Social Leadership: Fairness, Humility, and Community

Social Leadership is founded upon fairness: deeply distributed, clearly visible, transparent, and fluid. It won’t come from system and process, but rather from engagement and action, within our communities, grounded in the behaviour of every individual. Social Leadership is very much a cultural phenomena: both generator of, and product of, a healthy culture.

There is a humility to Social Leadership, grounded, as it is, in our actions within our communities: a desire to help others to succeed, to measure our success in the achievements of others, and to selflessly share not only our resources, but our time, our thinking, our support. That’s not to say that Social Leadership is simply altruism: perhaps the best way to consider it is as an investment. Investing in co-creation, investing in communities, investing our trust in others.

There is nothing inherently good about Social Leadership, any more than there is anything ‘good’ inherent in cars or technology, but it can undoubtedly be deployed in service of the community. We can engage in our communities to help them to do better, and to learn to do better ourselves.

The change that we need starts with me: this is a truism of Social Leadership. If we look for fault in others, without first curating our own space, then we do disservice to our community. Communities are the ‘sense making’ entities that hep us to be more effective, but their engagement is something that we earn, not something we take for granted.

Ultimately, Social Leadership is awarded to us, not demanded by us. Founded upon fairness, carried with humility, invested in our communities.