Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 61
TD leadership dispositions or mindset
•
Being eager and open to learning (forever) – Most
collaborative leaders in projects addressing complex
challenges take on leadership responsibilities with great
passion, ambition, and subject- matter expertise, though
not always with extensive leadership training or even
much prior thought to what it might take to pull off a
successful project. Inevitably things don’t go as planned or
hoped. What characterizes effective collaborative leaders
is that they do not give up when such challenges emerge
but are self-aware, reflexive, and committed to learning –
not just about the topical issues, but about leadership and
their own role in successes and failures. Leadership itself
becomes a lifelong learning journey.
•
Risk taking – Given the complexity, difficulty, frequent
uncertainty, novelty, and innovation involved in leading
multi-collaborator projects on complex challenges,
leaders often must do things they have never done before
(e.g., give testimony before a legislature, speak to the
media, integrate scientific and Indigenous knowledge), or
work in ways they are not accustomed to (e.g., give equal
voice to collaborators, sharing responsibility, authority,
and financial resources equitably). They must also allow
others to step into leadership roles, try out new things,
and create a culture of bravery, acceptance, and safety
that makes it possible for all to take risks.
•
Having respect and empathy – Given the complexity
of sustainability challenges – diverse and sometimes
divergent – valid perspectives must be welcomed, heard,
and respected. Similarly, different kinds of expertise,
skills, ways of knowing, strengths, and weaknesses
come into play in any collaborative project. Embodying a
respectful and empathic attitude is critical for trust and
team building.
In this Design Guide, we strive for trainers to enable their
trainees to become members of “leaderful ecologies,” i.e., welltrained leadership practitioners who step in and out of leadership
roles in TD projects as the situations demand. At the same time,
we recognize that TD researchers are situated in institutions and
work with colleagues, partners, and institutions that still often
function according to the rules and assumptions of positional
leadership. Thus, in practical reality, the most effective TD
leaders can navigate fluidly across the leadership spectrum, and
handle the often-contradictory demands of the different types of
leadership depicted in Figure 1.
Such leaders tend to have recognizable dispositions toward
themselves, other collaborators, the issues at hand, and
leadership – a leaderful mindset – or the BE-ing aspects of the
proficiencies we outlined earlier. You might recognize it in these
common traits:
•
Seeing and tending relationships – In collaborative
or collective leadership, recognizing, developing, and
maintaining relationships – among researchers, between
researchers and societal partners, among societal
partners, and between disciplines, sectors, and issues at
stake – is of fundamental importance; effective leaders
understand this, either intuitively, or from experience.
Relationships, in fact, are at the very heart of the systems
their projects aim to address. While things and outputs
are important, tending relationships is primary.
In-depth exploration of leadership
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