#149 Relational leadership for sustainable impact with Celine Schillinger

"Leadership is a collective ability. It’s not an individual skill set."

Now more than ever this phrase rings true for leadership in teams, organisations and society as a whole. The inherited leadership model is destructive, not productive in today's interconnected world.

Never has it been more important to challenge the status quo, to unlearn old formatting and build new patterns so that organisations and teams can thrive. The best way to avoid risk is to actually do nothing.- Celine's observation highlights a critical issue in modern leadership. Many organizations inadvertently foster environments where inaction is safer than innovation. I see this firsthand frequently.

Leaders, fearing blame for mistakes, often maintain the status quo. This “risk of doing versus risk of not doing” dynamic stifles creativity and energy. We need leaders to challenge this complacency. Rather than trying to be the best, leaders should challenge themselves ethically and morally; pursue human pastimes to maintain emotional and creative ability; hold space to think and feel; and improve the quality of relationships with their people and between people - leadership is a collective ability, not an individual pursuit.

Celine shares her insights and experience from working with leaders all over the globe and from researching her book : Dare to Unlead.

The main insights you'll get from this episode are :

1. The inherited leadership model is destructive, not productive: it is evident in the corporate world that leadership has been transformed into an industry, making it difficult to progress (business- and human-wise) in large, industrialised companies.
2. Toxic patterns are reproduced, resulting in a male-dominated, ego-drive, territory-obsessed culture with the heavy infrastructure of prediction and control that is slow, outdated, inefficient, and comes at enormous personal, social and planetary cost.
3. Red flags often come in the form of multiple small indications, such as cultural, ethnic, and gender homogeneity at decision-making level; a prevalence of no vs yes; and difficulties driving innovative projects forwards because leaders are risk averse.
4. A lack of accountability for not doing the right/wrong thing leads to complacency and ‘yes’ people who maintain the status quo, leaving no room for new blood or change, which in turn produces stagnant energy that is directed into negative politics.
5. In the workplace, we have to be with people we haven’t chosen or who aren’t like us, giving us an opportunity to develop our diversity muscle in terms of dealing with different opinions, worldviews, etc. against a clear mandate of making the business work.
6. Leadership is about enabling something productive; creating value across the board; and mobilising all talent - energy and power are omnipresent and can be either a constraint or an opportunity, depending on the mindset.
7. Familiar power structures are still honoured, e.g. one knowledgeable expert has the right to overrule all other opinions, but they are no longer applicable given that managers now are often less knowledgeable than their direct reports.
8. Knowledge and relational work has changed the foundations of old decision-making systems, with more agility and diversity required - leaders must stop seeing themselves as the centre/top of the system, and rather as an enabler of a network.
9. Leaders must foster strong, effective connections in multiple ways, including making themselves dispensable - mentoring other good leaders to overcome the parent/child dynamic and step into the less comfortable environment of an adult/adult relationship.
10. Late-stage, extractive capitalism is unhelpful in that it encourages us to seek an ‘easy’ solution and gives way to a ‘strongman’ approach: when it comes to mobilisation vs manipulation, the former should be top of mind for any engagement professional.
11. The new identity in the workplace is not tied to roles or locations, but is part of a larger, living ecosystem in which people must feel valued and welcomed - hierarchy can remain, but the relational aspect is more relevant, and everyone is important.
12. Relational energy is scaled by spreading the load and opening up the vision to everyone – it cannot simply be replicated as it is a living system, therefore new versions can be created by connecting the energy centres in the system for mutual benefit.
13. Leadership practice based on liberty, equality, and fraternity (from the French culture):
14. Liberty: allowing for more (creative) freedom in the system (reducing control, trusting people to play); becoming free yourself (questioning our behaviour and latitude)
15. Equality: connecting freedom at a collective level (having a network model); maintaining a cohesive network (no bureaucratic control)
16. Fraternity: wanting to be together with very different people; promoting co-activism
17. It is important to build a ‘we’ space – internal social media let down by algorithms that fragment rather than connect; community audio (e.g. internal radio/podcasts) gives people a voice without a visual image that can have an excluding effect.
18. Storytelling and relational leadership in the AI era must value the human aspect to heal, teach, lead and let people be human, otherwise we will have more rebellion and an increasingly negative impact on the planet.
19. Rather than trying to be the best, leaders should challenge themselves ethically and morally; pursue human pastimes to maintain emotional and creative ability; hold space to think and feel; and improve the quality of relationships with their people and between people - leadership is a collective ability, not an individual pursuit.

Find out more about Celine and her work here :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/celineschillinger/?originalSubdomain=fr

https://www.figure1publishing.com/book/dare-to-un-lead/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dare-Lead-Relational-Leadership-Fragmented/dp/1773271822

https://weneedsocial.com/