Reply To: Exercise 13: Your Models for Leadership and Emotions
Essay 1: What is Leadership?
• What is leadership?
• How have my views on leadership changed over the exercises so far?
• What leadership experiences have I had so far?
• Who are my leadership role models?
• What do I consider success or failure in leadership? Good or bad?
At this point in my life, it’s hard not to hear Josh’s words come into my head when I’m asked to define leadership: helping people do what they already wanted to do but didn’t know how. This definition is succinct and accurate. And also, as I considered the question “what is leadership?” throughout the week, I found myself wondering: who would I call a leader in my life? Are there different levels of leadership? Am I a leader? Is it helpful to include in definitions of leadership some sense of how the leaders feel and act and how the groups/ people they lead feel and act?
I found myself considering different scales of leadership.
There are leaders of families, where leadership duties include: providing safety for the group/ ensuring the group’s basic human needs are met, providing direction for the group (i.e. what are we doing today?), and providing opportunities for the group members to step into their own independence/ leadership/ best selves. I’m a leader of my children, but it’s not like they can opt out. So it makes it easy to be a dictator.
There are leaders within communities. Some of these leaders are voted into public office, and some simply solve problems that they noticed nobody else was solving. Usually, nobody asked them to solve the problems –i.e. there wasn’t some authority delegating the task. I found myself thinking of my local social work mentor, Lisa Ladendorff, who founded Northeast Oregon Network (NEON), a nonprofit working toward improving the overall health and wellbeing of our community. She made something out of nothing and is a wiz at getting grants and growing staff. Furthermore, she accepts formal and informal mentorship roles, and is more than happy to share what she knows; she is not territorial about her expertise and stepped down as ED from NEON “as soon as I could,” she explains. (She’s still on staff as the training director and acts in a consulting capacity to the current ED.) Her colleagues tend to feel capable and appreciated under her leadership; we also tend to feel safe getting vulnerable. When working with her, I feel inspired to lean into my own “growth edge” (a phrase she taught me) and acknowledge those places traditionally known as weaknesses.
There are leaders of states and nations, though I have to admit that as I reflected on folks at this level, I could only think of people in public office. Through my work with our local emergency shelter (Right Track Resource Center), I find myself working with a consultant who knows a lot of big names in local, state, and federal government, as well as major players in the business and philanthropic worlds. He plays a role in effecting major change in the world and he built his own career and consulting firm out effecting such change. He does what he says he’s going to do and he helps all kinds of noble organizations do their work more effectively. I consider him a role model… but is he a leader? Or is just doing his job (and doing it well) distinguishable from leading? I haven’t quite figured this out yet, though I acknowledge there’s probably not one “right” answer.
Sometimes I think leaders are easiest to identify postmortem. That is to say, their impact is measurable by how many people show up to the funeral. In a documentary about The Notorious B.I.G., I remember seeing footage of jam-packed streets and balconies throughout Brooklyn of people mourning the loss. Was Biggie a leader? He was certainly something. He certainly touched lots of people he’d never actually met in profound an intimate ways. (If that sounds like I’m alluding to sexual assault, please get your mind out ‘tha gutter.) Is the Notorious B.I.G. a leadership role model to me? Perhaps. I would certainly consider it a life well-lived if thousands of people could say that I helped them get through tough times. And yet, ideally, I want even more than that. I want to give people the skills and connections to alleviate their tough times, not just get through them.
I also find myself thinking about effective leaders who caused tremendous harm in the world. Hitler could have spent his whole life ranting in beerhalls to small, disengaged audiences; the reason we know his name is because thousands of people eventually followed him. Which brings me to another element of my definition of leadership: someone who others want to follow. Lots of people wanted to follow Hitler at first; eventually (as happens with violent leadership), many eventually followed out of fear that not-following would lead to physical harm. So, there’s another element of “good” leadership: someone who others want to follow, absent of any threat of physical harm otherwise.
My own leadership experiences have been practiced—at least by my thinking—on a relatively small scale. I led the RTRC consultant through a round of the Spodek Method as part of our conversation about why I felt uncomfortable supporting his monthly flights across the state. I introduced a conversation that he would not have introduced; I solicited action that would not have otherwise been enacted. (For the record, though, this was action that I did not invent. It was action born of the consultant’s own experiences and emotions.) It’s not like I “got” him to do something he didn’t want to do, but I did make something out of nothing in a way that was a net positive for me, for him, and for the environment. Is that leadership? Seems so.
Previously, I would have named my role as the board chair at RTRC as leadership experience, and maybe it is? But that role feels like something that was already defined. So maybe leadership means creating something new?
The assignment as I understood it was to consider leadership models, so all week I developed the following analogy:
Leadership is like being the captain of a ship. Good captains (leaders) attract a crew who have the freedom to do other things but who choose to be there. Managerial captains (leaders) can only keep crew aboard if the crew has no other option or if there’s some threat to personal well-being if they leave. Good captains are willing to navigate uncharted waters; managerial captains only go where their patron tells them to go. Good captains incorporate their crew into key decision-making, and their crew feels ownership and buy-in to the whole mission; managerial captains like to feel separate and higher up than their crew and make decisions without their input.
My views on leadership are changing even as I write this essay, so I look forward to hearing everyone else’s ideas soon. As it is, I’ll stop here.