Blending Leadership: Getting Out

Blended leaders know that there are many ways to go outside the four walls of their organizations, many ways to examine other realities, solutions, questions, and answers. They know that you don’t have to leave school to leave school. Whether they are active professionally on Twitter or Facebook, or spend time reading relevant blogs; whether they engage with others through webinars or the comment functions embedded in various media, blended leaders make it their business to know where to find whatever they happen to be looking for. They are “networked” in the sense described by Rainie and Wellman: “Networked individuals have partial memberships in multiple networks and rely less on permanent membership in settled groups. They must calculate where they can turn for different kinds of help — and what kind of help to offer others as they occupy nodes in others’ extended networks" (Rainie & Wellman, 2012, p. 12).