These times call on ALL of us to be better leaders
One of the most important ways to be an effective social change practitioner is to cultivate leadership, your own and others. Our movements have come a long way in shifting the paradigm of leadership. The old paradigm elevated a simplistic ideal where leadership was often seen as the charismatic person (usually male) at the top of a hierarchy with all the decision-making power.
Now thanks to the efforts of newer generations of activists––particularly BIPOC, women, non-binary, and LGTBQ leaders steeped in the lessons of organizing for racial, gender and environmental/climate justice––the realm of leadership practices has been dramatically expanded. The orientation long used by organizers in struggles for systemic changes has become much more widely embraced. We now increasingly understand the need for “leaderful” movements where leadership is not seen as just a role in a hierarchy or approached from the perspective of scarcity or exceptionalism.
These movements have taught us that leadership is a set of qualities and practices that can and should be widespread. In fact it’s an orientation ALL of us must cultivate in order to be better organizers and grow our collective capacity for transformation.
One of the most fulfilling parts of my consulting practice is coaching leaders of varying levels of experience. I get to both support and co-learn. Through aiding my client’s growth and pulling on my own decades of experience in organization-building and social change work, I’ve distilled 10 key leadership practices below. Whatever our role in the movement, these 10 tips should be part of everyone’s toolbox who is working for a better world.
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- Cultivate self-awareness.
- Pay attention to what’s going on inside yourself. Self-awareness is a foundational skill that undergirds almost all leadership orientations. Recognize the impact of circumstances and when you’re out of sync with your goals or intentions.
- Incorporate self-assessment into how you do your work.
- Build time for self-assessment into your routine in multiple places: planning, prioritization, mid- project and after-the fact reflection.
- Pause and explore what’s happening BEFORE it’s a crisis.
- Do hard things when they are easy. Intervene early. Shift dangerous dynamics before they become a crisis. Auto-pilot leads to accidents.
- Ask yourself for help.
- Part of why coaches are helpful is they are outside the situation. Try to model the same dynamic by getting some distance to reflect and reconsider.
- Interrogate the situation from multiple perspectives.
- Multiplicity is your friend. Ask yourself: what are different things that might be happening? Create mechanisms to check your blind spots.
- Develop more than 1 hypothesis to test. (Play what if…?)
- Try on new perspectives, without committing to them. Don’t let yourself get trapped between only 2 choices. Imagination is a super power.
- TOOL: Polarize to recenter: articulate worse case/best case, hopes vs fears, what if I did B or C instead of A?
- Embrace complexity.
- Accept that cause and effect is difficult to predict except in very simple situations.
- TOOL: “Probe” difficult situations with small experiments. Let feedback loops guide you towards solutions.
- Give yourself homework (Invest in yourself)
- Your leadership is a critical part of your work, so invest in yourself. Include personal development in your goal-setting. Build capacity to take risks.
- Give yourself a day off.
- Social change work is a marathon, not a sprint and we need to pace ourselves.
- Take the work seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.
- Humble revolutionaries are more effective and resilient revolutionaries.