Leadership is a muscle, let's get training...

Right off the bat, you need to know that leadership is what makes Áine and I come alive.

We flipping love it. We both come from countries where leadership has been imposed, 

questioned, protested, debated and defended (Ireland and South Africa respectively.)

Áine and I don’t call or text each other to talk about our day or our relationships or our lunch plans, we jump on a call to discuss leadership; how we showed up in a day or in a relationship or at a lunch; what we read about leadership that sparked curiosity or disdain; and how either of us would typically respond in a given situation (Áine is a millennial and I am Gen X.)

So the first premise of TouchPoint is how alive leadership is in us; and our mission is to breathe life into leadership to make it a natural, responsive, evolving entity that is an expression of every one of us. 

It’s not about blind ambition and it’s certainly not about power. It’s more about awesome and complex perspective: to simultaneously scan horizons whilst locking focus. It is imagination, creation and inspiration; or in business terms: leadership is vision, design and motivation. 

At the very heart of it all is people. Áine and I care deeply about people. And we have seen so many unhappy people at work. In leadership and as a result of leadership. 

Leading is an awesome responsibility; it is a calling, a talent, a skill. It is not simply the next rung on the corporate ladder. It needs to be nurtured, prioritised and above all, demonstrated. And to achieve all of this, it needs practise. If we see leadership as part of us and not an extension of us, it becomes a muscle to be trained, not a tool to pick up and put down - and then bury in a drawer. 

When times are tough, when change seems to be dismantling more than it is solving; when all we can see is more unravelling, it is so easy to want to return to what was. It is conditioned human behaviour to want to regain control, power and certainty over something that is shifting. 

The trend to default to legacy leadership when things get tough demonstrates the fragility of current leadership models. They are neither fit, nor fit for purpose. Our technology has connected systems into networks that are too vast and varied to control. 

The future of Leadership will be connective, collaborative, adaptive and in flow with the rhythms of people, technology, visions and transitions in business. Our leadership muscle has to be as impenetrable as it is absorbent and evaluative to be able to accommodate the impact of infinite change and infinite possibility.

And for that, we need to be leadership fit. We need to train our leadership muscle for the work we need it to do: we need it to be strong, flexible and supportive for whatever may come. 

Let’s get to work…

-Kate Bruce