I am a Twitter neophyte. I follow a group of active “tweeps” who seem busy, not just chatting, but raising awareness and sometimes money for local causes. I follow, Erica Mayer and she runs a “water campaign” in a fun and effective way. I clicked over to read about the organization and person who motivated her to start her charity water campaign.

I started to follow @TCManWalking and got to his website. His story, his courage and passion are amazing. Chris is currently without permanent shelter, or a job. While managing a very severe situation, he created this website in hopes of forming a network of people and organizations dedicated to serving this vulnerable population in the Twin Cities.

His request for water and reusable bottles has been pushed completely through social media. He inspired me to test my network. Do my “friends” and “followers” really have a connection to me? Yes. I’ve been overwhelmed by the support of friends, neighbors and professional colleagues. I am excited to provide some very basic needs to people in our community who are homeless.

It is true you can spend hours on Facebook doing some really silly things. Reconnecting with old friends and colleagues is fun. The introduction to new people, places and things is inadvertently creating a new level of civic awareness. Social Media may be the catalyst that connects people to their community in new, fresh and sometimes basic ways. That is a good thing, right?

Target Field

Last week I had the opportunity to take a tour of Target Field. It was a few days after they started to lay down the sod and the rich, green grass seemed to bring the building to life. It wasn’t hard to picture Carlos Gomez making a leaping catch in center field, or Justin Morneau driving a home run into the plaza beyond right field.

When it opens next year, Target Field is going to be a major asset to Minneapolis and to the entire state. But as I stared over the field and up to the Minneapolis skyline I couldn’t help but think back to the time when the Twins ballpark was a dream of a few believers, a hot button issue among voters, and a test of the leadership of this community. In that way, Target Field is more than a ballpark. It’s a symbol of Minnesota’s long tradition of strong leaders who will look past what’s popular to do what’s right.

“Leadership” is a concept that is difficult to define, but its importance to a community is impossible to overstate. And in an era when shouting has started to replace discourse, and outrage overshadows nuance, leadership only becomes more central to a community’s ability to move forward for the common good.

Minnesota has been lucky to have a rich history of great leaders, both in the public and private sectors. If you look at all of the elements that make this a great state to live in, you will find leaders who have championed each of these causes. Whether it is education, the arts, our natural resources, our economic strength, or our world-class health care facilities, these assets don’t just build themselves. They are the result of passionate and visionary leaders.

In this blog, I hope to highlight some vital elements of leadership, and to applaud those in our community who are rising to the challenges we’re facing. I believe it is important to call out good leadership in a time when true leaders are increasingly being attacked. In particular, there are two essential marks of leadership that are currently being tested.

The first is the ability to engage in and encourage respectful dialogue and debate. We seem to be in a downward spiral of disrespectful partisanship. “Shouters” are dominating some of the town hall meetings about health care reform, and are almost universally dominating media coverage of the issue.

When did it become acceptable to “shout each other down” in a public forum? When did the taboo get lifted about calling someone a Nazi or comparing someone to Hitler? By doing this in “polite society” aren’t we giving these symbols of ultimate evil more legitimacy than they deserve?

We need leaders who are able to rise above the noise to foster debate and engage opposing viewpoints. We need to get back to the day when people can disagree with each other politically, and still go out for a friendly drink when the debate is over. That’s how Paul Wellstone did it. That’s how Ted Kennedy did it. That’s how our leaders need to do it now.

A second crucial element of leadership is to be able to keep an eye on the True North that is the “common good.” It’s easy to get your bearings confused when you are being hit hard from the left and the right while you’re trying to move forward. The common good should be a guiding light for any great leader. It is defined by your moral center, the philosophy that brought you to a leadership position to begin with. All decisions should lead toward that central place.

Emotion can be the enemy of the common good. How many times have you heard people who are outraged about paying taxes for schools when they don’t have kids in the public school system? This is when we stray from a focus on the common good.

Right now we’re seeing video from town hall meetings of people literally screaming about keeping the government out of health care. Their praise of private health insurance is compelling, but anyone who has dealt with a serious illness can tell you just as emotionally how tenuous that relationship with private insurance can really be. Our leaders need to make changes now, so that those “shouters” will never need to know how quickly they could have found themselves without insurance and without options.

The ability to listen respectfully, process information and then decide on a course of action that will benefit the common good is unique among great leaders. That brings me back to Target Field.

I was one of the volunteers (and a minor player to say the least) who worked to communicate the benefits of the new ballpark when the political tide was moving the opposite direction. At the height of the debate I witnessed a town hall meeting that in some ways foreshadowed the health care town halls we see today.

“Let the billionaires buy their own ballpark!” was one popular slogan.

“How can we fund a baseball field instead of schools?” was another. (I never saw it as an “either/or” question.)

But in the middle of the emotional appeals, I saw that trait that has always helped Minnesota move forward. I saw leadership.

Hennepin County, the City of Minneapolis, and a small group of dedicated leaders kept pushing for more debate, more discussion, and finally a solution. Next year we will see the fruits of their hard work.

On opening day I hope the vocal opponents of the ballpark will come out and see that it’s not a gift to the Pohlad family, but is an asset that our entire state should be proud of. I hope those leaders who kept pushing for the stadium are sitting behind home plate for the first pitch, enjoying a dog and a beer. Oh, and I hope Joe Mauer puts one into the cheap seats.