February 9, 2010There’s tyranny in the teacher/leader labels

Filed under: This Week in the World by merylrunion |

When you teach communication like I do, sometimes people get self-conscious about what they say. Yesterday a meeting planner apologized for suggesting changes in my session description. Once she realized my openness to her ideas, she turned into a goldmine. You’ll be reading some of the PowerPhrases she shared with me in the weeks to come.

While writing this post, I received a communication question from a reader who had the following quote in his signature code.

The task of Leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already – John Buchan

It made me think of myself as a PowerPhrase leader more than teacher. But even that seems odd, because we tend to think of leadership as hierarchical. If I read the above quote and try to elicit your greatness, I’ve made myself higher than you and turned you into an object of my leadership.

But if I elicit your greatness because it delights me, we empower each other, and our conversations become dynamized. I sincerely believed this meeting planner would have ideas that would synergize with mine, and the result would be so much more than either of us could come up with on our own. And I was right.

What does that make me? Am I a facilitator? An alchemist? A synergist? Whatever I call myself, I’m having a great time of it. And amazing things are continually born in the process.