5 essential traits for leadership on the SDGs

Community Solutions, a nonprofit organization working to end homelessness in the United States that was recently selected for the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change award, has succeeded in part due to its founder’s “generosity mindset.” That’s according to Paul Shoemaker, the author of “Taking Charge of Change: How Rebuilders Solve Hard Problems.” The newly released book features leaders such as Community Solutions’ Rosanne Haggerty, who Shoemaker said embodies this leadership trait, “moving past all diversions, getting the best from everyone, making their whole greater than the sum of its parts.” A generosity mindset is one of five traits that all leaders need to take on complexity, Shoemaker said in a talk at last week’s Greater Giving Summit, an invitation-only series of online events hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We can accept the world as it is or find and build up more leaders like Roseanne Haggerty,” said Shoemaker, who is also the founding president of Social Venture Partners International, a global network connecting donors, nonprofits, and social enterprises. “We as giving leaders can either invest more in people like her or become those kinds of leaders.” The other four traits are authenticity, data conviction, complexity capacity, and cross-sector fluency. Of the five, a generosity mindset is the most obvious when it’s missing, Shoemaker said. While the book focuses primarily on traits needed to address inequity in America, its lessons are relevant for any leaders taking on complex challenges — including the Sustainable Development Goals, he told Devex. Of the 38 “rebuilders” Shoemaker features in his book, he said three leaders who are focused on global social impact stand out: Kathy Calvin, former president and CEO at the United Nations Foundation; Michelle Nunn, CEO at CARE USA, the American member of humanitarian organization CARE; and David Risher, a co-founder and president at Worldreader, a nonprofit focused on digital reading solutions. Nunn and Risher embody cross-sector fluency, which Shoemaker defines as natural movement across the private, nonprofit, and public sectors in a fluid and nontransactional way. Before joining CARE, Nunn co-founded Hands On Atlanta, a volunteer mobilization organization that later expanded to a national network and then merged with Points of Light to create the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service. She has also run for the U.S. Senate. At CARE, Nunn has navigated private sector partnerships with companies such as chocolate manufacturer Mars, which in 2018 committed to scaling CARE’s village savings and loan association model across its cocoa supply chain in West Africa. “As Nunn told me, it’s good when a for-profit company donates money or volunteers its people,” Shoemaker wrote. “But the real power is when you can align the economic interests of both entities.” Risher, who formerly worked at Microsoft and Amazon, brought a tech industry approach — starting with the customer and then working on the products and services that meet their needs — to his nonprofit efforts. But his work at Worldreader taught him that systemic problems cannot be solved without the government. Often, there is a false assumption that knowledge flows in one direction: from the private sector to the nonprofit sector, Shoemaker said. “Companies that don’t get that lesson, to look to and learn from the social sector, are not just missing big opportunities, they are putting their corporation at risk long term,” he wrote in his book. Shoemaker presents Calvin, who worked at AOL and led the AOL Time Warner Foundation before joining the UN Foundation, as an example of complexity capacity — or thinking in a nonlinear way — but said she could just as easily be categorized under cross-sector fluency. “She is a passionate advocate for multisector problem solving,” Shoemaker wrote. Calvin oversaw the transition from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals, which Shoemaker described as more actionable, measurable, and usable across sectors. “For leaders, the challenge is how to do what you think you do well but in a new environment where other qualities are going to be needed in that decade,” Calvin said in an interview with Shoemaker for his podcast, which builds on the book. Calvin said she would add two essential qualities to the five in Shoemaker’s book: resilience and humility. “There’s increasing appreciation by each sector for the other sectors’ strengths, and figuring out who comes to the fore to get the problem solved together is going to be the name of the game for everybody in the future,” she said.