Thursday, 13 May 2010

Taking JCI to the next step - Horizontal leadership - leading beyond authority

In this post I write about what we need to do to take JCI London to the next step, make us a player in the London civic space, and also a bit about personal ambitions and impact.

JCI London has a cooperation with Common Purpose where we organise a joint event about once a year. Last year's was on passion and this year's event will be on "your leading edge". Common Purpose and JCI have a lot in common, though Common Purpose is a professional organisation which allows for a whole other level of events, the passion and purpose behind the organisations are much the same, and the people are all engaged, passionate and interesting, so we all get along brilliantly.

I've recently started one of Common Purpose's programs, International Navigator together with my Marketing Director Evren. So far we've done one full day seminar and one half day learning session. The full day seminar was on leadership, power and leading beyond authority and it really got me thinking, challenging my concept of both power and authority. The half day learning session was on passion, we also worked through some individual leadership challenges (and not surprisingly I chose one JCI London is facing right now), but I'll write more about that later as it deserves its own post.


So what is leading beyond authority?
Leading beyond authority is a concept developed by Julia Middleton, the founder and CEO of Common Purpose, and expanded on in her book Beyond Authority: Leadership in a Changing World

In short - you have your inner circle, where authority is asserted by formal positions, structures or hierarchies. For me - I'm Director in my company, I'm President in JCI London, and both those positions give me a formal right to authority and power in those inner circles. In my company its the people I manage, and in JCI its my directors and council (though yeah you can debate how much actual power I have over my directors ;) ).

The second circle is the wider company, and in JCI its our members and partners. I have some notion of authority by being the JCI President, but I have no formal authority over anyone.  My position is recognized, but does not necessarily imply any direct authority.

The third and final circle is the wider community or civic space where we have no formal authority. I'm not recognised neither as JCI President nor as Director in my company. If I want to lead in this circle I have to do so based on personality, impact and achievements in that circle. Achievements and authority from one circle is not directly transferable from once circle to the next.

For each person and each organisation these circles are different, but overlap. For example one of our partners would have their inner circle in our second circle, while our inner circle would be part of their second circle, etc.

How do we move our authority into the third circle? 
I believe JCI definitively deserves to be more visible in the third circle, have more authority. I don't mean the authority or power to boss people around, I mean presence, visibility and recognition. I want the newspapers to call us if they need a quote from a young leader, I want the CEOs of companies to recognize that involvement with JCI adds value to a CV, I want the HR departments to encourage their employees to become engaged with JCI, and I want our programs and projects to be recognized.

We need to be more visible, have a clearer branding strategy (or rather...have a branding strategy in the first place), a fresh profile, quality events and also flag ship events that extend beyond our members. It all sounds so easy....after speaking with people who've never heard of JCI I've come to realize that there's no way we can expand outwards unless we know who we are and can explain this to people in less than an hour, so branding - knowing who we are, is the first step.

Horizontal careers
All this have also inspired me to look at my career and my goals and how I personally can move horizontally. I realised that I want to stop focusing on the upward career ladder, but rather focus on how I can expand my career sideways. Does this mean I don't want to move upwards in JCI UK? Not really, but that is because (and I might be big-headed in this) I think the organisation needs me to get more involved, but it does mean that if I had thought these thoughts last year I'd probably stayed on as business director and worked on creating more outwards impact in that role. 

This lead me to read a bit on portfolio careers (yes yes a book review is in the making). Portfolio careers are careers where people have more than one job, often jobs that compliment each other, jobs that contribute to our portfolio of skills. Jobs that make us feel more like a whole person, drawing on more than one skill set and more than one type of challenges. I want one of those!

Thinking about it, I've come to realize I  have a portfolio career. I have my day job, I write for Malvikbladet, and I'm the President of JCI where in addition to doing the management I also give quite a bit of training. Not all of the jobs making up a portfolio career need to be paid jobs, for example a trustee ship can be part of a portfolio career, and I definitively think JCI is part of my career, though unpaid. What do I want to do more of? More training, more speaking, more writing, maybe also find a trustee position somewhere.


So my goal for this year and the next two years is to move JCI London and JCI UK outwards into the civic space. I want us to be visible, to be a player, to be counted with and on. It will take time, but we need to start now. This year my focus is to create a brand for us, a profile, and make our members proud of who we are and what we stand for. Building on this we'll take the organisation outwards, forwards and upwards. yay!


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