Do people who fear learning to lead think it means imposing hierarchy?
A friend calls leadership “the l-word.” I used to think of leadership as not something anyone could learn. I thought you either had it or you didn’t.
I also associated it with control. Today I associate it with help, support, empathy, compassion, listening, awareness, and social and emotional skills like them.
It’s been so long since I associated it with control, I have to work to reconnect with that feeling so it takes work for me to empathize with someone who describes it as “the l-word.” I mean, when I was little we used “the f-word” to describe the worst curse word, which rhymes with duck. Today, “the n-word” seems the most taboo word to say or write, at least for people who aren’t African-American.
So to call leadership “the l-word” seems intense. I think a lot of people associate leadership with hierarchy, dominance, patriarchy, threat, coercion, imposition, and such. To be more precise, I see such associations in people on the political left. I think they are getting stuck in preconceptions that deprive them of understanding and all the social and emotional skills I listed above.
Since the majority of people working on sustainability are on the left, I see a lot of environmentalists effectively shooting themselves in the foot by cringing at and refraining from leadership by confusing it with an incorrect preconception.
I’m trying to figure out how to learn more about this preconception, verify the accuracy of my assessment, where it comes from, and why people stick with it against the evidence and as it causes them to lose elections and other shortcomings it causes.
Leadership does not mean imposing authority, dominance, or other forms of coercion. It’s not a tool for authoritarians. It doesn’t mean patriarchy, sexism, racism, etc.
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