Our Leadership Model

What Is Collaborative Leadership?

While it takes many forms, the Wurtele Center’s programming centers around our model of collaborative leadership. We define collaborative leadership as taking the initiative to work intentionally and inclusively with a diverse group of people to achieve a common purpose.

The Wurtele Center believes that collaborative leadership is important for every Smith student to learn, because the ability to galvanize a group of people to work towards a shared goal will serve them well, no matter the paths they take through Smith and beyond. The world Smith graduates enter is becoming increasingly marked by complex, thorny problems that will require those who want to be part of the solution to be highly adaptable and deeply human-centered. We recognize there are lots of ways to practice collaborative leadership, and we explore with our students what it means to them to work with other people to bring about positive change.

Our Core Principles, Skills, and Frameworks

Below are the principles, skills, and frameworks that support the Wurtele Center’s model of Collaborative Leadership. Students who participate in Wurtele Center programming may not encounter them all at once, but each of our programs connects to at least one.

Core Principles

(what we care about)

Leadership is not always positional.

The words “leader” and “leadership” are often affiliated with particular positions of power, but leadership is much more than that. We talk about “Big-L Leadership” to designate formal leadership positions, while “small-l leadership” captures the everyday, flexible, interpersonal ways someone can hold influence. They are interrelated, and one is not inherently better than the other. “Big-L” Leaders can artfully practice “small-l” leadership, and “small-l” leadership doesn’t require a “Big-L” position to be effective. Recognizing the difference between the two allows us to expand what it means to lead.

Every person has inherent dignity, brings an important perspective, and deserves respect.

Grounding leadership in common human dignity enables groups to leverage the power of the group’s diversity, collaborate more successfully, and disagree productively. This principle is at work in all of our programs, but especially the center’s attention to human rights-oriented leadership and the work we do helping our community build the capacity to hold difficult conversations.

Any change we facilitate should actively foster regenerative relationships.

“Regenerative” means focused on renewal and restoration. Our goal is to develop collaborative leaders who seek to cultivate healthy and sustainable relationships with other people, in our communities, and with the planet we inhabit.

Core Skills

(what we teach and try to practice)

Collaboration

The lion’s share of leadership work is located in the collaboration that happens within diverse groups and teams. The Wurtele Center focuses on building collaborative skills such as understanding the joys and challenges of group life, practicing deep listening, giving and receiving feedback, managing conflict, and generating group creativity.

Facilitation

“Facilitation” is the practice of enabling groups of people to work productively toward a common purpose, recognizing that the goal might shift over time. It’s an approach that doesn’t advance one leader’s agenda but instead works to maximize group engagement. Facilitation practices include designing collaborative work sessions, responsively managing group dynamics, and helping a group towards making decisions.

Public Voice

Leadership is often associated with being in charge, but one can also exert influence by sharing ideas and knowledge, whether through public writing, speaking, or other creative mediums. We see public voice as a part of collaborative leadership in that it brings people together around powerful ideas and essential questions.

Core Frameworks

(some of the theoretical structures we engage in our teaching)

Me-We-Impact

Enacting collaborative leadership requires us to work at multiple scales. This includes understanding ourselves (Me), while collaborating proactively with others (We), in order to make collective change (Impact).

Futures Thinking

Having a positive impact on the world around us necessitates that we be skilled at recognizing the signals of change, imagining many possible futures (hence the plural!), and working actively to build towards the futures we most desire. Futures Thinking is a theoretical practice that offers strategies aligned with this work.

Systems Thinking

Most problems worth solving are complex, meaning they do not have easy answers and often contain multiple interconnected parts. Systems Thinking is a set of frameworks and practices that allow leaders to see how different parts of a problem fit together and identify interventions that can transform the system.

Collaborative Leadership Publications & Projects

Members of the Wurtele Center staff actively engage in research, both solo and in collaboration with Smith students and colleagues, on topics related to Collaborative Leadership as a way of evolving the model. Below are some past and current publications and projects:

  • “Group Projects as Spaces for Leadership Development in the Liberal Arts Classroom”: Published in the peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Education, this article shares the research conducted by collaboratively by Wurtele Center Director Erin Cohn ‘00, Marta Almazovaite ‘24, and Sirohi Kumar ‘26, on the topic of how students develop collaborative leadership skills via intensive group projects in the academic classroom
  • Pedagogies of Possibility (forthcoming, West Virginia University Press): This volume of articles on “supporting undergraduates to imagine and build futures of their own making” is co-edited by Smith’s own Jess Bacal and includes an essay on participatory and speculative design practices that support more imaginative and generative pedagogical practice co-authored by Wurtele Center Assistant Director Megan Lyster, as well as a more reflective version of Erin, Marta, and Sirohi’s article above.
  • Collaborative Leadership Card Deck: In 2023, the Wurtele Center created this deck of cards as an interactive tool designed to assist collaborative teams as they manage their group life and work together to solve challenging problems. Each card in the deck includes a prompt for team members to engage with, whether that is a question to reflect on together or a strategy to employ when the group feels stuck, experiences conflict, or just needs a break.
  • The Collaborinth: A slowly evolving creative research project, The Collaborinth is an interactive, immersive installation that will engage visitors in direct experience with research on what it takes to work well with others in real time and embodied space. Visitors will make their way through a series of rooms in small groups, each of which explores a core topic in human collaboration through embodied experiences. The project is a collaboration between Wurtele Center Director Erin Cohn ‘00 and Design Thinking Initiative Director Emily Norton, with deep creative and research support from Nuala MacDonald ’27.