Leading as Healing
For some time, it’s been clear to me that our approaches to leadership and organizational change lack a key dynamic: the leader as healer.
I call this Healership. In fact, my 1999 master’s thesis in Organizational Leadership was titled Healership: The Limits of Strategy and the Call to Heal.
Today, 24 years later, there is a still more profound need for healing in our organizations and the people they impact. This applies to most leaders—including positional leaders, emerging leaders, community leaders, and leaders in most other contexts.
It also applies to you and your own organization, especially if you (and it) work for justice.
The word healing means to become whole or to set right. The word health originates from the Anglo-Saxon word halen, meaning whole. The word healing is also connected to the Old English word hālig, from which holy is derived. The journey into healing is thus holy—a necessary calling and practice.
Healership calls us as leaders to dive deep into who we are—and what we most want to live into and grow into. It also calls us to inquire into what holds us back, constricts us, or make us stumble.
“Healership asks each of us to integrate the whole of who we are – without ignoring our wounds, foibles, and limiting beliefs. It urges us to engage in deep inner work, with the understanding that we heal in relationship, not in isolation.”
At first, these forces, habits, and assumptions may be invisible. But they become visible when we deeply explore the often-shadowy parts of ourselves that we tend to ignore, resist, or think we have already worked through. As they become more visible, we can hold these edges gently, explore them, and play with how to bring them more into the light, so that the most healing can occur.
Most of our organizations, structures, and systems were built on a highly fragmented, individualistic, disconnected – and often racialized, or in some way otherized – set of beliefs. These have created the antithesis of wholeness and of justice. Yet we are continually seduced and reduced by these tightly bounded and harmful constructs. It’s no wonder that our efforts toward genuine, positive organizational transformation and justice often only go so far—and that so many of us yearn for more meaning, purpose, and deep connection in our lives and work.
Over the past 24 years on my own Healership journey as a consultant, coach, interim leader of several organizations, and social justice activist, I’ve learned (and continue to learn) a great deal about Healership. Here are some key insights:
Embracing Healership requires the fierce and graceful courage to bring forth all parts of yourself. This includes your strengths; your heart’s yearnings; what feeds your vibrancy and life force; and what you are tempted to run from, gloss over, or think you have outgrown.
Healing—and thus Healership work—are both an inner and an outer commitment and journey. Healing happens through individual and communal practices and generative, accountable relationships.
Six core ingredients encourage the conditions for healing and Healership to emerge:
Recognizing your trauma activators, and knowing and practicing embodied ways to settle yourself—and, thus, help settle others. As Resmaa Menakem notes in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, “A settled nervous system encourages other nervous systems to settle. This is why a calm, settled presence can create room for a multitude of possibilities, and become the foundation for changing the world.”
Understanding that these trauma responses in individual bodies—yours and everyone else’s—are often historically, culturally, and socially shaped, and that we can disrupt these patterns through mindful and embodied practices—and begin to heal from them. In this process, we can also refrain from passing them on to others.
Growing your emotional and social intelligences, including 1) your self-awareness; 2) your ability to regulate your nervous system and manage your emotional responses; 3) your ability to recognize and anticipate your impact on others; 4) your empathy for widely varied lived experiences: and 5) your accountability to yourself and others—and your ability for honest reckoning and self-correcting when you stumble.
Claiming your own story of leading. This story compels you to grow into who you aspire to be—and helps you generate the positive impact you aspire to have. What stories do you currently embody as a leader, explicitly and implicitly? What stories are left out that you want to bring forward? Which ones hold you back? Who is included and not included—and why? How are these stories held in your body? How have these stories been shaped by your social location and positioning?
Centering generative relationships. Whatever your title is—formal or informal—you do your work within relationships. This requires moment-to-moment presence throughout emergent dialogues—and mindful navigation among multiple lived experiences. It also means taking a stance of curiosity with others. Doing so, can not only strengthen your leading and Healership—it can engender the conditions where people feel their contributions are genuinely valued and that they matter.
Transforming conflict. Conflicts are unavoidable—and attempts to avoid them often encourage them to grow. Skills in conflict management and transformation, combined with presence and compassion, can not only address the issue at hand, but inspire healing in you, your people, and your work relationships.
One especially helpful approach to work-related conflicts (though not legal situations such as harassment) is Narrative Mediation. Narrative Mediation asks us to consider conflict as a problem-saturated story rather than as competing interests. This externalizes the conflict rather than blames specific individuals. It also creates a structure for those in conflict to co-create an alternative story of cooperation. Narrative Mediation also invites us to investigate and critique structures of power and entitlement and our relationship to them.
The essentials of Healership aren’t the only things you need to lead effectively, of course. All the widely recognized skills—strategic visioning and action, facilitation, coaching, deep listening, the ability to engage and inspire others, and a willingness challenge the status quo—are as essential to leading as they have always been. Healership is a deeper, holistic dimension of leading, not an added-on flavor of the month.
Healership asks each of us to integrate the whole of who we are – without ignoring our wounds, foibles, and limiting beliefs. It urges us to engage in deep inner work, with the understanding that we heal in relationship, not in isolation. Healership asks us to lead from our scars, not our wounds—while recognizing that, as human beings, we will make mistakes or go temporarily astray.
As adrienne maree brown observes, we “move at the speed of trust.” As you and your organization face ongoing change and uncertainty, you are called to help grow ever more trust—with others in your organization, with yourself, and with your own Healership path. As you embrace and live into your own healing journey, you can spark more vital, positive change in others—that can ultimately ripple across and beyond your organization.
Stay tuned for more – soon!