What's the Kind Leadership Guild? A Peek behind the Curtain (Challenge #80)

Greetings kind leaders to a slightly different and longer episode of the kind leadership challenge! As I mentioned a couple months back, over the summer I and an intrepid few long-time followers of the kind leadership challenge have been beta testing the new improved version of the kind leadership guild—a support group and community of practice where educational and library leaders come together to heal themselves, their teams, and their organizations, so we can all effectively, humanely, and collaboratively build the better world we need. Over the next few weeks I’m going to be sharing my opening lecture from a recent guild meeting, the ground rules we follow to create a psychologically safe and trusting space for leadership development, and even chat a little with one of the charter members of the guild. As you might guess I’m doing this because I plan to open the doors to the Guild a little wider in the fall, and I’ll share how you can get on to the waitlist at the end of today’s episode.

But before I go to the tape, I’d like to explain the structure of a typical meeting of the Kind Leadership Guild. Because I want to keep the guild accessible to any leader and group sizes small enough for good discussions, I hope to expand into more meeting times as the guild grows. However, for now there is only one monthly meeting time, on a Saturday morning, 11 AM eastern time. When we gather, we do a quick round of introductions of both members and first-time guests. After introductions, I give a 15-20 minute mini-lecture on how to approach that month’s topic from the perspective of Kind Leadership—this is the part of our meeting that you’ll be hearing today, and as you’ll hear it’s sort of like a longer and more detailed version of an episode of the Kind leadership challenge. And then comes the part that makes the kind leadership guild different from a lot of these kinds of coaching groups. 

I shut up, and open up the floor, and we have a conversation! Not student to teacher, but leader to leader! We talk about real-world examples of that week’s topic, and crowdsource ways all of us—me included—can do a better job at growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively to build the world our communities deserve. As you might imagine, that part of the guild meeting is kept strictly confidential. However, for the next few minutes, sit back and enjoy a brief glimpse into the opening of a kind leadership guild meeting, as I  how we can use kind leadership to establish, communicate, and enforce boundaries.

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I hope you enjoyed this glimpse behind the curtain of the kind leadership guild. As you can imagine, a community like this can only thrive with some jointly shared ground rules and core values—and in fact collectively creating them was the first and only item of business for the kickoff meeting of the Guild back in June. I’ll be sharing the Kind Leadership Guild’s ground rules and how we created them in next week’s episode. So here’s your challenge for this week—head over to kindleadershipguild.com to learn more about the guild. if you’re ready for the full experience, you can enter your email at the bottom the page to sign up for a free guest seat in an upcoming meeting of the Guild. if you’re listening to this episode in real time, our next meeting will be Saturday, September 9 2023 at 11:00 AM eastern time.

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Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for working to grow humanely, manage effectively, and create collaboratively in your own organization. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.