How have our alumni been leading with what’s for Aotearoa to thrive in these times of disruption? REBECCA SINCLAIR (Alum 2016) shares with us her journey and how her time on The NZ Leadership Programme (NZLP) has influenced her leadership mahi since graduating.
How did your time on the New Zealand Leadership Programme change or impact the ways you interact with the world?
The NZLP grounded me in ways that I didn’t know I needed and allowed me to understand my own peculiar ways of being in the context of everyone else’s. It completely fed my intellectual curiosity about how complex dynamic systems work, especially as they pertain to people, but also got me to understand at a deep level the way those systems play out through our bodies and our emotions and our diverse ways of being in the world. For me it was truly transformational.
NZLP gave me the confidence to expand my horizons beyond the work that was directly in front of me, and see how I might be able to use my strengths to connect up the various systemic issues we are facing (environmental, economic, cultural, social, political crises), and explore how paradigm shifts might be possible. This has led to the work I am currently doing with colleagues on the Pākehā Project.
Where are you at now on your lifelong leadership journey?
Ha! In the middle of it, as always! Right in the messy middle figuring it out as I go, learning from every experience and every interaction, letting life evolve me. I know that it is not only the Leadership-with-a-capital-L part where the learning and the magic happens.
What wisdom and tools from your NZLP experience have you added to your kete? How do these serve you in challenging times of disruption, change, or conflict?
It reinforced for me that the ability to be relational is essential for leadership. I kind of knew it intuitively, but the programme deepened and broadened my understanding of that in such profound ways. It was not only about being relational with others, but also with myself, and the vast world of which I am a part. NZLP gives you the exquisite wisdom to see everyone you come into contact with as complex and extraordinary creatures to be met where they (and you) are in that moment, and everything you encounter as a set of complex interdependencies that do not always play out in predictable ways.
We are living through a time of extraordinary change, where so much we once took for granted is no longer certain. The ability to see and meet complexity, while holding people at the heart of what I do, has been foundational for me at moments where road maps and detailed plans were just not available. Those moments are becoming more frequent, and the ability to meet them with humanity, wisdom, and calmness is essential. NZLP gave me a different kind of courage to the one I thought I needed; the courage to slow down, to look with tenderness and wonder at the world around me, and to stand up for intimacy and love even when that is counter-cultural.
Covid-19 shone a light on so much of what is wrong with the way we are living in the world, but it also revealed the potential for our redemption, where community, care and creativity come together. I loved the window into a potential future of vibrant nature, clean air, slowed-down people, and rich local communities cooperating for collective good. I hold that vision firmly in my mind and my practice to counter the story we keep being told of individual self preservation and Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest. It has shaped my current research, and drives the work I am now doing, with other Pākehā, to help bring an ethic of restoration to our Tiriti-gifted collective life.
What impact has your time on the NZLP had on your communities and organisations?
We have been really clear about the importance of our people—our staff and students and wider communities—and have been brave about challenging the status quo approaches of the University. We have focused on culture and community and have contributed that perspective to our parent institution. And it has helped us to be even more conscious of the ways our settler colonial institutions are structurally and systemically continuing to impose a dominant worldview in a land and on a people that did not ask for it. This unsettling self-inquiry continues in our College, as part of the wider University and it asks us all to be accountable.
If you had one piece of wisdom for future leaders, what would it be?
Don’t listen to people who say you need to be tougher, more masterful, more certain, more detached. Soften. Connect. Imagine. Love.
REBECCA SINCLAIR is Associate Professor at Toi Rauwhārangi, College of Creative Arts at Massey University, and the co-leader of The Pākehā Project.