Fragments: Leadership at the Intersection

I’ve spent today considering aspects of leadership, specifically for those people responsible for strategy and direction. What – if anything – is leadership. And how – if at all – can we develop our capability, practice, or voice?

Here i share some fragments of thought.

We talk about ‘leadership’ as if it were a thing, when it may be little more than a taxonomy of action, or a judgement upon such action.

We talk of ‘developing’ leadership, implying that there is deficit (which of course we qualify against our desired traits) and also a sense of ‘better or worse’ – in terms of capability.

In both cases we are liable to conflate things which are true, for things that we desire, or simply like.

There are tensions within any notion of leadership – that it be both ‘good’ and ‘fair’, and ‘effective’ and ‘structural’. We cannot be everything, as we are accountable in so many different dimensions. In this sense, and as i have explored recently, leadership may be viewed (if it is a thing at all) as an inherently imperfect feature (of inherently imperfect systems).

We must consider our nature to reduce: to analyse and deconstruct in the belief that there is a simply underlying structural component, and that if we ‘reduce’ things far enough, we will both find it, and be able to reproduce it. Reductionist approaches can be useful abstractions to categorise things, but may include significant assumption or elasticity. And we must remember that some things (like truth and trust) exist in multiple parallel contexts. So right now i both trust you, and don’t. And i hold both things to be entirely true, but in different parts of my self.

Social Leadership describes an understanding of leadership beyond systems. A notion that we lead at intersections, through both our formal authority but also social authority. In this sense it is a negotiated, not structural, model of power – and indeed it views leadership as inherently a conversation about power, with the caveat that it may be executed by using almost no power at all, except that invested in us by others.

Leadership at the intersection of systems is a model of leadership as motion, trespass, of understanding boundaries, and of operating to interconnect, often through difference.

#WorkingOutLoud on Social Leadership