There are just three days left to support my new book, ‘The Humble Leader’ over on Kickstarter: this is a guided reflection in Social Leadership, considering the role of humility in our practice.
It’s a small and beautiful hard back book, which can easily be read in the time it takes to drink a coffee, but may form a space for reflection, or the basis for a conversation.
Or perhaps nine conversations: the book is structured across separate chapters, each acting as a discussion on humility in a different context.
It’s not a book i intended to write: i never sat down and cleared out the time, as i have done with others.
Rather, this work came together through a series of essays and ideas across almost eight years.
And then, it suddenly felt right.
As part of our broader exploration of Social Leadership, and in the rapidly evolving context of the Social Age, perhaps we need a type of leadership that is more humble than heroic.
People willing to ask not ‘what will it cost?’, but ‘what can i invest of myself?’, not ‘what will you do?’, but ‘how can i support?’. Not ‘here is an easy answer’ but rather a willingness to explore together.
These are easy words to utter, but we are welded into structures of power, influence, and control that can lead us to more easily speak than to listen, to find greater comfort in certainty than curiosity. That make it easier to see the value in money than in people.
A more humble type of leadership will be distributed, will be discovered.
Against the backdrop of the Social Age, where our societal structures of organisation, reward, and accountability are often focussed towards the top, perhaps it’s the right time to look down, to look out, and to look to each other. With humility.
You can find the Kickstarter Campaign here.
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 