Ideas on Leadership

By Jenny Niklaus, Chief Impact Officer
Class XXIV
 
I am often asked: what are the most important skills that leaders should have in our world at this time? If I had to boil it down to the essence, in no way an exhaustive list, it comes down to four things: Fear, Vulnerability, Curiosity and Community.
So much of what drives us is fear. Fear is an emotion we often work to avoid or to mitigate as it lays bare the things that we cannot control. I deeply appreciate the term used by Bob Johansen in his work on leadership literacies: voluntary fear engagement. What you and I would call grit. In an uncertain world the best way to manage fear is to engage with it voluntarily, walk towards it and not away from it. The more leaders can be in this place of uncertainty, they will see clarity emerge from complexity and vision arise from volatility. “Clarity will be rewarded, certainty will be punished.”[1]The path to clarity is through the voluntary engagement of fear.
Engagement of fear requires of leaders another underused skill: vulnerability. It is clear that the leaders that embrace vulnerability as a critical skill, and employ within their organization, have higher functioning teams, more readily meet their goals and have higher job satisfaction. All organizations thrive in the presence of creativity, innovation and learning and the greatest threat to all of these is disengagement and fear. Brene Brown talks about the need to re-humanize places of work and that this very act is innovative and disruptive.[2]It is through the creation of leaders and teams that can be resilient in the face of failure, engage with authentic feedback, and be courageous in their risk taking that you can reignite creativity, innovation and learning within an organization.
In order to engage with fear and vulnerability, start with getting curious. Curiosity is one of the tenets of mindfulness and it asks us to get interested in our internal landscape as well as externally in the dynamics of our organization. The critical function that curiosity plays is the removal of judgement. Getting curious allows examination of the issue from all sides, it models a culture of inquiry and learning, and allows leaders and their teams to be nimble and to pivot as new challenges arise. It provides a frame for vulnerability.
Lastly, we have to speak to community. We all exist within many different communities: home, work, social, political, religious, city, state and country. The role we hold as leaders, how we show up and the intention we hold for our work has great impact across the ripples of our community. This is especially true in how we work to impact change. I believe that the role leaders play within community is to get curious about the context in which they are trying to effect change. This includes not just identifying the barriers that exist externally but also the ones that are internal to the organization or you as the leader. “This context – life is a set of problems to be solved-may actually limit any chance of the future being different from the past. The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.”[3]  If we are truly invested in creating the conditions for change in our communities, what are we as leaders holding on to that does not allow for the change that we are seeking?
Leadership done well must begin with the personal development of the leader. You must be willing to engage in a certain amount of introspection on these concepts, and others, in order to provide clarity in the midst of the complex and vision the future. Per Brene Brown “…we can’t give people what we don’t have. Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.”
[1]Bob Johansen, “The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything”
[2]Brene Brown, “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead”
[3]Peter Block, “Community: The Structure of Belonging”