Finding the patterns of my leadership — 10 phases and qualities
What’s in a role or a title — why does identity matter? Identity is the boundary between the self and the world — it’s what they see of you and what you want them to see.
In living systems identity is the boundary between ourselves and our environment, self and organisation, family, community. It is the porous layer that defines what we might call our self, who we are and what we want to be in the world. It is the story we choose to tell about ourselves. (*)
The identity of “leader” however does not mean one thing — have one articulation of what it might be. It can be inhabited in different ways by different people and indeed at different times. As I come to another phase shift in my working formation, and look to shift the role I have, I want to reflect back on the different phases of my leadership, in relation to the different roles, functions, teams and organisations I have led to understand the patterns of my leadership.
This is a reflection on a life time of leading — living leadership — recognising that at every phase there is leadership potential. That we need to bring our inquiry and exploration to our both our qualities but also our blind-spots and edges. I offer these ten different phases to see if you can also notice the qualities of your leadership over time — to see how it has changed and to see if you can notice your unique pattern.
Doing this has helped me also articulate the title and role I want to live into for the next phase at the School of System Change, Chief Enabling/Evolving Officer.
- Coordination — a type of leadership
I didn’t know if to bring this in — It was my first job as a coordinator of a multi-stakeholder group — and I was very young and inexperienced. In some ways it was simply an administrative role, the stringing of people and their ideas together. However I want to mention it as I think an important part of leadership is not always about rank, i.e. that of being high up. There was something really lovely I learnt from this role — the being in contribution to the group or network, the inexperience meant I could ask questions and be somewhat neutral and really serve what was needed. I have taken this stance often as you hopefully see through the following phases. So I also mention this as an invitation to others who are at any level or stage — what does it mean to lead from where you are?
2. Leading a programme of work — the trailblazer, innovator of practice
At WWF-UK I lead a programme of work on learning for sustainability in education — and as part of that we were also supporting and exploring what leadership meant for Schools. What was needed and what I brought to the role was the design of a wider approach to change (which later I would call a systems change approach), helping move from projects to a wider programme, an exploring of the edges of what change making practice might be and finding approaches and methods that might fit with and for the programmatic questions we were asking. My role here was a sort of visionary, or perhaps entrepreneur, creator, pulling together different threads, projects and approaches, looking and exploring for appropriate ways forward and then setting the overall framing and approach for others.
What is often needed in leadership is something to follow, a trailblazing spirit that helps provide a coherent whole — sometimes called a strategy (which can be of a programme not just an organisation). Leadership requires direction setting and framing that feels coherent.
3. Beyond operational management towards enabling others
When I joined Forum for the Future — my title was Head of Leadership and Change — first just in the public sector then across all of their work. The work was supporting the leadership of people and organisations in sustainability, during this time I was also explicitly exploring the question of my own leadership and how this was showing up across a team. I got feedback that I needed to be better at management, there was a perceived need for paying attention to the structure of the meetings, the finances and the operational elements — the management of how a team needs to function. I took this question away and reflected on it and realised that this was not the core way I wanted to lead and although some of this was needed what was also needed was me stepping into a role where I could really support and enable others — I needed to play to my strengths. I spent about two years actively paying attention to what leadership for me looked and felt like — so the insight here is that it takes time and attention to work on these things to really uncover your uniqueness.
The lesson from this period was about finding one’s own style, asking yourself the question: what is my way of managing and leading? How can I bring the best of myself to the team and group, rather than to fit into others models of what is wanted or needed. Whilst also paying attention to the roles that you are not taking, so filling in the gaps for example making sure the operations still happen.
4. Leading a Lab: legitimacy to experiment
In 2011 the System Innovation Lab was set up to experiment and learn about the edge of systems change practice so as to support Forum evolve their strategy in practice, building its capacity to do so. The leadership that was required during this time was about providing an authorising environment for others to experiment, to seed ideas and practice and to support their trial in practice.
Over these six years the shape and form of the work and team continually shifted, from a tight team of a few to a wider mesh of multiple sub-teams experimenting in different places and ways. We were not just experimenting in the work that we were doing but also the way we were seeking to be a systemic self-organising entity. Living the change ourselves.
It took leadership that was adaptive, often unseen, but it did need leadership.
“There’s no such thing as self-organization. There’s only unseen, unacknowledged, and unaccountable leadership.” Alana Irving,
I was exploring different stances that might be required. I was being protective of the work that was going on in the Lab, standing up for the people and the work — and doing the influencing and work with others outside through more implicit and personal approaches — building on social capital and relationship building. Leadership can have this strange boundary energy — as no one is ever really leading from the top as such, there are always those you are trying to support and those you are trying to engage your board, funders, other directorates that you are interacting with to influence, support the work of the team. This is where the role of power in leadership emerged as a live inquiry and I realised we needed to bring more of an awareness of power so this dance can be done in a healthy way.
Healthy power: where power is fluid as well as visible, named and understood.
5. Leadership in a collaborative (rather than collaborative leadership)
Over six or seven years I was part of the different forms of leadership of the Marine CoLAB — a group of marine and related NGOs working together to put value at the heart of our solutions for the Ocean. One of its intentions was to place collaboration at the heart of how we operate, “to meet regularly as equal and active participants in an innovative, effective and supportive collaboration, whilst welcoming ideas and expertise from others”.
What I did learn about leadership was about understanding everyone’s unique contribution and skills and really playing to these — that it is not actually about being equal. For example I was not bringing knowledge or standing in the Marine space but was bringing in both the systems change approach as well as the facilitation skills required to support the collaboration — through our governance, decision making and ways of working. What I learnt here is that leadership requires facilitation skills, the enabling and supporting of teams, people working together in different forms as well as bringing in the wider governance questions of the structure and form — for example deciding on financial distribution. At the core of this working well was also deep trust building, spending time together to really know each other so we could flow and move well — as we could together. As I move forward I am interested in how we can be more explicit and pay more attention to these questions of transformative governance and facilitation to support leadership in collaboratives.
6. Interlude — leadership as supporting endings
Transitions, the process of changing from one state to another
I also want to pull out a thread of my leadership that doesn’t sit with one time or form I was leading — that is the role of supporting endings and transitions. Over the years and as part of leading different projects, teams and organisational functions there have been times when things need to end, or more transition and evolve to the next phase. For example Fourm used to run a network, and it was part of my role to oversee it but it became evident that for that phase of the organisation it was not what was most needed in the world. As a manager, and as someone who puts people’s personal development first, there have been multiple times I have talked and supported people move on, realise that the organisation and their personal needs did not fit or needed to be more aligned. As a leader we must both notice and support these inflections points.
Leadership is both doing and having the hard conversations and also recognising that things might need to end in order for other things to be born. Often we might create new strategies and projects but often forget to end and acknowledge what is closing. Endings are critical to the process of renewal and transformation — and so leadership needs to pay strong attention to this.
7. Source energy leadership — the seeds of the School of System Change
One of these endings was the Forum Masters on Leadership for Sustainability, as we did a review of what should happen next it seemed as if it was not viable in its current form — and out of this the question about what learning offer might we grow came about. The process of weaving threads together from what was needed, looking at the bigger picture and contribution we wanted to serve, seeing what was happening in the external environment, what we have to offer, what relationships might form, seeing where there is potential and pulling together a vision, a sense of what something needs to be. This form of leadership is about spotting the potential, what the nutrients are in the ground and starting to seed and bring forth what wants to be grown.
I feel with this type of leadership we often think it’s visionary — as if a spark of lightening hits the hero and they now know where to go, where I think the experience is much more emergence from the soil, much more about seeing what might want to arise and starting to manifest from there. Leadership here is about also making this resonate with others — from those who need to sign off the idea, to the first seed funders, partners and team you start to work with.
8. Cultivating culture — leading as modelling a new way of being
As we evolved the Lab and I took on a role as director of a number of teams that were building capacity and learning for systems change at Forum, I wanted to learn from my previous roles and think about what was most important to support this work going forward. The first thing we did was come together across the teams and have a deep conversation about our purpose. We also discussed what name to call the function, to help manifest this in the organisation. We had been given the title “Equip” however this did not feel like it connected to what we wanted to be and how we wanted to work. We then explored other names, such as Alchemy — depicting our desire to support the process of transformation (perhaps with magic) but in the end we settled on Cultivate — which sought to learn, connect and build capacity for systems change, and by using a word that was organic, and said something about the way we wanted to do this work, an enabling and supporting others to learn. This origin story shows something about how we lead the work, through cultivating our relationships, embodying our values of being systemic and where learning was at the heart of everything we did.
Over the five years from that point leadership of Cultivate was about modelling a culture, a way of being from this purpose, about allowing other ideas and work to flourish from this worldview, as well as enabling those across the teams to lead, experiment and develop the work that was needed, helping to thread the ideas together.
9. Deep intentions and collective inquiry: is this leadership?
Some years ago a few of us were exploring the concept of Living Change, grounded in the recognition that the changes we seek are present within us, that we need to explore what it means to live the change we are experiencing. At the heart of this is an essential practice, a way of being based in action inquiry, exploring questions in practice that help us navigate the complexity and change we experience. In some ways there is no “leadership” in that no one person leads but the depth of the intention both means that anyone can initiate anything from this deeper inquiry, and use it to shift and show leadership of what is needed in the world. So why do I mention it here? I think we need to remember that the forms of leadership can be many fold and come from many places but what often matters is not always the single purpose but the intentions and relational energy that helps to guide yourself and possibly others. As a leader you have to recognise that people are following you and with that also comes responsibility with what you are modelling and signalling what is valued and needed in the world — for me this is about really living the inquiry and change we are seeking.
10. Evolutionary leadership — working with the hard and soft of relationships and power
As I reflect and go through these phases and remember the experiences, I notice the emotional labour, the process of taking care of feelings and well-being of those you work with alongside what we might consider the work — how leadership is very much (for me at least) a relational capability and as such I also notice how power, as a way to explore this relational energy, is also woven through these experiences.
This most recent phase has been about shifting the School to be a sister organisation of Forum, to start to prepare ourselves for living into our ambition of operating as a network that is practising systemic ways of organising and transformative governance. It has called forth in me to really use the lessons of the previous phases. From the conscious closing of the Cultivate function, ending projects like the Marine CoLAB and even having an evolution drinks (rather than leaving drinks) for me to acknowledge the nearly 15 years of work at Forum. It also took a lot of holding, emotional work, of shifting relationships, both with colleagues at Forum as well as asking really hard questions about what constellations are required for success in the next phase; doing the hard work of reconfiguring these relationships and seeding new patterns. The systems geek in me wants to highlight that leadership through this phase feels like moving around the adaptive cycle — the closing, the seeding, the reorganisation in order to support the opening and abundance (hopefully) of the next phase. The work of leadership perhaps is not just taking on one role but about knowing what role to take when, when to lean in, be clear and set healthy boundaries, visions and directions, and when to lean back and give space and invite in others to share leadership, enabling and cultivating the culture, space and ways of being required for the next phase. It’s about working with the hard structural elements in balance with the soft flows.
So what have these phases taught me about leadership? It has show me that leadership is:
- Coordinating — being in contribution to the group
- Trailblazing — weaving approaches and practices into a coherent whole
- Finding your uniqueness and enabling all roles across a team
- Dancing with power — providing legitimacy for others
- Facilitating governance and supporting diversity of people and approaches
- Being able to have hard conversations, supporting endings and evolution
- Spotting potential and manifesting from intention
- Cultivating culture from and for deep purpose
- Living change and inquiry — being the change you want to see in the world
- Relational work, moving and adapting to what is needed to support evolution
Noticing the waves of leading these ten stories signify I want to pull forth two themes from this pattern. First is that of enabling, the importance and care I think is needed in really supporting others in reaching their potential and contribution to the team or project — with the additional elements of legitimacy, creating the cultures and conditions for people as we all the governance structures that are needed to support them. Second is that of seeding and finding potential that can manifest into a new way, strategy, organisation — I am going to call this evolving leadership, supporting the direction that needs to emerge.
So as I move into the next phase of the School of System Change as I seek to lead this in the position of CEO. I have found it challenging to be call myself the Chief Executive Officer, due to its connotations with current power structures and ways of organising. However to play into both my style and intent to live into a different more systemic way of organising as well as to navigate current worlds and future possibilities — I am going to cheekily adapt this title to that of Chief Enabling/Evolving Officer — to signify the stance of leadership I wish to make, a process of shifting power, taking an approach of enabling the team and network to re-distribute and decentralise power whilst also flowing and adapting, supporting its continued evolution of the strategy and organisation to live into its deeper evolutionary purpose.
“Evolutionary purpose — truly seeing the organisation (or organising form) as a living entity with its own energy and sense of direction” LaLoux Reinventing organisations — and leadership as supporting this emergence.
Whilst also watching out for when I might also need to end that role, transition and no longer lead the School — actively designing for my own transition out when the time is right.
A final word on leadership — here I have talked predominantly about leadership as something you might find in one person, as if leadership is about a leader — when we know, especially taking a systemic lens that leadership is collective, so a massive appreciation to all who have been part of the groups, teams and collaborations I have both been a part of and in some form have attempted to show qualities of leadership, and all the leadership they have also shown and worked alongside to contribute. I am also sure their experience of me might not be how I have articulated it here and I know I have stumbled around in the dark (and will continue to do) as I explore these roles — so I appreciate your (continued) patience and support of the work that we do together.
