pebbles in the water
Leadership is a relationship.
It began with the dissolution of my marriage, the death of my mother - with whom I had had a complicated relationship growing up - the loss of my job due to the closure of the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the loss of the home I was purchasing – all in the same year. And no, this is not an episode on a reality show or a Hallmark special, this really was my life. And it yes, it was what Brene Brown refers to as the "messy part" at the time. But somehow I intuitively knew that the only thing I could change was me - or rather the way I related to my life and the people around me. So I became curious to learn about relationships, both with myself and others – to understand how relationship works, how it thrives, and how it fails to thrive.
In my tenure in the tech industry, I experienced examples of good leaders who cared about their people and encouraged their growth and development, who challenged them to think creatively and solve problems. And I experienced leaders who belittled, yelled at, dominated, ignored, or talked about their people behind their backs. I personally have experienced being slighted, sidelined, publicly bullied, and sexually harassed by individuals who held leadership titles. All of which contributed to my realization that leadership is not related to position or title in any way. Leadership is directly related to who the person chooses to be internally, at their core, and how they show up. And how they relate to the people around them - the people they lead.
Leadership is relationship – I believe that you cannot separate the two. We are all, each of us, leaders in our own ways - in our own lives at the very least - or at the very most! In our organizations and our communities.
And I believe that there is an ever-widening and deepening need for a new vision of leadership in our world – one that acknowledges that we do not exist in silos, separated, and isolated from others “over there.” That this isn’t an “us” vs. “them” world. That we are interconnected. And that the way we relate with the people around us has a ripple effect on how they interact within their circles of influence as well. That our survival, and that of our planet, requires us to develop a perspective of leadership that has relationship and interconnectedness at its core.
And that one small change in how we relate to ourselves and to others in our lives has an exponential effect that flows outwards impacting the well-being, creativity, productivity, engagement, and eventually, the overall bottom line of the whole as well.
