#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ego-drive, territory-obsessed culture with the heavy infrastructure of prediction and control that is slow, outdated, inefficient, and comes at enormous personal, social and planetary cost.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