1.6 Leadership involves staying engaged and seeing a task through to the end

You need to engage in and stay with leadership practice over time. This is mostly because power has a way of biding its time until the fuss goes away, and then going back to business as usual. Many organisations – and even governments – know that people’s attention spans are limited by the demands of contemporary life, and that media tends to move on from news stories quickly.

Figure 7 Leadership involves perseverance and persistence to enact change

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This is a photograph of a yellow sign with the inscription ‘keep going’.

Figure 7 Leadership involves perseverance and persistence to enact change

Hence when organisations face a difficult public issue, it is quite common for them to make reassuring statements but not do anything meaningful. The classic example of this is climate change – so much so that a word has emerged to describe the phenomenon: ‘greenwashing’. ‘Racewashing’ is also a real phenomenon, and many of you will be able to point to major institutions you feel promise change but fail to deliver. This is why it is important that leadership stays the course and does not drift away, even as people’s attention and energy start to slip.

As you will have noticed from the six aspects of the definition, leadership is not a solitary pursuit, but involves people supporting one another to generate the agency to lead. This activity will begin to explore that process.

Activity 1 The agency to lead

Timing: Allow around 15 minutes

Watch the following interview clip with Jason Sinclair, where he describes the process of realising his capacity to become a leader. As you watch, can you identify any people and opportunities that enabled him to step into leadership practice?

Think about your own opportunities too. Do you have access to any role models, mentors or close colleagues for mutual learning and support? Make some notes about how you could build on your existing networks to gain more support for leadership.

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Transcript: Video 1 Jason Sinclair – my leadership journey

JASON SINCLAIR:

I’m Jason Sinclair. I’m chief operating officer at Profile Resourcing Group, and I’m also non-executive director at Milton Keynes University Hospital and the vice chair of Milton Keynes Community Foundation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

My leadership development journey was not necessarily straightforward. It’s a bit of a higgledy-piggledy route. Initially, when I started on the leadership side, it was postgraduate program. And I managed to meet a couple of influential people in an organisation, which helped me in my journey.

I met, who I didn’t know at the time was one of the execs, a VP of HR at National Grid, on the stairwell. We got talking, hit it off, was invited to her office the next day, and she planned my route a little bit in terms of that organisation. Moved me into a different team, went from a team leader to a process manager. She put me on to doing my CIPD to get to Level 7. And from that, I was able to leapfrog at the organisation a little bit. And then when I moved, in my next couple of moves, I went from an associate director level up to a director level role.

Also, did a Chartered Management Institute Level 7 at that point. And then, eventually, in the last five years or so, I moved into a C-suite position. And then that’s when I started getting quite a bit more active in the board profile as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So looking for help, I didn’t know I needed to, but it just accidentally happened naturally. I networked. I was one of those people that would talk to anybody. I was really confident about approaching people, so I think that that was really useful in my journey, being able to speak to lots of different people regardless of their station and where they were. But I was always looking for opportunities to interact with management and executives where possible, but then also looking for opportunities externally. Again, external networks and obviously professional qualifications that would allow me to develop.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A message I’d like to share with emerging Black leaders is to be confident of your own skill set, really look for support in lots of different areas. So look for allies. Look for people internally in your organisation that can support and help you with your development. But also, be really positive and intentional about looking at outside sources, outside groups, networks, and other events that you can plug into and get to know people. Network is the most powerful thing, I think, in terms of a leadership journey. The more people you know, the more your confidence levels will grow, the more opportunities you’ve got to speak to different people to get their perception, their advice, a little bit of reflection on their journey, and that will help you with yours.

End transcript: Video 1 Jason Sinclair – my leadership journey

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Video 1 Jason Sinclair – my leadership journey

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Discussion

What Jason’s experiences show is that no one develops the capacity to lead on their own. It is a collective practice, with several people working together, building one another up so that they collectively have more capacity to act than they did previously. Working in this way, they also make the most of the opportunities that are present for them to lead.