Julia Middleton's Thoughts on Leadership

Where do you turn for new insights, or to throw yourself into the unfamiliar? Do you have to take a year out and travel the globe? Or should you simply go out in your own street and see it through another person’s eyes?

I explained the Common Purpose 360 Day (an invitation from Common Purpose to do exactly that, and challenge the way you see the world), to my daughter last week. She started giggling. She said that I had pestered her all her life to “never judge anyone until you had walked a mile in their shoes”. She said that she had discovered the perfect response to my lecturing…you should do it, because then by the time the person you are judging has figured out what you are up to, you are a mile away and have their shoes! I fear that I am not a serious parent.

Her giggling came the day before she threw me, unplanned, way out into unfamiliar territory, because she fell and fractured her skull. It has been a grim and frightening week and her recovery sounds like it will be lengthy. I have spent hours and hours in different levels of serious casualty wards – seriously out of the familiar and challenging the way that I see the world.

So what have I learnt, or re-learnt?

• How impatient I am and how much stress that puts on people around me
• How easily I slide into the “group speak” of being horrible about the British NHS. At every level it has been  top notch for us, all week. I must stop adding my voice to the endlessly critical naysayers and share my pride at how impressive they were.
• As I walked down one corridor (for the four hundred and fiftieth time), I looked again at the notice board with the thank you notes pinned to it. I have to get better at taking the time to write letters of praise and thanks.
• How lovely it is watching a team do what they really love…and doing it really, really well. That’s what the emergency room was. It took me some time watching them to spot who the leader was (in fact I am not even sure I know now). I suspect it was the person (who looked least like the leader) who came and put in another drip when all the others had failed. She (or he maybe if it wasn’t her) was invisible, but you could feel her everywhere. 

Next year, I want more control over my 360 Day experience.

So what will you be doing?