Two Mondays ago, a group of our 21inc alumni had the opportunity to dialogue with Joan MacArthur-Blair. Huddled around a few bistro-style tables at The Hub Halifax, Joan shared some of her thoughts on what she calls the 3 tenets of “sustained leadership” – hope, despair and forgiveness.
I won’t say much about the content of this exchange firstly, because these Alumni Dialogues are meant to be intimate and off-the-record, but also because Joan is writing a book on the subject, and well, you should buy it when it comes out.
Instead, I’m going to share a few (full disclosure) unprocessed thoughts on where my mind has wandered in the past weeks, as a result of the dialogue with Joan.
I have been thinking about moments of leadership. Authentic, honest and “unphotoshopped” moments of leadership: the ones that make you soar and those that nearly break you.
Fake it until you make it
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the unfortunate reality that we don’t seem to encourage honesty and openness about the trials and tribulations of being a leader. How often have you witnessed leaders, emerging or established, admit that sometimes, leadership sucks, that they don’t know what they’re doing, or that it’s hard, or that they have been “brought to their knees”, shaken to the core by a leadership moment. When we hear of those accounts, it’s either after the crisis or unwillingly. Never is this norm more obvious than at a high school student council (any year, any high school) where you certainly don’t show vulnerabilities.
In leadership, we don’t talk about our bruises and our scars.
This leads me to my next train of thought…
Leadership as a sport
This annoyance with the pressure to always appear confident and unfazed and to a certain extent unemotional might be part of the reason why I love sport. Sport is real, it’s raw and it’s universal. You can’t hide your disappointment or despair. [See Team Canada’s performance at the 2011 FIFA World Cup, entering the tournament ranked 6th in the world and going 0-3, finishing last in their group].
So many stories of leadership parallel those of sport. And sometimes, in sport, and in leadership, we just have to step up and be the hero (but not all the time).
And like in sport, leadership can leave you with bruises. For some perverse reason, in leadership, we don’t wear them with as much pride.
