Leadership Behaviours for Regenerative Power
A few years ago my friend and collaborator Louise Pitre and I kept finding ourselves deep in conversation about power. About how we understand it, and its abuse, and how we might find ways to use our power for good. We both started from the perspective that power is not in and of itself a bad thing: as Larissa Conte defines it, power is simply the “ability to move energy through a system.” However, in social change spheres we tend to notice how power causes harm and reinforces injustice and inequality.
So Louise and I decided to develop a framework for shifting leadership power away from the dominant ways that power shows up in the workplace, to a way that would be more regenerative and restorative. This framework came out of much conversation, research and codesign. Louise and I were creating a course for women and gender-diverse leaders, so we dove deep into existing thinking and teaching on that, along with our own experience with leaders to produce the Reimagining Power Framework. While the complete list of sources is long, I have included a few of the sources that most impacted our thinking at the end of this blog.
We developed two stories of power – one that tends to be dominant, and one that is what we imagine could be. We named 12 leadership behaviours and compared how they tend to show up in each of the two stories.
I’m going to tell you two stories about power.
The first story may sound familiar. Power is something that some people have lots of, and other people have less of, and those who have the most power tend to win. People are motivated to get more of it to have more control.
This kind of power is located at the top of mainstream organizations and the systems and institutions that we interact with on a daily basis. The people with the most power tend to be disproportionately white, male, and well educated and connected. Even when there are exceptions to this or in sectors that are led more by women, the dynamics of power tend to be the same.
Productivity is valued over wellbeing. There is no attention to natural cycles and limits. Everything is linear, logical and progress oriented, and there are assumed right ways to do things. Plans can be made and then followed to completion, and people who know how to follow these linear plans and “right ways” hold a lot of knowledge power.
Hardly anyone, particularly those in power, pay attention to how complex systemic issues play out in the day-to-day, and there is limited awareness of how inequalities are embedded in the structures and mindsets that reproduce this story.
In the second story, power is more like life force energy. It is all the ways we can move energy through a system. This means that we all have it in different ways at different levels at different times.
People make it together. We can grow more of it through mutual support and openness to different ways of being, doing, and knowing. Power is shared, and is located throughout the system in different ways, including in people’s lived experiences.
The focus is on moving with natural rhythms and life cycles of acceleration and deceleration, regeneration, rest and ending. We can access power when we need it for the benefit of the whole system, and release it to be accessed elsewhere when it’s not needed.
We are aware that our human interactions, relationships and structures are complex, and things don’t grow exactly how we expect them to. This also means we are aware of some of the common patterns that lead to unequal or unjust use of power, and are committed to noticing and trying to address them when they arise.
Feeling into where your organization might reside
Let’s take a moment and imagine ourselves in the stories. We can think of them as a spectrum with every organization falling somewhere different.
Imagine your arms can make the spectrum and that you are holding an image of a clearcut in your left hand and an image of a garden in your right hand. Which feels closer to your reality right now? Maybe the clearcut feels pretty close to your core right now, and the garden feels as far away as you can stretch. Or maybe you are somewhere in the middle, moving your hands back and forth to find an ever shifting tension between the two. For those of you whose organizations have done a lot of work to share leadership and address power inequities, you may feel that the right hand feels almost in reach, despite some old patterns still popping back up sometimes to pull that left hand closer again.
These two landscapes are in relationship with each other in ways we can’t fully understand.
12 leadership behaviours to help you shift
There are behaviours and choices people can make to move more in one direction than the other.
As a part of the Reimagining Power Framework, we identified twelve leadership behaviours and compared how they play out in the dominant story and the reimagined power story. The twelve behaviours we explored were:
- Understanding of the role of the leader
- Level of transparency around power
- Feedback and openness to different perspectives
- Sense of urgency
- How success is measured
- Overdelivering
- Knowledge and expertise
- Resource use
- Conflict
- Ways of doing things
- Decision making
- Relationship to emotions
The framework describes each of these behaviours from two perspectives, to help you to identify some of the signs of where you might be, and how you might explore different paths. For instance, here is the “feedback and openness to different perspectives” behaviour:
Feedback in the dominant power story
In the dominant power story, feedback tends to go disproportionately one way from leadership to employees. The leader tends to take a defensive or expert stance. There is often a culture of perfectionism that makes it hard to receive constructive feedback. Feedback is given for reasons of performance management and to get the employee aligned with the organizational goals. There is an emphasis on “right and wrong,” and the focus is on getting it right. People tend not to question, or challenge the “boss”.
Feedback in the regenerative story
In the regenerative story of power, people in formal leadership roles approach feedback with a sense of curiosity and willingness to learn from mistakes, question assumptions, and value other perspectives. Everyone feels empowered to give and receive feedback in order to reflect and deepen the learning of the whole. The organization values learning and reflection as essential to be able to adapt to changing conditions. There is a focus on continuous learning from both successes, unexpected outcomes and outright failures, and people embrace the idea that there are many ways to do something.
Where are you when it comes to feedback?
Take a moment to notice your experience of these two different stories of feedback.
- When have you experienced the dominant story? When have you experienced the regenerative story?
- When do you uphold the dominant? When do you uphold the regenerative?
- In your experience, what does the reimagined story of feedback look like, sound like, and feel like when it’s happening in practice?
If you’d like to know more about trainings related to this framework, see here and here, or you can reach out by email.
Barefoot Collective, The Barefoot Guide to Learning Practices in Organisations and Social Change. (2011)
brown, adrienne maree, Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017.
Diamond, Julie, Power: A User’s Guide, 2016.
Fraser, Tatiana and Glass, Juniper, Bridging the field of feminist and systems practice: Building ecosystems for gender equity, 2020.
Jones, Kenneth, and Okun, Tema, “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups” 2001 https://pfc.ca/documents/white-supremacy-culture/
Laloux, Frédéric, Reinventing Organizations, A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
Wheatley, Margaret and Frieze, Debbie, Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host, Resurgence Magazine, Winter 2011.