As a Protégé in Bowen’s Leadership Challenge Workshop, the Community Project Challenge portion of the year-long leadership program was daunting at first mention. The Community Project Challenge requires each Protégé to lead a major community service project. This requires the identification of an appropriate opportunity, the organization and scheduling of the effort, the recruitment of help to accomplish set goals, the execution of the project and finally the reporting back to the group of what the effort accomplished. In the course of our workshop sessions, it became clear to me that I had been ‘waiting for permission’ to spend time helping in the community – there was and is always plenty to do at work and at home! But shortly after the challenge was announced, the opportunity called.
