In the Shadows
Shadow died today.
She was one of our Silver Sussex hens. One of The Girls That Gossip. And, lately, I had started to suspect she was also the one in charge.
I say in charge because Shadow certainly seemed to think she was.
There was always something happening.
Someone standing somewhere she didn't approve of. Someone eating something she'd apparently decided belonged to her. Someone getting too close. Someone requiring correction.
Shadow had opinions.
Lots of them.
And she wasn't afraid to share them.
Honk.
Move.
Mine.
Stop.
Not there.
Some days it was exhausting listening to her.
And I wasn't even a chicken.
What struck me almost immediately after we lost her was the quiet.
The flock seemed calmer. More peaceful.
Although, almost as soon as I'd said that out loud, I heard a correction coming from the coop.
They're still chickens, after all.
There will still be boundaries. There will still be resources. There will still be disagreements and a pecking order.
But something felt different.
And it made me think about Cloud.
Earlier this year, we unexpectedly lost Cloud too.
Cloud was different.
She seemed to have status within the flock, but I don't remember her constantly needing to demonstrate it.
The others seemed comfortable around her.
She fitted wherever she went.
No drama. No fuss.
The flock was generally calm.
Perhaps that's the strange thing about safety.
You don't always notice it while you have it. Sometimes you only recognise it by what replaces it.
Cloud's death was sudden.
The flock hadn't prepared for it. Neither had we.
There wasn't a chicken recruitment exercise or a particularly robust succession plan.
But somebody had to step forward.
From everything I've observed since, I think Shadow did.
At first, I thought Shadow had simply become the new leader.
Sitting here tonight, I'm wondering whether that's quite fair.
Shadow had suddenly found herself being a Cloud.
Maybe she wasn't ready.
Maybe she inherited responsibility before she'd worked out how she wanted to carry it.
And perhaps, like humans sometimes do when responsibility feels bigger than our confidence, she reached for the thing that felt safest.
Control.
More watching.
More correcting.
More involvement.
Maybe all that honking wasn't confidence at all.
Maybe some of it was the weight of a crown she'd only just picked up.
Cloud and Shadow both had influence.
Both cast a shadow.
But perhaps Cloud's was cast far enough away that those living within it didn't feel cold.
Shadow's was harder to escape.
And that made me wonder:
What does it feel like to live in my shadow?
I've worked for different kinds of leaders.
I've worked for people who enabled me, trusted me, gave me boundaries and then gave me room to operate within them.
And when I feel genuinely enabled, I don't do less.
I go further.
I think bigger. I take ownership. I challenge things. I solve problems nobody specifically asked me to solve because I care about the outcome.
I've also experienced leadership where enormous amounts of energy are spent trying not to get something wrong.
Check first.
Ask permission.
Don't challenge.
Wait for approval.
Learn what irritates the person in charge.
Work around them.
And perhaps most uncomfortably, I've probably demonstrated elements of both kinds of leadership myself.
There have certainly been times when I've been so busy fixing the next problem, correcting a process and keeping everything moving that I've failed to ask why I keep having to intervene in the first place.
Fix the symptom.
Fix the process.
Don't look too closely at the structure producing it.
Honk.
It's remarkably easy to confuse being busy with leading.
Imagine getting on an aeroplane.
Halfway through the flight, you discover the captain handing out the meals.
Very hands-on.
A little later, they're selling the duty free.
Excellent visibility.
Now they're collecting rubbish from row 26.
Really understands the operation.
There's just one awkward question.
Who's flying the fucking plane?
Leadership doesn't require us to do everything.
In fact, obsessing over every moving part can prevent us from doing the thing that only we can do.
The captain needs capable people around them.
People who understand their responsibilities.
People trusted to make decisions within clear boundaries.
People who know when something needs escalating.
And, importantly, people confident enough to say:
Something isn't right.
Because there was another problem with Shadow's leadership.
Nobody appeared particularly keen to challenge her.
And if challenging the person in charge repeatedly earns you a peck, eventually you learn something.
Not that they're right.
Just that disagreeing isn't worth it.
Silence can be wonderfully seductive to a leader.
Everyone agrees with me.
Nobody is challenging me.
Everyone does what I ask.
Look how well this works.
Except perhaps nobody agrees with you at all.
Perhaps they've simply learned what disagreement costs.
Or perhaps they challenged once.
Then twice.
They raised the problem. They escalated it. They tried to change something.
And nothing happened.
Eventually, silence can mean something much more dangerous than fear.
It can mean people have stopped caring enough to speak.
They're still there.
They're still doing the job.
But they're no longer trying to change the things they can see are wrong.
Perhaps they're simply waiting for the next opportunity to come along.
A leader can force somebody to remain in a role.
They cannot force them to remain invested in it.
The opposite of challenge isn't always agreement.
Sometimes it's resignation.
And once that happens, a leader loses something incredibly valuable.
Information.
You can surround yourself with people who tell you you're right and become more confident while becoming less informed.
Eventually, everyone can end up going along with a very bad idea.
Nobody felt safe enough — or cared enough anymore — to say otherwise.
That's where I've started thinking differently about psychological safety too.
Safety doesn't mean nobody gets challenged.
It doesn't mean everyone gets what they want.
It doesn't mean an absence of boundaries.
Quite the opposite.
Big ideas need space.
Big trust needs safety.
Real love needs boundaries.
Boundaries tell us where the safe space is.
Good leadership doesn't then need to fill every inch inside it.
People need room to think, move, question, contribute, get something wrong and sometimes tell the person in charge that they're wrong too.
Because a leader who is threatened every time somebody else steps forward isn't creating leadership.
They're collecting followers.
And I don't believe leadership belongs to one person.
I believe leadership is collective.
We already understand that better than we sometimes realise.
Put a group of us on a football pitch and we'll look towards the person who can read the game.
Put us in a race and someone else might set the pace.
Give us a complicated puzzle and suddenly a completely different person becomes the one everybody needs.
Anyone who grew up watching The Crystal Maze already understands this.
You didn't send the person who was brilliant at the physical games into every room.
Physical.
Skill.
Mystery.
Mental.
Different challenge.
Different strengths.
Different person.
And occasionally somebody still got locked in.
Leadership is allowed to move.
A good leader doesn't need to know everything.
They need to understand what they have around them.
Who knows something I don't?
Who has seen something I've missed?
Who needs support?
Who needs a boundary?
Who should I listen to?
Who should lead this bit?
And am I listening to any of them...
or have I become so captivated by my own voice that I can't hear anyone else?
Leadership being collective doesn't mean nobody is in charge.
It doesn't mean responsibility disappears.
And it certainly doesn't mean anything goes.
Sometimes I lead.
Sometimes I follow.
Sometimes I challenge.
Sometimes I support.
Sometimes I need somebody else to notice what I've missed.
And sometimes the best thing I can possibly do is get out of the bloody way.
There is, however, an important distinction.
Responsibility can be shared. Accountability cannot simply be outsourced.
When we choose to bring a dog into our lives, we become accountable for that choice.
We can share responsibilities.
Someone else can walk them.
A kennel can care for them while we're away.
A vet can treat them.
A trainer, behaviourist or Dog Listening professional can advise and support us.
Friends and family can learn the boundaries we use in our home.
But ultimately, they are our dogs.
We chose them.
We remain accountable for the environment and relationships we create around them.
And perhaps that's another lesson for leadership.
Delegation isn't abdication.
A leader can distribute responsibility without surrendering accountability for the whole.
In fact, they should.
Because if everything needs the leader, the leader hasn't necessarily created capability.
They may have created dependence.
And that word matters with dogs too.
We sometimes mistake a dog needing us constantly for evidence of an extraordinary bond.
But love and dependence aren't the same thing.
I want Charlie and Elsie to love having us around.
I don't want them to believe they cannot cope when we're not.
A confident, capable dog should be able to rest when their humans leave, not spend that time stressed, frightened or redecorating the house by removing the sofa one cushion at a time.
Good leadership shouldn't make those around us incapable without us.
It should leave something behind when we leave the room.
There's a strange comfort in being indispensable.
If everything needs me, I must be important.
But I'm increasingly wondering whether being needed for everything can sometimes be evidence that you've led very little.
And somewhere in all this, I realised I was thinking about dogs.
Because humans can do Shadow rather well too.
Sit.
Leave.
No.
Stop.
Wait.
Quiet.
Off.
Another behaviour.
Another correction.
Another thing to fix.
The dog is unsettled.
Give them a Kong.
They're distressed when we leave.
Give them a toy.
They're worried about something.
Distract them.
They're doing things around the house that make us uncomfortable.
Train them to stay in a crate.
But what, exactly, have we solved?
I have nothing against Kongs. Toys and enrichment can be wonderful. A crate can be a safe, comfortable den when a dog understands it that way.
But none of them answers the question we've conveniently skipped.
Why are they unhappy?
If a dog is destroying the house because they're distressed when we leave, preventing them from reaching the sofa might protect the sofa.
It hasn't necessarily changed how the dog feels.
We've fixed the thing that made us uncomfortable.
Have we fixed anything for them?
Humans are rather good at this.
We see an outcome we don't like and create something to prevent it happening again.
A new rule.
Another approval.
Another process.
Another control.
Problem solved.
Except sometimes we've simply made the symptom harder to see.
The problem is still sitting underneath it.
I've had that thought with Dog Listening too.
Why isn't this working?
I've doubted.
And one of the more uncomfortable things Dog Listening has taught me is to turn the question around.
Am I actually communicating what I think I'm communicating?
That's difficult.
Because it's much easier to make the problem something outside ourselves.
The dog is reactive.
The dog won't listen.
The dog keeps barking.
The dog is attention seeking.
Fix my dog.
Make it stop.
Make it go away.
And there are absolutely times when behaviour needs professional support. Dogs have individual personalities, experiences and learned behaviours. Dog Listening isn't about pretending otherwise.
But behaviour is also communication.
If I'm constantly reacting to the symptom, I may never stop long enough to understand what sits underneath it.
And if my own communication is confused or inconsistent, I can't fairly judge the response I'm getting as though I'm somehow outside the system.
I'm one of the moving parts too.
That was quite a difficult thing for me to accept.
But it also changed everything.
Perhaps that's why I've become less interested in arguments about what leadership should be called.
I'm more interested in what it feels like.
Does everyone around the leader spend their time monitoring them?
Or does their presence allow everybody else to relax?
Does compliance mean trust?
Does silence mean agreement?
Does challenge mean disobedience?
If everyone needs you to tell them what to do all day, have you really led them anywhere?
Dog Listening has taught me to listen beyond dogs.
To watch interactions.
To notice patterns.
To question what I'm contributing.
To listen to the world around me.
Everybody has a role in that collective.
Charlie can alert me to danger.
Elsie can notice something I haven't.
Their communication matters.
But once they've given me that information, they don't need to carry responsibility for deciding what happens next.
Likewise, everybody in our home needs to understand and respect resources, boundaries and interactions.
Information can come from anywhere.
Responsibility can move.
But as the humans who chose to bring these animals into our lives, the ultimate accountability remains ours.
Leadership is collective.
And good leadership doesn't silence that collective.
It creates enough safety to hear it, enough awareness to understand it and enough confidence to know what to do with what it says.
But while I've been writing this, I've started wondering whether I've been a little unfair to Shadow.
She was controlling.
She was bloody noisy.
It was exhausting listening to her sometimes.
Again, I wasn't even a chicken.
But perhaps I've been asking the wrong question.
What if Shadow wasn't a bad Cloud?
What if she was actually a perfectly good Shadow?
Under Cloud, perhaps Shadow's watchfulness had a place.
Her willingness to challenge had a place.
Her voice had a place.
She didn't need to carry everything.
She was one moving part within a collective.
Then Cloud disappeared.
And Shadow found herself being a Cloud.
Would she have been different if she'd been allowed to remain Shadow?
I don't know.
But I know enough about leadership to recognise the question.
We do this to people too.
Someone is brilliant at their job, so we promote them.
Then we discover that the thing we've promoted them into requires completely different strengths from the thing they were brilliant at.
And sometimes, instead of questioning the system, we try to fix the person.
Another process.
Another intervention.
Another symptom.
Honk.
Perhaps good leadership isn't only about knowing when to lead.
It's about understanding what you've got around you well enough to let people be brilliant at being themselves.
I'm writing this where I spend a lot of summer evenings: at the garden table with my laptop.
In winter, I'll migrate back to the dining table.
The table changes.
The laptop generally doesn't.
It's where I work, think, write, learn and study.
During the day, it might be the work that pays the bills.
At night, it might be dogs, Dog Listening, rescue, planning, writing, or simply trying to understand something — and myself — a little better.
Trying, I suppose, to become a better human.
And a better leader.
Although I do close it.
That's important too.
There has to be space left for actually living.
Tonight, apparently, I'm sitting here learning about leadership because a chicken died.
And every now and then, I feel a spot of rain.
Nothing dramatic.
It starts.
Stops.
Starts again.
After weeks and weeks of heat and dry ground, I genuinely can't remember the last time I sat here and felt rain at all.
This summer has felt intense. Heatwave after heatwave. We've even watched frightening fires tear through places only a few miles from home.
The sky hasn't quite decided what it's doing yet.
It might pour.
It might not.
But something has changed.
And I can feel it.
So I'm staying exactly where I am.
Laptop open.
Waiting to see what happens.
I've actually enjoyed the sunshine this year. Perhaps more than usual.
I've even bought T-shirts that aren't black or navy.
Perhaps this is my midlife crisis.
A slightly more summery version of me seems to have emerged.
Apparently you can't always wear black and live in the shadows.
Although I still intend to do both whenever possible.
And sitting here has made me think that perhaps I've been looking at shadows wrongly too.
We need shade.
After the summer we've had, sometimes it has been a gift.
The problem isn't that leaders cast shadows.
We all do.
The question is where they fall.
How much space they occupy.
Whether they provide shelter or block out the light.
And perhaps, most importantly:
What grows beneath your shadow?
That's a considerably harder question.
At work.
At home.
With Charlie and Elsie.
With friends.
And, perhaps more than anyone, with Mike.
Poor Mike. He gets more of me than anybody else.
The good bits, hopefully.
But inevitably the Shadow bits too.
Because we don't get to decide what our shadow feels like simply because our intentions were good.
We have to be willing to look at what happens around us.
Cloud cast a shadow.
Shadow certainly did.
And so do I.
The coop is quieter tonight.
There are four Girls now.
I don't know yet who will step forward.
I don't know whether Nutmeg will remain our sheepish little hen or whether we'll discover that some of what we thought was Nutmeg was actually Nutmeg living in Shadow's shadow.
I don't know whether somebody else will decide they're in charge.
There have already been a few corrections.
Of course there have.
They're chickens.
But I'm going to resist the temptation to decide what it all means.
For now, I'll watch.
I'll listen.
I'll let the flock show me.
Because perhaps awareness is where all of this begins.
We have hundreds of interactions every day.
Sometimes we lead.
Sometimes we follow.
Sometimes we challenge.
Sometimes we support.
Sometimes we intervene.
Sometimes we go with the flow.
And sometimes we need to stop talking long enough to notice that it's raining.
Perspective gives us choice.
Perhaps that's what Looking Sideways has increasingly come to mean to me.
Not having all the answers.
Just being willing to move far enough away from my own answer to notice what else might be true.
Shadow spent an extraordinary amount of energy making sure everybody knew where she stood.
Cloud seemed to need considerably less.
But Cloud had been Cloud for a long time.
Shadow suddenly found herself being a Cloud.
Perhaps she was still learning how to be one.
Perhaps she would have been different if she'd been allowed to remain a Shadow.
Perhaps all of us are still learning when to lead, when to follow, when to challenge and when to step aside.
The rain still hasn't quite arrived.
The coop is quieter.
Something has changed.
Perhaps neither needs me to decide what happens next.
Perhaps the strongest leadership isn't measured by how much everyone around us needs us to do.
Perhaps it's visible in what they become able to do because we're there.
And, occasionally, because we've had the confidence to step aside.
Russ
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