Leader As Convener

Peter Block
https://designedlearning.com/leader-as-convener/

We know that leadership matters. Traditionally we have defined the function as visionary, role model, designer, inspiration, and voice of where we are headed. We ask our leaders to be coach, listener, and a gardener who grows people.  

Now is a moment for us to reconsider this construction. The option is to ask the leader to create connection among the led… [and to] move from hero to host. Our invitation is to shift the content of what we teach leaders. This involves how we gather, how we occupy a room, both live and virtual, how we learn.

The future will not be a return to something. It will be the reimagination of something. The major challenge for leaders will be to develop the skills and mindset to convene and engage people in new ways. Leadership holds the possibility of the capacity and power to invite us into an alternative future.

The leader’s task is not to promise or define the alternative future. This is too often a marketing campaign. Managing the news. An alternative future does not occur by offering certainty. It begins by increasing authentic connection. Relational activism. Especially with the stranger. This means creating new habits of how we convene people. The purpose is to engage them in co-creating a response to a shifting market, technology, and supply world. 

We need to learn how to transfer this convening-and-engagement thinking and its tools into the minds, hearts, and hands of leaders and people who run things. And make these common good protocols a habit.

The invitation is to shift leadership to convener wherever we are together.