Leadership Asheville: The Power to Create Positive Change

Members of Leadership Asheville 24 participate in a team exercise on leadership and communications. Leadership participants (front to back): Elaine Robinson, Ed McGowan, Jr., Audran Stephens, Jackie Dula, Michael Shoffner, Gregory Wheeler, Kay Manley, Todd Sharpe, face obscured, Barry Hendren, Bill Kelley, and Kim Ferguson.

by Gerry Goertz

As Executive
Director of Leadership Asheville for the last four-and-one-half years,
I’ve had an opportunity to get to know more than 170 members of our
community. Spending nine months with these participants has left me
with the feeling that there is a real desire growing in the region: a
desire to build a better community, not just for themselves, but for
all members of the greater Asheville area.

Did they
enter the program feeling that way? Based on my conversations, many
did, although in most cases that wasn’t what motivated them to apply.
Many different reasons were mentioned: the networking opportunity,
meeting with community leaders, learning about the history of the area,
analyzing community challenges, strengthening their leadership
abilities, touring different parts of the area, etc.

Nine months later,
something else emerges in addition to a stronger interest in building a
better community. Having spent time together in class, on community
interviews and in small team projects, there is an esprit de corps that
you normally associate with the military and athletic teams. This
spirit is accompanied by a trust among the participants that didn’t
exist at the beginning of the program.

Over
nine months, it’s amazing to see how having conversations about
interests they share and how working shoulder-to-shoulder can produce
mutual respect and trust. Once they get to know each other better, they
aren’t so quick to question each other’s motives. They may not always
agree on the solution, but they know that the other person cares about
getting to a similar result. To me, this is one of the keys to building
a stronger community. It is also an important element to acting
differently. We must build trust among community leaders — a trust that
each will act in good faith.

Knowing
each other and their shared values better can often be the difference
between healthy conflict and conflict that can tear a class,
neighborhood, organization or community apart. In a speech Frederick
Douglas made in 1857, he talks about the dangers of unhealthy conflict:

I am not
trying to abolish conflict. There is great value in healthy conflict.
And the dangers of group-think are real. Conflict can inspire creative
leadership. Where there are fundamental conflicts over values, they
should not be ignored in a sentimental yearning for consensus. The
problem in our communities today is not that we have conflict, but that
we manufacture conflict and exaggerate differences to the point where
it is very difficult to make meaningful change. Too often we abandon
basic civility and cannot disagree without questioning the motives of
our adversaries. Our standard as we debate should be similar to
doctors’ Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” Disagree, but don’t tear the
community apart as you do.

These
words resonate with me and, I believe, with most of the nearly 1,000
citizens who have graduated from Leadership Asheville. They know that
the quality of our conversations is an important element in building a
healthier community.

At the
end of the program, I also see a heightened sense of personal
responsibility and accountability for the condition of our community.
The Leadership Asheville experience stresses the importance of that
responsibility to strengthen the civic capacity of our communities.
Strong government and private sectors aren’t sufficient to ensure
community health. Communities need a fundamentally new way of thinking
about how a community does its business: a commitment to build a new
collaborative approach to community leadership. Leadership Asheville
graduates recognize the pitfalls of continuing business as usual. They
know the importance of having leaders who are able to reach across
boundaries and work constructively for community change.

One
program can’t unite or change a community, but I do believe that the
graduates of one program can. As part of the Leadership Asheville
program, I’ve seen small groups come together and provide an
extraordinary service to the community in just nine months. I’ve seen
graduates go on to assume important public leadership roles in our
community and observed important work performed by graduates about whom
you never read. I’ve seen firsthand Leadership Asheville participants
subscribing to the words of Parker Palmer, a Senior Advisor to the
Fetzer Institute: “Let’s learn to think of community as a gift we have
been given — and then embrace the hard work necessary to receive that
gift. The work of community involves discipline and dialogue and
accountability.”

Widespread citizen leadership is a critical component of a healthy community.

Participants
in Leadership Asheville learn that community building is not a
spectator sport and that widespread community leadership can be a
catalyst for transforming the greater Asheville area.