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most managers are cooperative, friendly, and willing to share information — but what they lack is the ability and flexibility to align their goals and resources with others in real time. Sometimes this starts at the top of the organization when senior leaders don’t fully synchronize their strategies and performance measures with each other.

First, consider the goal you’re trying to achieve. Map out the end-to-end work that you think will be needed to get the outcome you want.

Second, convene a working session with all of the required collaborators from different areas of the company to review, revise, and make commitments to this collaboration contract.

It’s learner-centered teaching—it’s those instructional strategies and approaches designed and used by teachers who want learners to be motivated, independent, and self-regulated.

We criticize students for their surface learning approaches and yet I see a lot of surface learning when it comes to teaching. Our infatuation with teaching techniques—the tips, tricks, and gimmicks that can make our teaching dance—yes, they’re important, but so are the assumptions and premises on which they rest. We quest for “right” answers to what we think are simple questions. “Should I call on students or let them volunteer?” The answer depends on a host of variables including; how you call on students, who you call on, when you call on them, and what’s the motivation behind calling on them. Thinking that good teaching results from having right answers trivializes the complexities that makes teaching endlessly fascinating.

learning about teaching. I have talked with teachers who admit they don’t do any pedagogical reading and others who don’t do any professional development activities. How can you expect to stay instructionally alive and well when you’re not taking actions that promote health? It’s not about needing to improve; it’s about wanting to grow. It’s about taking our love of learning and tackling teaching as a subject to be mastered, a skill to be developed.

too many nonprofit CEOs and their boards continue to miss the answer to succession planning sitting right under their noses—the homegrown leader.

leadership development deficit.

The sector’s C-suite leaders, frustrated at the lack of opportunities and mentoring, are not staying around long enough to move up. Even CEOs are exiting because their boards aren’t supporting them and helping them to grow.

the single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants. Many collaborative efforts ultimately fail to reach their full potential because they lack a strong relational foundation.

Trust not control

network entrepreneurs focus on creating authentic relationships and building deep trust from the bottom up. This focus on relationship-building costs relatively little yet ultimately makes a tremendous difference in impact. Network entrepreneurs ensure that the power of others grows while their own power fades, thereby developing capacity in the field and a culture of distributed leadership that dramatically increases the collaboration’s efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

To accomplish this, we embraced the network principle of “node not hub,” deciding early on not to invest in top-down remedies, but in collaborative models that would remain in tact after our initial financial support ended, usually after a period of 5-7 years.

equired that local communities develop a data-gathering system.

consensus data model that large segments of our industry could embrace and use to standardize terminology and reporting across all shelters. We invested in building data-gathering systems for the shelter field and saw those early efforts blossom into genuine cultural change.

. Let Your Calendar Be Your Sword

Learn Outside of Your Comfort Zone

Learn with Other People

Electronic literacy.

Myth 1: Social Learning is a New Fad

Myth 2: Social Learning Means Only One Thing

Myth 3: You Don’t Have to Be Social to Get Social

1. "We can do it"

2. "Good job"

3. "That was worth it"

“If you're not continuously adapting and changing and embracing… if you don't have a culture of agility within your company to adapt to these changes, you're not going to be successful,” he said.