I didn’t grow up wanting to be a leader. I grew up wanting to have fun. And leadership often seemed like the opposite of fun: initiative, responsibility, accountability. It was easier to wish for better leaders, and to complain about bad ones. I mean this in the broadest sense, from talking about the political leaders of a country to talking about the social dynamics within a group of friends.
As I got a little older it started to feel dishonest of me to remain averse to leadership. I had experienced multiple occasions in which I found myself stepping up to the plate and creating better outcomes for people. This knowledge would weigh on me every time I witnessed bad things happening and I chose to stay silent, to “keep my hands clean” and remain uninvolved. Sometimes it *is* best to remain uninvolved, but if I’m honest with myself I know that I have on multiple occasions allowed things around me to get worse because of my selfish desire to remain personally unsullied.
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Some little anecdotes: I started a band, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. I created a Facebook group and managed that, which was also work, and also fun. Not just for me, but for lots of other people, too. I saw people develop friendships with each other, even couples getting engaged. At the same time I witnessed around me, and heard in private conversations, how other people were lonely and fearful. And I thought, well, that’s easy. You just have to face your fears and talk to people. And then introduce people to each other. That’s a kind of leadership in of itself. Those of us who possess the capacity and the will to do something can make a difference on behalf of those who can’t quite manage it themselves.
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I faced criticisms for the things I did and tried to do, much of it extremely valid. People pointed out to me that I wasn’t a very good listener, that I talked over people, could be dismissive of their concerns and worries. I tried to correct all of those things – it’s an ongoing process. I think I have made lots of progress, but I also know that that class of inner work is never finished. (I may even have overcorrected on some of them. Balance.) To be human is to have failings, imperfections, blind spots. That’s why we need each other.
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Perhaps above all else, the thing I most despised in my youth was incompetent, arrogant authority figures abusing their power to tell me (and others) what we could and could not do, how we were supposed to act, how we would be punished for failing to comply. I hope this comes through in all of the work that I do: this adamant insistence that people be allowed to be free, be allowed to think for themselves, to choose what is right for them, and even to make bad decisions in the process of figuring out their relationship with their own sovereignty.
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I started out on Twitter with zero followers like everyone else, and no special assets or accolades that would give me an “advantage” other than my own natural curiosity. As I tweeted in my own earnest way, I found myself developing “an audience”. As I write this there are 27,000 people following me. Some of them might be bots and inactive accounts and so on, but it’s still at least 10-20k people. In the grand scheme of things, this is a drop in the ocean – maybe having the same amount of influence as say, a local band. And yet, it feels like there are responsibilities that come with that. With moderate power comes moderate responsibility, maybe?
I’m writing this to think out loud about my own relationship with my audience, the platform that I have.
I will admit that for much of my life I badly desired an audience. Part of it is a desire for personal glory. George Orwell wrote beautifully about this stuff in his 1948 essay Why I Write. Part of it is a desire to address injustice, wanting to right wrongs. I started a blog initially just to stay in touch with my friends, but I was incensed when I read an article in The Straits Times (Singapore’s national newspaper) that I felt irresponsible misrepresented some statistics about the state of our society, and I blogged angrily about it. It got a bunch of attention, which I think was a good thing for the issue and not so great for me. Well – how it is for me is something that remains to be seen. (Parable of the horses)
If you can do something, you should, shouldn’t you? “Somebody should do something”. I’m somebody. And, even if it might not feel like it, so are you. It is by doing what you can, doing what you believe is good… that you make a difference, however small. Big things have small beginnings.
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A leader should always be listening to her people, soliciting and welcoming criticisms, and looking out for them even when none are forthcoming – because criticisms can be hard to do, particularly in a context like work where the leader might have power over her employees’ livelihoods. You have to earn trust, you can’t simply demand it.
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Sometimes leadership can be as simple as doing something in public: leadership via demonstration.
I do not wish to “rule the world”. The world is an infinitely large, complex and convoluted being.
A “high modernist” or “top down” approach to leadership doesn’t quite work when we’re dealing with highly complex systems. You can’t micromanage the world. The world manages itself. I’d like to see the world become a more thoughtful, kinder place. I can’t force this on anyone, and to attempt to do so would be self-defeating. You cannot coerce people into being better people because all they’ll learn from it is that coercion is how things get done.