Quiet Leadership: An Endless Weight

Quiet Leadership explores how, through the smallest of actions, we improve the system around us. It’s about leadership in the everyday, with humility, through kindness, fairness, and with grace.

The final section, on ‘Grace’, is about a fluidity of style, a recognition that ‘leadership’ is not something we are awarded or achieve, so much as a state we try to remain within. I chose the word as it’s about graceful execution, but also a quality of care and choreography.

In it i talk about the weight we each carry: it’s easy for us to focus on the noise, on the visible loads, but of course many people carry other weights that we cannot see. They carry burdens of care, of their own mental health and wellbeing, of commitments into other communities, of vulnerability and self doubt. The only two things we can say for sure are that everyone carries weight, and nobody can carry an endless load.

Part of the grace in Quiet Leadership is to learn how to ask about that weight, and to be willing to bear heavy burdens together.