Quiet Leadership: Degrading our Ecosystem

Every day, through small actions, we both enhance, and degrade, the ecosystem that we exist within: in the work on Quiet Leadership i consider the Organisation itself as an ecosystem, a forest, filled with trees and shrubs, streams and rivers, hills and plains, and seek to understand the ways that all of these things are interrelated, and how impact in one areas creates imbalance in another. Essentially it’s a view that the whole system cannot be healthy unless all of the tiny connections are tended to, and that when we are out of balance, it is often lots of small things, rather than one major issue, which causes the toxicity.

This focus on ‘small’ actions is at the heart of Quiet Leadership: not programmatic approaches to change or culture transformation, but rather a deeply personal journey, where we seek to understand our own, personal, impact and action within this ecosystem.

Change is always anchored in the action of the individual: if you and i never change, then neither truly does the system. But why is change so hard? This work seeks to understand that in good systems, full of good people like you and me, there is still degradation and toxicity: not bad people deliberately thwarting us, but rather all of us, in small ways operating against each other, or without a systemic, holistic, view of the world.

I am offering the four week Quiet Leadership programme freely into my Community through 2021 and beyond, to anyone who works in healthcare, NGOs, or who can make a commitment to pay their insights forward into their own Community. You can sign up here.