Liberating Leadership: Leadership Without Leaders
In 2006, I was serving as a Residence Director at the University of Wisconsin-Superior hiring a team of student paraprofessionals (resident assistants). One of the interview questions we asked all our candidates was to describe what they thought was a good leader. One of the candidates responded with the following:
“A good leader is someone who knows how to lead when necessary, follow when required, simply step back and observe when appropriate and do all of it with a smile and a good attitude.”
To date, almost 20 years later, it remains one of the most concise and complete definitions of a good leader that I have heard. I often refer to it when I consider the merits of more formal academic definitions of leadership. I have since amended my own definition of leadership to include the original elements of Appicelli’s response to conceptualize good leadership as the process and ability to oscillate between leading, following, and observing in the service of accepted and emergent goals within a collective.
A cursory glance at my resume will reveal the word “director” popping out with alarming regularity. Most people who see my resume would think I have a lot of leadership experience, and I do, in a conventional sense. But the truth is that these titles of leadership are ones that I have worn with great discomfort. Not because I didn’t have the competence to do the work or the motivation to lead. But because I had a very different notion of what it means to lead.
The phrase “liberating leadership” is a double entendre. Certainly, it alludes to the idea that leadership as a concept needs to be liberated from its “great man theory” origins as ably articulated by my colleagues in the first edition of our series. But it also means that leaders can and should be liberated from the expectations of being all things, to all people, all the time. One of the unfortunate by-products of our thinking around leadership based on notions of endowed abilities or traits is that we hold leaders to standards of performance that are unrealistic and perhaps even divine. Leaders are expected to have a vision. Leaders are expected to know everything. Leaders are expected to do and do well. Leaders are expected to succeed. Leaders are expected to inspire. Leaders are expected to manage. And the list goes on and on. I invite you to think about that time when someone charged with leadership has disappointed you. What were your expectations of them? Were your expectations similar to those of your peers? Were the expectations reasonable? What were your expectations based on?
When (not if) Leaders Fail
If leadership expectations are so varied and omnipresent it stands to reason that failure in leadership is inevitable. The liberating leadership project is about considering the assumptions embedded in popular notions of leadership such that we broaden the horizon of how leaders and leadership can be. The hope is that by checking our assumptions we make leadership more accessible and responsive to those who are too often left in the margins.
As you consider the following assumptions, we invite you to reflect on how these assumptions have informed your leadership. What happens when you interrogate these assumptions for validity, merit, or universality?
Assumption 1: Leadership is good/necessary
Perhaps the most fundamental assumption about leadership is that it is good and necessary. Leadership is premised on the idea that order, convergence, organization, and conformity are necessary to attain an outcome. Liberating leadership means we must consider the impact of prioritizing order over disorder, convergence over divergence, organization over disorganization, and conformity over non-compliance. A cursory glance at the words that are actively discouraged in conventional approaches to leadership reveals that these are the common methods of liberation for people who are historically oppressed. This in turn leads us to the obvious question “who does leadership serve”?
Leadership can be a versatile tool for those who have historically held power to continue the marginalization of those who are historically oppressed. It can also be a liberatory tool if priorities are intentional and chosen with care and in the service of elevating those who are rendered voiceless.
Assumption 2: Leadership toward a destination
Leading… yes. But to what end? Conventional approaches to leadership assume a pre-determined destination or outcome. Leadership is usually charged with determining the outcome or destination and then expected to guide with resoluteness and determination toward it. Deviation from a destined path, altering pace or direction, and uncertainty about the value of the destination are all too often coded as a lack of or bad leadership.
But consider for a moment that too often it is only cis-, white, able-bodied, men who have agency over their (and other’s) destiny to set a destination. These are also often the class of people who typically end up in positions of leadership. Prioritizing steadfastness, determination, and urgency toward a destination that does not represent the interests of those who are often neglected only continues to serve those who are already in power.
A liberated leadership model allows and invites uncertainty, deliberation and even deviation from a pre-determined path by allowing for emergent destinations.
Assumption 3: Leadership allows for follower agency
As pointed out by my colleagues in Part I of this blog series, leadership research, and thinking originated largely in the military circles where few men were charged with leading larger groups of men. It is therefore no accident that much leadership thinking is coded with masculinity. But another complication arises when the origins of leadership thinking emanate from a context where follower agency is diminished to the point of marginal.
It is important to consider whether followers have the choice and agency to follow leadership, or if they are mandated to follow under the threat of loss of life, livelihood, or other drastic consequences. If followership is mandated to the point of non-existent agency, leadership becomes dangerously close to enslavement. This may sound hyperbole at first glance, but I submit that in a capitalist system, oppressive leadership can very easily be the modern slave master in a suit.
In a liberatory leadership framework, followers’ agency is treated as sacred, and it is the responsibility of those in leadership to create processes that safeguard that agency. Agency to disagree, disrupt, and deviate are necessary mechanisms to contest power in leadership.
Assumption 4: Leadership (verb) requires leaders (noun)
Another artifact of the “great man theory” of leadership, is that it always centered on a singular or a small cohort of people as the essential crux of leadership. Leadership always depended on leaders and the success or failure of outcomes rested on leaders. If we borrow from Critical Race Theory, and assume that the leaders we create are products of a social, educational, political, and financial system that are inherently coded with racism, sexism, homophobia, and other harmful ideologies, can we reasonably expect leaders to advance DEIJ outcomes? This would be akin to disrupting racism using racist tools... or cleaning a table with a tainted cloth.
Liberatory leadership cannot center people who are inherently the products of an oppressive system. Rather liberatory leadership has to be located in re-imagined systems. Systems that deliberately collect and enshrine a set of knowledge, practices, thinking, and mechanisms with the express purpose of contesting taken-for-granted ways of doing things. Liberatory leadership is a systemic response to the follies of history seeking to maintain a status quo on power relations.
The response to systems coded with oppressive ideologies looking to maintain status quo must be a system tooled with liberatory thinking. We contend that liberatory leadership must be a system of practice that can advance DEIJ outcomes despite leaders who are the product of racist systems. These must be systems that distribute power, allow for follower agency, endowed with mechanisms to pursue emergent outcomes, and are open to always center the needs of those with the least social power.
Inherent in a liberated leadership framework that centers systems and processes rather than people is the freedom for a leader to be uncertain, to change course, to be deliberate, and yes… to fail. This framework liberates leadership… and it liberates leaders.
Building your Leadership Ethos
Section 2: Assessing Leadership as a System or Process
In the second segment of developing your leadership ethos we invite you to reflect on the systems and processes that enable (or disable) leadership. Systems are a collection of practices and processes codified by conventions or rules that are easily replicable across time and context.
With this in mind, reflect on the following questions on how your leadership process leans into systems.
What routines or practices are built into my leadership process that restore or protect the agency of the people impacted by leadership?
What routines or practices are built into my leadership process that allow or encourage me to change courses based on emergent needs? How do I respond to emergent needs?
What routines or practices are built into my leadership processes that intentionally distribute power in decision-making to those with the least power?