By Meredith Woodward King
If you take a Vermont Business Center seminar with Merryn Rutledge, be prepared to share your business challenges, engage in an active discussion and learn from your fellow participants.
“My sense is that people carry a lot of wisdom within them,” said Rutledge, a consultant who works with businesses and nonprofit organizations on strategic planning, leadership and communication issues, “so when you get a group of people together who are really focused about learning about a challenge and talking about it with other high-caliber peers, they’re going to make a lot of progress in finding solutions or strategies for that challenge.”
She attributes her dialogic teaching style to her days at Phillips Exeter Academy, a private, co-educational boarding school in New Hampshire. As an instructor there from 1978 to 1993, she taught seminars and also acquired facilitation and management skills by leading faculty professional development, supervising staff and overseeing curriculum reform.
“Phillips Exeter is famous for its seminar style of teaching, where students do much more talking than the teacher,” she said. “The whole magic of teaching is to know how to ask questions that engender good, vigorous discussion that brings learning. This ability to ask questions is a fundamental skill for leadership, too.”
Rutledge’s interest in leadership development and interpersonal communication first arose during her childhood, however. She heard many stories from her father, a longtime program director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “He traveled all over and would come home and tell us about his work with other people, organizing and leading programs,” she recalled. “He organized other leaders in a collegial, collaborative way, and I always admired him.”
As an adult, she gained a cross-cultural perspective on how people communicate. She spent two years teaching in France and later became affiliated with a diversity program at the Wellesley Centers for Women. That last experience led to her interest in adult education, and after moving to Vermont, she launched her own business, ReVisions, LLC, in 1995, in which she focuses on organizational and leadership development, communication and facilitation.
As her work evolved, she found herself increasingly coaching top-level managers in everything from leadership development to organizational restructuring. Her clients have included for-profit and non-profit organizations such as the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, the Vermont Student Assistant Corp., Lake Champlain Transportation Co. and Summit Center for State Employee Development.
Most recently, as part of her doctoral study in leadership and policy studies at the University of Vermont, Rutledge has begun examining group problem-solving in coalitions – organizations specifically designed to unite top leaders from various groups in tackling a complex societal issues such as hunger. She’s exploring their dialogue and “sense-making,” or how they make sense of the problem they are trying to solve. After obtaining her doctorate, she hopes to write more books; she already is the author of “Strategic Planning Guide for Leaders of Small Organizations” and many articles and book chapters on leadership and management.
No matter what the organization, Rutledge finds a common thread among the top leaders. “One of the issues I see in leaders today is that it can be pretty lonely at the top,” she said. “One of the benefits of the Vermont Business Center’s Leadership and Management Professional Certificate Programis that it develops a collegial group of leaders” who can help each other.
“Leadership really comes from the self,” said Rutledge, an instructor for the VBC since its start-up. She teaches a seminar on “The Strategic Leader: Organizational Performance from the Center Out.” “There is no one way to become a leader. It’s a matter of learning as much as one can and bringing that learning together with one’s experience – and with a collegial group of peers.”
Last modified November 01 2007 12:52 PM
