A leadership journey - 5 lessons learned
It’s been a year. Yikes! 52 weeks as Chief Executive of Ākina. I remember this date because it coincides with my youngest child’s birthday. Perhaps I was subconsciously wanting another as my youngest grew, although you wouldn’t call Ākina 2021 a young child - instead a passionate, fiery and hopeful teenager, with conviction that she can make the world a better place.
On October 11, 2021 we started our journey of many steps together. Today, I wanted to stop and reflect, and share 5 things I have learned:
1. We do not know what is possible
We don’t know what is possible. Stop and chew on those words for a minute. They are powerful.
There are some constants around us: change, death and taxes. In addition we live in a world with constraints, but we don’t know what is coming in the future, and we do not know what is possible.
This has taught me to not dismiss an early idea as impossible, to be comfortable with not having all the answers, and that anything could be possible.
We don’t know.
2. Be You - trust yourself
My visions of successful business people, informed by LA Law and Ally McBeal, included grey suits with pencil skirts, a cell phone stuck to the ear, and an office with glass walls. “Success” involved long hours, lots of adrenaline and dinner out of those funky takeaway noodle boxes we don’t see so much in New Zealand.
Setting out as CE, I didn’t have a grey suit and definitely not my own office. I decided that I needed to be much better informed if I was going to be a chief executive, and began spending hours pouring through Radio New Zealand, NZ Herald and trying to soak up the many expert reports being waved around on LinkedIn pages of well informed types.
It was kinda exhausting, and took up all my spare time. The best advice I received was stunningly simple.
Be you.
“What the heck does that even mean?” I thought. In essence it means trust yourself. Feel confident in your decision-making, be yourself and trust yourself. This part of the journey has been liberating.
3. What is leadership?
The first year of leading Ākina has involved finding my own answer to that question, and I am certainly still on that journey. What I have learned so far is that leadership is about collaboration, facilitation and listening. I am a big fan of slowing down to speed up, and of looking backwards to inform the future path.
Lifting up others to perform at their best, while working towards a shared goal in a supportive environment is a privilege and a responsibility.
4. You can’t pour from an empty cup
This has been an important lesson from my 4 ½ years at Ākina. It’s great to be passionate about what you do, but it cannot consume you. I can see that I have tinkered on the edge of burn out a few times in recent years. There have been moments of struggling to shift the dial by just working that much harder - or longer - while juggling preschoolers, school & community commitments, the pandemic, house moves and other side hustles in directorships and governance.
This lesson feels very cliche, however when the going gets tough it is an important reminder to me that grinding out more emails is not the answer. Getting outside into nature is much more like it.
5. Have fun
I have learned this year that one of my personal life values is having fun. I am in the privileged position to have my physiological and safety needs met, and in the current climate it has been somewhat confronting to accept that having fun is important to me. I worried that this desire for fun meant I was somehow less committed to the system-change the world so desperately needs, and I was minimising the wicked problems the world is facing. What this internal narrative ignored was that I too am human, full of curiosity, ideas and yes, a sense of fun.
I am fortunate enough to have the resources and opportunities to think about what having fun means to me and actively seeking it out. Recognising this has felt expansive and motivating. With thanks to those who come along for the ride!