The shift is to believe that the task of leadership is to provide context and produce engagement, to tend to our social fabric. It is to see the leader as one whose function is to engage groups of people in a way that creates accountability and commitment. In this way of thinking we hold leadership to three tasks:
- Create a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity, accountability, and commitment.
- Initiate and convene conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs through the way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engage them.
- Listen and pay attention.
Consider one context in which you currently lead or could lead: it could be in a classroom, a neighborhood meeting, a discussion with other parents, a management responsibility… How might you make room for gifts to emerge and what would it look like to organize the conversation such that the others move into a place of clarity about commitment?
We’ll be discussing this journey toward commitment and belonging in the next several days.
Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging (p. 88). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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