The Leadership Power in the Margins
As organizations and industries grapple with a sustained stress test in the midst of the perpetual crises within which we live, navigating through in meaningful and humanistic ways is critical.
A recent Untapped Leadership newsletter asked:
What aspects of yourself are marginalized at work?
What gets "checked at the door" for the sake of professionalism, collaboration, and credibility?
What might be missed in the case for creativity, innovation, and critical analysis of complex work challenges if we don't access or offer all of our available information?
Answers to these questions are likely wide-ranging and fully dependent on context. The list can feel particularly expansive for those with marginalized identities. Unfortunately for all of us, however, is that a great deal of power is overlooked as a result -- power that we can employ to tackle our most complex and persistent challenges as well as imagine a professional (and broader) world anew.
Here are some ways to understand the aspects of your experiences that may be marginalized. Through this examination we can begin to explore ways to harness that power meaningfully in the workplace.
Audit Your Authenticity
Authenticity and vulnerability have become increasingly popular frameworks for considering how to lead. It is a welcomed shift from the more transactional, hierarchical, and prescriptive literature that typically overwhelms management bookshelves. Brené Brown's work brings a human-centered focus to defining leadership that is more connected to elements of the human condition that, in decades past, would be compartmentalized and excluded from the workplace. For marginalized leaders, however, the ask is bigger.
Throughout a workday or workweek, take stock of moments when you feel most aligned with who you are as well as moments when you don't. What is the context? Who are you speaking with? What is the outcome you are moving towards and what is the timeline? Consider noting these reflections down at the end of each day in an Authenticity Audit. There is nothing to fix of change just yet, but there is an opportunity to raise your own awareness of moments and reasons for any self-editing that can occur throughout the day.
Examine Your Organization's Leadership Culture
There are some aspects of organizational culture that predate even its longest-tenured members. There are elements that we inherit and we can't quite pinpoint their roots. Aspects of culture exist in both explicit and implicit ways. Embedded in that culture are an organization's explicit and implicit definitions of leadership.
Organizations must examine their leadership cultures to identify what leadership styles and behaviors are most valued and rewarded and what leadership may be going unrecognized. Organizational charts should not be interpreted as leadership maps with the cluster of valued leadership sitting at the top. To begin to examine the potential in the margins, you must fully define what is at the core. As companies examine ways in which their interpretations of leadership may narrow within their culture, they'll build a better understanding of how to inclusively expand.
Test the Boundary
The greatest source of innovation, critical thinking, and creativity comes from people having the space to harness their unique viewpoints to bring both their best and worst ideas to a process. We tend to lean towards being polished, practiced, and boundaried when it comes to professional exchanges, often thinking twice before offering a new idea or a different perspective that is grounded in varied lived experiences. With an acute awareness of context, power dynamics, and culture (as not all workplaces may be conducive), why not say the thing that is on your mind in the next meeting or 1:1 with a supervisor? Why not contribute the thought that diverts from the group when the dominant line of thinking doesn't resonate for you?
To shift and expose the power that exists in the margins, we'll have to introduce those margins into the core of our work. Doing so may encounter headwinds and thus assessing the context is important, but these contributions are crucial enough to consider acting upon them. Change happens in micro-moments. Who knows? We might find that others held similar thoughts. We might also find that some boundaries are self-imposed.
All of us, in various ways, have the opportunity to understand the realities of work and leadership from expanded perspectives that can often go unnoticed. In those overlooked shadows the answers to our biggest challenges very likely exist.
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