07D2-00 -Discuss the leader-stakeholder relationship as it pertains to the building of a coalition. Include in your discussion an analysis of the bridging elements that facilitate the formation of strong coalitions and the pitfalls that can cause coalitio

Coalition Building: Audio Interviews Coalition Building Interviewer: How often did you find yourself needing to build or work with coalitions in your work as a public administrator?

Representative Keith Ellison United States Congressman, 5th District of Minnesota Washington, D.C.

Well you know what, I have never experienced any other kind of experience. I have only worked in coalition and needed to build and pull together coalition. So coalition building is essential to any public purpose because, obviously, no public is completely homogeneous. I do not care if you are in a rural area where everybody is at the same religious, ethnic and cultural group; you still have men and women, you still have people who have different income levels, you still have people at various educational levels, and people who do different kinds of work.

So diversity and coalition building is always part of the calculation and every public leader needs to always be thinking about how they keep everybody under the tent. And this is an important point because sometimes public leaders think that they are community leaders and the truth is sometimes they are the same, but sometimes they are not. A person who is driving on to sort of vindicate some societal wrong, who is exercising their First Amendment right as a private citizen has a right to sort of ignore coalition building and just sort of focus on their mission and raise the moral imperative. But someone who has a public charge and a public responsibility has a duty to bring people along consistent with solving a public problem.

So that means that you have got to talk with and be in dialog with the various stakeholders, the various coalitions which may make up your group. So this is an important skill to have and of course, it begins with listening, listening. What does everybody need to be a part of the group? What are the points at which the coalition needs to split? When is the coalition's work done? Sometimes it is and we have to be able to recognize that and sometimes we have to recognize, sometimes not every coalition member can be together on every issue. But we have got to be careful to understand that we do not split apart for reasons that are not necessary, sometimes style and just methodology will split as apart when they do not need to. But that means that the public leader needs to be engaged in listening, working it out, negotiating, compromising but never wavering from the vision of the mission of the coalition.

State Senator Katie Sieben Minnesota State Senator, District 57 St. Paul, MN Oh, all the time, I would say. It is really important to have the allies and people who understand various angles or aspects of what you are trying to accomplish or bring different perspectives to the problem you are trying to solve. So I would say it is essential in my work to have, to work with groups of people or coalitions to accomplish what I am trying to get done. Ms. Deborah Chas e City Council Member 1998 - 2003, Mayor 2002 - 2003 City of Kennmore Well, first I was not a public administrator, I was an elected official. And as an elected official, coalition building was a critical element to achieving anything throughout the region. That was both, with citizens, and with the other elected [officials] in the region. Our city was one of 39 in the greater King County area—all suburbs to Seattle. So it was very important when we talked about highway connections and roadway issues. If we talked about public health delivery, etcetera, that we all got together and worked together to achieve a common goal.

So it was critical to achieving anything that was really meaningful, because of the mobility of people from community to community. But I also observed that the city staff, the true public administrators, would build important relationships with other cities, so that they could combine and use fewer resources to create things like webpages that had permitting for small jobs that five cities went together and had build, and all of their citizens were able to apply for permits into their individual cities without having to drive forever to town hall or take time off from work to make that happen.

We also did things like combining public works departments with the neighboring cities, so that we both had a bump in staff, but we did not need it a 100 percent of the time, so it allowed us to actually have more response when we needed it. So that is where coalitions are very important.

Mr. Kai Hagen Engaged Citizen Frederic, MD There are a lot of interest groups out there, and people fit into different ones and different parts of their lives. Whether they are fire-fighters or teachers or people in one community or environmental concerns or whatever. But we have common concerns, and if you do not work to build coalitions you will only have an operating majority or critical mass of support on the simplest no-brainer kinds of issues, and not the ones so challenging community and those are the ones that are most important right now.

Strategies for Coalition-based Work Interviewer: What Strategies do you find to be the most effective with coalition-based work?

State Senator Katie Sieben Minnesota State Senator, District 57 St. Paul, MN I think that it is important to be very specific in assigning tasks when you are looking to build a strong coalition of support. I found it helpful to ask people to do specific things or ask them what they would be willing to do so that you can be certain that different members of the coalition are either doing the same things that there are lots of people doing that or doing different things so that you are sure that various angles of what you are trying to accomplish, so that those things do indeed get done. So I would say, first, it is important to strategize and then to divide up the work or to assign various tasks to different numbers of the coalition.

Ms. Deborah Chase City Council Member 1998 - 2003, Mayor 2002 - 2003 City of Kennmore First of, bringing together all the effected stakeholders and representatives of them, obviously, you cannot have a meeting with 100,000 people in a large community, but making sure that those stakeholder groups are represented in the mix, and here in our neck of the woods, that means, sometimes you have Native American representatives, and you have the Audobon society, and you have the local cities, and you have the counties, etcetera. So it can be a large number of stakeholders for a particular issue.

And then the next thing you need to do is listen very carefully to everyone's opinions, and respect those opinions of others, and be respectful while people are discussing. Sadly sometimes these sorts of meetings can get very negative.

Then finally, working to find common ground that will satisfy the vast majority of the concerns in the room.

Mr. Kai Hagen Engaged Citizen Frederic, MD If you create baggage through how you operate in general or you bring baggage into the situation, coalitions are very hard to create. You need to have a good process, you need to operate in a civil manner, it has to be consistent and reliable and ultimately you have to focus on common interest.

You can give people the ability to focus on common interest by creating the working environment that is civil and has that good process. If there is baggage and history and pour in our personal relationships and everything underlying the effort, it is in trouble from the start.

Coalitions: Mistakes Leaders Make Interviewer: What yould you consider to be the most costly mistakes that leaders sometimes make in working with coalitions?

Representative Keith Ellison United States Congressman, 5th District of Minnesota Washington, D.C.

I think the biggest mistake is failure to listen and therefore to incorporate the needs of the coalition partners. Everybody comes from somewhere, everybody has their particularities, their demographic description and when you say, I am concerned about the group I come from, and that is all I am concerned about, then you are ignoring the needs of a constituent member of the coalition and that might mean destruction of the coalition. So listening, being able to tolerate some criticism as the leader is very, very, very important. You can not be too sensitive, you have to have a thick skin and you have to be able to listen, even if what you are listening to is unpleasant to listen to, because it might mean people are critiquing your leadership.

Well, this is important for you to do, to bear that because sometimes people are just venting, and sometime people are telling you something that you really need to hear in order to preserve the coalition and in those instances, it just means that as a leader, you got to be thick skin, it can not be about you. It has got to be about the mission and you have to keep your ears wide open and be sensitive to what the group needs. But there is also a balancing because you can listen to everybody to such a large degree that the group gets bogged down and group is not moving because you are trying to accommodate everybody. Well that is when the leader has to be able to balance that listening with that commitment to the vision and the mission of the coalition. And sometimes you have a situation where the group wins because everybody is a little bit unhappy with what we are doing but only a little bit.

They are happy enough to stick with the coalition but nobody gets everything that they want. So it is really a balancing test and that, of course, you can find the proper balance by, again, listening and trying to figure out what the person is trying to say in crediting people with good attention even if you do not agree but how they say it or when they say it or where they say it. State Senator Katie Sieben Minnesota State Senator, District 57 St. Paul, MN I think that sometimes in coalition building or when you are trying to accomplish a larger goal, it is important to remember that not everybody hears everything, the same time that you do. So conveying information to one another or making sure that everybody understands where you are in the process is probably the most important thing, so that everyone is operating from the same understanding but also so that time or energy is not wasted because of lack of communication and coordination.

So probably, it kind of goes hand in hand lack of coordination where your repeating efforts or doing unnecessary things or failing to communicate with other members or other allies, I have seen, it can be really detrimental or ineffective.

Ms. Deborah Chase City Council Member 1998 - 2003, Mayor 2002 - 2003 City of Kennmore First off, not really listening; secondly, doing it just for show, being prescriptive in their answers, even having in their mind before they get to the meeting of what they think the result should be, asserting their own private agendas.

And then, even if they have not done any of that, and they have come up to a good conclusion, if they do not share and communicate everything that was considered and how and why they made the decision that they made, that can sometimes derail a project as well.

Mr. Kai Hagen Engaged Citizen Frederic, MD If you see the coalition itself as it means to your end, if you think diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way, then you are going to have problems because you are selling something, it is not a genuine process. It is not open to compromise consideration of different views. It has to be open- minded about goals and solutions. And I think the failure to communicate properly and to be willing to compromise and to look towards common goals in a genuine manner is what ruins it 90% of the time.