Anni Townend

FED Central team member Anni Townend, author of Assertiveness and Diversity, writes this week about The Courage to Lead. This is one of a series of postings from Anni. Forthcoming postings include The Confidence to Lead and The Commitment to Lead. In each, Anni draws on her experience of working with senior leaders individually and with their team using Future – Engage – Deliver to develop their leadership muscles. At the end of each posting there is an invitation to practise stretching particular leadership muscles.

The Courage to Lead

“The core act of leadership must be the act of making conversation real. The conversations of captaincy and leadership are the conversations that forge real relationships between the inside of a human being and their outer world, or between an organisation and the world it serves.”

(David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. Page 61)

As leaders the first conversation is with ourselves. This, the very first conversation, requires great courage, the courage to be truly ourselves. It means being aware of ‘who we are being’ and finding out how we are experienced by others. This then is the second conversation which takes courage: to engage others in giving us feedback. It is one of the most significant leadership muscles that as leaders we need to practise. We need the feedback in order to find out if what we intend to be our impact is indeed the impact that lands with others. The only way of finding out is for us to ask others for the feedback, to be in inquiry. As soon as we engage in the giving, receiving and asking for feedback we are building bigger relationships which are encouraging of courage and of real conversation.

Practise!

Practise stretching your leadership muscles of asking for feedback this week. Choose two people with whom you would like to build a bigger relationship, ones which will require courage on your part to ask for feedback. You might choose one person where you feel that the impact you intended is the one that landed. And one person where you feel that the impact you intended is not the one that landed. Gather this valuable information about you from them, listen and thank them. Grow your leadership and grow the relationships. Let us know how you get on.

Learn more about Anni Townend, the author of this article – click here