This past month I had the privilege to facilitate a series of workshops called Essential Skills for Leadership Success. I went to Hartford, Portsmouth, Boston, and Burlington, Vermont, to talk about how our museum profession can best prepare for the demands of cultural leadership. We started out each session with the following observations:
Leadership is one of the most over-analyzed, over-dissected, and over-promoted topics today. Check out Amazon, with more than 143,000 leadership-related books offered for your reading pleasure. In addition to all the tomes, we have workshops, seminars, blogs, social media (29,000 LinkedIn groups!), academic programs, and, if cost is no object, scores of leadership coaches who will train you one-on-one until you too have the right stuff.
We are obsessed with leadership, yet it seems to be our society’s most elusive quality. We demand leadership in our public officials and get partisan gridlock. We expect leadership in our corporate CEOs and get greed, incompetence, and narcissism. Each day it seems our leaders disappoint.
No wonder so many young people have jaundiced views of leadership. In the museum field, we are noticing a reluctance in emerging professionals to be museum leaders. “Too many headaches for too little reward.” “I’m not leadership material.” “I don’t want to walk around with a target on my back.” The excuses are numerous and, I’m sure, similar in many other fields.
Part of our problem is that we have a skewed view of leadership. We perceive leaders in our culture as superhuman, visionaries who inspire the multitudes and shape history based on their charisma. This is an heirloom from World War II: think Churchill, FDR, and Ike. We venerate our leaders, which means they are special, different from ordinary mortals. The characteristics of leadership are therefore rare, available only to a select class that by dint of DNA or circumstance has unlocked the secrets.
However, we are evolving a new conception of leadership, one that aligns with our evolving society and serves it better. In that conception, leadership is not a skill we learn or inherit; it lies within everyone, empowering each of us to improve ourselves and our institutions. There is no duality between leaders and followers. Leadership is part of our universal human makeup and it is up to us to become aware of the leadership capacity that we possess innately.
So what are these inner leadership characteristics? Collaboration, for one. We lead by achieving consensus more than commanding. Caring is also key. Leaders display great emotional intelligence, using compassion to serve people and help them discover their own leadership capabilities. Communication is another leadership trait. As leaders we speak the truth of what is and inspire others by connecting them with what might be.
Leadership, therefore, is not a position or role, but a state of awareness accessible to everyone. With that awareness, when we are able to channel our inner Churchill, we enjoy greater satisfaction and engagement in our pursuits because we bring greater value to those pursuits and to our lives.
Dan Yaeger