Margaret Sanger's Leadership Lessons for Today

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Courageous Leadership contributor Anne Doyle is a Detroit-based leadership and communications consultant, former TV journalist and global auto executive. For more: her website -- and blog.

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Planned Parenthood’s 25-year Plan, Here's Fast Company Magazine's interview on how Gloria led a movement to create a bold new long term vision for the future.

How do you lead deep-seated change in a large organization where just about everyone expects to have a voice? Here are a few rules that Gloria Feldt used to pull it off at Planned Parenthood.

Create urgency. PPFA's affiliates had to understand that this was a crucial moment, "that we really could change the direction of the organization's future," says consultant Watts Wacker. The solution: an invitation-only summit with big-name speakers.

Include everyone. Feldt's committee pushed itself to get input from every corner of the organization. That meant hundreds of meetings with affiliates, whose input was distilled at regional sessions. Many affiliates also involved their clients and community groups.

Adapt the process to the culture. A by-the-book style never would have flown at PPFA. So the organization designed a standard innovation process, but it let local groups veer off course, as desired.

Make it transparent. At every turn, the PPFA committee published and shared the results of its work. The idea was that including people in the process would win support -- and would also sharpen the final product.

Lead, but don't control. Feldt, says Wacker, "saw that you can't 'increment' yourself into the future. She got her board to listen, then put people in place who responded." But she respected the culture of her organization; she recognized that change needed to be driven from deep in the ranks as well.

Read the rest:

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Fast Company Magazine Profile

ENCOURAGING WORDS:

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."
- Beverly Sills

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. -- Stephen Covey

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas Edison

"Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass...it's about learning how to dance in the rain."--I don't know who said this but I sure do believe it!

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Goethe

Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 09:38PM

Who inspires you as a leader?

So often during my 30 years with Planned Parenthood and since as an activist author and speaker, I've turned to stories about Margaret Sanger for inspiration and encouragement when I've faced tough challenges. What must it have been like for her when she started out, with little money, at a time when birth control and even Here's Margaret looking happy as a clam while being arraigned on charges of providing birth control to women--she knew it was an opportunity to build public sentiment for her cause.dispensing information about it was illegal?

But if, as I believe firmly, a leader is someone who gets things done, then Margaret (having worn her mantle, I feel we're on a first-name basis) was a leader par excellence. She founded the movement to bring birth control to American women and the organization that today is called Planned Parenthood.

"We must put our convictions into action," she was fond of saying.

That's why I'm looking forward with such great excitement to speaking at the Brooklyn Museum on Sunday, September 13, at 2pm on "Margaret Sanger's Legacy and Leadership Lessons for Today." It's the perfect date, because September 14 is the birthday of this visionary leader. And the museum is the perfect location too, since her first birth control clinic was opened in Brooklyn in 1916--you can read that story as I wrote it for the New York Times.

I'll get to tell several of my favorite stories about Margaret's life and work, the history of the birth-control movement, the role that birth control plays in women's equality and empowerment, and what activists and other leaders today can learn from Sanger.

By the way, Margaret Sanger is a featured guest in The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. Be sure to take a look at that fantastic installation while you are at the museum. Her plate fittingly is graced with fiery red female genitalia.

The lecture will be in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Forum, on the 4th floor. I hope you'll join me.

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