Merrill Park Neighborhood Assn.

Are you a resident leader?

Do you have what it takes?

Leadership Qualities

1.) A good Leader likes people.
Most of the work of organizing is work with people: talking with them, listening to them, working with them in groups. Most of the time you spend as leader is spent with people. If you don’t really like people, if you don’t really enjoy being with them, it shows. But if you really do like people, that shows, too.

2.) A good Leader is a good listener.
In organizing, listening is more important than talking. In this world, the people who aren’t on top don’t get listened to very much. Nobody asks their opinions. Nobody wants their advice. But most people have pretty good opinions, at least about the things that affect their own lives. They’d like someone to listen to those opinions.

3.) A good Leader makes friends easily.
If you’re going to spend a lot of time working with people, it helps if they like you and think of you as a friend. If you’re not open to making new friends easily, it may be difficult for people to work with you.

4.) A good Leader builds trust easily.
Building trust isn’t quite the same as having people like you. But in organizing, we need to be more than popular. We need to be trustworthy. When we organize people, we encourage them to take risks in their lives. They need to trust us enough to take those risks.

5.) A good Leader talks well.
Talking doesn’t just mean being a public speaker. It just means being comfortable talking about your own ideas. It also means being able to express those ideas in plain enough language so that most people can understand them.

6.) A good Leader helps people believe in themselves.
It’s hard for people who are powerless to believe in themselves. Everything in this society teaches them not to have confidence in themselves. But if people are going to change their lives by working together with other people, they need to rebuild that confidence. They need to believe they’re as good as anyone else.

7.) A good Leader can let others take the credit.
If you solve other people’s problems for them, you get the credit. But if you help them solve that problem for themselves, they get it. As a leader you have to be big enough to let that happen.

8.) A good Leader works hard.
If you become a leader, sooner or later someone is going to ask you why you do nothing except talk all day. But talking and listening are hard work, especially when you’re dealing with the problems of people. Sometimes it’s hard to keep going, especially when there’s no solution in sight. But you need to be able to do it.

9.) A good Leader doesn’t get discouraged too often.
Everyone gets discouraged from time to time. It’s impossible not to, when you’re working with people who have serious needs that in many cases aren’t going to be met. But if you get discouraged too often, you can’t work effectively.

10.) A good Leader has a sense of her or his own identity.
In organizing, we’re helping people discover who they are. To do this well, we need to know who we are. Especially when we work with people from a different background, we want to be sure that we don’t try to pretend we’re really like them. When you’re working with people who are different from you, there’s a distance between you and them that you need to respect. That’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.




11.) A good Leader asks questions.
Asking questions is one of the best ways to get people to think, speak, and act for themselves. If leaders were only allowed three phrases, they should be “What if…?” “What do you think?” and “How do you feel?”

12.) A good Leader if open to new ideas.
In organizing we’re always trying to learn from experience. But we also know that just because something worked the last time doesn’t mean it will work this time. As a leader, you should be open to any idea the people you work with suggest, even if at first it seems unfamiliar or strange. You never know.

13.) A good Leader is flexible.
You’ll find that people and events often change quickly. You need to be able to change with them. If a plan you spent a lot of time putting together depends on a certain situation and that situation changes, you have to be emotionally able to abandon your plan and come up with a new one.

14.) A good Leader is honest.
You shouldn’t fool either the people you work with or yourself. You don’t want to pretend that things are going well when they aren’t. You need to be honest enough to tell people things they may not want to hear.

15.) A good Leader is self-disciplined.
In some situations you may be out there all alone. You need to be able to set goals for yourself and evaluate your progress. Sometimes you have to keep working even though there’s no one making sure that you do.

16.) A good Leader is mature.
One of the dangers of organizing is that you may end up working out your personal problems at the expense of other people. If you’re in a period of tremendous emotional change yourself, it may not be the best time to be a leader.

17.) A good Leader sets limits.
Just as you don’t want to unfairly use the people you work with, you don’t want them using you. If you start out doing everything for people, you’ll never be able to help them do things for themselves. You need to be able to say “No.”

18.) A good Leader is courageous.
This doesn’t mean that you need to be prepared to face physical dander. The courage a leader needs is of a quieter kind: keeping going when it’s hard to do, being able to tell people things they don’t necessarily want to hear, taking risks, opening yourself to criticism.

19.) A good Leader has vision.
In organizing, we’re trying to do more than just fix up a house here or get a job there. We’re trying to build a better world through people working together. A good leader has a dream of that better world.

20.) A good Leader has a sense of humor.
As a leader you see a lot of pain and suffering. It’s hard not to take that suffering and pain on yourself. But you can’t allow it to dominate your life. You have to laugh sometimes, too. Working with people is a serious business. But if we’re all seriousness every minute of the day, it tears us apart.










Leadership Skills

1.) Working with People:
Being able to talk to people one-on-one, listen well, help them work through their own ideas, encourage their own leadership potential, motivate them, help them feel better about themselves, and push them toward making realistic commitments.

2.) Issues:
Being able to define issues in a community, understanding what makes good issues and what makes poor issues, and being able to work with people to define their own needs and priorities.

3.) Meetings:
Knowing how to hold a successful meeting, set an agenda, chair, deal with some of the problems that can come up in meetings, and encourage participation by all people at a meeting.

4.) Organizations:
Understanding how organizations work, some of the different ways that organizations can be structured, and decision-making processes within an organization.

5.) Strategy and Tactics:
Knowing how to develop both long-range and short-range strategy, set goals and establish priorities, and choose and use tactics.

6.) Money:
Understanding how to raise money for an organization both from basic sources of external fund raising and by establishing grass roots fund raising within an organization, planning budgets, and managing the finances of an organization.

7.) Research:
Learning how to do investigative research, understanding the uses of information in developing strategy and tactics, having a sense of what information is useful and what isn’t, and knowing how and where to look for information.

8.) Communication:
Maintaining a system of communication within an organization, knowing how to use basic tools such as newsletters, leaflets, pamphlets, phone banks, and advertising, and building person-to-person systems for communicating in order to create a real group from a bunch of individuals.

9.) Media:
Learning how to deal with public means of communication (radio, television, and the press), conduct yourself in an interview, establish working relationships with the media, integrate the media into strategy, put out a basic press release, and stage press events.

10.) Training:
Defining the basic needs of individuals and groups, setting up training programs to meet those needs, and training people yourself.


11.) Culture:
Learning the basic history of people’s struggles, understanding some of the historic battles that people have fought in this country from which we have learned many of the lessons that we use today, helping people appreciate their own group’s culture, understanding the culture that you yourself come from and how to use it as a way of giving you and other people strength, and developing a vision that is real to you of where your own work fits.

12.) Institutions:
Developing a sense of what the important institutions are in struggles for change and having an understanding of institutions such as unions, synagogues, and churches, and learning how to work with them as part of coalitions.

13.) Politics:
Understanding basic techniques of electoral politics and knowing how to develop electoral campaigns on issues and run candidates for public office.

14.) Public Speaking:
Improving your ability to speak with small and large groups and being able to communicate a sense of values and visions as well as strategy and tactics.

15.) Staff Supervision:
Helping to supervise staff, working with other leaders to develop staff policies and procedures, learning how to hire and fire when necessary, and learning how to get the best out of staff members without letting them control your organization.

16.) Power:
Learning how power works, who has it, how they got it, how they keep it, and how to take it away from them.

Email us
aevans@mpna.org