Turning the world the right way up: disruptive ideas and strong leadership

I am a proud fellow of St George’s House, Windsor Castle. Last week I took part in a 24 hour conversation Disruptive Leadership:Your Way. 

It was a privilege to be part of the conversation with peers from across different sectors and disciplines with different perspectives, personalities and problems. We do all share one thing a common – a desire to be constantly reflective and constantly learning in pursuit of a goal: becoming bolder, better leaders.

Most of us hear about the importance of disruptive leadership every day. Lots of us in the social sector have an internal voice saying we must be more entrepreneurial and more disruptive. But what does it really mean to be a disruptive leader? 

In advance of the conversation we each had a call with our (very excellent) facilitator for the conversation, Pete Ashby. As well as asking what we hoped to get out of the conversation Pete asked the question ‘what does disruptive leadership mean to you?’.

The call happened on a sunny day. I was walking across Waterloo Bridge - my favourite part of town as I looked at the Thames to the east I realised I had signed up for a 24 hour conversation about disruptive leadership but I hadn’t actually thought too much about what it was. I just had a bit of a nagging voice that I probably need to be a bit more disruptive. In that call with Pete I had a penny drop moment - my perception of disruptive leadership was a noisy, blustery type of leadership but that mostly doesn't fit me. 

I was reminded of a meeting several years earlier with the inimitable Jane Slowey then CEO of the Foyer Federation. She had brought a group of us together to talk about thinking differently - more positively - about working with young people. Jane, like so many of us was bored of, and frustrated with young people being demonised in the press and policy making. She was bringing us together to imagine a different approach and a different future.

On that day somebody in my group said we needed to turn the world upside down. Without blinking out of my mouth came something along the lines of “no, the world is already upside down, we need to turn it the right way up and get everyone to buy into that”.

Until the conversation with Pete I didn't really thing of that as disruptive leadership. I am not (in my view) loud and blustery. I am however very comfortable talking about some issues that many people don’t necessarily want to talk about or deem 'sensitive'. My leadership is rooted in strong values - an endless commitment to equality and social justice. I know that social change requires all sorts of different methods and tactics. 

Whether it be sex education, young people's sexual rights, volatile substance abuse, HIV, bullying, LGBT rights or mental health I am constantly searching for ways to turn the world the right way up and building consensus in support of change. This is reflected in almost every job I have held over the past quarter of a century.

We had some really lively and fascinating discussions over the 24 hours. My three personal takeaways were:

1.     Disruptive ideas are king: there is a difference between disruptive ideas and disruptive leadership (thanks Liam Burns for making the distinction). Disruptive leadership if it isn’t anchored to disruptive ideas can be a potentially destructive style of leadership. Disruptive ideas only go somewhere with strong leadership and implementation. 

2.      Authentic leadership and self awareness is important but we might be getting so hung up on what it means to be authentic that it gets in the way of us actually being an authentic leader. A couple of us wondered what ethnographers observing leaders talking about authenticity over the next few decades would say. Would they think that some of us were getting hung up on what it means?

3.     Do our perceptions of authentic leadership limit our ability to be authentic people showing 'warts and all' who happen to be in leadership positions. 

I left with some personal challenges: not to sweat about my authenticity quite so much, to trust myself more, and to get better at being both patient and impatient.  

I also left inspired by the people I spent time with and the conversations I had. I left more conscious and confident that disruptive leadership isn't one size fits all. It comes in many different forms. It isn’t always noisy.  It is mostly really good leadership making sure that disruptive ideas that continually help us turn the world the right way up are implemented well.