Who Can Call Themselves a Leader?
By Helena Clayton, Leadership Development, Coach, Consultant & Facilitator
By Helena Clayton, Leadership Development, Coach, Consultant & Facilitator
Introducing our 2nd guest blog contribution from Helena Clayton, the director of Helena Clayton Leadership Development, coaching, consulting, and facilitation.
We are pleased to feature her writing as part of our mission to develop an ecosystem of strong supportive partner relationships, toward the collective pursuit of achieving better business for a better world.
We hope you find joy and inspiration in her thoughts on the evolving criteria for leadership as we have.
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Who can call themselves a leader?
I was talking to a group of emerging leaders recently about how a crisis reveals our faultlines – both personal and systemic. And about how this pandemic might have got us thinking about what we want and need from leaders and leadership. And how we might want something that’s different from what we’ve got now.
Sure, it’s my job, after 20 years of working in leadership development, to always be thinking about leadership and what it means. But I notice my thinking has shifted significantly recently. I notice I’m not only thinking about what’s in the leadership box, but more about what a different box altogether might look like.
It seems to me we’ve used the title far too lightly up until now. I have an increasing sense that leadership carries a very particular set of responsibilities, and that it should do, especially for these days. I think we need to use the term very sparingly. It doesn’t feel right to hold a senior role in an organisation and automatically call yourself a leader.
But these times we’re in are making me want to get really specific about what makes someone a leader and not a senior (maybe VERY senior) manager.
For example, I’m wondering if you can say you’re a leader if you only lead within your organisation and not within the wider world? Can you say you’re a leader if you don’t know what you stand for – and that you are taking a stand on something – and that you can articulate that if asked. What about if you have done no personal development work whatsoever and have little or no sense about who you (really) are, what core assumptions you work from, what are your values or what your deeper and maybe problematic motivations or drivers are?
So let me test out a few things here – say a few things out loud and as provocations and see what I (and you) think:
What if … what if no one has a right to call themselves a leader in their organisation unless they are:
For me this would mean building into all my leadership development programmes things like: education about the climate crisis; initiating a project to improve rough sleeping in your town; setting up a social enterprise to support Syrian or Iraqi refugees, say; or volunteering at a food bank.
In a leadership programme, how about a research activity to learn about practical activism for system change – maybe from Extinction Rebellion or Greenpeace, from community organisers in the US or from a young political activist in Nigeria – and learning new ways of changing a system.
To talk about love is often taboo and certainly distinctly unusual in our organisations. But what if your senior managers went through a leadership programme like this one – focusing on ‘leading from love’? What if, as one organisation has done, we build a Top team leadership programme solely around love, authenticity and vulnerability?
How might things shift for the better if all leaders experienced either a course of counseling or therapy or worked with a coach with a ‘deep psychology’ background? What if all your Top Team experienced something like The Hoffman Process?
None of these things is easy. All involve risk and courage. All involve reimagining leadership as something that very few people are equipped and ready to do.
But it feels right to me to demand that no one take the rewards of leadership unless they’re also willing to make an active choice and step up into the full responsibilities of what we need from leadership today.
If you could over-write our current leadership paradigm with one that’s more suited to these times, what would your version include? You might more to stimulate your thinking in this similar blog of mine on ‘eldership’. And of course, PTHR is also in the business of reimagining our workplaces and so there will also be plenty to provoke new thinking in The Energized Workplace or Transformational HR.
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