Leadership: Who Are We Actually Serving?

I am bloody passionate about community leadership.

Probably more now than I have ever been.

The more I travel around this country, sit in small communities, talk with farmers, volunteers, local leaders, people recovering from disaster and people simply trying to make their patch of Australia a little better, the more convinced I become that some of our strongest solutions are going to come from the ground up, not the top down.

That doesn't mean governments don't have a responsibility. They absolutely bloody do. It doesn't mean we stop advocating for funding, services, infrastructure, policy change or better support, because all of those things matter.

But I am a huge believer in community enabled recovery and grassroots leadership because I have seen what happens when people stop waiting for somebody further up the chain to come and fix everything and start asking, What have we got here? Who have we got here? What can we do together?

There is enormous strength in that.

It isn't about letting governments off the hook. It is about recognising the capacity that already exists inside communities and then backing it, supporting it and getting out of its way occasionally.

Some of the best leadership I have witnessed around Australia doesn't come with a title. It doesn't have a strategic plan sitting underneath it and it certainly doesn't always come from the person with their name on the letterhead.

It happens in halls, sheds, pubs, sporting clubs, around kitchen tables, on roadsides and leaning across the tray of a ute.

People see something that needs doing and they get on with it.

They know their community, they know who is struggling, they know who won't walk through the door of a service and they often know who hasn't been seen for a while.

That is community leadership to me.

But there is something else I have been noticing as I travel, and to be completely truthful it has been frustrating the hell out of me at times.

I am seeing a very real difference between what I would describe as altruistic leadership and egoistic leadership, and I reckon that difference matters because one has the ability to pull communities together while the other, whether intentionally or not, can slowly pull them apart.

Altruistic leadership, as I understand it, is leadership driven predominantly by service. The question being asked is not, What do I get out of this? but rather, What do the people around me need and how can I help us move towards that?

It doesn't mean being a pushover and it certainly doesn't mean agreeing with everybody.

Good leaders still have hard conversations. They make unpopular decisions, challenge behaviour, stand their ground and sometimes have to tell people things they don't want to hear, but underneath all of that there is a purpose bigger than their own recognition or position.

Egoistic leadership is different.

That is when leadership starts becoming more about the leader than the people they supposedly serve. Recognition, control, influence, reputation, status, being right, being seen as the person who saved the day or needing everyone to know how much you have contributed slowly becomes more important than the collective outcome.

And here's where it gets complicated. Egoistic leadership doesn't always look selfish from the outside. Sometimes it looks incredibly generous.

A person can give enormous amounts of time, energy or even money and still have ego driving some of that behaviour. The real test can come when somebody else gets the credit, when another idea is chosen, when they aren't included in the photo, when people stop needing them or when somebody dares to disagree.

That is often when you get a glimpse of what is really driving the leadership.

I've also seen these behaviours on every side of difficult situations, including among people who have genuinely suffered and among people who have stepped forward genuinely wanting to help.

That is probably one of the harder things to talk about.

Being a victim of something doesn't automatically mean every behaviour that follows is healthy or helpful, just as being a giver, volunteer, advocate, community leader or organisation doesn't automatically make everything you do altruistic.

We are human.

We all carry ego.

Me included.

We all like being appreciated, we all like knowing that what we do matters and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but trouble starts when needing that recognition begins directing the decisions we make.

I have watched hurt become identity.

I have watched helping become identity.

I've seen people become so attached to being the person who was wronged, or the person who came to everyone's rescue, that moving forward almost becomes threatening because moving forward might mean losing the role they have created for themselves.

And I think leadership exhaustion plays into this as well.

We don't talk enough about how extremely tiring community leadership can be.

In a small community particularly, you can be wearing ten hats at once. You might be on the CFA, the hall committee, the footy club, a recovery group, the school council and helping your neighbour down the road, while at the same time trying to run a business, keep a farm going, support your family and deal with whatever is happening in your own life.

Then add disaster.

Add renewable energy developments dividing opinion.

Add uncertainty around services.

Add funding applications, community meetings, government consultations, paperwork, media, Facebook arguments and people constantly ringing you because somehow you became the person who knows what is going on.

Of course leaders become exhausted.

Of course they get frustrated.

Of course there are days when they are angry, fed up and wondering why they bloody bothered.

We need to acknowledge that rather than expecting community leaders to somehow be bulletproof.

But exhaustion cannot become our identity either.

Burnout doesn't give us permission to treat people badly forever. Being under pressure doesn't mean every criticism is an attack and having carried a community through something difficult doesn't mean we own that community afterwards.

Sometimes good leadership actually means recognising when we are cooked.

It means handing something over, asking for help, letting somebody else lead for a while or admitting that maybe our judgement isn't as clear as it once was because we have simply been carrying too much for too long.

There is no shame in that.

In fact, I reckon that takes enormous leadership.

What concerns me is when exhaustion, hurt, recognition and ego all start mixing together, because that is when we can begin building walls while telling ourselves we are protecting the community.

Suddenly it becomes my community, my project, my recovery, my organisation, my idea, my people, my way.

And once we get there, listening becomes pretty bloody difficult.

We start deciding that anyone who questions us must be against us.

We stop being curious about why somebody holds a different view and start looking for reasons to discredit them instead.

I've seen this playing out around disaster recovery and I've seen it around renewable energy developments. I've seen it between farmers and towns, between neighbours and families, between different communities and between people who only months earlier would have stood shoulder to shoulder helping one another.

Then we throw council politics into the mix, state and federal politics, funding decisions, advocacy groups and social media, and suddenly an issue that desperately needed understanding becomes another battleground.

Metropolitan versus rural.

Farmer versus government.

Neighbour versus neighbour.

Those who lost everything versus those who didn't.

People who want development versus those who oppose it.

Long-term locals versus newcomers.

Council versus community.

One political party against another.

We seem to be getting incredibly good at finding lines to draw between people.

And I worry about where that leads us.

Because the challenges facing rural, regional and remote Australia are big enough already without us constantly creating new enemies amongst ourselves.

Disaster recovery is a good example.

Put two people from the same road through exactly the same fire and six months later their recovery can look completely different.

One might have lost their house. Another might still have their house but lost livestock, fences, income and their sense of safety. Somebody else may have escaped physical damage altogether but watched neighbours leave, their community change and the connections they relied on disappear.

Whose experience is more legitimate?

It is the wrong question.

They're different.

That is exactly why leadership needs to create room for difference rather than deciding there is one story, one voice or one version of what a community needs.

The same applies to renewable energy.

A farmer who has worked the same land for generations and is worried about what development means for their property, landscape, community or future is looking at the issue through a very different lens to somebody working towards national energy targets.

That doesn't automatically make one person backward and the other person uncaring.

They are standing in different places looking at an incredibly complicated issue.

Leadership should help those people understand each other.

Instead, too often, we choose sides and start throwing rocks.

The same thing happens with the metropolitan-rural divide.

I hear country people say, They don't understand us down there.

And sometimes they don't.

But I also think we have to be careful that our frustration at not being understood doesn't turn into an unwillingness to understand anybody else.

If we demand that someone walk in our shoes, surely leadership requires us to at least try walking in theirs as well.

That doesn't mean abandoning what you believe.

It means trying to understand why they believe what they believe before deciding they are the enemy.

Somewhere along the way politics seems to have crept into nearly everything. I'm not simply talking Liberal, Labor, Nationals, Greens or independents either.

Community politics.

Family politics.

Committee politics.

Organisational politics.

Who got invited.

Who didn't.

Who got funding.

Who missed out.

Who got thanked.

Who wasn't mentioned.

Who spoke to the minister.

Whose idea it originally was.

Who got their picture in the paper.

Who has the biggest Facebook following.

Who is allowed to speak on behalf of the community.

It can sound petty written down like that, but this stuff genuinely damages communities.

Little cracks become bigger ones and before long people who could be working together are spending more energy fighting each other than dealing with the problem that brought them together in the first place.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to four pretty simple things.

Unity, kindness, connection and understanding.

They might sound like soft words in a conversation about leadership, but I don't think there is anything particularly soft about them.

Unity isn't everybody agreeing.

I don't want that.

A healthy community should have different opinions. It should have people who question decisions, challenge authority and bring different experiences to the conversation.

Unity is being able to disagree and still recognise that we belong to something together.

Kindness doesn't mean avoiding difficult conversations or allowing poor behaviour to continue. Sometimes kindness is actually being prepared to have the hard conversation rather than talking behind someone's back for the next five years.

Connection doesn't mean everybody has to be best mates. It means keeping relationships intact enough that when the next fire, flood, drought or difficult day arrives, we can still stand alongside one another.

And understanding doesn't mean agreement.

That one is important.

I can understand why you believe something without agreeing with you.

You can understand my experience without making it your experience.

We seem to have lost a little bit of that.

The ability to sit in the uncomfortable middle.

Maybe because outrage is easier.

Outrage gets attention. Division gets engagement. Certainty sounds powerful and declaring somebody else the villain saves us from having to examine our own behaviour.

Understanding takes longer.

It requires listening.

Proper listening.

Not sitting there waiting for the other person to shut up so we can tell them why they're wrong.

It takes courage to sit with somebody whose opinion makes you uncomfortable and genuinely ask, How did you get there?

It takes courage to admit that you don't know everything.

It takes courage to give somebody else credit, particularly when you've done a lot of the heavy lifting.

It takes courage to let new leaders emerge.

And sometimes the greatest sign of leadership is realising that the community doesn't need you at the centre of everything anymore.

That is something I think about a lot in community enabled recovery.

If good community leadership works, the community should eventually need the leader less, not more.

We should be building capacity around ourselves, opening doors, sharing knowledge, bringing new people in and making sure that when we eventually step away there are ten people capable of continuing the work rather than a giant hole where one person used to be.

Leadership shouldn't make people dependent on us.

It should help people discover what they are capable of themselves.

And I have seen extraordinary examples of that all around Australia.

Usually it isn't the loudest person in the room.

It is the bloke who quietly checks on three neighbours after a rough week and never puts it on Facebook.

It's the woman who has been volunteering for twenty years and somehow always notices the person standing by themselves.

It's the farmer who helps the neighbour he has argued with for years because at that particular moment the argument doesn't bloody matter.

It's the person who knows who to call and uses that relationship to open a door for somebody else without needing anyone to know they did it.

It's the committee member who asks, Who isn't in this room and should be?

It's the person who can say, That wasn't my idea, it was theirs.

Those people give me enormous hope because I reckon we need that sort of leadership now more than ever.

I don't think Australia needs another generation of heroes standing on pedestals telling everyone they have the answer.

We need connectors.

We need listeners.

We need people prepared to bring others into the conversation instead of controlling the conversation.

We need leaders who can hold strong opinions without losing their humanity towards somebody who holds another one.

We need people who understand that leadership is not ownership and that service is not sacrifice without limits.

Look after yourself. Share the load. Take a break when you're exhausted. Get pissed off occasionally because you're human.

Just don't build your identity around being exhausted, being needed, being the victim, being the saviour or being the only person capable of fixing things.

Because leadership was never supposed to be about us.

The older I get and the more communities I spend time in, the more I believe our way forward isn't going to be found through more division.

It will be found in our ability to reconnect.

To be curious again.

To listen.

To be kind without being weak and strong without needing to dominate.

To recognise the humanity in the person standing on the other side of the argument.

And to build from the grassroots while still demanding that the systems above us do their bloody job.

Maybe every one of us who occupies some form of leadership needs to ask ourselves one uncomfortable question every now and then.

Who am I actually serving here?

The community?

The outcome?

The people who don't have a voice?

Or somewhere along the journey has this started becoming about me?

I don't think any of us gets that right all the time. I certainly don't.

But perhaps being prepared to ask the question, and being brave enough to listen to the answer, is a pretty good place for leadership to start.