Authentic leadership – the courage to lead

I am returning to this blog after a pause of about 18 months.  I had reached a stage where I had said what I had wanted say about learning in practice up to that point.  Now feels like the right time to get back into some writing.

Trigger points

During a consulting assignment looking at shaping an approach to help individuals develop their sense of purpose, I came across the Center for Courage and Renewal and the work of Parker Palmer. 

Having spent a good chunk of my adult life training managers on leadership, here was a body of work that was saying something very different about development and change management.  Gone were the competences, objectives and models and instead was an approach where people were given the time to be still, to listen, to discern the work of the soul.   

From what I have read about it, and what I particularly like, is that it’s not a coaching intervention and neither is it counselling or therapy.  It is an approach that seems to create a safe space to nurture personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it.   Although this might sound a bit hokey for some people, this ‘soul work’, as Parker Palmer would put it, struck a chord with me. 

Reinventing ourselves, reinventing organisations

In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux talks about the emergence of new organisations that are shifting away from traditional hierarchical models towards those that are employee-centred.

Laloux’s thinking has been informed by Parker Palmer’s work.  His book provides many examples of organisations that are practising new organisational models.  Models that are replacing traditional command and control methods, where responsibility for decision-making is held by a few senior people, and replacing them with approaches that visualise the corporate entity as a living organism with a soul. 

And this is what strikes a chord with me.  Over a number of years now, I have been interested in leadership development practices that shift attention away from the exogenous world of other people’s theories and models towards those that are deeply centred on the endogenous workings of each person’s interests.  What Parker Palmer and the Center for Courage and Renewal seems to offer is the means by which we can nurture our personal and professional integrity to transform ourselves and the worplaces and communities in which we live. 

Shapes of Leadership

My last blog was called ‘Culturechange - recognising, releasing and nurturing what is already present’ in which I was reflecting on how change happens in organisations.  In here are the same themes of the outside and the inside like a battle between two opposing forces.

And perhaps what I’m sensing is a battle for ideas that will turn on its head current practice around things like leadership development and change management. 

What shape would we like leadership to take in the future?  The answer to this must surely not be something that can be defined and taught through any kind of model simply because any model must be a simplification.  Models and theories do help shape the outline of what makes good leadership.  In other words, they can help us to define some of the important elements that might go into the mix.  But what they can’t do is to give shape to what’s on the inside and no amount of training will fix this.  Great leadership comes when what’s on the outside is matched by what’s on the inside and to create the conditions where this becomes possible requires a different intervention; one that allows us the space to explore our sense of purpose.

I’m interested in learning more about the Center’s work and have signed up to participate in an open event called the Shapes of Leadership: A Courage to Lead ® Retreat taking place on 17^th to 19^th May 2019.

Picture credit

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash