Playful Leadership Vague Thoughts

   

 (This is a CC-0 image that came up in a quick search for "playful leadership" - don't know about you lot, but it doesn't look that playful to me!)

For several years I’ve tried to pin down what I mean by playful leadership, and I haven’t been able to do it. I’ve also been struggling to be playful recently, probably not helped by living through a global pandemic, which hasn’t particularly helped me articulate what I mean when I think of playful leadership.

I’ve read lots of leadership and management books and articles, as well as plenty of stuff on play and games. Sometimes I feel like I’m starting to get somewhere, when an idea or model triggers a small “a-ha” moment, but then I fail to pull it together into any sort of coherent whole.

Part of this could be the temptation to pin these things down into neat models, or a clear set of steps (“5 steps to playful leadership!”), which we can follow and magically become a “playful leader”. None of these models, or steps, or whatever I found seemed quite right to me, even when I found several that seemed to touch on play – they’d sometimes have play as an important element, but perhaps not quite at their core, or reflecting how I felt about play and leadership. I also struggled to mash some of these different leadership models together, as I couldn’t successfully pull out their more playful aspects to form any sort of coherent whole.

Then, while in a very low mood and generally struggling, I had an important realisation. What I think of as playful leadership is really about encouraging a playful mindset in others. It helps if I play too, but I don’t need to all the time – the important thing is that I can enable others to play.

One of the components of my management style at work that is quite important to me is (trying to) protect colleagues from institutional politics, from micro-management of others, from unnecessary blame and retribution when things go wrong. In effect, these are also ways I try to gently shift the workplace culture towards giving permission to try things and fail. To play with different ways of doing things, knowing that they will be allowed (encouraged) to do so, and that as long as they don’t cause harm, it doesn’t matter if there is no immediate benefit either – as they can learn from that experience and try something else next time that might work better.

So my evolving understanding of my particular flavour of playful leadership probably has something like this at its core:

Helping others to be more playful.

The bits that stood out for my in other play and management texts, probably did so as they were potential enablers for that to happen. It’s ok that none of them were complete answers for me, and may even have been contradictory. But all of them could be tools that help take me part-way to being a playful leader – as it’s not a set way for me to act, but the impact I have on others.

I don’t need a 7 step method, or 4 zones of playful leadership, or anything else that pretends to be a complete answer. What I need is a clear idea of what I’m trying to achieve, and then a kit bag full of possible tools to help.

I don’t need a routeplan and detailed map to follow the “right” path. I need a compass, maybe a vague map, a penknife, a change of clothes, etc., so that we can find a good enough route that depends on the people present at the time, where they need to get to, and have some help for the challenges we need to overcome together. It doesn’t matter which things we need from that kit bag, or the exact route, just that we have a selection of tools that are available to use if we need to.

So what sort of things do we need in our kit bag? What goodies can help to enable a playful attitude, so I can be my sort of playful leader? I’ll have to start thinking in that way over the next few months and see if I can pull something useful together!