Kids at Hope Discuss Management vs Leadership

Posted on: Aug 15 2009 | Posted in: ACE Announcements


Alberta Recreation and Parks Association has partnered with Kids at Hope to roll out this award winning program across Alberta. These insightful comments are from their Executive Director Rick Miller. Rick will be presenting at the ARPA provincial conference in Lake Louise October 29 -31st.

We trust you are having a great summer. Kids at Hope continues to grow as our country struggles to understand why we continue to lose so many children to drugs, gangs, dropping out and aimlessness. Schools, communities and youth organizations across the country are embracing the powerful strategy developed by Kids at Hope to support the success of all children not just
some children. We continue to explore these challenging issues with the best minds in the country and are excited to share our findings with each of you and your communities so together we can reach every child without exception.

But before I do so, I want to discuss the difference between running our organizations as a bureaucracy with all its systems including human resources, accounting, facilities, programs/curriculum, fund raising, etc and supporting the cultural side of our agencies. Management runs our systems i.e. the bureaucracy, but leadership focuses on our culture. We understand that most organizations spend a disproportionate amount of their day focused on the management and very little time understanding the culture. We accept that management is where our efficiencies lie but culture is where our effectiveness is found. Unless we can harness the strength and potential of our culture we will never achieve our collective vision of ensuring the success of all children, No Exceptions. That is why Kids at Hope is all about unleashing those elements which only exist in our culture but are rarely unleashed. These elements include hope, optimism and success, They are about inspiration, empowerment and transformation.

When the Space Shuttle Columbia crashed the investigation board which studied the accident identified the culture of NASA as the main contributor. We submit to you that by and large our organizations and schools are efficient but we still lose to many children. Could the main contributor be the “culture?” We are convinced and our research supports the fact that it is.

The second issue I want to share is a mental blueprint about Kids at Hope and its cultural strategy. We recognize, again, that culture does not lie nor can it be found in manuals, memo’s or reports but only in the minds and hearts of people. To help us get closer to this understanding we have aligned our Three Universal Truths to our High Five Practices. By doing so we are able to translate our three most dominant research findings about success and failure into a series of powerful expressions.

When we can internalize these Three Universal Truths and operationalize them through the High Five Practices we then have successfully shifted the paradigm from “at risk” to “at hope.”

Finally, below is a link to a column that was recently published in The Arizona Republic (Arizona’s statewide paper) This column is part of a series of our Kids at Hope editorials published over the past year in The Republic. http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/07/26/20090726edmiller0726.html

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