“The ability to make the difficult happen” — nice phrase, and I’d say sometimes leadership also involves inviting the easy to happen!

Best to you and thanks for stopping by.

I’m a project manager and certainly see leadership as a calling as part of my role. A wise man once told me that project management is “the ability to make the difficult happen”. This certainly requires leadership.

Again, thanks for posting. I look forward to reading more of your work.

As you know, I fervently believe that conventional hierarchal leadership in organizations requires a strong calling, a visionary and meaningful one that refuses to take no for an answer. If we allow it to die (i.e. be silenced,) part of us will die along with it, and we work without our true Ho‘ohana [intention for worthwhile work] in that organizational context. We may never realize the full potential we have in our capacity for leadership should the calling part of it remain unanswered.

I am so with you on this: “power and values are living aspects of leadership, but I don’t believe they are its essence — they aren’t the call to stand in an exposed place and bring change to the order of things.” So while it is absolutely true that “Sometimes [the call of leadership] is only a tiny action” and most of us must start there, I personally want this one in our workplaces today: “Sometimes it’s about changing a whole world.”

Capitalist that I am, choosing to dwell in the art and science of it all, I want business to be more courageous and much more relevant. I want business to be useful to our communities, and fulfilling to all of our stakeholders, not just some of them. And you can bet that I want leadership and management to both be callings and nothing but.

I agree that leading certainly can be a calling that is embodied by other aspects of who a person is. I have a friend who moves very easily and with the support of others toward a leadership role, no matter what group she finds herself within. It’s possible to talk about her qualities of temperament and the knowledge she exhibits, but I think these are secondary to a refined sense of inner direction that she expresses, moment to moment, standing in what for others might be awkward space. Even when she mindfully decides to take some other role than that of the leader, there seems to be a certain “gravity” that returns her to the thing she loves the best.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the famous structural anthropologist, commented in his memoir, Tristes Tropiques, that “chiefs exist because, in every human group, there are [those] who differ from their fellow-beings in that they like prestige for its own sake, are attracted by responsibility and for whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward.” I would add that the act of leading is not limited to people who feel called to certain social roles — chief, president, boss — but who are drawn to the act of leading, the moment of truth itself, sometimes perhaps even with a sense of reluctance. There is a call to leadership there, as well, perhaps the more important for its lack of dependence on social rank or formal power.

Thanks for stopping by, my friend.