Face Plants: We Assumed Trust Would Translate. We Were Wrong.

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By Abby Saloma

Senior Director, Leadership and Talent, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation

Editor’s Note: We’re back with the latest installment in our Face Plants series, focused on funder mistakes and lessons learned. Enjoy today’s piece from Abby Saloma of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation!

One of the core tenets of the Schusterman Fellowship, a program for leaders creating meaningful change in the Jewish community, is that for participants to develop as leaders, they need to feel a deep sense of trust with others in their cohort. We use a variety of modalities to help Fellows get to know one another and share not only their values, gifts, and accomplishments, but also their grief, fears, and failures.

At the beginning of the program, Fellows introduce themselves to each other through an exercise inspired by the Japanese storytelling style “PechaKucha.” They narrate four photographs that best represent their personal and leadership journey. The images often tell just as much about their losses as they do their wins.

Later in the program, Fellows serve as peer coaches for one another to help uncover assumptions about a leadership dilemma they are facing. In another session, they work in pairs to uncover “competing commitments” that prevent them from making important changes in their life and organization.

We know making space for vulnerability, trust, and relationship building yields a return. Seventy-two percent of Fellows have collaborated in a meaningful way with other Fellows within a year of the Fellowship.

Our intention with the Fellowship, however, is not only to build the leadership capacity of individuals, nor is it just to catalyze collaboration among cohorts. One of our goals is to build and sustain a network of leaders that collaborate on system-wide challenges. After we had two cohorts under our belt, we decided to bring them together for our first-ever gathering of Senior Fellows (or alumni).

We created a packed agenda and assumed cross-cohort relationship-building would happen organically during sessions. Further, we assumed that the built-in trust that existed within cohorts would translate across cohorts. It did not.

Fellows felt overwhelmed by the agenda. They largely stuck to their own cohorts. And, when cross-cohort connections did happen, they lacked a foundation of trust. As a result, conversations remained surface level, particularly on controversial topics. The gathering ended without any indication that meaningful cross-cohort collaborations would follow. 

For example, Senior Fellow Heather Wolfson remembers, “Our cohort had a very intimate connection. When we launched into the full cohort experience right after our individual cohort closing, I had difficulty making the transition to the larger group. I found myself grasping for more time with my cohort. Since the larger gathering was in the same physical space as our cohort closing, it was almost as if the other cohort was coming into our sacred space. I ultimately didn’t have the capacity to open up.” 

Senior Fellow Suzanne Feinspan adds, “It felt hard to reconnect with our own cohort since this was the first time we were seeing each other since the end of the program, and even more so to connect with a whole bunch of folks who we had no existing relationship or shared experience with.”

We were kicking ourselves after that first Senior Fellows Gathering because we realized we could have done so much more to break down barriers between the individual cohorts and help move us toward our goal.

We learned (or re-learned, I should say!) how important it is to provide “breathing room” for Fellows to express vulnerability, build trust, and develop deep relationships.

We just held our second Senior Fellows Gathering, and the agenda looked completely different. This time around, we

  • Gave each cohort several hours to reconnect first as a cohort before bringing our four cohorts together;

  • Themed the gathering “Beyond Boundaries” and invited Fellows to intentionally seek out people they didn’t know to have conversations that required courage;

  • Spent the entire first evening on modalities designed to help Fellows get to know each other across cohorts;

  • Hosted a storytelling evening, during which Fellows shared deeply personal stories about their life and leadership; and

  • Put Fellows in small group, cross-cohort “pods” which reconvened each day throughout the gathering.

The evaluation results suggest that we made progress—participants valued having the time to build relationships and connect across cohorts. More than 60% of Senior Fellows surveyed told us they had collaborations or ideas for collaborations with other Senior Fellows in the works as a direct result of the gathering.

In one Fellow’s words: “I loved connecting with Fellows from other cohorts. Over the course of the gathering it became less important who was from which cohort, and it left me feeling grateful to be part of the network.”

To us, that says it all.

Abby Saloma1 Comment