In my role as Chair of the Board of the Land Portal Foundation, I recently had the opportunity to take part in two trainings to help me develop my leadership skills. The first was a 2-day Feminist Leadership ReTreat in Mechelen, Belgium, which I took part in alongside our Managing Director, Laura Meggiolaro, our Board Secretary, Laura Cunial, and seven other women leaders from different civil society organisations in Europe. The second was a full day of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Training, together with the entire Land Portal Board and Core Team, that we undertook within our Annual Meeting week in a picturesque villa outside Rome. Both trainings were highly complementary, and it was deeply satisfying to be able to bring what I learned during the Feminist Leadership ReTreat into the DEI Training Day and the Land Portal Annual Meeting itself.
The ReTreat was led by Joanna Maycock and Angela Philip, two amazing women leaders with vast experience of facilitating and coaching – Joanna has even done Flip Chart Training to learn how to make beautiful flip charts, a type of training I didn’t know existed! They paired up a few years ago to run these trainings several times a year, to meet the need for a “safe and brave space” for emerging women leaders to reflect on their strengths and explore new ways of reaching their full potential.
On Day 1, we learned about the origins of feminist leadership in the thinking, writing and lived experience of civil society women in South Asia, notably the work of Srilatha Batliwala at CREA. We discussed what ‘feminist leadership’ means, as opposed to ‘ordinary’ good leadership, and debated whether one could be a feminist leader without being an anti-capitalist – I am relieved to say that one can! We learned that feminist leadership is not about women leading or about excluding men. Men can be feminist leaders too, because feminist leadership is simply a style of leadership that focuses on social transformation, paying attention to the dimensions of power, care, inclusion, collaboration and courage. Ultimately, feminist leadership is about challenging power structures in all forms, but especially those which are based in patriarchy.
Also on Day 1, we explored who we currently are and would like to be as leaders, creating a personal ‘Barometer’ and taking part in a powerful ‘Visioning’ exercise that encouraged us to meet our future selves. I found this last exercise very inspiring – watch this space! On Day 2, we took part in ‘Peer Coaching’ and ‘Constellation’ exercises. Both activities were very helpful to me in thinking through some of the leadership challenges I have recently faced. We discussed power a lot, and we ended the ReTreat with a moving exchange of acknowledgments for each other, and for what we had all brought as individual women leaders to the training. I left recharged, looking forward to the week ahead, and to seeing the two Lauras again, and all our other Land Portal colleagues, at our Annual Meeting in Rome.
The Land Portal Board and Core Team Annual Meeting each year is a working meeting, where all those who care most passionately about this virtual Foundation’s success get together in person to strategise for the year ahead. As a remote organisation – Land Portal has no physical office – the Annual Meeting is one of the few times where we can really get to know each other on a more personal level. This year’s location, in the countryside just outside Rome, allowed us to walk and talk, eat and talk, and drink and talk. Of course, there were also slightly less exciting things to be done within the formal sessions, on policies and budgets and technology and risk management. But we had a lot of fun around it all, including a pasta-making course and some spontaneous dancing on the last night.
On the second day of our Annual Meeting, we had arranged for the UK-based Project 23 to come and run a DEI Training Day for us all. Project 23’s two facilitators, Gary Rayneau and Kasey Robinson, were adept at guiding us all from very different starting points, knowledge levels and lived experiences of DEI issues, into collectively developing a fantastic set of 30 action points by the end of the training. These action points, two each per Board and Core Team member, came from ourselves, as a result of the journey Gary and Kasey took us on that day.
We started by exploring our understandings of DEI through a ‘Slido’ exercise, sharing ‘Name Stories’, and reflecting on our personal ‘Diversity Circle of Influence’. I discovered through this last exercise that most of the people in my personal circle share similar values to me. This gives me a powerful sense of closeness and belonging, but I lose out if I don’t actively seek out people who have different values to me. Connecting with such people, drawing them closer into my circle of influence, would enhance the diversity of thoughts and ideas that I am exposed to and help me grow in appreciation of, and tolerance for, other humans who do not necessarily share my personal values.
Another powerful exercise encouraged us to assess our ‘Privilege’. Gary read aloud 10 statements about different types of situations in which privilege makes a difference, and asked us to reflect on what we do not need to do or think about because of our privilege, what we get or have provided for us because of our privilege, and what assumptions we are able to make about certain situations because of our privilege. As a white Australian woman who has benefited from a good education and interesting and enjoyable career in international development, I naturally assumed I would score highly for privilege on all 10 statements. It was it a bit of a shock, as we went through the exercise, to discover that I was privileged in only five of the 10 situations, and not in the other five. Certain things that I had taken for granted, ignored, or simply accepted as ‘just how life is’, on this assessment, reduced my overall experience of privilege in life. Of course, five out of 10 is not bad at all, and I fully appreciate that many people in our world would come out totally lacking in any privilege at all on this assessment exercise. But it was food for thought, and I am still digesting the implications.
We moved on to look at ‘Circles of Control’, to identify areas in which we could each take actions to strengthen DEI within the Land Portal. We brainstormed our own action points and then refined them through ‘Hot Seat Questioning’ with colleagues in small groups of twos and threes. We then ended the day by sharing all our action points together as personal commitments for a combined Action Plan on DEI, which we will report back to each other on during next year’s Annual Meeting.
Having come to Rome, and the DEI Training Day, fresh from the Feminist Leadership ReTreat in Mechelen, I was in a very open and receptive headspace to reflect on how I can better serve the Land Portal Foundation during the remaining two years of my term as Chair of the Board. One key concern for the whole Board of Directors is how to increase our own diversity on the Board, and this is something that will be high on our agenda over the coming year. We are also coming towards the end of a lengthy process of reviewing and updating all our governance and operational policies to ensure they adequately reflect the high standards of DEI to which the Land Portal aspires.
On a personal level, my key takeaway from these two trainings is that, while it is undoubtedly essential to embed both DEI and feminist leadership principles at the organisational level, it is also my responsibility to continually strive to embed DEI and feminist leadership principles into my day to day relationships with all my colleagues at the Land Portal and beyond. We are all human, and humans are not perfect. Of course I have not always got things right, and I will continue to get things wrong. However, as our DEI trainers encouragingly told us, the goal is to keep moving further and further forwards from where we are now. This I believe is most definitely the outcome of my recent time in Mechelen and Rome. I know I have personally taken some important steps forward. It was indeed time very well spent.