Nothing meaningful about organizational leadership can really be articulated in a tweet, but four years ago I read an interview with MIT's Director of Libraries, @mchris4duke, that I've been quoting ever since because it's so fantastic (and succinct). A brief thread:

First up, a shout-out to the amazing @tararobertson who interviewed Chris and wrote it up as a chapter for an academic book on feminist librarians. Luckily, it's available here as a PDF: http://eprints.rclis.org/31849/ 

In the interview, Chris talks about feminist leadership and she highlights a few central organizing principles, which I'll summarize imperfectly as:

1. Transparency
2. Agency and choice
3. An ethic of care

She defines the latter as “Trying to create an organization where people feel comfortable and welcome as their whole authentic selves, to the extent that they want to bring that to work.”

I’ve always loved the way she phrased that, as it respects that not everyone wants to bring personal things into the workplace. *And* it emphasizes important things: safety, welcome, authenticity.

There are so many wonderful things in the conversation between Chris and Tara -- Chris weaves in her military background when she talks about her ethic of care, and how the whole person and their physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing are crucially important in that context.

She talks about maximizing choice, and defaulting to transparency.

She talks about prioritizing inclusion and seeing it as a central aspect of leadership work.

She talks about how there's no such thing as a neutral agenda, so your best hope as a leader if you want to maximize choice and agency is to be self-aware about yours, and transparent with it.

And she talks about self-care, participatory leadership, institutional politics… lots of stuff. It's a quick read, and packed with insightful, pithy, lovely conversation between two brilliant queer women who have profoundly shaped my thinking about leadership and organizations.

Anyway: go do yourself a favour and read the interview. And if you're like me, you'll want to save it so you can reference it again and again.

Been thinking about this some more, and I think one thing this interview articulates for me is that none of these principles on their own (transparency, agency/choice, ethic of care) suffices; they must be integrated.

Transparency + maximizing choice without an ethics of care is just libertarianism; it does nothing to address power imbalances.

Also, transparency about one's agenda is only as meaningful as one's level of self-awareness: about bias, priorities, goals, place in bigger systems, etc.

Same goes for maximizing choice: it's a good principle, but it's most meaningful if it's paired with crystal clarity around power dynamics, structural issues, etc.

That's where the ethics of care comes in, because if you aren't actively seeking out perspectives that are different from your own, you cannot de-bias yourself, and your awareness of your self and the systems you operate in just can't be that great.

And of course, at the end of the day we all have to make decisions based on incomplete information and shifting contexts, and accept that those decisions will be imperfect, and deal with their impacts. But it's possible to be decisive, agile, and inclusive.

Anyway. Leadership principles usually seem shiny in theory and get real tricky in practice, and I'm not suggesting this is the be-all, end-all of frameworks, or that we lionize a single leader as Yet Another Individual Hero. (Love the screechy sound of that acronym)

But I just… want us to bother caring about each other, both at work and elsewhere. And I don't think that's a distraction. I don't think it's too much to ask. I don't think we actually *get* anywhere meaningful if we don't invest in each other's wellbeing.