A New Definition of Leadership
In order to set leadership free from a one-dimensional view, we would offer that rather than being defined by position or title, leaders are those who are responsible for their world.
What does it mean to be responsible? The word responsibility is often associated with burden, with something that is mandated. The dictionary defines responsibility as “the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something” and “the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something.” Responsibility feels heavy, significant, dutiful, and perhaps a bit scary.
We’d like to offer a more expansive definition of responsibility. What if responsibility existed outside of the burden of the task, of getting the job done? What if we interpreted responsibility as a choice rather than a burden? What if the choice of responsibility generated a context of ownership and self-authorship beyond the immediate task at hand? In this new context, responsibility becomes generative and nourishing rather than weighty and burdensome.
As we choose responsibility, we immediately have more freedom and creativity. We are able to shift from being a passenger with things happening to us and instead be open to the challenges of our lives and allow them to shape and grow us. We are able to break free from our ego’s fears and need for approval and instead meet our world with power and with love. Life is just more fun when we are choosing to be responsible. We experience our life as an unfolding adventure rather than something to be endured. The difference is as dramatic as the difference between eating the white pith of an orange and savoring a burst of the sweet juice.
In Co-Active Leadership, responsibility has two important parts. The first part is to be response-able: able to respond. In other words, we must have the awareness to notice what is needed in the moment and the agility to respond from a wide palette of creative choices rather than from an entrenched system of patterned and predictable reactions. This is the co of responsibility.
The active aspect of responsibility entails choosing to be responsible as cocreators of our lives and our world. The circumstances of life will come and go, from birth to death with the full range of human experience in between. These ups and downs are a given in our human journey.
However, we have everything to say about how we respond to these circumstances. We have the choice to react in a patterned way, blaming someone else for what is happening, or to create from those same circumstances, using whatever happens as an opportunity to evolve and grow ourselves and the people around us.
When we choose to be responsible and creative rather than reactive, we stop being victims of our lives. We cease to feel as if we are running down a hill after our life, trying to catch up. Instead, the choice of responsibility puts us squarely in the driver’s seat of our life. We become coauthors and cocreators of our lives rather than merely passengers. Now we are aware and alert enough to respond to circumstances, and we have enough self-authority to be creative and expand our range by consciously choosing to act from a full menu of options.
Leadership development, then, becomes about growing the size of the world for which one is able to be responsible. Sometimes this area is very small. Some people are not able to be responsible even for the world of themselves, and they move through life unconsciously, bumping into different people and experiences without self-awareness.
This understandably creates concern about the concept of anyone being capable of choosing leadership. What about the people who are unconscious, who don’t want to be responsible and choose instead to hide from responsibility? Don’t these people have to be prodded and controlled and told what to do?
And what about all those other people who are selfish and dominating and don’t care at all about other people? Don’t we need to guard against these people? How can we possibly hold these people as capable of leadership? Doesn’t that just lower the bar and weaken the power of leadership for everyone else?
We would maintain that the capacity to grow both our self-awareness and our ability to be responsible is available to anyone. It’s important to be present with people wherever they are (co) and at the same time provide them with opportunities to choose responsibility and act powerfully (active). When we adopt a Co-Active framework for leadership, we are available to be receptive to people while at the same time holding them accountable for their actions.
In our experience, people generally want to do well. The more we look for a demonstration of responsibility, the more we will find it. If you believe that people are broken and in need of fixing, they will likely perform to your expectations. If you view people as generally creative and resourceful, it’s more likely that you will find those qualities in others. As we create our world together, every day, it’s important to pay attention to where we are placing our attention. So often, people feel powerless and ineffective because they have been told that they are wrong and that they don’t have what it takes to lead effectively.
For several years, Karen had the opportunity to work with inmates of several prisons. This was a real gift, as it taught her a great deal about how people are trained from a very early age to view themselves as unworthy. The men that Karen worked with knew for certain that they were not leaders. They had begun life as “problem children.” As teenagers, they graduated to being “juvenile delinquents,” and as adults, they moved on to be criminals and convicts. Their view of themselves as defective had been consistently reinforced for much of their lives.
Karen and her co-leaders remained committed to viewing these men as valuable human beings who were capable of goodness and wholeness. While firmly believing that they should be held accountable for their actions and for the crimes that they had committed, Karen and her co-leaders also maintained that they were whole and resourceful human beings, capable of learning and responsibility and worthy of respect and love.
Over time, the men began to turn toward this positive regard like sunflowers toward the sun. Many began to change the way they dressed and talked. Others reached out to repair relationships with family members and loved ones. Some began to talk about how they could make a difference in the world and how they might be able to prevent others from making the kinds of choices that had cost them so much.
Not all the men opened up. For some, that creative leader within was buried so deeply that it might never see the light of day. Some remained inaccessible, lost in a haze of drugs or alcohol or mental illness.
Still, there was a considerable change in many of the men, and for Karen it fortified the certainty that we don’t really know what has happened to people and why they act as they do. While people must be held to account for their actions, they are still human beings worthy of respect and even love.
If we can respect the being of people (co) while at the same time enforcing accountability for action (active), and if we can support a multidimensional understanding of leadership, all kinds of change become possible.