Swinging the Hammer

When you listen to the language used in Organisations to describe leadership, you will often hear language of power and effect: we drive outcomes, make things happen, and build momentum. It speaks to a muscular model of leadership that sweats and strains and, through great effort lifts the weight (or pushes others to lift it). It’s like leadership is a sledgehammer that we swing at problems, time and again, to beat them into submission.

Clang. Clang

And a bigger leader will be a stronger one, able to lift a heavier hammer.

CLANG CLANG

But this presents a challenge: if leadership is muscular then it may exhaust us.

There is another frame within which to understand leadership, which is one of enablement and care. Under this conception, the role of the leader is to listen, to understand – to ‘know’ the system and the people within it – to walk the boundaries and feel the weather. To connect and curate. To work on culture, but not as a manufactured entity (where we shout it out) but rather as an inhabited one. A narrated one. A woven one.

Of course, the people who exhibit these traits may, or may not, also carry the title of leader.

But how, we may ask, can such a system be effective? Do we not need ‘strong’ leaders to ‘drive’, and ‘push’ and ‘carry’?

Well, yes, but perhaps we should consider what strength really is.

Perhaps strength is trust?

Perhaps strength is culture?

Perhaps strength is gifting space?

Perhaps strength is giving opportunity?

Perhaps strength is listening?

Perhaps strength is gratitude?

Perhaps strength is almost nothing like a sledgehammer at all. But rather like a whisper that carries.

I think we become trapped in our legacy and largely industrial models of Organisations, as structural entities and as hierarchies of both power and wealth. We become almost inoculated against the idea that there may be other ways – other structures of organisation, other models of leadership, other mechanisms of effectiveness.

We become stuck in our own certainty.