Humanize the Earth!

New Leadership

For the last couple of years I’ve been thinking about and working on “new” ways of organizing that are sometimes hard to describe. It’s sometimes more clearly what they’re not. They’re not hierarchical, for example. In any event, Jean has a fantastic post about Leadership in Participatory Culture that gets at some important points about this “new”:

Leaders within this context display, I think, the following characteristics. And I would, of course, prefer to think of them as nurturers. But to bridge from one paradigm to the new thrivable participatory one, we will use the past terminology. Leaders, then, in participatory culture, noticeably portray the following:

• trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
• draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
• demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
• act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
• show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
• listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
• instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
• defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
• hold each participant to their greatness
• open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
• willing and ready for new opportunities
• able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty