Education inoculates us against disruption. As our communities endure more disruption, especially here on the West Coast of Canada, it is important for leaders to reflect on ideas, models, and frameworks of leadership that will help us help others to grow, thrive, and perform in ways that improve our world. I believe that asking great leadership questions raises awareness and fuels learning.

Over the past few weeks I’ve done some deep dives into classic and emerging ideas about leadership.

• Inclusive Leadership means creating a work environment in which all in individuals are treated fairly and respectfully, have equal access to opportunities and resources, and can contribute fully toward an organization’s success. According to Dr. Shirley Davis, inclusive leaders are committed to engendering inclusive workplaces, have courage to challenge the status quo, demonstrate awareness of cognizance of bias, possess curiosity and have a hunger for other perspectives, show cultural intelligence by navigating effectively through different cultures, and work collaboratively and enable people to express their ideas freely and without judgment.
• Servant Leadership argues that the most effective leaders strive to serve others, rather than accrue power or take control. Servant leaders primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong.
• Cooperative Leadership comes from having a sense of ownership. As all members of a co-op are owners, all members are, or should see themselves as, leaders, regardless of their day-to-day responsibilities. Cooperative leadership is facilitative, rather than directive, and focused on bringing out the best in people, rather than telling them what to do.
• Responsible Leadership presents an attractive and potentially useful integration of research on leadership and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by combining psychological safety with purposeful knowledge sharing. Accenture has opinions, too.
• Social Purpose Leadership infuses the enduring humanitarian or societal reason a company exists into everything it does throughout the organization to advance its priorities in its industry ecosystem of stakeholders.
• Ethical Leadership means that individuals behave according to a set of principles and values that are recognized by the majority as a sound basis for the common good. These include integrity, respect, trust, fairness, transparency, and honesty.

Based on my exploration of these concept combined with my ongoing commitment to growth as a leader, I came up with three questions that, I think, raise awareness of leaders, especially cis-gender straight white middle-aged privileged leaders like me.

Leadership questions

How will you serve historically marginalized communities?

By including and elevating historically marginalized stakeholders within and outside organizations, according to Jonathan Doh and Narda Quigley, leaders will engender important individual-level effects through various psychological pathways: “stakeholders with higher levels of trust, psychological ownership in the organization, and commitment to the organization are likely to engage more with the organization at the individual/micro level, which is likely to have important long-term individual-level benefits for all involved.”

Based on Davis’s “six Cs” model, two very specific areas where I can grow is by demonstrating courage and curiosity for consistently: as a new leader seeking to build healthy relationships with colleagues, I have shrunken from moments to challenge a colleague’s use of the phrase “pow wow” because it would make the moment uncomfortable; as an enthusiastic problem-solver, I can most too quickly towards a solution instead of listening and learning more about peoples’ experiences, especially when they are very different from mine. As Layla Saad notes, it takes discipline to take on a demanding process with no easy answers.

How will you deal with organizational politics while advancing positive community impact?

From my perspective, the best leaders consistently rise above politics by authentically and strategically demonstrating how work – product innovation, customer service, organizational development, risk management – serve the firm’s purpose. Doh and Quigley’s “psychological and knowledge-based pathways” represent a framework for transparently describing and modeling leadership that fosters trusting and open social connections throughout (and beyond) organizations.

By transparently and, dare I say, joyfully approaching collaboration with this sort of framework sends signals to others what leaders stand for and how working with them will look and feel.

How will you engage with unethical and/or self-serving leaders while you play “The Infinite Game”?

Shefali Roy’s TED Talk resonated with me because of how she articulated how work often unfolds at the intersection of personal and organizational values. I believe that every supervillain believes they are the hero of their story (The Joker believes that he is serving the world by revealing its absurdity and Thanos was committed to bringing the universe into balance by eliminating half of it). Throughout our careers we will meet self-serving leaders who authentically believe they are serving the greater good through their achievement of power and authority.

The co-operative approach of member-driven decision making, a focus on people, and concern for the community, I think, is at odds with leadership practices that enable the amassing of power through short-term, economic results at the expense of ethics or people-centric-practices. From my perspective, cooperative leaders must have accountability that serves their direct reports, peers, and community-stakeholders (members or customers), not just the bosses and backers who often represent the economic direction of a firm.

Whether leaders are operating in a formal cooperative business or within a cooperative context, such as in employee-owned or member-governed enterprises, cooperative leaders “should recognize accountability as a strength; leaders depend on their communities in everything they do, just as Wall Street CEOs depend on the support of their profit-seeking backers. Being accountable is a way of being in solidarity and of making leadership work”. The infinite game is cooperative because its leaders know that winning together benefits us all.