The Power To Share Power
Tania Luna is the author of Lead Together, and the co-founder of .Scarlet Spark and LifeLabs Learning.
By Tania Luna
That first year of the pandemic was the worst and best experience for me as a leader.
At the time, I led a company with about 100 employees and 1,000 clients. The business was growing every day. Then COVID hit, and our clients’ budgets dried up. We had no line of credit and our cash reserves were dwindling.
As a (recovering) control freak, my first instinct was to fix it all myself. I figured I’d work as much as it took and sleep some other time. But it turned out that 24 hours a day couldn't cut it, and I was burning out, fast. Fortunately for me and my business, I shifted my focus from using my power to sharing it.
I dig into the practice of sharing power in my new book, Lead Together: Stop Squirreling Away Power and Build a Better Team. It’s a business parable grounded in psychology and laden with practical tools, offering leaders a “power-with” rather than “power-over” paradigm in the form of a squirrely, page-turning story.
To share at my company, internally, we made all our financial records transparent to the team. We reviewed our goals and results together weekly. And we gave everyone authority to experiment, innovate, and take on new projects and roles.
Externally, we made our knowledge and tools free and accessible to our clients and community. At the time, most couldn’t afford to pay us because their organizations were struggling, so we concentrated on helping them grow stronger however we could.
That year could have been the last in our history. Instead, it became our most successful year yet – financially and emotionally. It was a year that beat me up but also made me a better leader. By learning to share power, we helped create a team and community that didn’t just survive but flourished.
““By learning to share power, we helped create a team and community that didn’t just survive but flourished.” — Tania Luna, author of Lead Together, and cofounder of Scarlet Spark and LifeLabs Learning #PowerToChangeStories https://www.tanialuna.com/ ”
Tania Luna is the author of Lead Together: Stop Squirreling Away Power and Build a Better Team, an entrepreneur, psychology researcher, and writer. She founded Scarlet Spark, a nonprofit that creates human-friendly workplaces for organizations that help animals, and LifeLabs Learning, a leadership development company. Her other books include The Leader Lab: How to Become a Great Manager, Faster and Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable & Engineer the Unexpected. She is also the co-host of the podcast, Talk Psych to Me, and a TED speaker on the power of perspective. https://www.instagram.com/laniatuna ; https://www.linkedin.com/in/taniadluna/ ; https://www.tanialuna.com/