Sparked by Jonathan Fields

Author:Jonathan Fields
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2021-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Service, not dominance.

Pam Slim (Warrior/Advisor) is one of the most genuine, kind, open, honest, fair, wise, and decent humans you could ever know. She’s a lifelong gatherer of people and catalyst for collective action. Pam is also the founder of K’é, “a physical space in downtown Mesa, Arizona, that hosts the The Main Street Learning Lab, a community-based leadership development space that supports and strengthens the work of diverse entrepreneurs—especially entrepreneurs of color and their allies.” The word K’é is a Diné (Navajo) word that translates roughly to “system of kinship,” or the feeling of being deeply connected to a community. Pam was led toward this name because it spoke to what she wanted to create, and also reflected the culture of her husband and children and the central role it plays in their family and life.

While Pam has devoted much of her life to advocacy, her true superpower and deeper impulse is to build intentional community, and to guide members toward constructive, equitable outcomes in a grounded, highly collaborative, yet immensely powerful and respect-fueled way. Pam has a very strong sense of her role in relation to any community she helps catalyze, especially when it comes to relative power. Instead of being front and center, her approach to gathering and leading is more focused on creating the space, offering the invitation, then supporting those from within the community as they step into leadership and work toward specific outcomes.

Leadership, in her eyes, is having the courage to say things that need to be said and creating models that are going to be useful, help people, and, critically, not cause harm or perpetuate models of dominance. “It’s my job to be increasing your leadership capacity to make you better, stronger, more capable in what it is that you’re doing,” she shared. “So you trust your own judgment more, so that you have more discernment, and not so that you’re blindly following something that I would say.” Organizing and leading, in Pam’s experiences, is never about positioning yourself as being stronger, better, wiser, or more powerful, it’s about helping people to develop their own leadership capacity, supporting them where you can, then getting out of the way.

This is an important insight. Part of the often hyper-masculine, extroverted, and aggressive mythology around leadership comes with a certain expectation around the assumption of superiority and dominance. It alludes to—or outright demands—that you lead from a pedestal, assuming you’re better, smarter, more powerful or capable than those you seek to gather and lead. While this may “work” as a short-term mechanism to rally action, it quickly collapses under the weight of disrespect, repression, disenfranchisement, disaffection, and, inevitably, contempt. It’s not only ineffective, it is destructive to those who seek to lead, to the community, to the vision, and to the larger third-party culture that might well have benefited from a more evenhanded, humility-meets-dignity, service-driven approach. And, to you, because it stops you from being able to effectively do the thing you’re here to do.

Dominance-driven leadership is, in no small part, a dysfunctional manifestation of super-ego-run-rampant.

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