REMINDER: “leadership” shouldn’t be seen as an exclusive skill to be hoarded atop hierarchies or feared when it is expressed from unexpected sources. We should all be growing the leadership capacity of the people around us. We are in a planetary emergency and we need LEADERFUL movements to face it.
The graphic above is from 2011 when a group of core organizers were intervening in the Occupy Wall Street movement to challenge some of the misconceptions that horizontal and consensus-based organizing models are “leaderless.” Instead successful movements actually unlock as much leadership capacity was possible. As the Black Lives Matter movement helped amplify we need to get beyond scarcity and prioritize building “leaderful” organizations and movements.
There are many great resources to help us implement these ideas but one I often return to is the 2005 article “We the Leaders: In Order to Form a Leaderful Organization” by Joseph A. Raelin, in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 2005, Vol. 12, No.2. The paper is not specifically focused on social change organizations, but many of its suggestions align with the best practices of many directly democratic organizing models.
Raelin’s research identifies 4 Cs which organizations engaging in “leaderful practice” can utilize. Leadership should be concurrent, collective, collaborative and compassionate.