The Cambridge Leadership Associates is a key NCLI partner bringing the expertise and experience to advance the leadership capacity of our country’s highest potential future natural resource conservation leaders. The result is an extraordinary curriculum and comprehensive learning experience of historical magnitude.

The Cambridge Leadership Associates from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government are the most recognized experts on Adaptive Leadership™. Adaptive Leadership is the principal theme throughout the Institute’s instruction and discussion. The principles of Adaptive Leadership are grounded to real conservation problems and challenges. Conservation luminaries will share their experiences from a unique conservation perspective, and this combined effort produces a truly remarkable, unique learning opportunity.

Distinguishing Leadership and Authority
Addressing a core concept of Adaptive Leadership, this session can be a breakthrough in how we think about leadership – a departure from many of the historic approaches. It defines leadership as separate from authority. After all, not all authority figures are leaders.

We spend most of our time in our personal and professional lives trying to divine what people want us to do and then meeting those expectations really well. This is noble work, but has nothing to do with leadership. There is a tension between the exercise of authority and disappointing your people’s expectations. Leadership is about disappointing your people at a rate they can absorb. And, the question to be learned is how hard can we push, and how far?

Session facilitated by Marty Linsky, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge Leadership Associates.

Distinguishing Technical Problems from Adaptive Challenges
The classic error in business is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. One of the first works of Adaptive Leadership is defining the problem correctly – is it technical or adaptive? When the answer is that it is an adaptive problem, meaning the authority figure doesn’t have the answer, then there will be a struggle for them not to come up with one. This is where the work of Adaptive Leadership begins. This is where the skills can be learned for what to do next.

Interactive session facilitated by Marty Linsky, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge Leadership Associates.

Getting on the Balcony
Leading change has much to do with the ability to maintain perspective in the midst of action and is critical to lowering resistance. Any military officer knows the importance of maintaining the capacity for reflection, especially in the “fog of war.” We call this skill “getting off the dance floor and going to the balcony,” an image that captures the mental activity of stepping back from the action and asking, “What’s really going on here?” The good news is you can learn to be both an observer and a participant at the same time.

Interactive session facilitated by Dr. Hugh O’Doherty, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge Leadership Associates.

Emotional Intelligence
This session examines what is heralded today as equally or more important than intelligence in leading organizations – emotional intelligence. Effective leaders are able to manage their own emotions and manage relationships positively even in negative situations.

Guided by a clinical psychologist, this session delves into answering questions such as: What can we learn from cognitive science about the connection between emotions, thoughts, and actions? How does anger fit with being emotionally intelligent? What are some common cognitive distortions?

Session facilitated by Dr. Tom Kalous, clinical psychologist, Stokoe & Associates.

Team Building
A number of team-building activities such as on- and off-site low and high ropes courses, the creation of peer consulting groups composed of Fellows, individual projects, videos, and electronic discussion boards build trust and group cohesiveness for your network of professionals attending the Institute. Debriefings with each activity connect back to Adaptive Leadership in conservation.

Leading Organizational Change in the Workplace
In the name of leadership, people use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already feeble controls, rather than engaging people’s best capacities to learn and adapt. In doing so, they only create more chaos.

Revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology have overturned centuries-old images of the universe. They provide powerful insights into alternatives for the design, leadership, and management of organizations.

Session facilitated by Dr. Margaret Wheatley, Berkana Institute, author of bestselling book “Leadership and the New Science.”

Having Courageous Conversations
Courageous conversations are conversations that orchestrate conflict to resolve different beliefs and priorities while preserving relationships. They enable people in organizations to expand their collective intelligence. In the Courageous Conversations module we will learn how to manage even the toughest conversations more effectively and with less anxiety using tools such as the ladder of inference.  We will practice new ways of seeing and diagnosing self-defeating communication patterns and learn how to create a container for courageous conversations, how to diagnose the underlying structure of difficult conversations, how to reduce defensiveness, how to surface what is not said, and how to intervene to keep conversation purposeful. We will introduce four types of conversations and explore why breakdowns occur among them and the implications of each for organizational learning and for making progress on difficult leadership challenges.  We will explore the concepts of inner and outer voice - the outer voice being the public filtered event and the internal voice being a mix of underlying issues, challenges, emotions, loyalties, values and identity.

Session facilitated by Dr. Hugh O’Doherty, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge Leadership Associates.

The Role of Spirituality in Professional Life
The role of spirituality in professional life is typically a taboo subject. What does it mean to manage other people’s spirituality in the workplace? What role does/should your spirituality play in your professional life? How has religion affected public policy in natural resource conservation?  A rare, relevant and timely discussion is led by one of the principal conflict negotiators whose work history includes Ireland’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics.

Session facilitated by Dr. Hugh O’Doherty, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge Leadership Associates.