Collective Leadership is an Orchestra

La June Montgomery Tabron

06.15.21

How do you synchronize individual and unique leadership talents into one beautiful song? At the Kellogg Foundation, La June Montgomery Tabron focuses on just that challenge, working with every component of the team to best serve the overall mission.

Summary:

How do you synchronize individual and unique leadership talents into one beautiful song? At the Kellogg Foundation, La June Montgomery Tabron focuses on just that challenge, working with every component of the team to best serve the overall mission.

La_June_Montgomery_Tabron

La June Montgomery Tabron

I think in individual leadership, you are leading into your talent and your strengths, and there's a lot of autonomy in that type of leadership model, whereas in collective leadership, obviously, you're leading with others, it's almost like an orchestra, right? There needs to be the synchronization of all of those talents into a common song, and at the Kellogg Foundation, we learned through some of our own leadership development that, we call that Direction, Alignment, and Commitment, DAC, that's the creative leadership model, but everyone on the team has to understand what we're pursuing, first of all, and be very clear on what the end looks like, and then once we are clear on the end and they're all committed to achieving that and we are aligned around our values, then the execution could happen more synchronously, and I think that is what we've built at the Kellogg Foundation, and it wasn't always that way, it's a learned journey that we've been on as it relates to all of our work, and leadership in particular is something that we believe is part of our DNA, so we lead into it, we've really focused on how to develop the best leadership for serving children.