Leadership for our time

Radical in-the-moment leadership

More than 20 years ago, as a young activist, I started my journey of supporting and nurturing young feminist leaders. In the past five or so years, I have come full circle as I once again started interacting with and supporting the leadership journeys of activist leaders, including those working in social justice organisations. The difference is that now we live in a world that is much more“VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). Thanks to technological advances in the last few decades, the magnitude, speed and frequency of human communication across the globe have increased to levels not possible before. How we work is rapidly changing. Remote work has led to more distributed teams; increased access to information has changed how we consume data; and cross-functional collaboration is breaking down traditional divides between departments, teams and even skill sets.

As we navigate unchartered territory, new forms of leadership are needed. Over time we have seen conceptions of leadership progress from the individual, heroic, charismatic, or transformational, to a more values-driven leadership. The challenges of our times – from racial justice to climate change, economic inequality to health equity, gender justice to LGBTQ+ rights – can only be met by strong, diverse, grounded and revolutionary leaders who are capable of developing imaginative, innovative, creative and scalable solutions to achieve social justice.

However, it is not only the outcomes of leadership that matter. The leadership process matters as much. From my experiences of working with different organisations, movements and collectives, what is most needed is courageous leadership that offers new approaches to care, uncharted vision and trust.

Leadership as courage

Now when I think about radical leadership, courage is the first thing that comes to mind; the courage to explore uncharted spaces or dive into unknown waters. In conversations with leaders of organisations, I am struck by how many of us feel like we are flailing. The current moment requires leadership that goes beyond strategy to leading on culture too. As we navigate organisational spaces, we are aware of the strain as polemical issues, such as tackling structural inequalities based on neo-colonialism and racism, arise. Responding to emergent issues in our contexts often keeps our leaders stuck and unable to focus on the true mission of their organisations. Leaders also struggle to navigate ecosystems with strong, sometimes divergent, voices that challenge authority, and may lead to anxiety, risk aversion and inertia if responded to inappropriately.

In such circumstances, what is needed is leadership that is willing to move with humility – respecting that we don’t know all that is there – while also being anchored in our own values and sense of what is needed. Navigating these dynamics can feel like the experiences evoked by the Falling Tower card of Tarot. Such an analogy conjures up new questions:. As we travel these waters, what needs to collapse, around us and within us? Who is falling? What hurls the lightning at the tower? What needs to be thrown away? What needs to be learnt? What needs to be unlearnt?

The ability to start from scratch again and again takes deep courage. Leadership in this situation means actively soliciting feedback; being willing to say ‘I don’t know’, admitting that we are overwhelmed, and that together we all need to be vulnerable to make it through the moment we are experiencing. Leadership as courage allows us to move beyond a willingness to adapt. Instead, we choose to approach opportunities carefully through these internal (and external) contestations and continue to show up to do the messy work supported by our values and politics.

Leadership as courage needs to be complemented by finding and building support for ourselves and the work we value, and through cultivating ways to nurture connection, creativity and innovation while also deepening agency and choice at all levels of the system. Courage is not an internal, subjective state of mind disconnected from what happens around us. Rather, it also correlates to a quality of relationship between the individual and their communities and an informed understanding of what is possible between the system and the self.

The ‘I’ in leadership

Leaders in the social justice sector are expected to be collaborative and decisive, humble and bold, fearless and emotionally vulnerable, creative and laser-focused, kind and fierce. (Strategies for Social Change, Love Notes to our Leaders)

Leaders who respond to the call of our time reject narrow conceptualisations of the charismatic, natural-born leader and superhero. Instead, we recognise that leadership is not necessarily about the ‘individual’ leader. At the personal level, leadership requires deep honesty, constant reflection, the courage to experiment and fail and the ability to keep embracing new learning in order to grow. It’s important to think of leadership, not as an individual, but, as Barbara Kellerman proposes, as a system. This requires us to include those who hold leadership responsibilities, those forming part of the broader collective that the leader is connected to, and the context(s) within which leadership occurs. Thus, we move beyond the framing of leadership as ‘exceptionalism’; rejecting myths that leaders are rare and superior human beings endowed with characteristics not found in the majority of people. While exceptionalism, rooted in neoliberal white supremacy thinking, means we often hold leaders to unreasonable standards of perfectionism, letting go of exceptionalism allows us to accept the very humanness and flawed nature of those in leadership.

This applies even in the context of leadership as a system, with those of us occupying the role of leaders accepting and understanding our responsibility to transform mistakes and shortcomings into significant leadership growth opportunities. By modelling this type of reflective leadership behaviours, we can inspire and encourage the same behaviour in the people around us, creating a multiplier effect. This synergy creates high impact and innovation for the collective endeavour to which we apply leadership. The bottom line is that self-reflexivity pushes us as leaders to challenge ourselves to counter the ways of being or holding onto these roles as self-sacrificing, all-knowing, super-heroes or even unicorns. We become more and more aware that what is most needed are leaders who can be real, and who practise self-reflection and self-compassion.

In my experience of coaching leaders, I have found that leaders who can stand firm are the ones who acknowledge the impact of past experiences, especially those pivotal or defining moments that have shaped who they are and how they lead. It is important to note that leaders coming from experiences of historical and multigenerational ltrauma based on racism and other related oppressions face even more complex leadership challenges. These may include dealing with issues such as imposter syndrome, or navigating systems of micro-aggressions daily where their leadership decisions are more frequently scrutinised. It may be more difficult for such leaders to trust, ask for help, or show vulnerability for fear of being seen as an ineffectual leader. At such times, self-doubt and internalised oppression may lead to inaction, excessive self-criticism, imposter syndrome and defensive reactions.

It takes an additional layer of work to navigate internal needs, whilst also being available for the work needed from our leadership. The stakes are high as leaders have to show up and act against this backdrop, and navigate at times chronic self-doubt and difficulty, no matter how successful we are in our work. Leaders are now even more acutely aware of how current challenges and strife could push us to the edge of our endurance, with many of us noting the potential effects of short-term wins on our long-term health and well-being.

The ‘we’ in leadership (trust)

I don’t know about you, but I desire to trust and to be trusted in a way that makes room for our histories, cultures, and futures; to trust and be trusted in a way that fortifies what makes us human. I commit to generative life and love practices, perspectives and decisions rooted in transforming the world, one relationship at a time. – Austen Smith

As we lead effectively, self-awareness and reflexivity become one muscle we have to strengthen. In the space of the ‘we’, the role of leadership is to facilitate collaboration, participation and inclusion. The primary approach for leaders is to support teams to get better at collaborating, thus ensuring they have all they need (skills, resources, tools) to fulfil their mandate. In practice, this means providing space for all types of communication and communicators. It means helping people improve their organisational skills. It means helping people become effective debaters and mediating discussions with competing voices or ideas. It also means anticipating how collaboration might break down and taking action to prevent it before it happens

It is equally important to be attuned to the thoughts and feelings of the collective to best manage such spaces. In the space of the ‘we’, trust and radical honesty are the building blocks for leading. This includes trust in oneself, one’s community and the world: trust that we are not alone, and trust that, if we truly step onto our path to align our politics and our actions, and show up for this work, it will lead us closer to where we want to be.

When we ‘lead’ from a place of humility, vulnerability and surrender, we enable others to do the same. This, in turn, develops trust in our shared togetherness, in knowing that we are not alone, that it is safe to be vulnerable because we will not be judged, that promises are kept, that people say what they truly mean and that we can share our frustrations without fear of losing relationships. It is trust and interdependence, not individualism, that gets us through moments of crisis, chaos and conflict — and allows us to embrace the limitless possibilities of the work we are called to do. Trust and non-judgement are particularly important as they help us maintain compassion, whilst allowing a plurality of perspectives, experiences and expectations. As leaders, we have to continuously challenge ourselves to imagine the views of those whose positionality and identities come with the least social protection, as well as the views of our greatest detractors. This is uncomfortable work, but we have to be willing to do it without taking refuge either in reflexive condemnation or in blithe denial of the power and positionality we have access to by virtue of occupying positions of leadership.

We relinquish relationships for both urgent massive work, and a false sense of individual safety. We won’t get free if we can’t learn to operate at the scale of collaboration across differences, across platforms and exposure, in spite of efforts to sow dissent amongst us, to develop leaders who know how to disagree and still work together. – adrienne maree brown 

As with “group think,” research suggests that members in organisations can significantly influence each other’s emotions. When the emotional tenor within an organisation begins to shift, and the underlying concerns are denied, ignored and left unaddressed, the organisation runs the risk of eventually self-imploding. The role of leadership in such situations is to get curious instead of reactive, especially about the particularities of the event. This requires setting aside habits of thought and perception so we can look for the novel and the unexpected. Instead of railing too much against the underlying emotions, there is an invitation to notice what is behind it. Such moments of navigating the ‘we’ require us to strengthen our ability to hold the tensions of opposites, discomforts and polarities so that what is new can emerge from turbulence and rupture. All this relies on an ability to acknowledge and endure polarised oppositions within ourselves too.

The truth is that leadership is dynamic, complex, contextual and nuanced. As such, leadership is a set of skills, and like most other things in life, leadership skills can be honed through meaningful practice.

Intersectional liberatory practice

As leaders, we are scrutinised more for what we do, than what we say. While many social justice organisations articulate values and intentions around practice, the reality is that for many their greatest struggle is to align those utterances with actual aligned practice. Additionally, most social justice organisations, despite their best intentions, are still working to shed remnants of white supremacy thinking and ways in which working from perspective impacts the experiences of people in their ecosystem.

For example, while organisations have great intentions around practices of shared leadership, self-care, accountability and sustainability, in reality bringing these values to life is an imperfect practice. Moreover, when we get bogged down and distracted by the imperfectness of a practice, we are unable to work on those aspects of the practice that are working. As a result, we never get to develop the rigour to hold ourselves and others accountable and to be honest about what is working and what is not. What often happens is that paralysis results from the practice of calling out or one-upping people, or from indiscriminate critique. We fall short of cultivating thoughtful practice, such as a consistent state of questioning, reflection and acting in service to our missions or purpose, because we start hiding behind our fears and our inability to be in loving courageous conversation with one another as we dream into being our desired experience of practice. In other words, as we engage in practice, what is most difficult for leaders (and all of us in the collective) is to be willing to tackle hard truths about ourselves, and the challenges our organisations and movements face, without succumbing to demoralisation or disconnection.

This process of building liberatory praxis, is about moving our ideas from the abstract into the lived experience space, and includes testing and refining new ways of being and working together. In this space, even though we are not all equal (we need to acknowledge differential power and positionality), we all have to be in a state of perpetual learning – challenging prevailing ideas and strategies with enthusiasm and scrutiny r to collectively sharpen our thinking, advance better strategies and evolve our liberatory practices.

The role of leadership is to ensure liberatory practice is on the agenda; and not only when we experience problems in the system.

We must explore better ways of communicating and supporting each other and building inclusive, anti-racist, transparent and truly democratic organisations and practices. It requires us to craft better ways of building consensus, embracing generative conflict and bringing more community care, joy and celebration into the work – to nourish us and help us heal from the trauma our communities have endured across many generations.

Liberatory practice is also about our movements getting a lot more disciplined about articulating and actually building what we are for rather than merely what we’re against. It requires our movements to get better at going beyond visioning to designing and engineering a liberatory future within and outside of our organisations. (Strategies for Social Change, Love Notes to our Leaders)

Conclusion

Leadership for our times requires a radical reimagining of how we think about leadership. It requires openness, curiosity and inquiry as we observe ourselves, the collective and the system. This type of leadership requires us to open our hearts wide up, to connect with others and, from that space, to find the resources to navigate the complexity of our emotions and experiences as we navigate complex ecosystems.

Lastly, leadership for our time requires more than just intent, it requires us to put our actions into a field of emergence. In this field of emergence, we need to have courage and trust in ourselves, each other and in an unfolding vision that is bigger than any of us. While we don’t know what will emerge, our politics, increasing capabilities and willingness to try out new things, will carry us. As such we create conditions for what needs to be born, to emerge. As we walk our journey of leadership, we acknowledge that we are stepping into new territories and new actions with vulnerable courage, curiosity and trust.