Tomorrow, the beginning of our Crowd Wisdom program, will be another experiment in giving responsibility and power our Steinberg interns. We'll get together in the morning to share ideas on whatever topics the interns want to talk about.

The question I have needed an answer to for a long time is this: How can I help interns be productive and energetic at the beginning of the day? Our interns are great, and we already have a strong working environment, but the mornings usually seem to start off just a little bit slowly.

I keep a long mental list of problems, issues, and concerns, and I'm always on the lookout for solutions. (I suspect most managers and teachers do this.) I recently read a terrific article in The Atlantic entitled What Makes a Great Teacher?. The story is largely about Teach for America's efforts to discover what makes great teachers so great. They identify practices like walking around the classroom (instead of staying glued to the chalkboard) and having an established routine for each day, so students know exactly what they'll be doing next.

It immediately struck me that many of these insights are easily applicable to management. One of the practices that interested me was writing a Problem of the Day on the chalkboard every morning, and students who come in get right to work on the problem. Could I do something like this at work?

Interns often have great ideas that I'd like to flesh out some. Mark Averell, for example, suggested an internal website that would aggregate Sacramento- and Capitol-related news sources, tweets, legislative hearings, and district events. After he built it, he asked me for ideas of other resources he could add to the site to make it useful for interns. Other interns working on projects hit roadblocks, and come to me for ideas to get around the obstacle. I can make suggestions, but I would rather tap into the creativity and intelligence of all the interns in the office.

So, Crowd Wisdom! Each morning we'll get together to solve problems and share ideas for doing things. I've created with a list of things to discuss, and each intern can vote for the things they want to talk about most. Each intern has 5 votes, which they can allocate however they like between topics. Interns can add topics that they think other interns would like to talk about.

What will prevent this from becoming a traditional, energy-sapping meeting, or an artificial "motivational" pep-talk? Well, meetings in our office have never been the soul-numbing affairs they seem to be in other offices. We all seem to enjoy our meetings as opportunities to share what we've all been working on. This probably has something to do with the fact that my boss doesn't use meetings as an opportunity to lecture the rest of us - our meetings are used for sharing information and ideas. We'll use Crowd Wisdom get-togethers the same way.

We'll only meet for 10-15 minutes, and we'll focus on exercising creativity and taking action. Interns in our office are already excited about work (interns often ask if they can come in more often than they're currently scheduled), so I'm not worried about it becoming an artificial event. I think this sort of program wouldn't work if they weren't already motivated.

But I think the biggest reason I'm confident Crowd Wisdom will be a success is that it's another opportunity for interns to exercise their creativity and initiative. This event isn't about me; it's about the interns and their work. They'll choose what we talk about.

This will also solve another problem I've been having - I can't keep interns' to-do lists stocked, because they work too quickly! Mornings are especially dry, because it takes me a little while to pull together new tasks. Interns currently jump into working on their Ownership Initiatives, but this will give them the opportunity to work on something else in the morning in case their Initiative is on hold for some reason. Beyond this, it will also create a get-'em-started atmosphere in the morning as we convene around a shared problem to solve. This is as much about creating team spirit as it is about providing tasks for eager interns.

I'll post updates as Crowd Wisdom develops and evolves. Share in the comments if you have some regular form of morning check-in with your colleagues or subordinates to get things started in

A few days ago I had the odd experience of mentoring one of my interns on leadership development. Odd because I'm so new to leadership development myself, but also because I felt I actually had things to teach. Much to my surprise, Lauren didn't immediately say, "Yeah, yeah, I already know that." Instead, she was nodding and taking notes. Also, I was reminded how much I learn when I teach - it forces me to articulate ideas that only exist nebulously in my mind.

Here are the basics of what I've learned so far, and what I told Lauren.

Involvement is a continuum. It doesn't help to think of infrequent volunteers, team members, and leaders as separate categories of participants. These types of participants belong on a continuum. Every volunteer should be seen as a potential team member, and team members can and should be encouraged to lead.

Leadership isn't a one-way activity. You can have lots of team members acting as leaders because leadership isn't a one-way activity that only occurs when someone leads her subordinates. Participants can lead laterally when they work on projects together, and help each other overcome obstacles. They can also lead upward - people higher in an organization should be open to the contributions of those below them. Developing leaders is less about grooming someone for a position of formal authority, and is more about developing abilities like critical thinking, communication, confidence, teamwork and a willingness to take risks.

Get participants working together. You'll have real trouble developing someone as a leader if you only assign him individual work. Even when tasks can be completed individually, get participants to work together on tasks so they can learn how to lead laterally. If tasks cannot be easily split up, ask participants to choose how to distribute a bundle of tasks, and ask them to talk to check up on each other's work. This will also help you recognize which participants take the initiative, and may be ready for more responsibility. Assigning work to groups also builds morale and team spirit, and takes a load off your shoulders, as you are no longer solely responsible for assigning tasks - you can ask a team to figure out the best way to accomplish something.

Assign responsibilities, not tasks. To engage a team member's passions, assign them broad responsibilities rather than narrow tasks. People want to feel they have accomplished something, and it's difficult to feel ownership of your work if you can't see how your work connects to everything else. Almost everyone has to do some tedious groundwork; a team member will be a lot more cheerful doing that work when she decides it's necessary to accomplish the goals she's responsible for than if you tell her to do that work. Sometimes you'll have to step in to remind a team member what sort of groundwork is necessary, but even in these cases, make sure to put the groundwork in the context of her overall responsibility.
When someone first gets involved, you should probably find engaging tasks to assign them, because they may not be interested in taking on responsibilities. But as people get more involved, you should give them the chance to take on responsibilities.

Gauge a participant's interest by suggesting they invite others. People who are really interested in the work they do will probably be enthusiastic about asking others to get involved, if you have ways new people can contribute without a large time commitment. If these opportunities exist and your team member isn't interested, it may be because he doesn't feel very engaged in what he's doing. Think about how you can engage him more. If you're already doing everything you should be doing, keep in mind that he probably won't be interested in getting any more involved than he already is.

Leadership development takes time. Leadership development not only takes time in the sense of needing weeks or months; it also takes real time from a leader's day. Don't shortchange your leadership development effort by assuming it will happen as a natural byproduct of management. Keep in very good contact with anyone you're developing as a leader, and anyone who is a potential leader. Don't drop the ball!

I'd love to hear your own suggestions - how do you develop leaders?

I've been slowly trying to get interns to work together more. I've been doing it both with my Davis Dollars interns and with my interns in Senator Steinberg's office, with different strategies.

I think it's important for a lot of reasons.

• It develops the interns' skills, initiative, and responsibility to be accountable to each other.
• Two heads are better than one - they can think of more ideas together than they'd be able to think of working alone on their projects.
• This allows me to tap into the creativity and intelligence of every intern. I can't think of everything. That fact is obvious, but assigning tasks unilaterally only makes sense if I believe I can think of everything we should do, and how we should do it. By allowing interns to talk about what to work on and how to accomplish it, they can come up with ideas I would not have thought of.
• It removes me as a bottleneck - when I need to assign tasks for everyone, it means interns are stalled if they need to wait to hear back from me. By delegating some authority to the intern teams, they can bypass me. This requires some watching, however, to make sure I approve of what they're working on.

There are different ways I'm having interns work together. My Davis Dollars interns work in small teams (2-3 people per team) to focus on different things. Two interns work on business outreach. Another is working on community outreach, which is broad enough that she helps other interns out as well as doing her own projects. Another intern works on our Gardenscaping project to create gardens for people in Davis, and she has some auxiliary interns helping her out, which I've helped recruit. Yet another intern helps other groups by working on design issues (creating publications, logos, etc.). Grouping them up this way has been tremendously successful in that it capitalizes on their good ideas and reduces pressure on me to think of everything.

In Senator Steinberg's office, I've been a bit less successful in thinking of ways to get interns to work together. They work together on their ownership initiatives, but I’ve had more trouble finding ways for them to work together on their core tasks of writing response letters and working on casework. Many of these core tasks are (to my mind) highly individual tasks that are difficult to split up.

I’ve been thinking of broader ways to get interns to work together, though. Working together doesn’t necessarily require splitting a task down the middle. Rather than assigning individual tasks to interns, I could allow them to create a division of labor by assigning a block of tasks to a group of interns, and allowing the interns to split the tasks between them. This would give them more initiative and make them partners in figuring out the best way to get through all the tasks. My current method commoditizes both the tasks and the interns by making piecemeal work out of something that could benefit from more creative thinking.

I did notice yesterday that two interns who were just starting out spontaneously started helping each other with tasks. Lucy, one of the interns, has already shown more initiative than average, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when she started helping Rochelle (who is a bit newer than Lucy). But I could also encourage teamwork by assigning each new intern to a more senior intern, and ask that senior intern to be responsible for guiding and mentoring the younger intern.

What are your thoughts? Do you have suggestions? How do you work with interns?

Thursday was the first day of my Intersectoral Leadership class at USC. One excellent thing about the program I'm in is that we do lots of activities that force us to experience the concepts we're learning about. The Dominoes and Poker Chips game created a really interesting leadership dynamic I hadn't ever witnessed before - there was an abrupt shift, before which we were operating as separate teams, and after which the whole class was unified, and I was surprised to find everyone listening to me.

So on Thursday morning, Professor Callahan began stacking dominoes and three colors of poker chips on the front table. He explained to our five table groups that we were going to play a game.

Each one of us would start with two random poker chips. Our objective was to be holding a domino when one minute was up, and we could trade chips for dominoes. Here were the trading rules:

1. You may trade three chips of different colors for one domino; you will also get one chip (of your choosing) back.
2. You may trade three dominoes for seven chips (of your choosing) back.
3. No stealing from other players
4. Anyone who does not have a domino in hand when time was called was dead.

He gave us two minutes to strategize. I was concerned people at our table would be competitive between each other, and quickly suggested that we all pool our chips to make some quick trades. I figured if we could convert our chips into three dominoes, then convert those back into more chips, we could convert our remaining chips back into four dominoes, and we'd all be set.

I don't know what other tables planned, but when he called for trading to begin, his table was mobbed. Everyone was calling for him to make exchanges for them. I had offered to be the trading rep for our table, and we got as far as our three dominoes, and exchanged them back into chips, when he called time. We had no dominoes; all of us were dead.

We all returned to our seats, and Professor Callahan counted the total number of dominoes throughout the whole class.  Only four people had dominoes out of a class of 21.

He reset the starting conditions (he took all the dominoes, and gave us each two chips), and asked us to take some time to plan again. We figured that, given the short amount of time, we should just hold on to our three dominoes and settle for one of us dying. I volunteered for that part, since I had proposed our plan, and knew I had to be willing to sacrifice, or they would distrust my call for everyone to contribute their chips.

We pulled this off, but at the end, the whole class only had seven survivors. We had done better, but no one else had. It still wasn't a very satisfactory result.

In the next planning session, and at the suggestion of one of my group members, I suggested to a group on one side that we could jointly pool our chips. They weren't interested, however, so we decided to stick with our original strategy - to no better success.

In the next planning session, Leila suggested again that we might want to coordinate with other groups, so the two of us approached two other groups that we had seen making plans together. I started talking to one of the two groups, and the other of the two started walking toward me to hear what I was saying. As the two groups converged on Leila and I, I raised my voice to be heard by both groups.

"We can all join our chips into one big pool," I began.

And in that moment, I noticed something strange and incredible. Suddenly the whole class was silent, listening to what I was saying. Everyone, including the group that hadn't been interested the round before, was suddenly a single group instead of separate pieces. There was a complete phase change, like ice cubes melting into a pool of water - a qualitative change in the nature of the group. The speed with which it happened was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life.

I don't know what exactly caused it. I'm sure it was a combination of factors:

• Everyone was frustrated, and were ready for someone who could propose a solution
• Other groups had been testing out the idea of coordinating, and were ready to try it on a larger scale when someone suggested it
• And we shouldn't underestimate the importance of someone speaking clearly and confidently - as Professor Callahan likes to say, a leader brings clarity.

We were sharing now, and everyone agreed to pool their chips, bring them to the front, and several of us would be in charge of making exchanges from chips into dominoes. We would immediately pass the dominoes back to others. When the time was up, Professor Callahan counted our dominoes. We had 9 - one fewer than we had had the previous round.

I sat down, frustrated, but fortunately was not allowed to give up, because immediately the de facto ambassadors for two other groups came over to me to figure out how we could improve. The game wasn't over, and our temporary setback didn't mean we had failed.

We planned again, refining and streamlining our process for assembling chips into piles. When we tried again, we earned 14 dominoes. The round afterward, we reached 17, and in our seventh round, we all had dominoes.

Afterward we reflected, as a class. Professor Callahan reflected that we had done relatively well (though not extraordinarily well) in terms of the number of rounds we needed to all get dominoes. He noted that every group sees a dip when it first joins as a group (which is pretty common for adopting any new strategy, not just in this game), which is discouraging, but that usually the drop is much more significant.

We also observed that once we had our strategy in place, a large number of people chose to be helpful by getting out of the way, and not clogging up the table area. Not everyone can be a leader; Professor Callahan talked about what he calls "followership," or the skill of being a good follower (even though you might also have the capacity to be a good leader), to allow things to get done. Too many cooks spoil the soup.

I noted that the task might have been significantly harder if, at the end of each round, Professor Callahan had totaled the score of each table, rather than of the entire group. We were already split into table groups, and totaling the scores in that way would have set us against each other even more.

At the end of the exercise, Professor Callahan told us to each keep our dominoes. Mine is now sitting on my desk, to remind me of that moment when we became one.