Day #791 - Shadows
Self within System
Sometimes leadership is about a specific skill or capability, whilst at others it’s a simple awareness.
I recently briefed a group of senior leaders about the culture of their Organisation, based on primary research within the employee group. Much of what I heard regarded communication, but not formal communication. It was about social interconnection and agency.
Whilst the group listened, I felt that what they heard was the ‘enemy’. A descriptive approach to saying what other people were doing wrong, and a sense that more formal pressure and direction was the solution.
Creating more formal communication, pushing that out, and using direct power to effect change, that’s all about skills and capability: awareness is to analyse what you have just heard and done. To disentangle personal feelings - because we are all within culture, and all feel the tidal pulls of it - and take a more analytic, systems, or metacognitive view. To recognise that it’s a co-dependent systems, socially co-created.
This is one of the hardest things, because it often means we have to accept that we ourselves are part of the equation.
To see the system - and to see ourselves within the system.
Use your sixty seconds today to consider this in your own practice: how easy is it for you to look around, not simply to ‘describe’, but to embody your self within the analysis.
In the Quiet Leadership work we describe this as seeing ourself operating in the light, but aware of the shadows we cast - and to accept that we all cast shadows. Engaging with these strengthens our leadership.
