Building Your Wolfpack
As we head into the retreat next week, I’d like to focus on Abby Wambach’s “New Rules of Leadership” from her book, Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game. Stemming from her 2018 commencement speech at Barnard College, Wambach’s rules outline so much of what our work in LAPH is about.
Create your own path: Your AHLP is a project with a new approach, advancing equity in new de-siloed ways.
Be grateful for what you have AND demand what you deserve: So much of our work for the public’s health is in a funding space where we are asked to be grateful for what we have or to divide among other equally important causes. Learning to communicate our story and impact is critical to advocating for and getting what our communities deserve.
Lead now – from wherever you are: Each of you has been selected for LAPH because you are poised to make change from where you sit in your home organizations, your teams, and your communities. Positional power does not equate to leading.
Failure means you’re finally IN the game: The LAPH experience is grounded in action learning, where you are using your real work as your learning ground. Inherent to the experience is a continuous quality improvement mindset. We reflect and learn from ourselves as we go.
Be FOR each other: LAPH is about collaborative leadership. To be successful in our communities, we must learn to lead with people from other organizations that are also seeking to advance the health of our communities.
Believe in yourself. Demand the ball: Each member of your LAPH team is critical to your success. Each of you has a network and a home organization with a role to play to advance your local efforts.
Lead with humanity. Cultivate leaders: Key to this work is believing in the humanity of our communities. Success is not achieved as individual leaders, but rather through leading together with our teams, and on behalf of and with other leaders we cultivate in our communities.
You’re not alone. You’ve got your pack: Working in a team is building your pack. Learning to reflect and lead together builds a resilient pack that is poised to continue working together.
This work is about building a movement that will inspire different approaches to improving the public’s health. So, “let’s storm these valleys together and change the game forever.”
If interested, we encourage you to also check out the TED Talk by George Monbiot about the repopulation of the Yellowstone wolves that inspired Wambach’s wolfpack mentality and new rules of leadership.
Image from amazon.com