Shared Leadership—What We Gain From It

11/2/21

Dear friend,

We've stumbled into a mini-series on shared leadership the last few weeks, and I am here for it. I hope you are too!

(If you've missed the last two entries in the series, you can find them here and here. In the first one, I talk about how shared leadership is about more than just bandwidth, and in the second one I talk about what we give up when we share leadership with others.)

Today I'm sharing what we gain from sharing leadership with other people and how I'm noticing it connects to what we believe about ourselves, our humanity, and our relationships with other people.

Here's what I mean by that.

I talked in an earlier article about how much I love doing things myself. I was a solo entrepreneur for many years, and it was fun for me. I got fast and quick at doing all the tech stuff and making all decisions. I liked being a one-woman operation.

But I've noticed that since I started sharing leadership, not just with my partner in programming but also with our Wisdom Council, our glow-up leaders, and our various group leaders in the Light House, that an immense amount of pressure used to sit upon my shoulders for all that one-woman work.

Now I get to say things like, "This is what I'm noticing. What do you think about it?" And someone else can offer a perspective on that thing, not to mention help me solve it.

Or I can say, "Here's something that feels like a gap in what we're doing. What might fill the gap in a way that aligns with our values and way of doing things?" And a whole bunch of ideas can emerge that show all kinds of creative ways we could fill that gap—way more than I'd ever have thought of by myself and far beyond my single scope or perspective.

Or I can say, "Oh, you want to try something like that? How cool! Go for it." And then I can watch someone else—or a whole bunch of someone elses—lean into their gifts and their joy, shining away for us all to see and to receive the light from it.

It's so much more fun to do things this way.

And it's deeply, deeply relieving.

This is where it connects to our humanity and our beliefs about ourselves and other people.

Are you someone, like me, who grew into a belief over time that things get done better if we do them ourselves? Or that other people aren't usually trustworthy, especially when it comes to the things we really care about? Or that since we have pretty good ideas ourselves, plus enjoy the creativity of finding those ideas and executing them, why would we invite anyone else to share that work? Or that we're supposed to be fully self-sufficient and able to do and be all the things any situation would call for at any time—and that doing or being less than everything to everyone and every situation is somehow a knock on us and our worthiness?

Sharing leadership is upending all those beliefs I've carried for so long.

It's healing me, you could say.

It's making me a better friend, partner, human, both within my work and beyond it.

It's deepening my belief in others and our connection to each other.

It's making me feel like a part—just one part, not the only part—of the human family, which is proving to be a really good and needed shift for my soul.

We aren't meant to be lone rangers in this life. We aren't meant to be every single thing to all the people. We belong to each other, even if this world's dominant ways would have us believe otherwise. And we add to each other's gifts, making a greater whole.

Seriously, the tapestry that's created when we all share our gifts with the whole is nothing short of gorgeous.

It's healing to be in spaces that help us experience and live deeper into this truth. It's the kind of humans we're meant to be and the kind of world we're meant to live in.

I want more of that for all of us. Do you?

Yours in contemplative light,
Christianne