Last week, I wrote that leadership isn’t math – that “leader plus situation” does not always equal a specific action. Two plus two will always equal four, but leadership is, as I said in that article, a big fuzzy gray area.
An astute reader, who occasionally sends me thoughtful and articulate responses to my articles (thank you, Mark!), did exactly that, “thinking out loud” in his email. He made the point that variability, as he put it, “agrees with biology” – in his words, “Genetic variation is critical to the success of any organism and by definition the entire species. You may be aware of the potential issues bananas face being a monoculture (no genetic variation), if there is ever an incurable infection that infects bananas, all the banana plants will die. It’s only in the variation that species continue to exist.” (Emphasis mine)
(And I didn’t know that about bananas. Whoa.)
He went on to say, “I’m wondering if there is a correlation to be made with leadership in that variation in leadership is critical to its success.”
Yes! Variation within one individual leader’s approach to different situations and different people, and variation across leadership throughout the organization.
As General George Patton observed, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
Or maybe the organization has simply become so embedded in “how we do things around here” that those who are thinking differently are unwilling to say anything that might go against the norms. To quote another military figure, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper: “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.'”
Find your own way as a leader. Allow the leaders you lead to find their own way – of course also encouraging the most humane, kind, and firm qualities of leadership. “Finding your own way of leading” should never include any type of toxicity.
Encouraging variability, even to the extent of sometimes hiring from outside the organization, is key to ongoing creativity, innovation, and engagement. As Mark pointed out, “In my own experience with leadership in volunteer organizations, the leader brings themselves to the position and they work within their own framework. They do it how they know best. Almost invariably, they leave the organization better than before as new perspectives bring new learning and new approaches.”
And that doesn’t have to be limited to volunteer organizations.
You may have noticed that I avoided saying “DEI” or anything related to DEI.
That was intentional; I wanted to avoid the hot-button buzzword.
That said, variability across the board – perspectives, life experiences, backgrounds, cultures, all of it – is part of what keeps us as organizations, as community members, as groups of any sort, vital and thriving. So, yes, DEI is important.