The wisdom of the ages: leadership is about participation

Establishing communities, or organisations — and repairing those that have lost their way — is a trick that only certain people (top CEOs, business leaders, and community developers) are good at. Some do it by instinct, some by terrible community art (all those mosaics!); most would benefit from some understanding of the black arts — I mean, emerging principles — of community development.

The key, the central element in establishing a community, a staff community, a corporate culture — (as the union movement has been saying for a long time, rightly as it turns out, though perhaps through a different lens) — is participation. Community participation, staff participation, early participation, genuine participation.

Building the ‘spaces’ for participation is no easy matter, but there are principles (see my paper!). Those principles summarise and extend more succinctly and directly many of the articles in my issue of Boss — which just goes to show that the lines between the community and corporate sectors, like the lines between work and family life, are blurry, blurred, dissolving.

Actually, the distinction between work and family life has always been blurry — all those files bought home from the office — it’s just that now we’re looking at the line from the other side: now family life is entering the office, not the office entering family life…

And as family life enters the workplace via the individual, community life enters through the aggregate of individuals: We extend our communal selves to the workplace as we extend our individual selves. We need to look at our new staff communities through a community development lens, and look twice at the hard, artificial boundaries we put up to keep individuals in their community ‘roles’. Keeping strict boundaries has never been a human forte.

Everything interesting in life, of course, happens at boundaries — but that’s another story.