What is your (leadership) Work: Part II
Note - This article is meant as a part 2 to my original piece on personal Work. If you haven’t read that one yet, consider starting there and then coming back here!
Before I became an Executive Director, my personal “Work” felt like my own - something that lived mostly internally. As my title + salary increased, my words and actions began to have much bigger and much more tangible ramifications, amplified by both my positional power and identity. When I took on a senior leadership role, my personal liabilities became actual liabilities: out there in the world, with the potential to cause very real damage if I wasn’t actively mitigating them. New paradigm, for sure.
I have previously written that my “Work” has been to learn to be enough. Enough for others, but more importantly, for myself. As a professional, I’ve always been a hustler. I’ve been conditioned to want to be the “best” and to want to win, and my life experiences and achievements have reinforced those desires. While there’s nothing inherently bad about wanting success, the issues come when that drive collides with your personal liabilities and positional power such that it negatively impacts others - especially people of color or other marginalized folx. Here are some ways this intersection sometimes showed up for me as a leader that sometimes caused harm. Do they sound familiar?
Hyper-focusing on what was going wrong vs. celebrating what was going well
Overreacting to setbacks or challenges
Focusing on staff or teammates’ shortcomings or growth areas over their strengths
Hoarding power and grasping for control
Overworking - leading to burnout, modeling unhealthy imbalance and perfectionism
To be clear, I didn’t always do these things, and I did plenty “right” too. But I had a responsibility to understand how my liabilities, which came from decades of my own experiences, relationships, traumas, and stories - might interact with my positional power and identify as a white leader to cause potential harm to others. If you do your Work as a leader, you’re working on yourself, and vice versa: Your personal Work will impact your leadership. As I developed more awareness and started to thread more connections between what felt like my own stuff and my leadership stuff, I’m now more likely to:
Hold complexity, looking both what is challenging and what is going well with equal weight;
React to setbacks as opportunities, ultimately determining a stronger strategy forward
Hold up my team members’ strengths, celebrate their wins, and champion their growth & development
Distribute power among my team and share decision making rights
Hold boundaries and ensure I am taking care of myself
Leadership is definitely about strategy, team-management, making tough decisions, enrolling others in a vision, and allocating energy and resources to ensure the vision and impact are realized. It’s also about working through your stuff - your Work - so you can show up for yourself and others as a more evolved human.
What is your (leadership) Work? Are you doing it?
