The site serves up a seemingly bottomless platter of fresh-picked video goodies: short clips that aim to “change the world one video at a time.” The issues range from marriage equality and environmental sustainability to international movements like World Water Day. After I watch a film, like the one below, I’m instantly eager to join the movement. Then I watch the next video, and again I’m completely moved.

Thinking Versus Feeling

There’s something intensely powerful about video as a medium. This is especially true in the world of nonprofits and social change, which relies on creating deep, meaningful connections among people and issues, across social, racial and national divides. While fact sheets and websites can help us understand a need, videos let us feel it.

Why does that matter? If you’re marketing a product or campaigning for a social issue, you need people to change their minds. You need them to agree with the need – to buy in. Research has found that the most successful appeals target our hearts, not our heads.

Tell Your Story

If the viral success of video campaigns like Kony 2012 proved anything, it’s that a rising generation of leaders is passionate about social change – and video is their medium of choice.

So you want to tap into their passion and share your story through video? Don’t be discouraged by the thought that you’ll need a full documentary team or a room of professional animators to make a great film for your non-profit.

Today, if you champion a social cause you can find a whole bunch of resources to help you create and share a powerful and impactful video. All it takes is a video camera – even the one on your phone can work – and a great story of your organization’s super inspiring impact.

Check out some of my favorite links & instructional videos to get you started:

DoGooder’s Video Awards – a great primer on video-making tips and a series of instructional youtube clips 

TechSoup Digital Storytelling Methods – ideas for making a video from “action!” to online in less than an hour 

When Fred shares this news with the colony, is he well-received? Of course not. People, penguins – any social group – seem to hate change that threatens a comfortable way of life. And when bad news breaks, shooting the messenger is the easiest solution – sorry Fred.

Have you ever been the Fred? It’s rough. I’ll say that right now. It’s difficult to be the first person in your group who recognizes a coming change. When Freds speak out, they might be criticized as fear-mongers or wackos. It doesn’t matter the situation – a melting iceberg, changing consumption trends, or the signs of a pending plummet in profits. Being the first to notice change is a lonely position.

After reading Kotter’s fable, though, I realize that shouldn’t be the case. Freds, and those who embrace change in any organization, are a huge asset to any group. Why? They’re thinking critically. They’re analyzing the situation. They’re not satisfied with the status quo. They’re willing to stick they’re necks out (do penguins have necks?) to keep the organization on track.

Like Fred, those of us who embrace and pursue change in our organizations are sometimes perceived as the problem people. I think that boils down to a general fear of change, and a dislike for those who try to force us into it before we’re ready. But if we wait, as organizations or individuals or penguins (this is an equal opportunity blog), to embrace change until we’re ready  for it, we’ll eventually be left behind.

To stay ahead, to lead the pack, to be innovative makers not safe followers, we have to learn to love change. How does that happen? For me, by learning more and more about organizations like Google and Apple, who are insanely successful because they caused change, instead of followed it. And by realizing that if I don’t hop off this comfortable iceberg, it will eventually melt all around me. And who wants that?

Photo courtesy of National Geographic: find it here.

Employers who hire for fit look beyond the resume, understanding that educational background and career experience aren’t the only indicators of a successful candidate. They look at an employee as a whole person, understanding how personality and experience determine an employee’s effectiveness.

Hiring for fit requires asking different questions. Does his personality match the team? Does she approach problems the way we do as an organization? Will his leadership style complement or clash with his coworkers? Does she hold the same values we try to promote as a company?

It goes both ways, too. As job seekers, we can look past the position offered on paper and investigate the company’s culture and values. Company websites often have information on company values and mission, but the best place to gather information is in the interview.

Do You Have Any Questions?

What kind of questions can you ask during the interview to help you figure out whether you’re a good fit for the company? The first step is knowing yourself. Think about the most fulfilling and frustrating workplace experiences you’ve had, and try to pinpoint the kind of people or environments where you thrive and where you struggle. Do you thrive in high-power, competitive environments? Does a micro-managing boss frustrate you? Is it crucial that the workplace celebrates individual accomplishments, or regularly hosts community-building events?

Once you know what energizes and what drains you in the workplace, you can craft your questions – but sometimes it takes a little sleuthing to get a real answer. For example, at my dream workplace, employees love their work because they have a direct positive impact on people. At an interview, asking outright, “do you love your work because you have a direct impact on people?” probably won’t give me the information I need. Instead, I could ask something like, “What’s most satisfying or fulfilling about this job/organization?” If the hiring manager answers something like “beating the competition” or “making money,” I know that I’m ultimately unlikely to be a good fit for the job.

Spend some time preparing thoughtful questions before the interview, and you’ll impress the hiring manager with your insight. Even more importantly, you might uncover red flags or warning signs that will help you avoid stepping into an organizational nightmare. Check out the video below for a fresh perspective on hiring for fit from Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why.

• We understand one another.
• Our opinions are equally valuable.
• We’re safe to create, take risks and call one another out.

We just click.

You can already imagine how this team works – focused, dedicated, caring and unstoppable. In a world where many teams feel stuck in neutral, what separates this dream team from the rest is a sense of community.

Without a sense of community in a team, we see unproductive conflict, team members marginalized, battles for power and spinning wheels. Often the greater organizations itself is stuck. Members don’t trust one another enough to take risks or delegate, so work is slow and creativity and innovation are stunted.

Does this organizational culture sound familiar?

Last week we explored the four natural stages a group takes to get to authentic community, as managed consultant Eve Berry explained in her Community Building through Leadership training for the Communication & Leadership last month.

Eve’s model provides a new framework for understanding the problems and solutions on our own teams.

Think Like a Community Architect

“We usually talk about problems in terms of people’s personalities,” Eve explained. We blame the problem person, the nagger, the visionary or the taskmaster for causing ineffectiveness and frustration. Instead, she says, “we should really look at it in terms of which stage of community they’re in.”

Understanding which stage a stuck team is in will help us understand the context for people’s actions. If a team is unproductive because people are afraid to challenge one another, maybe the problem isn’t a team full of people pleasers. Perhaps the real problem is that the team is stuck in pseudo-community. Rather than replacing teammates, a thoughtful leader might build an opportunity for productive conflict into the next team meeting.

Another common frustration in teams can be smaller coalitions of teammates that undermine the larger goal. Instead of blaming the ringleader of this coalition, we might see a chaotic and unsafe environment as the true cause of cliques.  With this definition, we’re likely to change the environment rather than blaming single person.

Using the organization’s developmental stage as a framework for understanding problems empowers everyone on the team. From this perspective, problems are a matter of environment, not people or personalities. Reframe the environment, and you give people a chance to change their attitude and behavior without casting blame.

Teams who have made it to genuine community maximize member’s time, intelligence and talents. Their meetings are productive, ideas innovative and efforts efficient. Eve agrees the process can be challenging.

How could building community challenge and change your team? Share in comments section below.

We were all vulnerable together, hoping and working for the same things – peace of mind, security, understanding.

That’s a sense of community – and it’s magic.

In her lecture at Canisius last month, executive consultant and author Eve Berry shared a career’s worth of insight explaining just what is “community” and how we can build it. Community can develop in teams, families, workplaces and neighborhoods, where we feel connected to and invested in each other.

A sense of community isn’t always the result of a trauma, but Eve shared that chaos and confusion are a necessary step in building authentic community.

No matter the organizations – a team, a family, a neighborhood – community is built in 4 stages.

The Rocky Road to Community

Eve described how most organizations are stuck in one of the first two stages. In pseudo-community, we chat, we brainstorm and we leave. Pseudo-community is a superficial version of community, marked by small talk, where a lack of connection and trust leads to a fear of conflict.

Next we move to chaos, where the need for power and control wins out over pseudo-relationships. In this stage, cliques form and leadership is resisted as people try to organize themselves out of chaos.

As a leader, our critical role is to lead our team through chaos to emptiness and to community. In order to grow, organizations in chaos need to surrender. In this stage, Eve explains, members admit “I just can’t do this anymore; I can only change myself.”

Building Up from the Bottom

Leading members to a place where they relinquish control and admit their personal responsibility is the catalyst for building true community. To build community, shift their focus from their own agendas to a greater goal.

From the emptying process, a group develops a shared vision or goal. Effective community builders lead members into this new mindset, where members are authentic, take risks and support one another.

On a team or in the workplace, a sense of community is that magical feeling that you can trust one another. Though the process may be painful, true community is a powerful thing.

Have you ever been part of a true community? Share your story in our comments section below!

One of the panelists who helped shed insight on this topic shared that though she has always wanted to run for Congress, she  knows the struggles she is up against as a woman. In the film Miss Representation and in Tuesday’s discussion after the screening, we discussed the double standards women in leadership face.

We expect leaders to be stoic and calm. When women act thus, they are accused of being cold and calculating – the kind of scrutiny Hilary Clinton has faced. Yet when women show more emotion, they are seen as unstable and even manipulative – scrutiny Clinton also bore during a rare show of emotion in her 2008 presidential campaign.

We expect leaders to act according to certain unspoken rules. We criticize our women leaders for following these expectations, and criticize them for deviating.

Yet what leaders want most, male or female, is to lead based on their own strengths and personality. Tuesday’s panel of local leaders shared how they have faced and risen above the double standard in their own lives.

Awareness then Action

“It’s a matter of accepting that fact but not going along with it at the same time,” encouraged Tracie Lopardi, partner at Harris Beach Attorneys at Law. Tracie explained, “You can still maintain the face that you are a female and maintain those leadership roles.” She says for women, successful leadership is a matter of  knowing who is around you, understand how they might perceive you, and using that information to navigate difficult situations to be the best leader you can be.

People Make the Difference

For Heather Filipowicz, Executive Director and President of the WNY Women’s Foundation, solidarity is essential to overcoming the leadership double standard. “I always think about it in terms of helping the sisterhood,” she said, explaining mentorship and support in terms of “reaching back” and “reaching forward”.

In her own life, Heather can see the ways women believed in her, helped her develop and helped her step up into leadership. At the same, she says, it’s important that women reach forward, connecting with others for advice, support and guidance.

“Many women tear each other down,” she shared, “and you have to work really hard not to do that.”

Be True to Yourself

Cindy Odom, CEO of the Girl Scouts of WNY, shared from her own experiences where she has been underestimated or misjudged. “You know what you want to do and you realize there are obstacles, but to thine ownself be true,” she said.

Cindy advised new leaders to determine their goal and assess the obstacles, knowing there will always be someone who underestimates your capabilities. With your goal and potential obstacles in mind, Cindy explained that you have the power to choose what you will and won’t do. “The great thing about it is that you decide,” she said, “and when you do that, nobody can stop you.”

So why is it, as we’ve explored in the past few weeks, that women are 50% of the population but only 17% of the national leaders and 3% of the CEOs?

You can’t be what you can’t see.

The Geena Davis institute on Gender in Media recently found that in G and PG movies, very few female characters have any occupation whatsoever. These are the films targeted at the youngest members of our society, when kids are still figuring out who they are and what their place is in the world.

The effect is simple, but important:

“The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.” – Geena Davis

The stereotypes don’t retreat once we turn off the Disney movies and stash our Barbies. We just face a harsher, even more harmful set of female stereotypes in mainstream media targeted at teens and adults. If you’ve watched a movie or TV show in the last few years (i.e. Jersey Shore, Housewives – Real and Desperate, Seth McFarlance at the Oscars, any 24-hour news show) you know this first-hand.

In this article, Forbes narrows it down to 10 stereotypes of women in power. Some of entertainment’s most popular powerful women fit the bill: Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Cruella Deville, and the real-life examples of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama.

Be The Change

To encourage a healthier perception of women in leadership – and to encourage our own girls to choose leadership – we need to root for a different set of role models. Let’s use our TV viewership, our dollars and our time to support strong female characters and roles that respect women’s bodies and minds. Let’s use our voices to advocate for nonsexist news coverage of our women leaders. Let’s use our relationships with young girls to remind them that they can choose their own paths.

If you’re in the Buffalo area, join the conversation at the Miss Representation screening March 26 at Canisius.

In our first story on women in leadership, we shared a pretty extreme statistic: women hold only 3% of powerful positions in mainstream media, which encompasses film, TV, publishing, and advertising. That means that 97% of the messages we see and hear about how women should look, act and think (or not) are created by men.

What stories and messages is the average teen girl, who daily consumes 10 hours and 45 minutes of media (music, television, internet, etc.), seeing each day? She is seeing one version of beauty – a digitally-altered, humanly-impossible standard. And she has grown up in a society where advertisers spend billions each year giving her just one picture of what it means to be a girl – sparkly, pretty and nurturing.

At age 7, she probably wanted to be a leader, but by age 8 her leadership aspirations have peaked. Has she watched one too many Easy Bake Oven advertisements? Or is she simply listening to what media, like the clips below, teach her about a woman’s place in leadership, politics and everyday life?

For every negative portrayal of women in media, I hope there’s a healthy and positive one. For me, I find inspiration in characters like Liz Lemon and Mindy Lahiri, and in people like Geena Davis, Kate Winslet and Katie Couric.

In Miss Representation, the documentary that explores how women are represented in the media, Katie Couric explains where she finds hope in this broken media system: “The media can be an instrument of change. it can maintain the status quo and reflect the views of society, or it can awaken people and change minds. It depends on who’s piloting the plane.”

Join us March 26 at Canisius College as we learn more about media portrayals of women and how we can be a part of the solution – or find a Miss Representation screening near you!

We’re elevating this issue not just because it’s about justice, or equality, or integrity – but because we are missing out on the rich insight and innovation that comes when we bring diversity to the table. The reality is – depending on the social institution you’re examining (legislature, world parliaments, media, corporations, etc.) – women hold between 3 and 20 percent of leadership position. 3 is abysmal, 20 is – unfortunately – great, but they’re nowhere near the 50% mark, where they should be.

Why is women’s presence in leadership so low?

It’s complicated, of course, but Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, suggests one cause is that women are simply dropping out. They’re “leaning away,” she says in her 2010 TEDtalk, when they should be “keeping their feet on the gas pedal.”

Many women make the choice to leave work to focus more on their families or other priorities, but others never climb to leadership in their careers simply because they can’t be what they can’t see. Without examples of women leaders in the media and in our everyday realities, we struggle to become the leaders we envision.

“Women systematically underestimate their own abilities,” Sandberg explains. They tend not to negotiate for themselves and attribute their successes to outside factors rather than innate ability. Why? Research proves that for men, success leads to likeability. But for women, success makes them appear less likeable. Do we fear, even unconsciously, that we’ll be disliked when we earn power and influence? I think back on the times I’ve tried to hide success from classmates or coworkers, and the answer is yes.

“I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments,” says Sandberg. To create that world, we start by becoming the role models we ourselves needed. By advocating for ourselves, and choosing to like and support other successful women, we break that cycle. An essential part of that journey is awareness. Explore these issues and be a part of the solution by joining Miss Representation at Canisius College on March 26.

A 2011 Harvard Business Review survey of over 7,000 leaders, women scored higher than men in 15 out of 16 categories of leadership competencies, including taking initiative, driving for results and championing change. According to Forbes magazine, women are better at navigating tricky organizational waters like seizing opportunities, networking, and leading sustainable change. In fact, major corporations with women on the board outperformed their all-male competitors by 26% worldwide over the course of six years – that’s including the global financial crash in 2008.

Now, I’m not saying women are better leaders than men. I am saying they are equally capable, insightful and smart – a fact that seems at odds with the realities of women in leadership today. Consider:

Women in 77 cents to every man’s dollar.

Despite the correlation between female board members and performance, 36% of U.S. corporations still don’t have a single woman on their boards.

Women account for one third of MBA students, but are merely 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs.

Women hold only 3% of clout positions in the mainstream media (telecommunications, entertainment, publishing and advertising).

Women hold 17% of the seats in the House of Representatives (the equivalent body in Rwanda is 56.3% female).

The United States is 90th in the world in terms of women in national legislatures.

With data like these, seeing women equally represented in leadership – in government, in business, in the media – is a clear social priority. If the U.S. is to remain a global leader in innovation, progress and equality, we need more female leaders in every sector. So through the month of March, we’re going to explore some of the complicated challenges facing women in leadership and try to identify some routes to progress.

Much of our information – and inspiration – comes from the award-winning documentary Miss Representation. The ComLead program is hosting a free screening of the film and a discussion panel with local leaders on March 26, 2013 on the Canisius campus in Buffalo. We welcome you to attend this event! Find more information here.