Belonging, Trust, and Disruption: Leadership Practices for Gen Now and Next

Overview: It is no longer enough for leaders to accept power structures within organizations. Examine eight leadership practices that cultivate trust and belonging while simultaneously disrupting status quo. Cultivate an inclusive, equitable, resilient culture that retains the workforce and encourages innovation in service delivery, improving client outcomes. Let's disrupt!Proposal text: Dismantling power structures within human service organizations begins with shifting leadership practices to cultivate trust, inclusion, and belonging. Through eight specific leadership practices, that align with social work values and ethics and are biologically linked to trust, a growth- mindset experience emerges. This results in a qualified workforce that stays, who is more engaged, creative, and committed to their work. Additionally, using an antiracist frame, leaders can directly disrupt power structures, processes, and policies that traditionally stifle autonomy, the celebration of diversity, and healthy, resilient culture and climate. A distinctive component of this style is that leaders expect the unexpected and thrive with the highest levels of uncertainty and guide teams through calm and trust.

Participants will examine the eight leadership practices that promote trust and will develop their own strategies to implement in their organizations. Examination of outcomes and data associated with living the eight leadership practices includes a connection to cultivating diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Undergirding the eight practices is a cross-discipline disruptive leadership model that is directed towards building an antiracist organization. Through identifying, naming, and disrupting power structures in partnership with their workforce and team, new culture and climate emerge. Participants will have the opportunity to brainstorm with colleagues about structural racism and systemic challenges in their own organizations and how they might tackle those with this model.

In this workshop, participants acquire skills to cultivate trust, disrupt systems, and keep their job in the process! The end game is to create a new generation of disruptive leaders, who will continue to dismantle the power structures of organizational systems to further quality service delivery, equity/diversity/inclusion (social justice issues), workforce retention, and outcomes. It’s time to disrupt!