we see all the time that concerns us and that we feel holds groups back.

We’ve talked a lot about equity in the past. We’ve done a podcast on it. We’ve written a toolkit so I feel like we can refer people to the other articles in our racial equity toolkit and things like that on that topic but we kind of reconnect back to the qualities that we mention in the toolkit and the practices that are in the article we wrote on centering equity in collective impact.

Political savvy is an interesting one because it operates at two levels. At one level there’s the ability to influence systems leaders and systems change. But it’s also about understanding the dynamics between different leaders, organizations, and systems in our community, how they relate to each other, who gets along with who, who influences you, how to influence different folks. It’s having that relational intelligence across the network to know if we pursue this, these two groups are going to be set off by this. I better go talk to them or recognizing that there’s a couple groups that are falling behind and they’ll freak out if they come to the meeting and see this. I need to go meet with them beforehand. It’s that knowledge of how people work together and interrelate and being savvy about how you work with them within that.

Dominique Samari: Often folks want to do that by email and that’s just not—it’s not supported by electronic communication. It really is about the relationships. It’s about picking up the phone. It’s about understanding the landscape. It’s about having the coffee meeting and that’s part of the work. Folks often think that that’s ancillary to the work but it actually is the work.

Paul Schmitz: Yeah, but the fourth is about project management and is really about the fact that you have to manage this. Collective impact doesn’t just happen with good intentions and a good plan. It happens because we manage the plan, and that means that we need workplans, we need accountability mechanisms. We’ve got to make sure people stay aligned.

I think people in collective impact love the community-building part of the work and hate the accountability part of the work but you don’t get to needle-moving change if you’re not doing both the inclusive work and the management work. I think that becomes a dirty word to people and they don’t like it, and they don’t like the accountability side but if you’re not holding people accountable for fulfilling the tasks in the workplan that moves the strategy, that helps contribute to our overall result, if you’re not intervening where you’re seeing programs not reach their results, and if we have the change the work or invest differently, if you’re not stopping things that aren’t working, all of that is part of it and we see a lot of groups love when we talk about the equity work and the inclusion work and things like that, and they don’t love as much the project management and accountability work but you can’t get to results if you’re not project managing the effort and you need to be able to do that.

Dominique Samari: I feel like it falls with being results based and project management are the same which is that lack of accountability, and so with results based, they don’t want to set a goal that scares them but, in this work, you have to set a goal that scares you, and with the project management it’s the same but at a different level. It’s that somehow, we’re not tracking this closely, we can just keep moving forward and it seems like we’re doing a lot but without actually knowing whether or not we’re achieving our result but to me the underlying fear is the same which is we don’t know if we can do this and we don’t want any evidence that we’re not doing it, right? And so I think those are the drivers kind of for both of those.

Paul Schmitz: The fifth is inclusive culture which is incredibly important. You have to create belonging and trust within the network, and that doesn’t happen automatically. It’s not going to happen because you’re nice. It’s going to happen because you actively worked to build belonging and trust within the group. We share practices that build and repair trust. I think that again a lot of that goes back to the relational side as Dominique says, and again I think sometimes people think that being inclusive and holding people accountable can’t coexist. They totally can coexist, and actually if you build great trust, that trust can be utilized to hold people accountable because they trust you and you trust them, and you know we’re all trying our best and we like each other and care about each other, and this isn’t working or we’re not making enough progress here, we’ve got to move.

Again, I think it’s how do we build the kind of trust and culture, and we talk about part of building the culture too is about how you build your meetings, and we just don’t see so many poorly run meetings that are boring where people are reporting out with people around long tables. I mean we still see a lot of people struggling to figure out how do they build a collective impact culture that’s really unique and different and energizing to people and supports collaboration instead of supporting old ways of doing things and kind of getting people stuck into the ruts of just sharing information. I don’t have to go to a meeting if you’re just sharing reports. I do have to go to a meeting if we’re looking at data and changing what we’re doing over the next few months at our agencies, and that’s the difference. When the meetings are set up to support our work, we go. When the meetings are just to exchange information, it’s optional. Dominique, anything you want to add on that?

Dominique Samari: No, I think that’s exactly right, and I don’t think this is forgotten but I think it’s not lifted up enough is that everyone at that table has competing priorities and limited capacity, and, and, and, and, and, so if you’re not building a culture that supports moving the needle, people drop off. That’s where you start to get attrition because it’s not like they’re not doing a million other things.

Paul Schmitz: And the final practice is adaptive leadership, and we included that because of a number of things, and it’s something we’ve done a lot of training with groups in adaptive leadership but because we see it as something and first is that collective impact is change, and so many groups forget that getting groups to change requires change management. You’ve got to be aware that you’re asking organizations to change their work, maybe change the populations they serve, change their outcomes, change their funding streams. That’s a lot of change and getting people to do that change is not easy.

A lot of times people just don’t ask people to change, and collective impact doesn’t work if we’re not changing. Our existing work is producing the result we have today. If we want a different result, people to have change. It means groups have to learn new behaviors and new skills, and so we have to prepare for that.

Adaptive leadership also teaches us skills in working across difference and having difficult conversations and solving complex problems. In collective impact there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of priorities as Dominique was just talking about but also, it’s about holding tensions, that a leader has to be able to be comfortable with the difficulty of holding tensions and what we mean by that is if half our collective thinks we’re moving too fast and half think we’re moving too slow, we’re probably moving at the right speed. If people think we’re—if some people think we’re too top down and some think we’re too bottom up, we’re probably at the right level. It’s like bending too far in one direction or the other limits us and we never can make everyone truly happy, and that’s got to be the job of an adaptive leader, is holding those tensions and being OK with it, that we’re not supposed to solve those but just help try to keep the tension moving in a productive way to keep people moving forward.

So that work around change management and holding tensions and having skills to work through conflict and choices and difficult conversations, that whole set of practices is really important because it’s hard work if we’re doing it right, and we’ve got to be able to work with people through that.

Dominique Samari: And it’s easier to hold those tensions if you’re always coming back to the North Star. I think when you start to lose the North Star, it’s when those kind of smaller battles start to pull people in different directions, right? Because they’re losing their grounding on what we’re actually trying to achieve.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s great, and I will note that within the paper for each of those six capacities you have some tips for hold to build that capacity so if you’re listening and it sounds like, yes, I’ve got it on some of these but there’s some areas where you’re kind of curious for how to shore up in that area, Dominique and Paul have offered some tips around building capacity in that area.

Paul Schmitz: I just want to say that we also have the stories from our backbone staff that we interviewed that illustrate what each of these look like in practice so we share like here’s what this means, here’s some tips for how to build it but we also have their stories that kind of illustrate what these look like in real life based on actual work they’re doing in collective impact.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Those are fabulous, and I will also note you have a statement or I don’t know if it’s a disclaimer or a clarifying statement that not one person typically peaks or spikes in all six of these, that you ideally want these present across a backbone team or between a backbone leader and their steering committee that is guiding the work so could you just say a little bit more about that?

Dominique Samari: Sure, they’re just wildly different skillsets, and so the type of person that is going to be an inclusive culture builder is probably not going to be the best person to project manage, and the type of person that is results based may not be the most equity focused or politically savvy. It’s just such a broad range of skillsets and that’s the beauty of the collective though is that you can look across the collective, across the backbone team, across your steering committee and really identify what are these skillsets that I need and then how am I making sure that I’m building a team that’s inclusive of all of them. Then the other thing that keeps coming up for me, I think it’s important to name for yourself that the default is organizational hierarchy and that you’re going to slip back into it, and I think if you can name that and kind of name it broadly, it’s easier to hold yourself and each other accountable.

Paul Schmitz: So the other thing we really emphasize is the relational part of this. Dominique mentioned that before. We actually have a segment at the end and if you read the stories across the six skillsets from those folks, they’re constantly talking about the relational aspect of this work. I think that one of the things we keep seeing especially post COVID is people believing they can manage collective impact purely over Zoom and purely over texts and emails. In our experience that’s really, really hard. There’s some cases where a group is statewide or national where they have to do a lot more of that but there’s no—you have to have time building relationships and you can’t build relationships just virtually.

You have to spend time in rooms with each other. You have to get together with people especially in a community that you’re doing collective impact in. You need to go to people’s offices, learn about their organizations, volunteer at their events, show up at their events, show up, get together with them for coffee. You’ve got to be seen as people, as true allies and partners who understand their work, understand what they’re up against.

If you want to be politically savvy, the way you do it is by getting together with people, understanding their organizations, asking them what worries them, what they’re seeing. It’s all that time getting to know people individually in your collective, and that takes time but that’s the work. The knowledge you gain and the trust and empathy and relationship you gain from spending that time will pay off immensely in your ability to manage it well.

What we see is if people’s main interaction with their collective is through meeting, the groups meetings, that just does not produce the same level of leadership and ability and capacity to backbone it. It’s all that time outside the meetings that really is where it shines, and so we talk about that but each of the—I mean one of the Beth Clay from Appleton says she doesn’t embark—no one comes to one of their network meetings without her first breaking bread with them. John Jacobs in San Antonio talked about going to other organization’s events and offering to volunteer with them, to just be there of service to them and show up for them because he’s asked them to constantly show up for the collective. He’s showing up for them too. We heard all these stories from folks about how much time they spend building relationships and getting to know people and getting to know organizations. I just have to emphasize that because it shows up throughout this.

Dominique Samari: Yeah, I think that’s really important to lift up. So much of this is about, especially that relational component, it’s about being human with each other. If you want to build community, if you want to build networks, you have to show up for people in a way that demonstrates that that’s what you’re trying to build.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you, Paul and Dominique. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about yet in this conversation?

Paul Schmitz: I would just say this. Collective impact is hard. Backbone leadership is hard, and so if you acknowledge that it’s difficult, that it takes a lot of different skills to do, that it takes the time of relationship building, and we can understand in leadership development we often say that it’s important for a leader to know what you’re strong at and were you fall short. We always use the example of we’re all half empty and half full. Know your full side and know your empty side, and that’s why we need to collaborate. None of us has the whole package and that goes back to the six skills but if we can authentically be clear about what we bring, and as Dominique was sharing earlier, find those who bring the other things within our network and be clear that these are the capacities we have to build and these are the investments of time we need to make in relationships and all of this stuff, that’s the key thing, and that’s what we’re trying to get across. And then on the mindset shifts, just you have to keep reinforcing them. It’s not something you read once and talk about but maybe once a year ask yourselves how are we doing at living in the network space, how are we falling back? What are ways that we might be tripping over ourselves or on some of these other things, you know. One of the coalitions has a set of criteria questions any new initiative or idea has to run through to make sure it aligns before they do it, and so I think one thing you could do is just create some type of system or process to kind of assess once a year kind of how are we doing and where are we at these, and which ones are we strong at, which ones we’re not as strong at, how do we build them, and it might be a way to kind of like use these as a way to guide your own capacity building.

Dominique Samari: I love that. I mean the only thing that I would add is that to give yourself and others grace, and so these provide you with the mindset shifts and skills that you’re doing something new likely. So if you’re starting a collective, you’re doing something new and that means you need to kind of approach it with a beginner’s mindset and know that it’s not going to be perfect, that you’re going to mess up and you’re going to take a step forward and then a step back and that’s OK but keeping your eye on kind of the population-level result and not kind of, as Paul said, coming back again and again to these mindset shifts knowing that you’re going to default I think is really important and just not pretending like, no, we’ve got this. It is very hard work, and it’s hard and new work for many.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, Paul and Dominique, thank you so much not only for joining today and for sharing all of this learning in your paper but for being fabulous advisers to the Collective Impact Forum and such leaders in the field so thank you. If folks want to learn more, they certainly come to collectiveimpactforum.org to find the paper and learn more about you all but where else can folks look to learn more about you and your work? Dominique?

Dominique Samari: You can reach out to me directly, @p3development.com or kinuniverse.com.

Paul Schmitz: You can find me through the Collective Impact Forum and I also have a website, leadinginsideout.org, either way but also through the forum where a lot of the articles and things we’ve worked on and the toolkits Dominique and I have done are posted as well.

Dominique Samari: You can also find me on a forum which I sometimes forget about.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, that was the first place I started. Come to our website and we are so excited that Dominique is formally an advisor with the forum now after just simply being a longtime friend and partner so thank you, Dominique.

Dominique Samari: Thank you.

Jennifer Splansky Juster: We will provide links to all of the referenced materials in our show notes and thank you everyone for listening and wishing everyone a great day.

And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.

We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.

The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.

In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit, that will be held online this April 29-May 1, 2025. It’s our biggest learning event of the year, featuring over 30 virtual sessions, and sharing out best practices from collaboratives from across the U.S. and globally. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to join the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit. We hope you can join us.

This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.