This seems like a good day to talk about leadership.
One way to lead:
- Have no identifiable values.
- Change your mind based on what seems to be popular, rather than what you actually believe.
- Adopt a “do as I say, not as I do” approach.
- When faced with a crisis, dither and procrastinate.
- Blame everyone else when things go wrong.
I doubt many people would see that as a good list.
Posting this today makes it an inherently ‘political’ statement, but to me, this isn’t about left v right, or lamenting v celebrating Boris Johnson’s demise. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s about the type of leadership we want.
We live in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Binary ‘yes or no‘ answers won’t solve the environmental, social and economic challenges we face. Finding solutions will be hard work, and require a combination of humility and audacity, of courage and vulnerability. Yes, they make decisions, but leaders also need to be able to say “I don’t know” and “It depends” – and we should be comfortable hearing those words.
Whether it’s deciding who we vote for, who we work for, or who we hang out with, we all get to make choices.
What type of leadership do we want?
