Make room for participants

By Kim Faber

 

How we do it – leadership through relation  
While the cornerstone in traditional leadership structures is the hierarchy, the leaders of CCPA are in constant eyesight with its participants.
When Anders Levinsen, founder and leader of the CCPA, travelled to the Balkans to give the second leader seminar in CCPA in 1999, he had to bring his 1½ years old daughter Amalie with him - despite the fact, that the child barely knew how to walk, could not talk, and was wearing diapers. 

 

Luckily, Amalie had regular sleeping rhythms, and when she was at sleep, Anders Levinsen was addressing the participants of the seminar. But when the girl was awake, the participants had to take care of themselves, while Anders took care of his daughter. “Then they were playing, dancing and doing exercises and had to make things work. And it went excellent. It was no problem for them” Anders Levinsen says. 
 

In this way, the idea of how CCPA should organize seminars and schools was born: through an extensive degree of self management, and trust in people´s ability of organizing and developing activities. “When you work with volunteers, it is important to understand, that participants need influence in what they do. That is why we are an unusually flat organisation. It is all about involving as many as possible and creating relations among people”, Anders Levinsen says and uses a metaphor to describe the function of CCPA: “To make a pc and a printer work together, you need a driver. CCPA is the driver between people, people who recently have been in a conflict.”

 

Consciously the organisation works with stimulation of head and body, intellect and physics. “Typically we start out a seminar by asking the participants to discuss different questions. Fx: What is a good environment for children? What are the characteristics of a good children’s coach? How does a parent support his/her children the best?
Not before everyone has been through this process of reflection, we go on to working with the things that mostly connect to a coach seminar: the sport and the games.”

 

What started as a coincidence, forced by the circumstances: that Anders Levinsen had to bring his daughter at a coach seminar has developed to a leadership tool. “It is a great strength that, when we visit the participants at the seminars and schools and we bring our family as well, we signal that we want to be together and play with them. We show the participants that we are loyal to the project, and that we respect and recognise them as equals to us.” Anders Levinsen says.

 

It is all about creating relations. And in a higher and more abstract level: to reconsolidate people that have been enemies not long ago. That is only possible if you find a balance among the participants - where the different ethnic groups see themselves as equal to each other. “And that is quite literally. Fx. We emphasise that there is a balance in the number of people from one to the other group that we hire.” Anders Levinsen points out.

To lead a group of volunteers, he describes as an exercise in meeting participants where they are and letting the things develop in their own conditions and circumstances, instead of presenting your own preconceived ideas and telling people how to make things work.

To put it shortly: to lead through relation – instead of leading through position.

 

That is fundamentally different pattern than the traditional organization and business leadership pattern, says Niels Thygesen, lector at Copenhagen Business School and expert in leadership. “Traditional leadership patterns build on position – a hierarchy with sharp separation between those who take decisions and those who carry them out. This gives the leader a certainty that he knows where he is heading.
Ruling, on the other hand – not on the basis of position with regard to the participants, but on the relation between the participants, means that you lead through a fundament of uncertainty and unpredictably. All kinds of leadership traditions take their point of departure in trying to reduce certainty and unpredictably. But this organization regards its leadership based on chance and sees unpredictability and risks as actives instead of passives”, Niels Thygesen says. “In practise, this means that if two participants agree that they want to try to do things in a new way, a complete different way than what is usual, then the leader does not say: “This is not how we normally do it”, but on the contrary: “Okay, then this is the way we do it now, this is what we precede with”. Then the leader does everything he/she can to provide the resources that need to be there to facilitate a success” says Niels Thygesen.

 

Leading this way does not render superfluous managements with regard to planning and practising seminars and football schools. On the contrary, Niels Thygesen says. “It requires iron fist management. It is the leader’s task to create the relations that the ideas evolve from”, he says.

 

Bjarne Ibsen, who is a professor at the University of Southern Denmark and scientist in the mechanisms in volunteer work, agrees with this. “You can’t expect things to grow from the bottom, just by giving the participants room. The settings need to be created, stimulated and facilitated, and this is the management’s task” he says.

Anders Levinsen admits that there can be a conflict in offering a lot of ideas of how things might work or not work based on experience, and then restraining oneself not to trump ones ideas through. “It is a balancing act. We want to tell how a football school looks like. But at the same time we know that if the locals do it 100% the same way as we tell them, then the football schools will die”.