A Safe Environment
for Learning to Lead
The great problem before people everywhere in the wide world is lack of leadership. Everywhere people are eager to do something effective about their conditions, even where their patterned appearance and behavior give a different impression. People are frustrated and sometimes turn to destructive outlets out of their frustration, but in reality they are everywhere anxious to take constructive actions. Lack of leadership and lack of policy are the crucial problems—the lack of leadership with a correct policy.
One of the effects of oppression has been to occlude people’s inherent talent for leadership—this inherent ability of every intelligence to organize other intelligences with it for joint effort. Even though each person is a potential leader, the person is usually unaware of this potential, and people everywhere are currently frustrated by the lack of leadership.
Our RC Community . . . can play a systematic role in the production of leadership. How do you learn to be a leader? Well, with great fear and trembling, as all of you know. It feels like a terribly risky business to take such initiative. Where do you find the safety to do this trembling and begin to assume your role? In RC classes. What happens to people who agree to dust the erasers or be an assistant or finally try to teach an RC class? They go up against their fears in an environment that is safe and supportive.
We have section* leaders and assistant section leaders at a workshop. What happens? What does a section leader get to do at a workshop? Gets to practice being a very responsible leader in conditions where he or she can’t possibly make very many mistakes or fail very badly. If one is an assistant section leader and gets up to lead, the section leader is watching, ready to step in and say, “You did fine; can I just make a small point here?” before one can have a disastrous experience. If one makes a small mistake, one gets a session afterward. Section-support-group leaders come to the breakfast meeting and get to boast of how well their sections are going, but they also get the chance to raise any unsolved problems. When they do, somebody has some suggestions and somebody else has some encouragement. All the conditions for growing safely into leadership are being provided. This is working. No one has ever grown leaders as fast as we have.
Harvey Jackins
From "Logical Thinking About
a Future Society," pages 91 to 92
* What Harvey is calling a section we now call a support group.