Leadership Texarkana works to foster community excellence

Leadership Texarkana has been on the job again this year, fostering leadership for community excellence, engaging and equipping ever more citizens to step up and take responsibility as leaders working together and working smart to make the best use of the resources we have.

We work with passion to that end because we believe that leadership is the lid on our success as a community.

In this past year of living vigorously through our foundational programs:

We’ve honored the 38th group of citizens to have completed LT’s year-long flagship Leadership Texarkana Class.

We’ve laid plans for 40 area juniors and seniors to be part of LT’s Today’s Youth Tomorrow’s Leaders program.

We gathered several hundred at our annual Lunch with Leaders to reflect on community progress.

Because example is not the main thing, but rather the only thing, we lifted up and celebrated 17 individuals and organizations who were nominated by fellow citizens for this year’s Wilbur Award honors, giving special props to Prissy Hickerson (LT Class of 1983) as our Leader of the Year.

We hosted 300-plus leaders for Leadercast 2017, where teams from business, industry, education, healthcare, government, and nonprofits pondered the power of purpose.

We worked year round to garner resources of wisdom, time, funds and other support from hundreds of generous partners who value our cause enough to invest in it.

Applying the wisdom of success in business to success in Texarkana USA, we recognize that numbers matter.

The degree to which any organization, business or community can achieve excellence is proportional to the percentage of individuals in the whole group who are stepping up to take responsibility for it and who are working together to make it all happen, (i.e., the number of leaders at every level).

For Texarkana USA, the more citizens who imagine Texarkana is their business, the better. Since the 2011 launch of LIFT (the Leadership Initiative for Texarkana) LT has gone for numbers, reaching beyond our LT classes and grads to engage and equip citizens throughout the community through well-reported LIFT joint leader summits, LIFT community reports, and LIFT editorials.

One of the exciting new LIFT efforts of Leadership Texarkana in past months has been the development of our Weekly LIFT as a vehicle for engaging ever greater numbers of citizens.

The Weekly LIFT is a weekly e-newsletter focused around What’s to Love about Texarkana USA.

It includes a Top 10 list of things to do each week, (including citizen input on favorite Totally Texarkana meals), but it isn’t your average events calendar; it’s a carefully crafted compendium of bullets and briefs about the people, places and events that make Texarkana a great place to be.

Besides the Top 10, the Weekly LIFT includes DYK (“Did You Know”) updates on progress and community superlatives to celebrate, shout-outs to businesses that are models for making Texarkana beautiful–clean, neat, green and pretty; profiles of local leaders from every walk of life, along with links to inspirational organizations worthy of their efforts.

Last but not least, the Weekly LIFT frames it all in the context of the community vision and values expressed by citizens over the past 50 years: Texarkana USA as a thriving center for business, education and culture that attracts–and serves–us all. Citizens committed to working smart for excellence, to educational and cultural riches, community pride, economic, social and personal well-being.

Ordinarily, a weekly e-newsletter would hardly be considered newsworthy progress. However, this one is just that, and you should care about it, because the Weekly LIFT has been designed with the intention to meet specific community needs essential to our collective progress.

Several influential readers see the Weekly LIFT as an ideal tool for recruiting folks to live here–providing prospects with an authentic weekly window on just what Texarkana USA is. But the potential benefits go far beyond recruitment.

From 38 years of experience with LT classes, we have learned that when citizens are made aware of our community assets and positive community endeavors, they become interested, invested and excited about the opportunity to be part of the community action. The intent of the Weekly LIFT is not just to grow awareness of what’s to love about Texarkana USA, but also to inspire citizens to step up as leaders taking responsibility for our collective future.

But there’s a third even more compelling value that the Weekly Lift could have for our community, by addressing an issue that affects every business in Texarkana USA: The Weekly LIFT has the potential to counteract the negative narrative that can result when citizens are uninformed, lack perspective about our authentic community riches and opportunities and lack community pride.

Business and organizational leaders know the insidious nature and potential damage caused by negative talk on a team; every successful leader knows that team pride and engagement are the foundations for excellence and each team leader makes it a priority to eliminate the negatives by providing authentic reasons for pride and commitment to the team cause.

Pride matters equally for Texarkana, USA’s efforts, too.

There are significant numbers of citizens who just aren’t aware of the abundant authentic reasons for pride in our community and it has been an ongoing community challenge for years. In the early 2000s, the Chamber of Commerce imported the idea of a Hospitality University, to which companies could send their front-line employees (most directly in touch with the customers and visitors) to a handful of training sessions to learn the virtues of the various content providing organizations in our area, such as TRAHC.

The thinking was that if our front-line citizens just knew what our community had to offer and what was going on in our community, they would be inspired to share it with the folks they came into contact with. They would become our community champions, letting visitors to our community know our community is great. Lots of good people put diligent effort into making it work, but Hospitality U never caught on.

The bottom line: homegrown negativity persists and still has the power to dog us to detrimental effect. Ensuring authentic broad-based pride among all team members in Texarkana, USA should be as high a priority for our community as the pride deemed necessary by our leaders for their football teams, or hospitals, educational institutions or businesses.

Pride is a priority with consequences.

The irony is that we are blessed beyond measure in this community with assets and excellence of every kind in Texarkana USA, outstanding leaders, ongoing progress, national and regional recognition for our efforts, natural beauty, and on and on. We are by no means perfect, but we have the assets; we just need to do a better job of making them known to all citizens.

The significance of the Weekly LIFT is that we have designed it with intention to change our community self-talk from “We can’t,” “We aren’t…” or “there’s nothing to do” to “Wow!” “Cool!” and “Who knew!?” which are the usual reactions each year as LT Class participants discover new perspectives about Texarkana USA.

From input we’ve received, we know the Weekly LIFT can accomplish these same ends. A recent email from a very educated, connected and well-informed subscriber in Texarkana said in part, “I am always amazed at how you can come up with so many things to see and do in Texarkana. I am always amazed at the excitement you can create by the news you share. I wish everything you share would make the local news outlets. I know some do, but often there are some that don’t.”

If it’s the widespread lack of knowledge of “What’s to Love” that yields a negative narrative, we must make it a priority to invest in the widespread distribution and sharing of knowledge. For those who do know what’s to love about our community, it’s natural and easy to speak in superlatives about it and its many second-to-none assets. But, the Weekly LIFT is only an effective tool if it is shared by critical masses of citizens throughout our community. If it isn’t distributed nor read, then it has no power to yield the pride and engagement so important for community success.

To make a difference, to make progress and to take local action, we challenge each reader and citizen to lead the way to new positive narrative, citizen engagement, authentic pride, new outcomes.

Subscribe to the Weekly LIFT at LeadershipTexarkana.com. and share it. Forward it to your friends and neighbors, co-workers and encourage them to subscribe. Print them out (from the hard copy link embedded) and leave copies on your counters for guests or on your employees desks.

In this era of overwhelming inboxes why would anyone choose to subscribe to yet another (seemingly) anachronistic email? Because if you ran a business that was plagued by negativity, you would do everything in your power to change the negative to positive, because it was important for your success. Imagine Texarkana is your business because it is.

Besides, we think you’ll like it. We’ve had people tell us it’s the only enews blast they open. You can always unsubscribe.

The alternative is you don’t subscribe, don’t share and do what you’ve always done and 10 years hence still be complaining that there are folks out there bad-mouthing our community and it’s (still) hurting our community and your business.

You can lead the way or you can assume other people will make it happen. Author Peter Kageyama writes: “It’s not only important for citizens to share a common vision of community excellence, it’s also critical for citizens to realize that they each are the ones who must create it and that just talking about it won’t get them there. We have to quit speaking about what others should do to speaking into the possibilities that we as individual citizens have the capacity to create.”

Leadership Texarkana’s success in this and all we do will be reflected in our community’s success because leadership matters. Numbers matter. Working together matters. Progress matters. Pride matters. Leadership Texarkana matters.

What’s on the Horizon for LT? Besides working toward our Weekly LIFT goal of canvassing our community weekly with good news and good ideas, we’ll also be developing our LIFT Focus for the Future to be an ever more useful tool for understanding our community’s status and progress, as well as developing our Community Leadership Inventory, as a similar assessment tool for individuals.

For more information about Leadership Texarkana, including how to become a partner in our efforts, go to LeadershipTexarkana.com or email info@leadershiptexarkana.com.

If you share an interest in our Weekly LIFT, or if you want to contribute content to be considered for publication in any of our feature areas, please let us know at info@leadershiptexarkana.com.