Power lab learning
3Leadership
Our learning journey brought together patterns and principles to create a power-sensitive leadership journey.
Leadership and organisational integrity insights
Power lab 3
Aims and assumptions
We are not suggesting that integrity should be top down, primarily shaped by boards and senior leaders. Rather, we see their engagement as essential because they hold strategic oversight of an organisation’s purpose, people and practices and are accountable for organisational integrity.
Our assumptions at the start of the Lab 3 were:
- Leaders must seek to understand the potential harm from both internal and external ways of working
- A board’s composite skills should include the ability to understand power and inequality
- Power-sensitive leadership can enable different voices and perspectives to thrive and inform change.
What is ‘leadership’?
We support a wide notion of leadership, recognising that leadership can be found across organisational structures. However, for the purpose of understanding how formal power can undermine or enable organisational integrity, we have chosen to explore the roles of boards and executives who have the most formal power.
Activities
The activities for exploring leadership were less propositional than in the earlier labs. Rather than sharing a proposed definition of power-sensitive leadership, Lab 3 featured story circles, action learning sets and a café for open and co-creative discussion, relying on the skills and experience of participants, so they supported each other’s learning. After each activity, participants were invited to add patterns and principles relating to power sensitive leadership to a collective wall of learning.
Power-senstive leadership
What we learned
1Power-sensitive leadership is essential for organisational integrity
From the Reveal and Imagine exercises, it was clear that to effect transformational change, leaders need to understand how systemic power context manifests in their organisation and centre integrity within its purpose, people and practices.
Unless trustees and executives understand and exercise power-sensitive leadership, they risk undermining rather than facilitating organisational integrity. This is because most of the formal power sits with them.
2 Power-sensitive leadership requires self-awareness & development
Leadership experiences, whether positive or negative, significantly shape a leader’s default approaches. This may mean unlearning existing patterns and assumptions before developing new strategies to improve integrity.
Leaders face the delicate task of being open to learning while deepening self-awareness. This involves embracing both vulnerability and confidence – all while spearheading organisational change. Navigating this path can be challenging.
Leaning into discomfort
Acknowledging cognitive dissonance is crucial. A self-aware leader actively engages with discomfort, examining her/his internal defensiveness and fragility.
3 Integrity requires representation of and strategic input from communities served and people with lived experience
Lived experience of inequality is often under-represented on most boards, and there is rarely any meaningful representation from communities served. It is crucial that strategic decisions increasingly involve input and perspectives from these groups.
We recognised the need to examine the barriers to participate at board and senior levels. The power lens should help reveal these, as well as the foundational steps organisations can take to remove them.
4 Power sensitive leadership journey for transformative change
Toward the end of the lab, we clustered the emerging themes from the patterns and principles posters.
We found that they naturally combined with the transformative power framework to form a leadership journey for cultivating transformative power for integrity.
The journey starts with the essential work of knowing oneself. From there we can build power with people and organisations to enable transformative change – real change for everyone.
Post lab comments & survey
Participant views
60% of post-lab survey respondents agreed that boards should engage in the Power Lab and 88% agreed that executive roles should engage.
As part of the lab, we started to map a leadership journey. Participants indicated that it would be helpful if we could signpost to useful resources.
I agree about bringing together trustees, senior executives and practitioner roles.
Beyond the lab
Developing our learning
We will explore short- and long-term options to enable increased board engagement and share our recommendations. Re-evaluating board competencies with more focus on leadership styles, lived and learned experiences, could be a key starting point.
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Activity
Reveal how power undermines integrity
We created this activity to reveal how power can undermine integrity at work.
Three participant groups were each allocated a structural power of societal inequality – patriarchy, structural racism or extractive capitalism – to consider while working through questions relating to the four dimensions of the power lens.
Groups worked through the questions in order, from blue to pink, writing answers on post-it notes of the relevant colour.
We started with the systemic context to so that people think about root causes from the onset. This also helped depersonalise the exercise.
The reveal questions
Grouping the post-its on the wall provided a useful representation of how power is experienced within an organisation
Activity
Imagine how power can enable organisational integrity
This helped participants visualise what an organisation would look like transformed: living its aim of organisational integrity.
We discussed how power can transformed from negative to positive through policy, beliefs and behaviours. Since this transformed organisation would still operate within a wider context of structural inequality, we then applied the power lens. The three participant groups of patriarchy, extractive capitalism and structured racism discussed what beliefs and behaviours within a transformed organisation could look like. As with the Reveal activity, we grouped post-its with examples on the wall.
The activity then draws on the four dimensions of the transformative power framework – power within, power with, power to and power for – to imagine an organisation that embodies integrity by harnessing positive power.
Finally, we discussed together what was needed to facilitate change: how formal rules could help organisations realise this vision.
