But I was troubled by his orientation towards the leadership he felt was required. “We need to drive these evidenced based practices through Chassis System , from top to bottom," he said. “We need to force communities to understand what’s good for them.” Uh, oh, I thought to myself. Yet one more well-intentioned, influential individual in society who wants to bring about change for the better, but just doesn’t get how social change happens.

The minute you use words like “drive” and “force” to describe your intended process for bringing about change I head the other direction quickly. We can’t force change in a system – or if we do, it’s likely to result in only temporary change. If we want to exercise leadership in bringing about social change, our leadership task is really about facilitating the conditions within which others can make progress towards the goal. The leadership work of social change requires an ability to catalyze collective leadership in others - a form of leadership that Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton and I refer to in a new Stanford Social Innovation Review article as “System Leadership.”

Nowhere in the social sector is the need for system leadership more apparent than in the collective impact efforts many of us are involved in supporting. By its very nature, collective impact eschews top-down hierarchical forms of leadership that may work in the corporate world (though, even in the corporate world, most executives are finding that top-down leadership works less and less as an effective means for bringing about organizational change). Indeed, one of the qualities of collective impact that enables communities to achieve progress at scale – across, in some cases, hundreds of organizations – is the fact that no one individual or organization is in charge of a collective impact effort. A few years ago author and New York Times columnist David Bornstein described the need for collective impact this way:

When it comes to solving social problems, society often behaves like a drowning man whose arms and legs thrash about wildly in the water. We expend a great deal of energy, but because we don’t work together efficiently, we don’t necessarily move forward. (March 7, 2011, New York Times)

For collective impact efforts to move from thrashing to thriving requires leadership less like that described by the eager-for-change pharma exec, and more like the leadership examples Senge, Hamilton and I share in The Dawn of System Leadership. Folks like Molly Baldwin at Roca, a community based organization who is transforming how communities think about supporting troubled young men and boys, and Darcy Winslow formerly of Nike, who helped catalyze an industry sustainability revolution in the design of athletic shoes and apparel.