 ‘Capabilities are freedoms conceived as real opportunities.’ (Amartya Sen) I keep coming back to this question: what is it that makes the difference? I’ve been drawn recently to reflections on this theme by Indian economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen. He distinguishes between capabilities, which are our resources (including our abilities and our potential), and conversion factors, which are influences on the real opportunities we have to use and fulfil them. Sen focuses his work on wellbeing and on the kinds of lives people and groups are effectively able to lead. He moves on to questions of what people, groups and societies need. Sen offers some interesting illustrations. Two people have the same resources. One is able-bodied and the other has physical disabilities that confine them to a wheelchair. All else being equal, the able-bodied person has more net resources because the person with disabilities has more related expenses. The former may also have greater net opportunities in society because the latter may be limited to places that are wheelchair-accessible. This could lead us to the conclusion that the person with disabilities should be given more resources to ensure equity. Sen then asks, what if the able-bodied person is hard to please and needs more resources to achieve a sense of wellbeing? What if the person with disabilities is content with their life and needs fewer resources to achieve wellbeing? If the goal is wellbeing, should we therefore provide more resources for the able-bodied person? Sen poses two challenges before we leap to this conclusion: sometimes disadvantaged people lower their expectations as a coping mechanism; and society has a moral imperative to support the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Sen provides another example of a person who owns a bicycle. The bike is a means to an end, to ensure mobility rather than an end in itself. Yet to convert the potential of bike ownership to greater mobility, certain conditions need to be in place. These could include, for instance, the physical ability to ride a bike; a social-cultural context that allows the person to ride a bike; and environmental conditions such as safe roads or suitable bike paths that make using a bike feasible. It’s a combination of capabilities and conversion factors that make this difference. So, what does this look like real situations? As far back as 2003, I wrote a research paper as part of an organisation development (OD) masters’ degree that aimed to identify and address common factors that influence engagement and effectiveness in organisations. I proposed that culture, complexity, capability and climate were critical variables. It’s about releasing and harnessing individual potential on the one hand, whilst creating the conditions in which people thrive on the other. This is, in my view, where coaching, action learning and OD intersect. What do you think?
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 ‘Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard.’ (D. Todd Christofferson) Secret agent? No. Estate agent? No. Travel agent? No. Change agent? Yes – that’s what I mean here. Personal leadership is all about outlook, attitude and behaviour. It isn’t about role or position. It is about seeing myself, whatever my role, as an agent of change. It’s about being proactive, seizing the initiative and embracing fresh challenges. It’s also about seeking ways to improve things and being resourceful to address them. Here are some examples of personal leadership, representing a shift from passive to active stance:
Personal leadership isn’t about being individualistic or selfish. It is about choosing to take responsibility for my own decisions and actions and, where it affects others, helping to manage the implications. For instance, say I discover I can’t make it to a pre-arranged meeting. A passive response could be to say, for example, ‘Apologies, can’t make it after all.’ And that’s it. It could leave the other party feeling unsupported, undervalued or disrespected. By contrast, a personal leadership approach could look something like this: ‘Apologies, some unexpected, high priority and urgent work has come up which means I can’t now make it to our meeting. I recognise the meeting is important and I’ve explored various ways to make it possible, e.g. by rearranging other work, asking colleagues if they can cover for me; seeing if other deadlines can be renegotiated etc, without success. Is the date or time of the meeting negotiable...or could I perhaps arrange for somebody else attend in my place? I would ensure they are fully briefed beforehand and check in with them afterwards.’ See and feel the difference? Bottom line: personal leadership is about exercising my agency to contribute my best, and to enhance the contribution of others. Would you like help with developing personal leadership in your organisation? Get in touch! [See also: Shared leadership; Personal leadership; Developing personal leadership]  ‘Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all of the darkness.’ (Desmond Tutu) A struggle I encounter existentially and in conversations with so many colleagues and clients at the moment is how to hold onto hope. Look at the news headlines and story after story of things going wrong. Not just small things but potentially world-ending things like climate disaster or nuclear war. The sense of overwhelm that this can create, along with a sense of complete powerlessness to change anything on that macro scale, can lead to feelings of deep despair. One option is to turn off the TV and social media news feed. It’s a bit like burying our head in the proverbial sand or sticking our fingers in our ears and singing, ‘La, la, la’. To be honest, on the mental health front, this kind of withdrawal can prove helpful and life-giving, at least for a while. After all, why burn ourselves out mentally, emotionally and physically for things over which we have zero influence anyway? Better, perhaps, to engage in mindfulness. Pause, breathe...relax. Except I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work for me. ‘I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.’ (U2) I’ve had to find a different way, and I’m still trying. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, ‘Hell is hopelessness.’ The need for hope is buried deep in the human psyche and the human condition. I find hope in Jesus and in taking action in my own small spheres of influence. I’m with Greenpeace on this: ‘The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought.’ How do you find and hold onto hope?  ‘Leadership is influence.’ (John C. Maxwell) It’s one thing to have insight. It’s another thing to exert influence on the basis of that insight. This is often a dilemma for leaders and professionals when seeking to influence change across dynamic, complex systems and relationships. After all, what if I can see something important, something that could make a significant difference, yet I can’t gain access to key decision-makers? Or what if, even if I can get access, they’re not willing to listen? What if people are so preoccupied by other issues that my message is drowned out by louder voices and I can’t achieve cut-through? Early in my career, I worked as OD lead in an international non-governmental organisation that was about to embark on radical change. I’d studied OD at university on a masters’ degree course and, based on that experience, could foresee critical risks in what the leadership was planning to do. I tried hard to get access to raise the red flags but, by the time I met with the leaders, it was too late. They had already fired the starting gun on their chosen programme. My concerns turned out to be well-founded, and the changes almost wrecked the organisation. I agonised for some time over why I’d been so ineffective at influencing their decisions. I learned some valuable lessons. Firstly, the view I held of my role – the contribution I could bring – was different to that of the leaders. I viewed myself as consultant whereas they viewed me as service provider. Secondly, the leaders had become so emotionally-invested in the change they had designed that they reacted defensively if challenged. They saw my well-meaning red flags as resistance rather than as a genuine desire to help. I would need to change my approach. Since then, I have practised building human-professional relationships with leaders and other stakeholders from the earliest opportunity. These relationships are built on two critical factors: firstly, respect for e.g. the studies, training, expertise and lived experience they bring to the table; and, secondly, empathy for e.g. the responsibilities, hopes, demands and expectations they face – both inside and outside of work. Against this backdrop, I’m able to pray, share my own insights and, where needed, advocate a change from an intention and base of support.  ‘Anyone can be a Father – but it takes someone special to be a Dad.’ (Wade Boggs) Father’s Day will feel very different this year. My Dad died recently and, no matter how old a person is when they pass away, to me he was still my Dad. That gave him a unique place in my life and a special relationship in my world of experience. To be honest, on reflection, I don’t think I ever knew my Dad that well. Yes, we shared lots of different times together over the years and I have all kinds of memories of him, but that’s not the same as…really…knowing…someone. He came from a generation that didn’t really disclose or expose deep feelings. As a child, I looked up to him as a strong, dependable figure in my life: someone I respected, sometimes from a relative relational distance. He was a motorbike fanatic and had a significant influence on my love for motorcycles and motorcycling, as he did on my brothers too. He was great at DIY – a talent that, sadly, I didn’t inherit from him – and could build or repair just about anything. I hadn’t really realised until we were preparing for his eulogy that I had never heard him once speak badly about anyone. He was a man of integrity and kept his silence. Two weeks before Dad died, I was called back urgently from Germany. He had had a fall, with complications, and the doctors didn’t expect him to survive. I raced to the hospital and, thank God, had time with him. He was vulnerable. I stayed overnight, tried my best to advocate for him and fed him gently when he could no longer feed himself. I plucked up the courage to tell him, for the first time, that I loved him. He told me, for the first time, that he loved me too. The day before he died, he whispered, ‘Thank you for everything you have done.’ I cried. I had never felt closer to him than in those precious, painful moments. A beautiful sadness. Dad – I will never forget you.  ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is one of the longest words in the dictionary, and ironically, it means the fear of long words. It originally was referred to as Sesquipedalophobia but was changed at some point to sound more intimidating.’ (Yalda Safai) You couldn’t make it up. Who would create a word like that – and why? One theory is that all professional fields create their own jargon, partly as a convenient shorthand for people working in that field and partly as an implicit status symbol. After all, if I know what the words mean and you don’t, that places me on a pedestal. It signifies I’m an expert – and you’re not. I did some work with a professional UK charity that wanted to change its brand tone of voice. (There you go: a bit of brand jargon). 'Tone of voice' means something like 'organisational personality'. Essentially, they wanted to change the way they express themselves in order to change the way in which they are perceived and experienced by those they want to work with. As part of the change, they decided to write in ways that one might ordinarily speak. It’s one of those curious cultural things in English, like in some other languages too, that we tend to write in one way and speak in another, even using different words to mean the same thing. Spoken words tend to be simpler and shorter. So, they set about de-jargonising their written jargon. Here are some examples they used to illustrate this principle, replacing written language with spoken – request: ask; require: need; advise: tell; retain: keep; endeavour: try; terminate: end. This made their communications feel less formal and more personal and conversational; especially when they also used first and second person (I/we/you) pronouns and active voice. (See how I slipped in a bit of grammatical jargon there?). So, language is important. A change of language can reshape the ways in which people and groups perceive, experience and relate to us, and to one-another. Language carries subtle emotional and cultural associations too, influencing how we (and others) feel, what we believe – and how we are likely to respond.  ‘Education consists of two things: example and love.’ (Friedrich Fröbel) I can’t remember last time a book gripped me as much as, Mahatma Gandhi Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth. (I’m trying very hard to read it slowly and thoughtfully so that I don’t get to the end too quickly). Perhaps it was Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, or Mother Teresa: An Authorized Biography. The next two books on my reading list are: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. and St. Francis and His Brothers. There’s something about reading the lives of these ordinary-extraordinary people of faith that always humbles, challenges and inspires me. I want to be more like them. They help keep my own life and work focused and in perspective. I have to remind myself: these were ordinary people, just like me, who became extraordinary through the life decisions they made. They proved in practice that faith is acting on what we believe as if it were true. They lived out: ‘put your body where your mouth is.’ At times, it can feel like standing vulnerable and naked in front of a mirror and seeing my own life, decisions and actions in sharp comparison and stark contrast to theirs. Yet I don’t want to be a carbon copy. I’m not in their situations and I’m not who they were in those situations. I’m me – and I’m here and now. This is my time, my place and my opportunity. I want to follow God’s distinctive call on my own life with authenticity and integrity, to be the very best version of me that I can be in His eyes. Who are your role models? What impact do they have in your life?  ‘People get tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them. You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth. They start as fire in the pit of your stomach but come out in a puff of smoke. You are not you anymore. And you don't know how to fix this. The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.’ (Nikitta Gill) Losing my voice was a painful experience. It started with frequent sore throats and laryngitis but steadily got worse. After a while, I had to suck on throat lozenges to be able to speak at all. My voice became very weak and, if I had to project it in a group or tried to sing, it felt afterwards like I’d been garrotted. Feeling increasingly concerned, I saw my doctor who referred me to ear-nose-throat specialists. They ruled out throat cancer and vocal cord nodules yet still couldn’t work out what was causing the problem. I lost count of how many cameras they ran up my nose and down my throat. As time went on with no improvement, they referred me to speech therapy. By now I was having to carry a sign at work to say, ‘Sorry, I’ve lost my voice’ and a clipboard to write down what I wanted to say. (It was amusing to see how many people wrote down their responses for me to read too. I had after all lost my voice, not my hearing.) The speech therapists were puzzled by the symptoms and tried various techniques without success. For 2 years, I virtually couldn’t speak at all. It took another 10 years of cameras and speech therapy before they finally worked out the underlying problem. Bizarrely, I had somehow learned to speak as a child without using the complex muscles around the larynx correctly. It was, in effect, as if I had found a way to imitate normal speech. That was OK to a point, until my work demanded more strenuous use of my voice. That’s when it became strained and failed. Apart from the intense physical discomfort, the social and psychological effects were profound. Over the years, I got tired of explaining my predicament. I became far quieter than usual and people related to me as if I was incredibly introverted, or simply didn’t relate to me at all. It became so very isolating. Not only did I lose my physical voice. I felt steadily as if I was losing my personal identity, presence and influence in social situations too. I felt helpless to resolve it and had no idea if it could or would ever be resolved. Salvation came in the form of a new friend, David, whom I met in a church and who had suffered from debilitating hearing loss for many years. When he described the social and psychological effects it had had on his life, for the first time I didn’t feel alone. It demonstrated the power of empathy and its place in healing. Now I could learn to speak.  ‘Just like seasons change in nature, they change in our lives as well. And, as they change, they ask different questions of us. What questions is your life asking of you now?’ (Funmi Johnson) I had a great conversation with Funmi, a fascinating and inspiring fellow coach, this afternoon and found her question (above) very thought-provoking. I’m at an age where legacy is a persistent question that calls out to me with growing insistence…and demands a response. Am I genuinely living my life authentically according to the mission and values that I claim to be real and true? Or am I compromising too much of what matters most, deluding myself with a clever façade that even I have found convincing? How deep will my spiritual footprint be? I love Funmi’s question. It stirs the waters and ignites a search.  ‘When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy.’ (Dave Barry) We can think of leadership as the property of a structure, in which a person designated as a 'leader' holds particular responsibilities and has, at least in principle, the hierarchical authority needed to fulfil them. We can also think of leadership as an intrinsic property of an individual. In this sense, leadership is something that resides within and emanates from a person, something that she or he has and does. This is the realm of competency frameworks and of leader-development initiatives. We can also think of leadership as the property of a group; for instance, a leadership team. In this idea, shared leadership is something exercised by a collective, where a diverse united group is, in potential, more than the sum of its parts. We can also think of leadership as a property of a dynamically-complex eco-system, in which acts of leadership emerge, sometimes unexpectedly and from unexpected places, and exert influence. This is the arena of dispersed and distributed leadership. In organisations, I’m finding the latter perspective especially useful. When working with leadership teams, I invite participants to reflect on the eco-system (cf Gestalt: field) as a whole; for instance: 'Where is leadership-as-influence exercised, inside or outside of the organisation’s boundaries? What are the distinctive roles and responsibilities of different 'leadership' entities within the system? What are the relationships between them? What does each need from the others to be effective?' I notice this invariably opens up far deeper, wider and richer conversations than those that focus on individual leaders alone, or leadership teams in isolation, as if they exist in a cultural-contextual vacuum. Some people find it useful to experiment with mapping their eco-system graphically, recognising that any depiction will reveal and, therefore, create opportunity to open up to healthy exploration and challenge, the way in which they construe their reality and leadership dynamics within it. |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! 
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