This week, I received the “Green Issues and Opportunities” Leadership Santa Rosa Award – along with 9 others in different categories. I felt truly honored; what a great event! There should be some nice photos coming out soon; I will be sure to post them. Below is the text to a press release that the Sustainable Enterprise Conference released; I really think I won the award because of our collaboration there. As and aside – the conference will be on May 11, at Sonoma Mountain Village, and again I will be MC as well as delivering a workshop “10 Ways to Build Your Dream Green Team” with my colleagues at CircadiaOne.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 5, 2012
Jan Kahdeman, Communications Director
mailto:jan@contactsec.com (707) 799-1646
Sustainable Enterprise Conference Co-Founder Genevieve Taylor
Honored at Santa Rosa Chamber’s Bob Blanchard Excellence in
Leadership Awards
Santa Rosa, California, April 5, 2012 – Genevieve Taylor, co-founder of Sonoma County’s Annual Sustainable Enterprise Conference and vice-president at Global Genesis, is a finalist in the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce’s Bob Blanchard excellence in leadership award. Taylor was chosen for her exemplary work in the category Green Issues and Opportunities.

“I am delighted to be selected as a finalist, and to be included in a group of people who are all making real contributions to Sonoma County,” said Taylor. “It’s been very rewarding to see the increase in interest and effort around environmental sustainability in Sonoma County, and I am pleased to see that Leadership Santa Rosa and the Santa Rosa Chamber are a part of that conversation.”

The Bob Blanchard award is an outgrowth of the Santa Rosa Chamber’s Leadership Santa Rosa program, the purpose of which is to identify, develop, and equip effective community leaders who will help create or support a spirit of cooperation for the resolution of future community challenges. The program provides a series of ten, full-day seminars with community leaders on a wide variety of business and
leadership topics.

Taylor is a graduate of the Leadership Santa Rosa Program, as well as of a similarly structured program that focuses specifically on environmental, economic and social sustainability, offered by the Santa Rosa non-profit Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy. As vice-president of consulting firm Global Genesis, she delivers training in leadership, communications, time management, conflict
resolution, and negotiations. In addition, she has been selected as this year’s Sustainable Enterprise Conference master of ceremonies.

In 2005, Taylor co-founded Sonoma County’s Sustainable Enterprise Conference along with Robert Girling, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Business and Economics at Sonoma State University.

“Robert believed we needed a forum for fostering the conversation about sustainability in Sonoma County,” said Taylor. “We gathered people from the business world, from Sonoma State, and from the Green MBA program at Dominican University to create a conference that offers enterprises practical tools for solid change. We focus on topics such as green business programs that are available in Sonoma County, green business venture capital, and how to track sustainability initiatives in local businesses. A host of changes are possible and necessary for improved sustainability, from small, obvious things like eliminating the use of plastic water bottles, to analyzing an entire supply chains to identify ways to make it more environmentally friendly and sustainable.”

Now in its 7th year, the day-long Sustainable Enterprise Conference is dedicated to helping North Bay businesses and organizations transition to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. This year’s program theme, Collaborating for a Sustainable Future, provides insights for organizations and individuals seeking the latest information on how innovation and sustainability will drive the economy while preserving the resources needed for an environmentally responsible and prosperous future. The conference will be held Friday, May 11 at Sonoma Mountain Village, Rohnert Park. For more information and to register, visit www.sustainableenterpriseconference.com/, or contact Oren Wool, event director, at (707) 636-4732, or oren@contactsec.com.

About the Sustainable Enterprise Conference
Produced by a group of Northern California business leaders, university faculty, non-profit leaders and entrepreneurs, the Sustainability Enterprise Conference aims to educate and work with North Bay enterprises and the local community to help integrate environmental responsibility, sustainable business practices, and economic and social equity issues to ensure a high quality of life for future generations.
The conference operates under the fiscal sponsorship of the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy, a 501(c)(3) public charity based in Sonoma County that is dedicated to insuring a sustainable future for California’s North Coast.
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www.SustainableEnterpriseConference.com
Sustainable Enterprise Conference | 555 5th Street Suite #300A, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 | (707) 636-4732

The New Science of Building Great Teams – Harvard Business Review.

Influential Women in Cleantech: Top 10 Women of Sustainability | lisa-ann-pinkerton-170507.

The Rise of the New Groupthink – NYTimes.com.

Collaboration, really, is best done when it is impelled by a real need; our meetings should be the same way!

I have been interested in collaboration for a long time, in parallel with my passion around sustainability.  What I have noticed is this: as people become empassioned about the “big” topics, and become empowered internally to make change, they naturally reach out to others.  Visionaries have realized that the only way they can really make a difference on these urgent, important issues (health; climate change; sustainability; the financial system; I could go on…), is that they must work together to make their vision happen.

This struck me so forcibly that last year (2010), I led a workshop called “Leadership Skills for the Visionary Collaborator.”  That day, along with 25 people who were leading change all over Sonoma County, we explored what leadership skills were specifically needed to lead effective collaborations – both within organizations, as well as between organizations.

For me, 2012 will be a year of exploring “what it takes” to be a visionary collaborator.  Many of my ideas are based on the leadership development training we already do at Global Genesis.  I am delighted by this topic; I feel that with a greater attention to the personal strengths and skills these visionaries bring, the more effective they can be.

And these days, the human race needs us to be effective.  Desperately.

So, what is a visionary collaborator?  How are they different from other types of leaders?

The visionary collaborator may be a CEO working with his suppliers and distributors  to set industry standards, like Jeff Mendelsohn at New Leaf Paper has done in the Paper Industry; they could be a set of non-profit leaders working together on enormous topics like Health, or Climate Change, like my colleagues at the Sonoma Valley Health Roundtable or the North Bay Climate Adaptation Initiative.  Or they could be  green champions in organizations, progressing change amongst various departments or throughout the organizational hieararchy.

Their task is made challenging, unique, rewarding and powerful because they are visionary, they are leaders, and because they know they must collaborate to be able to create their vision.  And they are both influencing change as well bringing their own original thoughts to the table, while navigating a group that must answer to multiple loyalties.

There is a classic diagram that we use in teambuilding, of many arrows pointing in opposite directions.  The task for the visionary collaborator is to help align those arrows in generally the same direction.    To state it simply, s/he is a person with original ideas about the future who is working with a group of unaffiliated people to achieve a common goal.  To do that they must use leadership, or  what I define as “the process of influencing others towards a specific goal(s). “

In essence, the visionary collaborator is honing her/himself to be an effective partner – one that others will flock to because they are trustworthy and able to create results.

I have been noticing that in this world, which is in crisis in so many ways – economically, environmentally, and socially – that collaboration has been an avenue for robust and extremely creative solutions to form.  Check out this interesting coalition as a start -

I have a belief that these skills can be taught, developed, and improved on over time – that leaders aren’t born, but are created.  That doesn’t mean they don’t have their own innate styles and strengths that can be brought to bear in these situations.  In fact, I would argue that given the complexity of collaboration, it is important to have a variety of styles and strengths for a collaboration to produce real, long-lasting results.

Here are some of the qualities that must be developed by the visionary collaborator:

1)      Self and organizational awareness.  One must be very aware of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, assets and liabilities; this awareness essentially allows one to partner fully with others.

2)      Ability to Achieve Results: These collaborators must be courageous, credible, urgent and tenacious.

3)      Ability to Cultivate  Relationship: These leaders must bring their own brand of patience, diplomacy, and consideration.

4)      Attention to Collaboration:  Finally, these unique people must be open, aware, empowerd, and discerning for their collaboration to succeed.

Over the next year, I will be exploring both qualities and skills that the visionary collaborator needs to succeed.  I will also look to many of my contemporaries in thinking about what makes a collaboration work, how to structure to succeed, and how to use the strengths that the individuals in the group bring to bear.  May it be a year of fruitful collaboration!

I will be facilitating Day 2 of this Summit.  NBCAI will be bringing together scientists, land managers, and policy makers from a multiplicity of disciplines – from health, to forestry, to emergency services.  They are keenly interested in the question, how WILL Sonoma County adapt and thrive in the face of Climate Change? The event is free – please join us! Register at the link above.

Formula for Change – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This is a great illustration for change that is applicable across a wide range of situations – whether you want to lose weight, or you want to change an organization.  Carrie Hays from the Halle Group first introduced it to me; thanks, Carrie!

This is a chapter on Real Time Strategic change, a change method to use when

1. Multiple Stakeholders have competing needs,
2. Aligned action is required
3. Results need to be achieved in radically reduced time frames.

(p. 275, The change handbook, “Real Time Strategic Change.”)

This is a really important methodology, and highly useful whether you are working in sustainability or other change efforts in your organization.

This article summarizes some insights first discussed in the book “Influencer: the power to change anything.”  They say that the following principles will help habits change in a workplace.  It is a nice list to read in comparison with the Oprah’s article on neuroscience and habit change.

Here are the principles they identify:

1. Linking to mission and values
2. Overinvesting in skill building
3. Harnessing peer pressure
4. Creating social support
5. Aligning rewards and ensuring accountability
6. Changing the environment

This is a fantastic article on how to “rewire” your brain to change your habits – like exercising, etc.

In the workplace, we talk a lot about “merit-based pay”, “reward and recognition systems,” etc.  But the best rewards for rewiring your brain,  says the author, is to reward often, don’t be stingy, and stick with it every day for 3 weeks. She has great examples of rewards, too: things as silly as goofy characters, etc.

If we were to apply this to our sustainability change efforts, we might think more about how to make “feedback” for change instantaneous – whether it is merely recording our progress, or sending a joke out to those who participate, or other fun things.  What “instant feedback” ideas can you think of?