Development

By: Alejandra Terán* 

As part of the On Think Tanks Fellowship Program, one of the topics that I wanted to learn more about was leadership. In the process, I realized I had several preconceptions of what leadership meant and some of them were not entirely correct. I started to ask myself questions such as: How can I promote a change in my institution having an introverted personality? Isn´t leadership something for more extroverted people? The fact that I don’t have a position of authority prevents me from exercising leadership? What is then necessary to be a leader?

The answer to all these questions is that there is not a unique recipe for leadership.

Leadership isn’t the sole preserve of extroverts

The leadership concept, especially in Westernized cultures is usually related to a set of characteristics. Our cultural heritage links leadership to extroversion, to being influential, charismatic and perhaps, dominant. As Susan Cain (2012) ^[1] points out in her book, we are a society that values more an individual of personality more than of character, a person of action rather a person of contemplation.  This kind of thoughts and conceptions lead us to think that quiet and introverted people are not leader material, but I’m glad to say that this is far away from being true.

We can all agree that normally extroverts have charisma, high power of influence on people and they are good at showing confidence and dominance, which are good tools for leading since people tend to trust and follow people with these characteristics. However, according to Susan Cain ^[2], introverts are actually also very effective leaders and often the most creative. She shows that, in fact, introverts tend to show a lot of commitment, they listen to their teams and get better results than extroverts; also, they are often great at making good decisions. With the latter, I mean that introverts can be just as good leaders as extroverts with their own set of skills. In fact, one third of the population in the world is introverted, and we normally ask them to act as if they were extroverts; in this process we lose much of their potential because we are losing authenticity.  If we cannot be ourselves, it’s most likely that we don’t work at our maximum potential.

You don’t have to be in charge to lead

Another preconception that we usually have is that leadership is necessarily linked to authority roles, such as being a manager, a boss or a director. We are used to expect that those who make decisions and find solutions are the people who have a superior position than us, and that sounds quite logical. I’m also happy to have realized that having an authority role is not a requirement to be a good leader.  Often leadership comes from the legs of the table, as Roland Heifetz (1994) would say. He explains that being a leader without formal authority has some advantages that we normally don’t see, such as having latitude for creative deviance, space to focus on one single issue, a closer place to have the detailed experience of the people and this makes the leader without authority win a larger perspective to make better decisions.

What leaders actually do

In the learning process, the definition about leadership that I found the most accurate was the one given by Roland Heifetz, that defines it as an activity that mobilizes a collective to do something, tear down problems or reach a common goal; it is related to actions more than words. In his book, he tells a set of stories in which he shows that normally in times of trouble we tend to look for answers in the wrong place; we look for a savior, a leader who can give us a good and easy answer. However, we need leaders who can make strong questions to us and make us part of the process to solve the problems. One of the most important ingredients, and I would dare to say the only one strictly needed for leadership is: passion that converts into actions. Characteristics such as charisma and authority are instruments, but they are not necessary conditions to exercise good leadership. The effectiveness of leadership depends a lot on our own convictions and how we transmit them to our team. These things can come from a wide range of people (extroverts or introverts) or from different job positions (apprentices, junior researchers, directors, board members, among others).

Anyone can be a leader

Many times, I’ve heard the phrase: “leaders are born, not made”, and this is a very dangerous thing to claim, because, people who don’t have the “required kit” for being a leader (following our preconceptions), could go unnoticed and not share their potential with their teams. There isn’t a unique recipe of personal characteristics in order to be a good leader.  Leadership goes much further. Just to mention some examples, many leaders were not great charismatic people or had formal authority when exercising leadership:  Mahatma Ghandi who was leader of the Indian independence movement and was actually characterized for his introverted personality and also not having a formal authority role in the government or other institution in India; Rosa Parks, also known as “the first lady of civil rights” who at the beginning was a regular woman with no elected office, but then she became an inspiration and leader activist because of her resistance to segregation laws in the United States; and now Greta Thunberg, a young climate activist who has lately inspired the world for her conviction and bravery, however, she is a school student who claims to be introverted and not so much of a talker. These leaders went up front because of conviction and passion, not necessarily because they liked to be in the spotlight or because they had an authority role.

In Think Tank´s context, we have to be able to multitask and be leaders in many situations. I am a researcher, but I have been in constant learning since I work in INESAD, sometimes I had to learn how to manage events, to help the communication´s department and also to manage projects, these situations were very challenging since they implied tasks that are not necessarily in my expertise area. I am sure this is a situation that many Think Tankers experience, and this is normally because our work goes much further than doing good research. We normally get out of our comfort zone, and that is a sign that we have a lot of passion and commitment for what we do (a great ingredient for us to be leaders in our own ways). It is probable that researchers are researchers because of the type of personality they have, perhaps many of them are people who like their personal space and solitude. However, this is not a reason for them not to be leaders. Researchers have strong academic knowledge and a great way to see problems from all its perspectives, they can contribute with outside of the box solutions or efficient ways to reach objectives.  On the other hand, many members in our organizations, are very young and in bottom positions of authority, from them we can get very innovative ideas and creative solutions. They also tend to have a great way to manage technology and reach young audiences, just to give an example. The persons we have in our teams are diverse, and they can be leaders embracing their own characteristics.

I don’t want to say that extroverts or people with authority are not necessarily good leaders, in fact, they also have many characteristics that can make them very effective at leading. What I’m saying is that we should embrace our diversities and get the most out of them, with this we can strengthen our Think Tanks and make potential leaders, actual good leaders. There is a lot of value that is wasted if we don’t break down our paradigms.

References:

[1] Heifetz, R.A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Harvard University Press.

[2] Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Broadway Books.

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* Alejandra Terán, Junior Researcher at INESAD.

The viewpoints expressed in the blog are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of their institutions or of INESAD.

This article was originally published by On Think Tanks on June 24, 2019.

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

A phobia is an irrational fear of something. We all suffer from phobias of some kind. My worst phobia is arachnophobia, which is one of the reasons I love living in the (almost) safe haven of La Paz. Instead of trying to confront and overcome my irrational fear, I chose to run away. If I hadn’t found La Paz, I would probably be working as a scientist in Antarctica (which still sounds like a very attractive option to me).

So, although some of my friends consider me excessively rational, I can understand and empathise with people who suffer from irrational fears. Our brains are far from being rational, and are still dominated by emotions that were useful during our evolution over the last several hundred thousand years.

One of those emotions that were useful in our evolutionary past is xenophobia: a deep-rooted fear of foreigners. For most of our evolutionary history, it is quite likely that strangers were very bad news indeed, so this instinct made a lot of sense.

The xenophobia instinct is still very much with us, but it makes little sense anymore in this globalized, integrated, and relatively civilized world. Most foreigners you might meet probably want to work for you, trade with you, or help you in some other ways. Less than one in a million is out to kill you. Your benefit from interacting with foreigners outweigh the risks many thousand times. So it is indeed an irrational fear now.

Anna Rosling (photographer; co-founder of Gapminder; one of Bill Gates’ Heroes in the Field; and daughter-in-law of my biggest hero ever) has made a really nice attempt to alleviate our irrational fear of foreigners, in a safe and comfortable way, with her Dollar Street project. The project visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos in order to show us normal life for normal families in many different dimension of ordinary life. This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the regular news we receive, which always show us the extremes, and thus give us a completely distorted image of the world. Her point is that people from other countries and cultures are not nearly as strange as they seem to us in the news.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Despite my initial hesitations about going ahead with the 8^th Bolivian Conference on Development Economics much too late and without any confirmed sponsors, I have to admit that the 8th BCDE conference, carried out at UPB-Cochabamba this week, was once again a big success, and that I have thoroughly enjoyed two intensive days of frontier development research and networking in Cochabamba.

One of the main benefits of organizing the BCDE conference is the chance to invite and meet amazing people. This year, I was particularly delighted to meet Sara Farley of the Global Knowledge Initiative. Her keynote speech was about Collaborative Innovation, and while that was very inspiring in itself, it was even more interesting to hear, over dinner, how she applies that concept to everything in her own life (even her recent hiking & camping wedding on a mountain top in the US). I would love to try to apply some of her methods and strategies to the complex development problems of Bolivia.

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