The following note touches on some broad issues that we struggle with as we ride the waves of leadership in our organisations. The note is a product of various moments of self and organisational-assessment and organizational development over the years. It is work in progress.

 

Leadership is the topic of the moment.

‘Leadership’ is one of the sexy topics of the moment. Many young women[1] are targets. Some well-known organisations have programmes related to young women and leadership. Examples include Akina Mama, Young Women Leadership Institute in Kenya, Katswe Sisterhood in Zimbabwe (Vagina Warriors) and Forum for Democracy in Uganda. Isis WICCE promotes women’s leadership in conflict and post conflict countries. The overall aim is to have a cadre of leaders with political skills to analyze, and strategize so that they can change the norms, institutions, policies, and practices that perpetuate inequality.

Generally, underlying some of the current approaches to leadership training and to definitions of leadership is the idea of leadership as a single leader representing a collective agenda, or a leader as the ‘director’, the formal head of an organisation or group. Often we forget that leadership is about learning how to shape the future collectively, especially if feminism is about building a movement with shared values.

Our goal should not be to build leaders, for the sake of building them as much as to build people who show commitment, support and drive activism, those who mobilize others to take risks, stand up for what is both innovative and just and who give their best. Some of them are already leaders, others will become leaders over time and yet others will be more comfortable in different roles, after all, a movement cannot be all leadership. What’s the point of having a good ‘leader’ if there’s nobody left in the army to fight the struggle?

As we coach, tool and support leaders we need to be aware that there are danger in extricating an individual from her community, training her again and again and sending her back to the community without ever checking if she still fits or belongs. One leader, after being trained, told her board ‘I have outgrown you. Better fire yourselves before l fire you.’ She fired them.

Many different models of leadership

 

We have many models of leadership. For example there are some people we have to greet with fancy words ‘the honourable x’; people who expect to be able to command everyone’s attention. Some of these are in our movements. Have we really and truly adequately considered the classism in many of our activist cultures? What kind of leadership are we promoting? Do we have a vision of the leader that we want as women, the kind of leader Africa needs? How do we deal with positional power vs activist power? Be that as it may, leadership is not about positional power, accomplishments, not even about what we do. It’s about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. It’s about giving people hope. Effective women’s organizing requires varieties of activist leadership – including the capacity to facilitate, mediate and mobilize – embodied in multiple leaders. Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feministsprovides guidelines for cultivating innovative new forms of power and leadership and for dismantling patriarchy and its structures.

Ability to inspire: Part of what makes a leader, is their ability to inspire others to action, and to build the capacity of those around them, to encourage people to give their best; and to recognise and value everyone’s participation, rather than requiring recognition themselves. So why are so many of our leaders so concerned with visibility & recognition? Are we contributing to the problem by having different kinds of awards, etc.? Does it also have to do with the need to prove to donors that x leader/organization is worth investing in?

Love:Activist leadership is about shifts in psychology, ideology and practice. It is about transformation.Transformation requires fundamental shifts. It requires love. Why love? It is the ultimate motivation of a transformative leader. Love of a country, movement, cause, principles, people we work with or those whose lives we want to change and love of the future. Love inspires, it activates audacity, boldness and courage, and it generates boundless energy. Without love of a cause, how can we take a stand, how can we make sacrifices, how can we venture, how can we take risks? It is love that generates the energy that keeps us unfolding the future, that keeps us engaged, that keeps us in the ‘groove’. There is a deeper commitment to seeing something through that also makes one willing to be ‘daring’ and not just be a bureaucrat and ‘represent’ people in an ‘all protocols observed’ kind of way. Love is what keeps transformative leaders going when the barriers the movement is fighting against seem insurmountable. Love should be ingrained in the DNA of our leadership training programmes.

Self-renewal: We have some tired leaders and organisations that have done the same things over and over again. A leader should be able to renew her energy and spirit and that of her organisation otherwise both expire. Inside itself, an organisation must be alive and constantly re-inventing its creativity. It should reflect on the spectacles and lenses that inform its practice, and critique these. Critical self-reflection is core not only to the quality of practice but to the ability to withstand processes of rusting and erosion. Anything less and the organisation succumbs to the forces that it thinks it’s so very different from.

 

Any programme aimed at supporting leaders should seriously encourage them to renew themselves so that they can deliver their messages with a quality of thinking that goes further and deeper than (probably) the prevailing thinking that is taking place around them. One way of renewing oneself is to expand the creative use of social media and improve communication.

Stop: The more we work, the more our work increases. It’s not possible that there will be ‘free time’ unless we create it. Being busy has become a positive value in itself, it’s as if we need to show that we are busy in order to feel validated, useful and important. How many conversations have you been in where people kind of compete with each other to show how busy they are? Should we not start a new competition, where leaders compete to show that they are spending time learning and thinking? Where are the organizations that include in their budgets time to think about what they have done; time to explore with the people in the communities they work with, with the other organizations they ally with – how they are doing? Is our work-style building up the capacity and confidence of those we work with? Are our strategies taking us where we want to be going? Resisting and ultimately transforming power – in all its relations, structures, forms, spaces, and places is not work for extremely tired leaders. It is work for those who stop, re-energise and retool.

Read and theorise: Leadership development needs to be supported with reading. How many of us set aside the time to read and to theorise our work? There are some leaders who claim they do not read because they do not have time. Yet, again, reading is part of keeping abreast of what is going on, and situating one’s own strategies appropriately. And when I am talking about reading, l am not talking about an hour a day on face book keeping up with people and enjoying some jokes although face book and other sites can be very helpful in keeping us aware of struggles going on in our own countries and beyond. But I am talking about reading research findings on our issues, so that our demands are grounded in evidence. Being a credible activist leader also means having an updated sense of political debates and critical thinking on the issues that we work on. Leaders need to have a sense of social movements across Africa and what their agendas are, the strategies they are using, and how these are changing and adapting. They should be able to respond with sharp minds if they are going to stay ahead of the game! There are now a range of online editorial and news sites run by African social justice activists that we could use to strengthen our work.

 

Share openly: Change is not possible withoutsharing leadership challenges and lessons learnt at least within own organisations or with other sisters. Good leadership encourages people to talk about what is not working, rather than only talking about what is working. The Hewlett Foundation, for example, has a ‘worst grant’ competition, where program officers have to describe the worst grant they made – looking at what lessons they can learn about the way they make grants, from these negative experiences. This is validating learning – creating a safe space within which we can talk about challenges. It also validates failure, acknowledging that many of the ideas that we have do not work! If we do not interrogate what went wrong we are very likely to repeat the same mistakes which is neither a good use of resources nor a contribution to moving our work forward. This is a good point in terms of making the case for both organizations and their donors to invest in regular organizational reflection.

 

[1] The Southern African Young Feminist Leadership Course looks at the meaning of feminism and how it shapes the politics of our everyday lives. It examines why men dominate in various spheres of life and what women can do to change this. By the end of 2014, the course will have been conducted in six countries, with over 400 young women participating.

 

References

[1] Zieliñska, M., Kowzan, P and Prusinowska, M., ‘Social movement learning: from radical imagination to disempowerment?’ Studies in the education of adults, 43(2), 2011:251-267.

[1] Ollis, T, ‘The ‘accidental activist’: learning, embodiment and action’, Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 48(2), 2008:316-335.

[1] Barefoot Collective, Barefoot Guide to Working with Organizations and Social Change, The Barefoot Collective, (published online), 2009. http://www.barefootguide.org/download.php.

[1] Holland, J., Reynolds, T. and Weller, S, ‘Transitions, networks and communities: the significance of social capital in lives of children and young people’, Journal of Youth Studies, 10(1), 2007:97-116.