I believe leadership is about making things possible. Leaders see potential, possibilities, and connections. They align resources, remove barriers, provide inspiration and motivation, and, when necessary, provide the direction needed to make things and ideas – big or small – a reality.
Leaders make connections with others, provide a framework or scaffolding of support and resources, and lean in or lean back as necessary. Leaders are generous with their time, a listening ear, and skills and experience, but they are willing to wait to share until asked. They are willing to be vulnerable and to freely trust, knowing that is the only way they will earn the trust of others.
Leaders are in service to their missions, values, vision, and objectives. Sometimes that means they take a supporting role for others, their clients, staff, and peers. Other times they take command or take control. Good leaders know how, when, and where to use which type of leadership for the best outcomes.
To be a leader, a person must be grounded in their identity and culture, understand their core values, and be highly self-aware. Leaders are responsive, flexible, and adaptable. They are willing to take risks, fail, and allow others to do the same.
To be a leader is to embrace paradox. Leaders are confident but humble, patient yet urgent, fearless but responsible, flexible but grounded, and strivers who have a plan B. Leaders lead others and are in service to others. They live in reality and dwell in possibility.
This is my leadership philosophy, what I consider to be leadership at its best, and the leadership I strive to enact. Of course, I don’t always meet my standards, and my standards may not be the same as others. But this is a vision, a direction, and a calling that feels authentic and meaningful to me.
Grounded and Growing
To be a leader, a person must be grounded in their identity and culture, understand their core values, and be highly self-aware. These are also the skills required for intercultural competency, anti-racism work, and inclusiveness. This is not a coincidence; leadership and anti-racism should be one and the same.
In the past several years, I have been intentionally working on understanding my own identities, purpose, and values as well as building skills in intercultural adaptation, curiosity, conflict, and communication.
This is critical because I believe communication, intercultural competency, and leadership are intertwined. You cannot have true leadership without intercultural competency. You cannot have intercultural competency without highly developed and responsive communication skills such as listening, discerning, curiosity, understanding, adaptation, humility, and willingness to take risks, make mistakes, and make repairs when things go wrong. Likewise, you cannot have successful communication without intercultural competency. Your interpretation of what you are hearing, seeing, and feeling will not be deep and nuanced enough to truly understand. Your speaking, acting, and meaning-making risk not having the impact you intend. Effective communicators are leaders who can create bridges of understanding, make meaning and connections, mine for conflict, and help resolve it. They can align people together toward a common goal or vision.
The skills, values, and characteristics that are most true for me are my core beliefs: Resiliency, independence, fun. Humility, vulnerability, acceptance. Gratitude, grace, kindness, and justice. Progress. Action. Stewardship.
All of these combined to create a purpose – to use who I am and what I have to bring grace, opportunity, and justice to as many people as I can – that feels true to me and transcendent of a particular role, job, organization, or activity I may be engaged in.
I hope to bring an honest, humble, and unyielding understanding of my own identity with me into my leadership, my work, and all aspects of my life. My commitment to understanding myself and building intercultural competency skills is unwavering and unfinished. Continuing to fearlessly learn, understand, interrupt, and interrogate my positionality, privilege, and responsibility to an anti-racist future is my primary, urgent, and lifelong development priority.
Responding and Adapting
I believe that leaders need to shift and adapt their approach as the situation requires. Role modeling and inspiration may be more effective in some situations. Others call for challenging the process or getting out of the way to let others take over. I believe good leaders know how, when, and where to use which leadership practices for the best possible outcomes.
Embracing Paradox
Leaders live in reality and dwell in possibility. Leaders should lead, and leaders should serve. This paradox, for me, is the most rewarding and confounding aspect of leadership. It requires and exemplifies “both/and” thinking, adaptation, observation, communication, and remaining grounded in my identity, ethics, and values. I am living and leading in the reality of the pandemic, scarcer resources, and a long recovery arc ahead. I am also choosing to dwell in the hope and possibility of what this rapid period of change could bring for our world, society, and organizations, and all of us as individuals.