What is Leading Beyond Authority?

Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa:

"When I started on the task of sorting out the mine workers, I consciously chose to leave the authority I had.  Because I took the view that others before me had failed by trying to operate it this way and that I would be better off taking on the task with no authority at all.

In the 1970s, the trade union movement began to surge. In those days there was an unquestioned principle that you never went to the bosses. I broke it – and went to ask permission to organize the workers. Asking the bosses for permission was like going to Alcatraz and asking for permission to organize a prison break-out.

I knew I was taking a big risk. Many before me had tried to organize the mine workers; there had been many such attempts between 1946 and 1982. I knew I had to do something new. Why would I take a long detour (which is what it was) and break a fundamental principle about working with the bosses? I attracted a lot of criticism from the trade unions and the ANC. It was a painful and lonely path to take.

But I knew that the authority I appeared to have was the wrong one. The miners were living in an almost military environment – they were like hostages. I knew that I needed to move outside the rules, outside the traditional way of organizing the workers and outside the authority that I had been given.

So I went to the Chamber of Mines and asked for permission to operate in the mines: for offices and resources and food for my officials. The timing was right because a report had just come out saying that black miners needed to organize into legalized trade unions.

Once we got going properly, the workers stopped feeling so brow-beaten – and stopped behaving like hostages. It was like lancing a boil: there was an out-flowing of this quest for freedom – and we became the fastest growing union in the world, with 360,000 members eventually.

So I eventually moved back into authority – but a different one. To get there, I had to make a detour and operate way beyond my authority first. If I had not taken that detour and moved way outside my authority, it would have not been possible to organize the mine workers so quickly. Of course, the strikes they then backed played a crucial part in making the country ungovernable and causing the break-down of the apartheid government. The detour was all part of achieving our original objective."

Taken from Beyond Authority: Leadership in a Changing World by Julia Middleton.

Leading in the spaces where one has little or no authority can be painstaking. So then why do it in the first place? The outer circle needs these types of leaders. Not simply as representatives of organizations that need to connect with the outside world, but as individual citizens in their own right.  We all live in society – and society needs the brains and abilities of all of us if it is to run well. Democracy is not just about voting every few years and then complaining in the intervening period about politicians not being able to run the place properly. We all need to engage as citizens. Some will do it by entering politics. Others will do it by standing up as leaders of civil society. But we all need to be involved.

Both in organizations and society, we have become far too good at delegating everything to the great "they". This can be politicians. Or “the people upstairs”. Or “the experts”. Sometimes, it’s just someone – anyone – else. What we don’t realize is that, sometimes, there is no "they". It’s “us”. Or even “me”. It has almost gone so far that, when you do stand up, you are seen as acting illegitimately, unless you are a politician, the boss, or a professional carrying the relevant institutional or departmental brief. Jude Kelly is the Director of the WOW Foundation in London. She says:

Therefore in order to carry out change, leaders need to be effective in leading beyond their authority.