Center for Leadership

“Leadership is speaking up, stepping up, and standing up to make a difference in something that matters to you and makes a difference for others.”Susan Mazza Founder
CEO of Random Acts of Leadership

The Center for Leadership at the University of Lynchburg is committed to advancing the understanding and practice of leadership in all areas of life. Our Mission Statement is “Growing strengths-based leadership and creating stronger communities through collective impact.”

We empower individuals and organizations to achieve their full potential by providing learning experiences, conducting research, and fostering collaboration across disciplines and sectors. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment where everyone can learn and grow. We value diversity, equity, opportunity, and inclusion and incorporate these principles into all aspects of our work.

The Center for Leadership consists of:

University of Lynchburg Leadership Academy
Lynchburg Tomorrow: A collaborative effort to promote community growth and development through a collective impact and strength-based model.
CliftonStrengths Coaching Center: Assessment that helps individuals and organizations identify and develop their unique talents and strengths, fostering a more productive and engaged team culture.

Our Collective Impact Model

The Center for Leadership is committed to a collective impact model, first articulated by John Kania and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. They identified five key elements of the model:

Common agenda

An agreement on problems necessary to address for a community to thrive and grow. Examples are numerous but could be connected to youth development, access to early childhood education, neighborhood leadership development, or achievement levels of students of color.

Common measurement/metric

For each problem, common measurements or metrics are identified. Metrics, an essential part of collective impact, are results-driven, not input-driven. The focus is not on how services are provided but on a common way to measure progress toward solving the problem. Stakeholders agree to measure success using the same metrics.

Reinforcing activities (consortium)

Stakeholders continue to focus on their vision, mission, and structure. They simply recognize multiple stakeholders are addressing the problem and through this recognition, stakeholders acknowledge that all stakeholder groups matter.

Heads met together (consortium)

While stakeholders address the problems in their way, individuals with decision-making authority within the stakeholder groups agree to meet regularly to discuss and share their work and to review data from the metrics. In essence, those involved participate in a consortium of stakeholders. Collective impact requires trust. As Kramer states, “Collective impact travels at the speed of trust.”

Group with a backbone function

Communities are often “program rich, system poor.” Individual stakeholder groups are making a difference with those with whom they work. Stakeholders are vital to addressing problems and helping a community move forward. For programs to have maximum effectiveness, they are best linked to a system to determine whether or not the collective groups are having an impact. The Center for Leadership provides the backbone that focuses on the common metrics and on providing a systemic response.

While the model looks simple, it is not. Collective Impact is not a natural act. What normally occurs is that individual stakeholders work independently on a problem, doing what makes sense to them, but they often have little knowledge about what other stakeholders are doing to impact the same problem.

The collective impact model provides a non-threatening process to gauge a community’s impact on identified problems.