WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO START OR GROW A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
How to be an authentic leader
Tip no4 to fellow and aspiring (social) entrepreneurs, from my lived experience
I often speak to social entrepreneurs. The most common questions they ask me are: What do we need to know in creating our own social enterprise? How did you do it? Where do we start? This is the third in a series of articles where I try to answer those questions and more.
If you missed the first two articles, the first three tips were 1) Develop a coaching mindset; 2) Working 12 hours a day only goes so far! and 3) Find your Tribe.
Dear fellow and aspiring (social) entrepreneurs,
Here is another tip from my lived experience that might help anyone who runs a business or is planning to start one, whether it is for profit or not for profit.
Tip no4. Be an authentic leader.
Being an authentic leader is one of the most important components of my journey as a social entrepreneur. I wish I had mastered it from the very beginning. Instead, I have been on a personal leadership journey that has taken almost two decades to make me the authentic leader I am now (well, as much as I can be!).
For me, being an authentic leader means being resilient, aligned with my values at work, able to show vulnerability, and having a strong desire to be empathic and curious about the people and systems around me.
My journey towards becoming an authentic leader has taken me about 20 years. I have been aligned with my values at work for most of my career. Twelve years ago, I founded a social enterprise, Micro Rainbow, where my passions in life for LGBTQI equality and social entrepreneurship found a beautiful home. I believe I have also been empathic at work and supported my colleagues to the best of my abilities. However, I didn’t score so well in being resilient and showing vulnerability, which are two of my core values. It is only recently that I have reflected on what stood in the way and this awareness has been life changing.
I did not have role models of authentic leaders growing up. My role models were people who worked very hard, almost relentlessly. For them, personal needs were secondary to work. It felt to me that family time also was less of a priority than work. I grew up associating hard work with the number of hours I spent working. I learned to feel good about myself every time I pushed my working day a bit longer. This is hard to admit… but I also had a nagging internal voice that judged others who did not work as hard as me.
The voice would say,
“they are not as strong as me”,
“they are not as committed as me”,
“they don’t have a passion in life…”.
In doing so, I thought I was being a strong, committed, and resilient leader.
I believed I was doing the “right” thing.
I was a “good” person.
I was being “successful”.
The mistake I made was to confuse endurance with resilience. I was not being strong and resilient. What I had was an extraordinary level of endurance (and youth!) which allowed me to continue pushing my body and mind to achieve more. It helped me take my social enterprise within the top 100 in the country. It helped me attract a few million pounds of social investment. It helped Micro Rainbow to reach more than 10,000 vulnerable people since its inception.
You might say, “Well, it worked well!”.
Yes, it did, but it came at a cost.
In throwing myself into an endurance race, I overlooked the importance of building resilience. Resilience for me is the ability to bounce back from difficulties and the ability to keep doing a job that is emotionally challenging like mine (we work with LGBTQI people who flee persecution) in a sustainable way.
I felt a lot of pride when people asked, “How do you do it all?” and I still do to some extent. The long hours I worked were noticed. I wish I had known the difference between endurance and resilience. For me an authentic leader attends to the needs of their body, mental health, and the connections around them. It took me several years to truly embrace that, and I still fail sometimes. My focus now is on learning new ways for building my resilience and in role modelling resilience at work and with coaching clients too. My pride no longer comes from the number of hours I work. It comes from the impact we achieve and in being as authentic as I can.
It’s taken my whole career to date to embrace vulnerability as a strength in my leadership style. Somewhere along the way, I internalised the view that bosses have to be tough, always. You cannot be nice and successful, being nice would mean being weak. Bosses are not weak. Bosses are ruthless. I do not remember seeing a TV series growing up with empathic managers. As the CEO of an organisation, I assumed you need to hold it all together and show that you are holding it all together.
Being vulnerable is hard and it takes practice. To me it still feels like being naked sometimes. People can really “see” you. I remember playing a game with my team during a training session. As part of the game, it came out that I had cried once in the previous seven days. Some of my colleagues felt validated by seeing me vulnerable and said:
“I can’t believe that Sebastian cried in the last week. I did not think Sebastian cried!”.
That game was such a gift to me. It made me want to share more vulnerability with my team and as a result be a more authentic leader. For me authentic leadership is a process that never ends. It changes as we change. It is different for each one of us. From my experience it is a liberating process that aligns my whole self with my values.
I hope that these articles contribute to showing a different side to me, a more resilient and vulnerable one. As I share the lessons I’ve learned in creating and growing a social enterprise, I also want to role model my own version of authentic leadership. I hope to offer aspiring and fellow entrepreneurs an alternative to the leadership templates they might have learned growing up, as I did. An alternative where we can all be vulnerable, empathic, resilient and successful.
With my very best wishes for your social entrepreneurship journey
Sebastian
To know more about me, you can check my profile on medium or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
