Questioning our Leadership Assumptions

What words or images immediately come to mind when you think about leadership?

Strong? Decisive? Heroic? Visionary? Charismatic? Great communicators? Courageous?

We can quickly end up with a super-human job description for leaders that then feels out of reach for most of us. Yet for each of the words or images you identified about leadership and leaders’ qualities, skills, behaviours and attitudes, the opposite is also likely to be true.

For example, it’s great when those in leadership roles can:

• have a strong sense of self and show and cope with being vulnerable too
• offer decisive answers and also know when it is better to ask powerful questions to help a group find answers together
• inspire people with their own vision and be a good facilitator, helping everyone’s voice to be heard in shaping a shared vision
• lead out front at times and be quiet nurturers of others, leading by walking alongside or behind, at other times
• be great communicators and great listeners
• be courageous in their actions and humble in their reflections
• help put plans, structures and systems in place and be comfortable working in situations that call for more organic, messy, one-step-at-a-time approaches.

So we can relax about what we expect leaders to know or be or do! From a CLD perspective, our aim is to grow a “leaderful” community, where people keep moving between different leadership roles depending on the situation. There are many different ways of ‘doing’ leadership.  And the best leaders keep adapting their responses, based on what they are noticing is happening in the community around them.

Some final questions

• What draws you to contributing as an active citizen in your community?
• What, if anything, holds you back?
• If you could lead and contribute in whatever way felt right for you, what would you like to do?
• What’s one step, however small, that you could take this month to help make that possible?