Day #29

Your Power, Alone

This week we are going to explore your power as a Social Leader: remember, your formal power is given to you by the Organisation that you work for, but your Social Authority is earned, and is held within your communities.

Whilst Social Leadership may be a consensual type of power, it is nonetheless ‘power’. It has great strength, but also finite limits.

We will use our time this week to explore that space, and those limits, to find your space as a leader, and the edges of your power.

Use your sixty seconds today to ask yourself this question: ‘What can you achieve alone?’

At first, this may be a simple narrative: i can make my morning coffee alone, i can write this post alone. Except that most of our actions are held within broader contexts: my house is clean and tidy more as a team effort than an act of individual heroism. I am able to be productive only because i have help to maintain my IT and a community to share my work within.

As you consider the things you can achieve alone, it may help to visualise yourself within the system as a whole: a scaffolding of formal power (those things that are held in rules, and written in your contract) and a cloud of social authority (your bonds of trust, pride, gratitude, belonging, held in social currencies).