Curated Story
KaBoom playground
Source: KaBoom playground

New Paradigm for Leadership – Everyone Leads

This article originally appeared on Next Billion

When Darrel Hammond, founder of KaBoom! set out to make sure that every child has a great place to play, his plan for building playgrounds had a special twist. 

Like other successful social entrepreneurs, Hammond’s approach challenges the dominant leadership paradigm in society – one in which a few lead and everyone else follows. They break from an authoritative, hierarchical approach to leadership and instead pave the way for everyone to participate as changemakers. They create new roles for people, purposes for institutions and relationships between actors.

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Ashoka insight

To successfully lead in a complex environment, the core role of a leader shifts to nurturing an environment for changemakers to emerge. Part of nurturing others to lead requires overcoming personal and organizational egos to listen, trust and share leadership. It requires self-awareness and openness not only for change externally but for change internally. We have seen Ashoka Fellows struggle in this journey, but when they succeed they gain an authenticity that ultimately rallies people around the idea.

Each one of us has the innate potential to unleash this new paradigm of leadership in our schools, universities, work spaces and communities. We too can root our leadership in building a culture of changemaking.