Chapter 5: New Leadership for Now and 2050

Addressing the dysfunction of racial inequity is not an easy task. Tackling climate change in a way that acknowledges the legacy of environmental injustice will require both thought and struggle.  Making education function in a way that engages students, their parents, and communities will be a challenge. Persuading Americans that immigrants add far more to this country than they subtract will require bold, visionary appeals to surrender old prejudices for a better tomorrow. Lifting up the issues of excessive incarceration will raise hackles and attempting to link city and suburb in a metropolitan whole runs against decades of segregation and abandonment.

Taking on all these issues at the same time is even harder—and it will require a new sort of twenty-first century leadership. But what does that leadership look like, how does it work, and how can we develop it?   

This chapter suggests that the answers to these questions can be found by shifting our zoom lens to wide angle, and focusing not only on the role of our policymakers in this new political arrangement, but also on that of our grassroots leaders.   The election of Barack Obama is important, but it is also the culmination of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s that challenged leadership to expand opportunity for all.  In a nation where no one group will be a majority, national  leadership must  collaborate with a disparate group  of actors,  and articulate a vision for a fairer, more just, and more productive society. Yet it is on the local level where inequity most deeply resonates—crumbling sidewalks in Detroit, diesel pollution in West Oakland, and lack of sufficient transit for low-income Atlanta—and where solutions are best identified.

The Leadership Learning Community has outlined the challenges ahead in which the twenty-first century leaders must be prepared to lead under conditions of globalization, increasing stress on the environment, increasing speed and dissemination of information technology, enhanced diversity, rapid change, unprecedented complexity, growing interdependence, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots (Meehan, Perry, and Reinert, 2009). And it is a full suite of leaders—from the grass roots to the grass tops— that will be necessary to undo decades of bad policies and produce viable, sustainable change.

This generation of leaders will have to prepare itself to deal with a stew of complicated issues, made all the more vexing because there is no precedent upon which it can rely for guidance. No previous generation of American leadership has ever had to tackle so much so quickly.  To quote the mantra of civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, Sr.:  'You can’t teach what you don’t know; you can’t lead where you don’t go.'