The core of Playful Leadership?

Photo from https://foto.wuestenigel.com/the-word-leadership-with-construction-workers-on-white-background/ under a CC-BY licence 

I think I’m finally starting to get my head around what I mean when I think of “Playful Leadership”*.

First of all, it’s not about playing ourselves as “leaders”, it’s not about making others play either, but more about setting environments, structures, enablers, that mean that other people are free to feel more playful, so that play may emerge naturally in them, when it makes sense to do so. A working definition for me (which will change over time, I’m sure!) might be:

Playful Leadership is not primarily playing ourselves, but growing playfulness in others.

We can play of course, but I'd say it doesn't have to be the centre of what we do - the important bit is enabling play to emerge in others, the focus is on them, not ourselves. Not everything we do needs to include aspects of play, but I think it’s important that what we do doesn’t kill play. We don’t need to create games or play activities that our teams, or followers, or employees are encouraged to do, we need to enable play to emerge and encourage it to flourish. So it’s definitely not about what a friend (Hi Mathias!) called “Playwashing”, which at it’s worst might drag employees to social events, or promote companies as playful because they have a table tennis table in reception, while expecting them to work ridiculously long hours, try to meet unrealistic targets, and be vulnerable to being fired if they disagree with the boss. It’s more about creating places of psychological safety, teams where you can trust your colleagues and boss, where you can experiment and fail safely, be creative, play to your strengths, be silly at times, have fun, feel like you (as part of a team) have strong elements of control over your work, and generally be in a place where play will naturally tend to emerge (and be valued).

There are probably 3 areas to think about around Playful Leadership.

The first area covers types of playful behaviours that emerge in a team that bring the sort of benefits that we’d expect (increased creativity, better productivity, better mental health, etc., etc.) that lots of people have written about. If we expect them to happen, we’ll probably recognise things as play in here, friendly challenges, humour, people going off to a yoga class together, whatever play the team feels happy with emerging that we can recognise, support, help to grow… but probably not initiate too many of them.

The second area are things we can do that help that playfulness to emerge in teams – which might not look like play in themselves. Things like helping make shared team values explicit (and acted on), setting clear boundaries (this is what the organisation expects, so use those as “constraints” to work within), making physical and virtual workspaces conducive to great teambuilding / working. Sometimes these things will look like the opposite of play (e.g. dealing with “underperformance”), but as long as they are done in a positive, enabling way, they aren’t – e.g. NOT having frank, serious discussions with a member of staff who is letting the team down in some way would damage playfulness.

The third area are things that are explicitly anti-play – disablers, rather than enablers. We should avoid doing them, but probably also need to watch out for them and to try and protect our teams from them as much as we can. Bullying, controlling behaviour, unnecessary secrecy, favouritism (the list could go on…) would tend to kill the environment needed for a team to feel playful, and for us all to feel the benefits that happen when play emerges from that. As a playful leader, as well as avoiding these behaviours ourselves, to some extent we often have to act as a shield from others “anti-play” behaviours, which can make us feel anything but playful ourselves.

I’ll hopefully develop this more in the near future, digging deeper into the 3 areas above, perhaps with examples of what playful leader type behaviour might look like in different situations? I’ll also link it to some more leadership models that are out there already that have aspects of psychological safety, perhaps some elements of playfulness about them too, but which don’t really focus on play or playfulness at their core.

 

 *It could, I suppose, also be playful management, but “management” tends to have strong implicit aspects of control, of direct line management against targets, etc. I believe there should be a strong leadership aspect to management, but “management” isn’t necessarily leadership. So I’m using “leadership” here, which can include (to me) positive, people-centred management, but isn’t exclusively that.