Power and Leadership

As I sat at the Health in the Hubs meeting the other night I observed that it was a room full of leaders and wondered what happens when everyone at the table is a leader with their own urgent issues?

I had been thinking about stages of leadership/power lately, which probably already exists and has a name in circles that study this sort of thing. I contemplated how we outgrow (hopefully) certain uses of power and wondered what, ultimately, we are working towards as leaders? This question collided with the previous question today and I have the beginnings of an answer.

Observations on the Stages of Power & Leadership

1 – Might is Right. I am tempted to call this Entry Level. What comes to mind are young men who feel like they can’t walk home at night without a knife. The problem is, the knife is no good if you encounter someone with actual authority, like the police, and it’s no good if you encounter someone with a bigger knife, or two knives. So it’s only good on weaker people in which case you don’t really need it. Many of the weapons in this arsenal are intangibles, like bullying and intimidation. When people boast about their weapons of choice it makes me think they don’t have other tools at their disposal. There can only be one Boss in this scenario, so conquests are perpetual until the Boss is overthrown. Sadly, even at international levels we are still playing games of “My gun is bigger than your gun.”

2 – Authority: Military, Corporate and Religious models use hierarchical authority to designate power and leadership, chiefly because it is efficient. It becomes inefficient (and a pain in the neck) when a person’s authority exceeds their intelligence. (It becomes barbaric when people use their authority to wield their Might is Right.) Authority is the most prevalent form of leadership in our society but I sometimes think that we are only ever one disaster away from falling back into a Might is Right world.

3 – Engaged: The New-School models perceive the untapped potential of people so leaders try to engage them in the quest. It is goal-oriented and favours thinking outside the box, particularly when the resources are all gone and the status-quo is threatened. It is creative and rewarding beyond monetary fulfillment. It is overthrown by Authority (Martial Law) when efficiency (often masked as security) is the priority.

Next is the exciting part – don’t you think?!

4 – Collaboration: This is about recognizing that it is a big world and there is enough pie to go around for everyone. It is about cultivating the leadership qualities in others, however they may emerge. The answer lies in working together, in using everyone’s strengths towards shared goals.

Not only would it work for Neighbourhood Planning Teams, I bet it would work for international affairs as well. I think about bodies like the United Nations perhaps representing the Authority stage and wonder what an Engaged Earth might look like, to say nothing of a world governed by International Collaboration.

I suppose first we have to recognize that many of the goals really are shared.

Rally for Code Red

What happens when our attitudes become unionized? What happens when fighting the good fight becomes more important than the outcome?

I was at the Hamilton Spectator for the Code Red 2.0 presentation on Wednesday. I was very moved by many of the speakers, by their understanding and compassion and willingness to take an unpopular stand, find answers, forge a new path.

I noticed that it wasn’t a recap of any sort. No one said “Here’s what we’ve done in the last year,” (which is plenty) and I’m ok with that, cause lots of people work tirelessly all the time.  I noticed that no one said “Here’s what we’re going to do now,” and I’m ok with that cause I think the work involves all of us, and is not about “them” fixing “us”. So while I was emotionally affected by the evening and came away feeling as if Hamilton was in good hands, my mind kept asking, “What was this?”

And I realized, this was what it needed to be: another step toward building consensus among all of our leaders and all of us that these issues are priorities and need to be addressed. It was a call for help to you and me to make sure our representatives at every level know that we care, that the health of our communities matters and that broken systems need to be fixed. And I was ok with that, because the alternative might be more of the same solutions, and more of the same problems.

On my way out, someone remarked at the irony of a panel of privileged, white, men who were addressing an issue that is, by the numbers, about women, about minorities. “And don’t you think we need to have an alternate meeting with appropriate representation?”

No. No I don’t. I think this WAS the alternate meeting. I think that sometimes we fight the good fight so long, we don’t know help when we see it. We get caught up in the how and loose sight of the goals. This IS the beginning of the future we’ve been talking about, for all of us. It is collaborative. It is caring. We don’t need to fight each other; we need to join forces and spread the word to stop this terrible trend of tragedies, no matter who is suffering them. No matter who gets credit.

I am confident that Hamilton is in good hands; yours, mine and ours.

Runnaway

When I was 11 I ran away from home and walked around downtown Guelph until after dark. This was pretty radical and I was sure I would get in trouble but it seems like no one noticed. Go figure, seven kids.

When I was fifteen I used to run away from home and sleep on the rocks at the Beach. No one noticed I was gone and though I spent the nights worrying about bugs and drunks and high tides I was pretty well hidden and enjoyed being alone.

When I was 28 and felt like I’d been looking after other people too long I took great big pieces of chalk and wrote all over the walls “How come nobody ever feeds ME?” I’m not sure this accomplished anything, though it may have spawned the chalk mural that became a feature of the apartment.

Last Thursday when I was uptomyeyeballs in unsolvable problems and ready to snap I left the cafe in the care of the neighbourhood and ran away again. I didn’t get far actually but I enjoyed being alone and able to think and sleep and relax and get a few things done. And I came back with some clarity and some direction that might lead to solutions.

And in my absence neighbours looked after the cafe and cleaned and shopped and entertained each other. We may not have a lot of staff, but we have a really big team. And somehow this feels like progress.

South Sherman Pioneer Village

About ten years ago I had this dream:

Something happened; a bomb or a war or some sort of disaster and everyone fled. I fled to some place that I knew the rest of my family would go to as well, and they did. So did many other people, friends and strangers alike. After a time of huddling in fear and wondering, we needed to make space for everyone and sort out who goes where, and then who could cook and what there was to eat. And then who could look after all the kids and when it became clear that this was going to be a long term arrangement, who could teach all the kids. Soon we had a list of everyone’s skills and how they could be useful. Everyone pitched in and a sort of pioneer village sprang up and before long no one was left huddling in fear and wondering. There was an incident with a message from another collection of people and to determine if we could collaborate with them, one question was sent to them, “What is important?” And the answer that came back? “People, people are important.”

This past Saturday the South Sherman Community Planning Team held an IMAGINE session where we got together with neighbours to imagine and describe what our neighbourhood would be like three generations from now after all of our dreams had been realized. And we ended the day with the fifty-cent question: “What are the priorities that we need to focus on now to make all of this possible later?” And the people who had come out, had given up their Saturday to help envision the future together, said that people were the priority: relationships, communication, engagement.

And today I realized that we are in the dream. That the disaster was a slow and poisonous one that sapped people’s self confidence and trust; it was an invisible, intangible disaster that left desolation in its wake instead of devastation. Devastation is so much easier to deal with than desolation.

And yet, here we are; believing that people are important, getting to know each other, finding out what each of us is good at and pitching in to make a difference. To make our own pioneer village.

Super Molly

Molly has come for crepes the last few weeks and each time she comes she draws a picture for the wall of the cafe. “I’m so good at doing art I can’t stand it!” she says. Yesterday she invented Molly Rockets Dipped in Chocolate, “It starts out chocolatey, and then the rocket takes off!”

“Community, can you watch my kid while I go to the washroom?” says her mom. I can’t tell you how moving it was to hear that. That she’s created a self-reliant trusting kid and we’ve created an environment she can trust, where kids can be themselves and know that all of the grownups are on their side.

I can’t wait for the day when all kids feel like they belong, everywhere.

Park Bench Lady

We see her almost every day, Stella and I. I say good morning just because. For ten months she didn’t answer. Then a little while ago she answered. “Good morning.”

Last week, I could see as I approached, that she was looking at me, anticipating it.

“Good morning.” “Good morning.”

And today, she said it first.

With a smile.

l don’t know what it means, but now I am looking forward to it.

Assets and the Giving Economy

On Saturday 19 year old Alex looked at the Asset Inventory on the wall at the cafe and said “Who’s Ariel?” According to the asset inventory, Ariel is a five-year old who’d like to learn to play piano. “I can teach her,” said Alex.

In Seth Godin’s book Linchpin he talks about a giving economy, where people give to their family, friends and neighbours rather than charge money, or interest. He talks about how this is the way it used to be and that this creates prosperity and abundance for the community.

When Celeste coordinates the Property Angels, when the coaches share their wisdom at the Neighbourhood Business Round Table, when Sarah teaches crafts to kids on Saturday afternoons, they give their time and they enrich their community immeasurably.

There are certainly no shortage of people outside of our community with whom to do business so if the 19 year olds get it, without explanation, without training or courses or workshops on giving, how come it’s so surprising, so novel to the rest of us? How come it isn’t normal?

Maybe it is normal for them. Maybe what this generation, much derided for their lack of work ethic is ushering in is a new-school economy, new-school community. Maybe for these children of boomers who were the centre of our economy, education, lives, from whom nothing was stinted, maybe for them giving is normal.

Maybe without even trying they are ushering in a giving economy.

Girls

We started a new program at the cafe called Aerobics and Americano. The aerobics portion of the title is a bit of false advertizing since we aren’t anywhere near being able to do aerobics. We’re still working on the whole lifting the arms above the head thing and lifting the feet off the ground. Mostly, it’s just a whole lot of potty humour filling the hour and I’ve discovered a secret delight in making Cindy Currie laugh.

I call Cindy the neighbourhood Ombudsman cause she is always helping people out of a jam, advocating for them, counseling them. She has now launched a social enterprise to help people in the community with their financial issues, and a broad range of issues they are. (Ahem.)

6am aerobics is a special kind of torture for me because I am already at the cafe from 7am to 11pm. Of course, the last month or so I can’t get in at seven, but more like 8:30. 6am aerobics ensures that I am there by 7am, however, I guess I didn’t really think the others were serious about the 6am thing – I doubted the sincerity of my lady friends.

I grew up feeling that I had to apologize for being a girl. Boys were faster, stronger, better and for the first many years I struggled to be faster, stronger, better too. As a kid, though I was shunned by the Boy Scouts (and shunned the Girl Guides in my turn) I was generally friends with the boys, and the occasional tomboy. It wasn’t till I was seventeen that I discovered how cool girls could be, but being me, I guess I have to keep re-learning these lessons.

I spent the summer I was seventeen in Belleville, Ontario getting my Glider Pilot’s License. I’d been working towards it since joining Air Cadets at fourteen and a whole lot of work was finally paying off. There was only one room of girls but about seventy guys in a barracks across the park-like grounds. Horchemer and Freisner were my friends and we spent as much time playing frisbee as studying. My impression is that the powers-that-be were surprised that we passed. Somehow a circle of teaching and learning helped each of us to fill in gaps in our knowledge. I ate and slept with the girls but the guys were my buddies.

One day, we girls planned a night raid on the guys’ barracks. There was one fellow I really didn’t like and I had a sweet revenge planned for him. I forget what his crime was, but the lingering question is why eight smart girls training to fly gliders would gamble their scholarships on a lark? We believed that as long as we stuck together, they wouldn’t kick us all out. But would we all stick together? Do girls do that sort of thing?

We mapped out our route to the guys’ barracks along the tree-shadows cast by the spotlights installed to prevent exactly this kind of activity. We had an inside guy who left a window open and my guys had told me where my enemy slept. Our scout hoisted each of us into the window and then stayed watch while the rest of us set about our missions in the darkened barracks.

I crept to the very last room, third bed on the left, and positioned myself over the head of my tormentor. I had two tubes stuck in my track pants; water-resistant glue for his mustache and Neat for his eyebrows. I put a glob of each on a finger, capped the tubes, stuck them back into their “holsters” and as I leaned over to wipe it into place, someone I hadn’t seen, who’d been watching, suddenly yelled out “This is it guys!”

I wiped my hands on my pants and ran for the door as groggy boys woke up all over. I was in the farthest of about a dozen rooms, running down a darkened hall, knowing for certain that our plan would fail; the girls would be long-gone and I would be “Returned to Unit” without a license.

In my imagination, if not for real, I did a very fancy dive out the window, landed head first into a roll and then up into a sprint across the empty field. In fact, as soon as I made to sprint, I heard behind me, “Rebecca!” and turned to see all of the girls crouched in the shadow of the window. Waiting.

And as we retraced our steps along the shadows of the trees as fast as we could go in this non-linear fashion, my heart burst with success, not at having tormented someone who I imagined deserved it or pulling off a successful caper, but that we, the girls, had made a plan and stuck to it. That we had come together as a team, supported each other and returned to laugh about it.

So why was I surprised when the morning moms showed up, not at the cafe but at my house, at 5:45 that first morning? And every morning for a week they came at 6am to the cafe, creaking and groaning as we turn back our biological clocks and weed out all those aging cells. Why was I surprised? Why did I doubt them? Is it fear of failure? Fear of success?

Maybe it’s just part of being a girl, that we have to rediscover and reinvent ourselves.

Today americano; tomorrow aerobics.

Social Innovation Emergence

The climate for Social Innovation Emergence is all around us in Hamilton. Seems to me the climate is created by three things we have in abundance: Assets, Need and Opportunity.

As has been documented, working artists tend to flock to communities where living/working expenses are low, as they don’t tend to make a big living from the art. What is often overlooked in conversations about this is that the working artists are entrepreneurs. While their market may be elsewhere, (somewhere where cost of living is higher but people are predisposed to spend money on art) they need to be able to live and work somewhere that they can afford. This migration brings some essential diversity of thought into an area.

Once there is a critical mass of artists supporting each other, it creates and energy that is like fuel for the industry, and attracts the small-business entrepreneurs. The risk is that the cost of buy-in for the small-business entrepreneurs is lower BEFORE there is actually sufficient market for their products. This tends to attract dreamers and visionaries rather than established commercial outfits who do their market research ahead of time.

The artists-entrepreneurs and small-business entrepreneurs are part of the innovation equation that is created by the OPPORTUNITIES to be found in low-cost environments, or depressed markets. Another part of the equation are the ASSETS and this is why I single out the depressed market. Though we have such frontier energy going on here, if we were really on the frontier, we wouldn’t have so many civic buildings available for our use, well-established organizations and infrastructure, to say nothing of abandoned and gorgeous architecture. This kind of environment has a flip-side, that of having to clean up much of what was abandoned, but one man’s garbage, is another person’s opportunity.

This brings us to the NEED. There is so much need here in Hamilton, besides the need to clean up abandoned toxic industrial lands. Talk on the street is that surrounding affluent municipalities consciously don’t provide for many of the raw human needs, so people with those needs, be it special care for medial reasons, drug use, homelessness, orphanages, aging without money or low-income housing, are sent to Hamilton. This creates a situation where everyone is in the same boat, and there are too many people in the boat, and the boat is sinking – as brought to the attention of readers in the Spec’s Code Red articles.

But as it sinks, there are opportunities for us to use the assets around us to help fulfill the needs. I have never seen more people anywhere so consciously helping each other, so conscientiously sharing. Social entrepreneur David Derbyshire works to develop Hamilton’s resident-led Community Planning Teams in the neighbourhood Hubs, empowering individuals in the cultivation of community assets, encouraging us to help ourselves and each other to thrive and flourish and recognize that we are part of the asset base of the city. Hamilton’s unique Hub system is a tremendous confluence of assets, needs and opportunities that is changing the way the governments and agencies interact with the communities they serve; creating a community of social innovators.

Social Innovators come in all different stripes, most of them unaware that you might call them that. Take Gail McGinnis for instance, who in less than nine months has initiated a community garden at Gage Park, a skate-borrowing room at Scott Park Arena, a beading and crafts group to help connect residents, a growing cat-rescue program and is now assembling an artist cooperative. All this in addition to her own work in photography and jewellery making. And all of it without fan-fare or recognition. Like many others, Gail just does what she does.

I remember the skate thing. I remember being daunted by even the idea of it, but there it is; over fifty pairs of donated skates for people to borrow. That brings me to the glue that binds the Assets, Opportunities and Needs into the breeding ground for Social Innovation Emergence: collaboration. Many hands make light work. Two heads are better than one. None of us needs to go it alone.

Indeed, none of us can.

Goodbye Culture

Culture is the sum of all the little customs and habits practiced by a given group of people. I suppose we are cultivating a culture here at the cafe that is part conscious and deliberate and part organic and evolving.

Within a few visits most people become regulars and start to feel at home, invested. A funny thing happened between Henry and I today after his business meeting. One of his guests left early and as he said goodbye I looked up, since people generally do say good bye here, sort of like when they come to your house – it would be weird if they left without saying goodbye. (Well, unless they get up en-masse and storm out cause they don’t like what you said, but that’s another post!)

So as Henry’s guest said goodbye to him and I looked up and the guest was leaving and I realized that he wasn’t saying goodbye to me, which isn’t weird in this case cause he’s new, but it is unusual, and so there was Henry sitting on the sofa and me sitting at the table and both of us waving at each other even though neither of us was leaving, him waving to me on behalf of his friend and me waving back. And I guess we both realized what had happened. And it was funny.

And that’s when I realized that part of our cafe culture is that people say goodbye. And sometimes they drop in just to say hello.