Showing the Way: On Leadership and Leaders in Child and Youth Care

I thought I might lead off this new year (well, new year in my context, anyway) with a few words about leadership, given that it was a popular discussion topic at the end of last year. Now, I have to confess, after reading all the postings, and a few fine articles that were sent along by readers, and even “thinking” about it (I hate it when I have to resort to such desperate measures), I still don’t really know what leadership is, except it seems to be somehow connected to “showing the way”. I guess like most people, I think I recognise it when I see it.

Sometimes it is leadership in the field, and sometimes it is leadership in a program or a specific situation. Like, well, take Henry Maier for example. He was clear, determined, real, and engaging. He got people interested in what he had to say about developmental care, rhythmicity and the importance of the minutia of everyday life – and he did it by how he was who he was. For an example of “how he was who he was” see this wonderful example of a teaching session with Henry fortunately saved by the University of Washington:

http://depts.washington.edu/sswmedia/1987_henry_maier

Henry was good at being with others the way he thought they should be with kids. That’s a kind of leadership, is it not?

But like I said, sometimes leadership is situational. I remember one time being in a program and watching a student on placement interact with a young boy – she treated him as if he was 11, which he was, while we had all been treating him as if he was 14 or 15 like the rest of the kids in the program. This young student “showed us the way” (even though that wasn’t her intention) and for that moment provided leadership for us in how to be with this young lad. Leadership takes many forms, and is not always supplied by the officially designated leader.

I knew a Child and Youth Care team once in which everyone was a leader at one point or another – when discussing one area, one person would lead, when discussing another, another person would lead. When there was a crisis of one nature, one person would provide leadership; with a different type of crisis it would be a different staff. The team lead the team; the “supervisor” was a facilitator of this process, but in many ways was not the real leader. I think it was Theodore Roosevelt who said that the best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what needs doing, and enough self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

I also have met teams where there is no leadership at all, it seems. Those are sad places indeed. Usually not much good happens for the kids when leadership is absent. The kids end up leading themselves. The staff ends up following them around and chaos reigns supreme.

Leadership can also be thought of in terms of the field as a whole, of course. Here in North America, as Kiaras Gharabaghi noted in last months CYC-Online , ours is a fairly passive field which seems to be unfolding without any distinct sense of national leadership. In other countries, like South Africa, dynamic and determined leadership is forging new territory and encouraging direction in the development of the field. But here we don’t really seem to be doing much nationally and that is a shame, because without some form of leadership, the field is destined for eventual oblivion. While we find some leadership in specific aspects of the field (e.g., standards for certification) and while there are some people who provide leadership – almost incidentally – through the work that they are engaged in, I have no overall sense of leadership as in a group that is organised in moving the field forward. Perhaps that is because here, unlike some other countries, National Conferences are not used to move the field in a specific direction.

Yet, on the other hand, in terms of service developments, expanding roles and contexts and in terms of educating the practitioners of the future, we seem to be doing quite well. But in a way, this reflection on my experience of leadership in Canada is neither here nor there is it because this is CYC-Net and it is an international forum. So, instead of being downhearted about “what’s going on at home” I can be excited by what I see in other parts of the world, like those few I mentioned previously.

Here are a few of the things I believe about leaders:

They believe in what they are doing, and through their way of doing it, they encourage others to follow their example, their ideas or their inspiration.
They can be good or bad.
They can lead others to create or destroy.
They can inspire loyalty or fear.
They come in all shapes and sizes.
They are not always at the front of the pack.

Thomas Paine is reputed to have said “lead, follow or get out of the way”. Seems to me, a real leader does all three. After all, in the end, leadership is a relational issue and in relational practice, we be as we need to be, go where we need to go. One can show the way from behind as easily as from the front.

Thom