In this series, authors will explore how individuals and communities imagine new ways to lead change, new mindsets to approach complex issues and new strategies to align leadership theory and practice. We will share examples of how local leaders address global issues, highlighting leadership perspectives and strategic change actions.
In this essay, leadership communication doctoral student and graduate research assistant Keyhan Shams, discusses leadership strategies emerging from his experiences as an urban planner and leadership coach in Iran.
In May 2019, I started a job as a leadership coach for local social change organizations in slums and informal settlements in the southeast of Iran. The 16 targeted communities were highly stuck in wicked problems like poverty, illiteracy, crime, addiction, and environmental pollution. Getting rid of the inappropriate dependency on officials and government and involving people in participatory slum upgrading were our main goal and objective in our Asset Based Community Development approach. When I entered the area, there were 12 Community Based Offices (CBOs) already established, with 72 facilitators, to work as social change organizations and I was supposed to add four more as well as train the facilitators, coach them, and monitor and evaluate their community-based projects. Working nearly two years in those areas, I came up with different strategies for coaching that I had never had any idea of before as an urban planner who would always sit in his office and plan for cities.
Stepping into the field
The entrance into the field confounded me. In the first meeting with 16 CBOs’ facilitators, I looked at their faces one by one while the former coach was introducing me to them. What I saw in their faces was a combination of fear and hope. Some of them were smiling at me with trembling fingers and some avoiding eye contact. They had been hired from the local communities to act as change agents and engage people in a participatory slum upgrading process. However, what was formed in my mind at the first glance had the least similarity to leaders with traditional competencies. They were scared, unconfident, and nervous. I did not perceive them as leaders, in the traditional sense.
Soon I discovered the reason for this anxiety. Observing their relationships with the former coach during that ten day visit, I realized that they had been instructed for one year in an individualistic top-down approach. When the former coach passed the works to me and left, one of the facilitators whispered in my ears, “Please tell me what to do, I don’t want to be fired!” I heard this sentence many times during the first visit.
However, these non-leaders had novel capacities that they had not been trained for. Before entering the communities, all the facilitators were trained. They were educated experts, having at least a bachelor’s degree in law, urban planning, social work, sociology, or economics. Yet, they had problem using their facilitation tools, skills, and academic knowledge in the communities. Nevertheless, many of them had close connections with people, they could instinctively communicate with people and attract them to the office. Auspiciously, people had found them trustable even though that hardly culminated in collaboration. Despite the initial signals, this came promising to me.
Listen! You are not “the” leader
I realized something in myself, I hated that top-down approach, and I didn’t like that kind of begging I heard from the facilitators! I didn’t know what kind of leader I was at that time, but I knew that I was not a classical leader. I thought a lot about disrupting the previous approach to coaching. Not because I would say it was wrong or I was familiar with a new approach to leadership, but I personally felt like I needed to listen and learn more than train and give speeches.
I started with listening. In the next site visit, I decided to allocate six hours to each CBO (18 hours per day) one hour for each facilitator – just listening. This was my first experience in coaching, and I didn’t know how to train them. Therefore, I started only with listening and tried to correspond their moral, emotional, and relational actions and stories with what I learned rationally, objectively, and technically in leadership and planning theories. This was fabulous. I was learning with them.
Unexpectedly, I found something paradoxical. Neither of the frameworks and concepts taught to them before worked for them and even they were not able to learn and use them. Part of it was because the facilitators could not make connections between the guidelines, processes, and conceptual frameworks and unplanned day-to-day realities of the community. I heard several times from the facilitators that it’s hard to go into the field and start a dialogue with a homeless person, an addict, or a labor child and try to engage them in community development with pre-established means-ends and plans. Most actions take place unconsciously in the moment and on feet and as human beings, we are barely able to get out of our habits, predispositions, and modus operandi (Carrol, et al., 2008; Heidegger, 1926).
How could “I” connect their consciousness to unconsciousness? How could I be a leadership coach in such a context? I told myself, “You cannot teach them some hints and provide them with a participatory process on paper and expect them to do exactly what you said.”
Call 911
Leaning toward these psychological concepts, I started two strategies. First, 24-hour on-call coaching: 911 strategy. My phone number in Iran starts with 911. I asked all 96 facilitators to call me and ask for guidance any time during the day while working with ordinary people in the field. Phone calls started! I received numerous calls a day. My office, home, and car were turned into a telecommunication center to co-produce directions with the facilitators in the field (Simpson et al., 2018). “If I do not receive a call from a facilitator for a long time, I will make a call,” I said to them solemnly. I tried to make our conceptual framework and processes tangible for them in the field in a co-production space through their actions or even sometimes change the process itself, depending on the feedback received from the field.
As the second strategy, I attempted to access their unconsciousness. I tried to transfer techniques, concepts, or notions by involving them in theatrical dialogues and games. Spending tens of hours teaching a concept was not as effective as one-hour participatory theater in which people can interrupt the scenario and collaboratively change the dialogues and the scene. For instance, in one theater exercise, I asked a law facilitator (actor one) to advise on her client’s (actor two) problem while the audience in the training is allowed to “cut” the play whenever they see the actors are exchanging wrong information, come to the stage, and play it in a way they assume right. This was repeated a few times until the group agreed on the right play.
Leadership emerges
One may ask, do these strategies signify leadership at all? I might not have any response to this question at the time. But now, after reading different leadership styles, I can define it as Leadership as Practice (LAP). Because in LAP, leadership is not limited to individuals. It “focuses not on the makers of processes but on the processes made within the concurrent undertaking” (Raelin, 2011, p.198). In this practice perspective, leadership happens in situ and emerges from everyday activities, interactions, and conversations in the field (Sergi, 2016). But not any activity, those routinized activities of interactors that form social knowledge and produce direction, coordination, and commitment to change (Crevani and Endrissat, 2016; Drath et al.,2008).
I can see these notions in my relationships with the facilitators. For instance, in the 911 strategy, I did not see any of us playing the role of leader in our day-to-day recurring interactions and sustaining it (Ramsey, 2016). It was a kind of action learning, withness-thinking, or entailing coaching (Raelin, 2011). Regarding the theatrical dialogues, “…leadership-as-practice orient[ed] us to what is internalized, improvised and unselfconscious…[and] to work with what is ‘unspoken’, ‘inarticulate’ and ‘oftentimes unconscious’” (Chia and MacKay, 2007, p.237). I am not sure but perhaps these two strategies resemble leadership-as-practice from an educational perspective.
In these interactions and situated occasions, we learned a lot together, not just us as coach and facilitators but also as people. We were arising, fading, and regrowing as developing organisms. We were becoming something new. Silent people started to talk, indifferent ones started to act and innovate, people produced power in some cases and transformed social and power relations (Pares et al., 2017). Based on my current interpretation, I can say that when I was leaving the field, leadership was occurring and emerging as a subject in some cases and failing and diverging in others. However, I have still been wondering, with all those successes and failures in the field, and with this notion of leadership as practice in mind, how can I define my identity as a leader?
References
Carroll, B., Levy, L., and Richmond, D. (2008). Leadership as practice: Challenging the competency paradigm. Leadership, 4(4), 363–379.
Crevani, L., and Endrissat, N. (2016). Mapping the leadership-as-practice terrain. In J. Raelin’s, Leadership-as-Practice (pp. 21-49). Routledge.
Crevani, L., Lindgren, M. and Packendorff, J. (2010). Leadership, not leaders: On the study of leadership as practices and interactions. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 26(1), 77-86.
Drath, W. H., McCauley, C. D., Palus, C. J., Van Velsor, E., O’Connor, P. M. G., and McGuire, J. B. (2008). Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 19(6), 635–653. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.09.003
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Blackwell.
Pares, M., Ospina, S. M., and Subirats, J. (2017). Social Innovation and Democratic Leadership: Communities and Social Change from Below. Edward Elgar.
Raelin, J. (2011). From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice. Leadership, 7(2), 195–211.
Ramsey, C. (2016). Conversational travel and the identification of leadership phenomena. In J. Raelin’s, Leadership-as-Practice (pp. 198-219). Routledge.
Sergi, V. (2016). Who’s leading the way? Investigating the contributions of materiality to leadership-as-practice. In J. Raelin’s, Leadership-as-Practice (pp. 124-145). Routledge.
Simpson, B., Buchan, L., and Sillince, J. (2018). The performativity of leadership talk. Leadership, 14(6), 644-661.
About the author
Keyhan Shams is a Ph.D. student in K-State’s leadership communication program. He has a background in urban and regional planning and served as a campaign manager and leadership coach in Iranian cities, slums, and informal settlements over the last five years. Keyhan is curious about the distance between learning and practicing leadership in the public sphere. Now, he works in KLC’s Third Floor Research program as a graduate research assistant. Check out more from Keyhan on his online platform.
