Links: Leadership

[sonia]

Three Common Fallacies of Quaker Leadership by Andy Stanton-Henry, seen else-dreamwidth. The named fallacies are leaderlessness, chill (not overtly exerting power), and empathy.

[...] being an empathic leader doesn’t mean we stand idly by in the face of power grabs, spiritually garbed dithering, and rhetorical violence. It doesn’t mean we allow a meeting’s mission to be sabotaged by unhealthy or immature people, no matter how much we care about them personally.

Questionable Advice: "My boss says we don't need any engineering managers. Is he right?

[...] hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems. In fact, hierarchy is absolutely critical to the adaptability, resiliency, and scalability of complex systems.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for those — I read them both and learned a lot.

[sonia]

Yay! It says something about our modern world that so many of us associate leadership with coercion, or conversely being ineffective.

Indeed

[jesse_the_k]

I'm thrilled to learn people are thinking about these things out loud on the Internet, and developing new ways to explain the issues.

My grounding in those topics is oh so 20th century: hanging out with an industrial engineer/department manager for 45 years (MyGuy); participating in Quaker camps and meetings; second-wave feminist activism; and most recently, being a SMOF at WisCon.

Re: Indeed

[sonia]

Another nifty icon!

I'm interested to hear more about what it's like to be a SMOF at Wiscon these days, if you feel like posting about it. It seems like I hear less about Wiscon on my reading list than I used to.

Re: Indeed

[jesse_the_k]

I bailed from the WisCon concom back in 2012, although I haven't kept a super-hard boundary.

Most of my experience was with the old guard. They'd all known each other for decades--some had exchanged partners! Several missing stairs. I was the old guards' age peer but only joined the concom in 2007, WisCon 31. (I immediately started encouraging all the lovely young folk I'd met at the con to join us.) Each area chair had a lot of control of their division. "Those who do the work make the choices." The con chair(s) herded cats. Decisions were made by default (we've talked about this 15 times, why would we need to deliberate further) and occasionally by discussion: the Access crew introducing a disability justice lens required many millions of emails. When we got stuck, we'd talk things out via consensus-in-the-feminist-fashion, expertly led by co-founder Jeanne Gomoll.

Both old and new concoms had to deal with advocates raising a stink about sexism, racism, cis-sexism, transmisogny, and disablism. Eight years later, most of the concom resigned. Members (many younger) took their place.

I've participated in the online cons and piped up about access issues because I'm evidently unstoppable on the topic. I'm proud of helping to make access work better at WisCon. I'm thrilled that among the attendees were the sort of geeks who wrote up "how to make your event accessible" and spread it via wikis to many other conferences.

The last two in-person cons I left halfway due to massive anxiety.

Re: Indeed

[sonia]

Thanks for the summary! Yay for accessibility and encouraging new folks to join! \o/ Sorry to hear about the anxiety. :-(

[silveradept]

Both very intriguing links. I agree with the idea that management should be occasionally putting their feet into the side of the business that is not management to keep themselves aware and to avoid disconnections.

[sonia]

I didn't notice the suggested crossover between managers and individual contributors until I looked at the comments on the second article. (Actually useful comments!) I thought the article itself advocated for a clear separation between the two. I liked the systems theory analysis, and I agree that it's a good idea for people to cultivate both sets of skills.