Vulnerability – the shift from leadership to eldership
“Leaders. What are you going to do next?”
“Get another leadership job”
“OK. then what are you going to do next?”
Here’s the challenge. Four decades ago there were half a dozen good books on the subject of leadership. Now, Airport bookshops and Waterstones are propped up by a plethora on the subject. Within this explosion of a love for leadership (of which I am a raving fan) there is a massive and flawed assumption. It’s this – that leadership is the mountain top. It’s the pinnacle, the cherry on the top, of your career. A few great leadership roles and then you…..and then you do what? Retire? Play golf and add a couple of non-exec roles in business or charity? The reason why this assumption needs challenging is that it is depriving leaders and society of their foundational building block of flourishing and legacy. My suggestion is that leadership is not the mountain top, but if you make it the mountain top then you have just created a glass ceiling, not just for your career, but for your life; not just for your organisation, but for society as a whole, especially the society that you are part of.
We all love Nelson Mandela (well, most do). He was an icon of…. what? Leadership? Of course. But leadership was never, even as a child, his mountain top. He was an elder. He grew up surrounded by elders. He revered them throughout the whole of his life from birth to death. He talks about them as a kid, as a man, at 50, at 70 at 90 years old. Traditional cultures, east to west, used to venerate elders as the linchpin to their societies. (Linchpins were used to hold the wheels of a wagon in place, so that the wheels wouldn’t come off as they crossed the bumpy terrain) The older, wiser people that you would turn to for wisdom, perspective, inspiration, insight and solving intractable problems and conflicts. They made us safer through their checks and balances.
Society today has lost these linchpins, that provide the glue, the perspective, and demonstrate true moral courage, because it has lost its elders. They seem to no longer be valued, desired or aspired to, (just remember how Ken Clarke and Lord Soames were discarded recently by their own colleagues).
Just as we cannot understand who Mandela became as a leader until we understand the leadership philosophy of Ubuntu, neither can we understand how he became a global elder without grasping how elders were the very linchpin, the fabric, of who he became and how he became it.
But here’s the good news. We can all become Mandela. I don’t mean clones of the actual Mandela. I don’t mean hero-worshipping groupies of the actual Mandela. I mean that every quality of eldership embodied in the life of Mandela can be learned by us all. Yes, all. Perspective. Wisdom. Inspiration. Courage. Vision. Resilience. Forgiveness. Discipline and…. Vulnerability.
“Woa!” I hear you say. “Hold on a minute! We are only just coming to terms with the V word in business and organisational leadership. Brene Brown is just becoming integrated into our business school curricula”
So, how does a leader make the transition to an elder? There are two bridges to cross. Firstly, if eldership is what lies beyond leadership, then surely every business school, every MBA, every executive programme, every organisations leadership programme, needs to be teaching eldership. If we don’t teach it, we are preparing leaders for glass ceilings. How many leaders later careers were either unnecessarily prolonged to the detriment of the organisation, or disillusioned because they thought they had reached the mountain top to be met with a void of, “I gave the best years of my life to becoming and good leader…. what do I do with all that experience now?”
Then there’s the second bridge. How do I cross from active leadership to eldership? What core learning do I need? What is the initiation rite from leadership to eldership? The answer is vulnerability. Why? Because eldership, by definition, requires the laying down of ego, of achievements and trophies, of being right, of always knowing, of being ‘the guy’ (gender neutral) and being at the centre of everything. Learning vulnerability is as essential for eldership as it is for leadership and yet is possibly the hardest thing a leader must learn. Possibly even harder for a male leader bought up in western culture. Whatever it is that Brene Brown’s work has brought to the leadership space in organisations needs to be dialled up even further to help us get beyond leadership to eldership.
Reflections from this article are taken from Trevor Waldock’s latest book (awaiting publisher) called Becoming Mandela – Letters To My Sons