Week 46, Year 2018 — Re-thinking leadership
One of my highlights of this week was participating in a workshop by Alanna Irving, masterfully facilitated by Nenad Maljković. A group of 20+ of us from all around the globe explored Full Circle Leadership through a series of reflective activities and discussions.
Full Circle Leadership is based on Alanna’s model of the eight facets of leadership — a versatile thinking tool for assessing individual or team skills. It can also used to identify gaps in project life-cycles.
By expanding our definition of leadership, we can see that most if not all people have leadership qualities which carry importance in different contexts — it’s not just about the select few ‘at the top’ with the big vision and big voice. This multi-faceted understanding establishes and protects the space for all kinds of individuals to thrive, and therefore has the power to make our organizations and societies more resilient and sustainable.
Breaking down a big topic like leadership into more clearly defined elements also helps us understand that one person simply cannot be good at all of them. Our tendencies also shift depending on those of whom we work with, which is good reason to use this model as a diagnostic tool for teams!
My understanding of operational leadership and its (often undervalued) role in setting a strategy in motion has been greatly enriched in the past six months, while I investigated and defined the field of ResearchOps with a community of UX researchers.
This kind of aha! connection of dots is really exciting — I look forward to examining other activities through the lens of the Full Circle Leadership model, while further developing my own style and strengths.
And coming off of facilitating an intense three-day workshop, it was such a pleasure (and relief!) to be facilitated and be able to focus on my own thoughts 🙌
I’ll stop at one theme in this #weeknote instead of my usual three, as it got quite lengthy.
Previously,
An announcement for next February!
