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Are you doing leadership? Do you call yourself a leader? Part I

This week I participated in a Faculty Leadership Institute at school that has my brain kind of spinning. There are many things I want to write about but I am particularly grappling with the title questions right now. Basically, I know that I am "doing leadership" - for most of my life, I have always done work that others would call leadership, like I was in student government in high school and college, I always held leadership positions in other student organizations, I've been on Boards of professional associations, I've chaired committees, etc. And currently, I'm not only the CTL Director but a University Senator and the chair of one of the more "powerful" Senate committees. And I know I'm pretty darn effective at all that work.

But a few years ago, when a colleague first referred to me as a 'faculty leader', I had an almost visceral negative reaction and immediately wanted to disagree with him. And in the last couple weeks, I have been in a few different situations (including this Leadership Institute) where I have been asked to think of myself as a leader and I feel a HUGE resistance to the label.

As I have started to really examine why, there are three aspects of my resistance that I think I can identify. One is that it feels arrogant, presumptuous. Leaders are Important People, People who Get Things Done and, often, they are Above Others, so some part of me feels like it would be bragging to call myself a leader - and nice people don't brag. That's my judgmental nature coming out but I do know that feeling comes from values instilled in me since I was pretty young. So when I dig into that a little deeper, I also find myself wondering: is it maybe that I think nice girls don't brag? Or that nice Japanese-American girls don't brag? I don't typically bring gender or race into these sort of discussions but I can't help but wonder because a) I'm pretty sure that girls are more likely than boys to be told that it is somehow unbecoming to brag and b) I suspect that Japanese-American parents are more likely than white parents to tell their children not to call attention to themselves.

Being a Japanese-American woman is definitely related to the second aspect of my resistance that I can identify, which is that when someone uses the label "leader", the mental image I see is more likely than not a white man. That is, when someone talks about "leaders", I picture political leaders (who are mostly white men), or business leaders (who are mostly white men) or even academic leaders (who are mostly white men, certainly in economics anyway). So in my mind's eye, "leader" conjures up "white man" and that sure ain't me.

The third aspect of my resistance comes from a very different place and that is a reluctance to accept the responsibility that I feel comes with calling myself a leader. Yes, leaders are People who Get Things Done - which means that if I call myself a leader, I will then be expected to Get Things Done. From one perspective, that makes no sense because I am already doing the work (I do, in fact, Get Things Done) so why should it bother me to claim the label? But there is a difference between doing the work and being expected to do the work - the latter carries the possibility of not meeting those expectations and that's scary / stressful. It also creates a sense of obligation that I just really don't want, even if I have every confidence I can meet that obligation.

In Part II, I'll share how my thinking is evolving to address each of these but I'm curious whether others feel this same resistance and if so, does it come from similar places? Have you found ways to overcome it?

Comments

  1. Jennifer - Thank you for sharing, and for being so open! I'm looking forward to Part II.

    ReplyDelete

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