Revisiting Quiet Leadership: in the Smallest of Actions

My work on Quiet Leadership was accidental. In the midst of the Pandemic i had written a book about remote culture (‘Finding your Campfire ’), and as we emerged from it, i was feeling reflective in my own practice, and was holding a broad ecosystem idea in my head.

This work was designed to be deeply personal, reflective, and local. It considers the idea of the Organisation as Ecosystem and the ways that we are interconnected. And it looks at how that landscape changes – the ways that we act upon it, but through the smallest of actions.

It was a view of culture from the bottom up, and leadership as a fully distributed phenomenon.

Whilst we had been wrestling with how to be ‘together yet apart’ as our offices shut, many of the large scale leadership programmes of yesterday had fallen over, wrestling with how to perpetuate legacy notions of location, power , and control, in an evolving world.

I became fascinated by this idea of leadership not as monumental, but rather as very personal, reflective, dialogic, and small. I started to talk about leadership ‘this afternoon’, and ‘to your neighbour’. And all within a view of the Organisation as Ecosystem – a biological analogy whereby our interdependence was examined at the hyper local level.

Me to you, then us into the system.

Quiet Leadership – in this first iteration – considers four elements. Humility, kindness, fairness, and grace. These are not definitive: rather it’s a first view of the landscape.

I run a four week open programme around this work – it’s free to everyone – and since the start i’ve guided over 5,000 people around this landscape, from almost fifty different countries. The work has also been adopted more formally within a range of global Organisations, and my follow up work, with the publication of ‘The Humble Leader ’ a couple of years ago, has grown stronger.

But other parts remain fragile, in particular the notion of ‘Grace’, the fluidity of our action, and our ability to find a flow in our leadership. There is still work to do here, to find the language and develop the ideas.

And so now i am revisiting it: in part to review some of the illustrations, but also the underlying ideas.

This is not a major rewrite, but rather, like the changing of the seasons, which themselves form a backdrop to the work, it may involve some growth. One thing i am keen to do is to experiment with different formats for delivery. Whilst i love the four week programme – and will continue to offer it in that format – i am keen to look at doing a compressed ‘half day’ version, and possibly a touring physical event too.

This work is not commercial: it’s free and open to everyone, and i always stress that everyone is welcome in this space. So whatever i do will reinforce and extend that idea.

One of the nicest things about it is that i am constantly meeting people in all sorts of different contexts, who quietly whisper to me that they came on this journey, that they loved this work. I think for some it’s almost a guilty pleasure. To take time out – unprompted – to develop our ‘self’ should surely not be such an unusual (or secretive) thing to do!