Leadership is truth telling

By many standards, I’ve achieved a lot of “success” and “acceptability” in my time on Earth. So have you.

But here’s my dark secret: After achieving “success” and “acceptability,” I realized that much of my success stems from a pattern of behavior and achievement that is unsustainable at best and detrimental to myself and the world, at worst. I  grew up to be a very “nice” lady and to not rock the boat or tell other people they’ve got spinach in their teeth.

Turns out, being “nice” doesn’t change the world, and good leadership simply means you are comfortable telling people when they have spinach in their teeth, just at a larger scale. And it also means people feel comfortable telling you when you have spinach in your teeth.

Very frankly, society wants us to be nice and focused on personal achievement so we won’t look up, disturb the peace, or take direct, kind, and liberatory action. I was, in this way, a very nice agent of the oppressor.

Revolutionary leadership is truth telling. The truth will set us free.

I am committed to leadership that interrupts and changes the world. And I’ve learned that failure is required to do that. And most humans (which, despite the belief of some, leaders are in fact mere humans) are afraid of failure. Most diverse leaders aren’t given the opportunity to fail and recover.

“We see this time and time again: White men who fail upward while people of color and women are trying so desperately to just prove their worth and working twice as hard.” —Ijeoma Oluo. 

In the time since I joined forces with Hello Seven in 2018, I have had a lot of failures. And, we have also had a lot of big wins. 

Notice how I said the failures are mine to own, while the wins are the wins of the collective?

To be a great leader, you must confront who you are, wholly. And understand that there are parts of your leadership that need work and are contributing to the failures of your team. And that’s why the failures are yours to own, as a leader.

We can’t simply confront the parts of ourselves that society has rewarded us for, but also the parts of ourselves that we haven’t as willingly expressed or acknowledged. Habits or patterns that we picked up over the years that need to be questioned and inspected and reexamined through a different lens than the one we’ve been conditioned to see ourselves, and the world, through.

Years ago, I joined a leadership program called “Leading Great Teams.” On our first call, we introduced ourselves and why we had chosen to participate in the program. It was a small group, about 20 of us, from an array of industries. There were leaders from small businesses I’d never heard of and leaders from bigger names I had heard of, like Zoom and Spotify. 

As we went around the virtual room, I heard the same things echoed from leader to leader:

“I don’t want to negatively impact my team.”

“I don’t know how to get my team working on the right things.”

“I don’t want to get it wrong, be hated, and be a bad leader.”

I found great comfort in the fact that I was not alone. The truth is, many are thrust into leadership before they’re ready. Mostly because we will never be ready. We are continually evolving, learning new things, and growing as human beings.

To continue evolving, we have to confront who we are.

In summary, friend, to become an aligned leader, you must first align with yourself. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

And remember, most of the people who are good are not as good as we think, and most of the people who are bad are not as bad as we think.

The goal is not to be a good leader or a bad leader. To be liked or unliked. The goal is to be truthful.

xo,

brittany