Letting Go of Leadership

We've been working on building a collective approach to unlocking the potential of Māori and Pacific business underpinned by a relational approach for a good while now. We knew that a ‘collective’ couldn’t be engineered and had to happen over time organically. Fast forward to today where we have a collective of over?100 businesses and arts practitioners all going in the same direction, committed to achieving economic self-determination and intergenerational change collectively. ?

An ever-increasing collective needing and offering continual and sustained support creates greater opportunities and new challenges. One of the challenges being our own capacity.?We hadn’t considered?word-of-mouth demand that would see a continuous stream of new businesses arriving on our doorstep (literally), seeking to be part of our community. ?

A relational collective necessitates frank and honest conversations. A space?where the collective themselves know that they have a?voice. It was no surprise that in 2023 we received feedback?from the collective which asked us to consider bringing a group drawn from the group around us to provide support and guidance on?direction, priorities, strategy and hold us to our purpose.?However, the constant juggling to meet increased demand meant that it slipped down the list of priorities. Up until now, after another reminder from one of our own.

Finally, this week we had our first Kaitiaki gathering. It didn’t?take long for us to see that we had a pretty powerful group of wāhine around us, some meeting for the first time. They asked about?our expectations and needs. Instead of heading straight into leadership/problem-solver mode (which is our usual MO), we made the conscious decision not to provide answers, nor to prescribe format, structure, or direction. To do so felt disingenuous and not in the spirit of working as a team. Rather, we reaffirmed our commitment to working collectively and left all whats, hows, structure, and decisions around the unknown to them. All we were there to do was to create the connections, share our journey to date, our vision of a regenerative eco-system and economy of meaning and then leave the next bit to them. ?

You see, we have always known that the collective is the answer for our communities and don’t know what form that will take as we move towards the future together.?As one member pointed out, while it’s scary not to have a predetermined idea around structure, decision-making and roles it’s also appropriate and exciting to approach the idea of a Kaitiaki group in a way that exists outside a colonised mindset and the existing hierarchical approach. ?

And so that’s where we’re at. The group will come together without us when they are ready. They will set the next course for the collective and we will be there moving through all the steps we need to take for our collective future, except now we aren't holding our vision alone. Instead we're taking the first step in surrendering our leadership to the collective itself.

If you're one of our collective reading this, then GREAT, you're reading our LinkedIn articles! More to come on this as it evolves.

So here’s to letting go, leaning on others, and being supported by those that we support.?

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