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Collaboration

Coalition Engagement Skill #6: Demonstrate energy and enthusiasm

Coalitions, Collaboration, Leadership, Listening, Partnerships, Prioritize, Uncategorized /

Engaging coalitions, partnerships, workgroups and teams is particularly challenging right now. Most meetings are still occurring virtually and “zoom” fatigue is real. When only a few people show their video and the energy is low, it is really difficult to effectively engage participants. As a coalition leader, you are responsible for modeling and encouraging positive […]

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Coalition Engagement Skill #5: Facilitate conversations and connections

Coalitions, Collaboration, Leadership, Listening, Partnerships, Prioritize, Uncategorized /

One of the most important roles for a coalition leader to play is that of a “master facilitator.” Although you may think you need to be the one to “do” everything, if you are really going to be able to achieve more together than you can on your own, facilitate conversations and connections. Join me

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Coalition Engagement Skill #4: Clarify meaningful roles and responsibilities

Coalitions, Collaboration, Leadership, Listening, Partnerships, Prioritize, Uncategorized /

Do you know what only you can do as a coalition leader? Do your coalition members know their roles and how they “fit” in the coalition? As a coalition leader, it is easy to “assume” that everyone knows what role(s) they are playing as part of the coalition. You may also have different expectations for

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Coalition Engagement Skill #3: Know your members’ interests and capacity

Coalitions, Collaboration, Listening, Partnerships, Uncategorized /

In order to engage coalition members, you have to know them. What are their interests? Where are their passions? Do they have capacity to participate in your work groups or teams? The more you can understand your coalition members and what is important to them, the better you can engage them in the coalition. It

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Coalition Engagement Skill #2: Create a neutral forum

Coalitions, Collaboration, Uncategorized /

How many times have you been to a meeting and you can clearly see that one organization’s agenda is clearly more important than any other organization? How often have you experienced competition among members?  When you are convening groups of people around a common purpose, someone needs to provide a neutral forum. In my experience,

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Learning from a successful coalition leader

Coalitions, Collaboration, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Partnerships, Uncategorized /

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’ Martin Luther King Jr. As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday today, we can learn a lot about coalition building from him and his work. As a leader, he knew how to build coalitions, engage his members and interacted positively with

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Partnership Pitfall #10: Unresolved conflict

Coalitions, Collaboration, Communication, Listening, Partnerships, Teamwork, Uncategorized /

Since coalition work involves working with people, there will always be conflict. 🙂 Conflict can be helpful, healthy and can aid the coalition in making better collective decisions. Unresolved conflict can be very destructive to a coalition and can erode trust and engagement. Conflict may be related to coalition decision-making, priority setting or among member

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Partnership Pitfall #9: Letting the loudest voices get their way

Coalitions, Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Partnerships, Teamwork, Uncategorized /

One of the best ways to energize your coalition toward collective action is to identify passionate champions who can provide leadership, inspiration and energy to accomplish the collective goals and objectives. Sometimes, these passionate champions can be very loud and insistent on their way. If “their way” aligns well with the coalition interest overall, that

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Partnership Pitfall #8: Under communicating

Coalitions, Collaboration, Communication, Facilitation, Partnerships, Teamwork, Uncategorized /

When we are leading a coalition, we can feel like we are always talking about what we are doing and can sometimes start to think that everyone else knows what we are doing too. 🙂  Even though we can be easily overwhelmed by emails, if there is infrequent and only occasional communication with only a

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Partnership Pitfall #7: Overselling and Under delivering

Boundaries, Coalitions, Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Partnerships, Prioritize, Rhythm, Teamwork, Uncategorized /

As a coalition, it can be easy to be overcommitted (which we talked about as our Partnership Pitfall #2). A related pitfall happens when we communicate to our partners and stakeholders that we can do more than we can actually do. In our enthusiasm (and sometimes our people-pleasing tendencies), we can communicate unrealistic expectations and

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Yes! Send me practical tips every week to help my coalition succeed!