Sometime ago, learning from John McKnight http://www.abcdinstitute.org/faculty/McKnight/ I began to understand the simple and profound idea that we are citizens, not simply consumers. In Dr. McKnight’s language, consumers don’t rebuild after natural disasters, citizens do that. Citizen, not consumer has become a mantra for me.

I like it because it is counter-culture. And I like it because of its deep truth, there is an inherent wisdom to it.  And I like it because it raises the bar; it demands action from me.

I’ve been wondering about something similar in our workplaces. Those of us who work in organizations, large and small, generally operate in hierarchies. The higher on the hierarchy, the more power I have and the more ‘airtime’ I’m usually granted at meetings for example. The lower I am in the hierarchy, the less power I have and the less ‘airtime’ I have. Back in the day for example, the only airtime I might have would be through the ‘suggestion box’, that was usually linked directly to the wastepaper can. (Not even to recycling!) But times have changed; the organizations we work in are a lot flatter, and with changes to technology driving so much of the changes to the way work gets done, there is a new power balancing act at play. Our businesses are slowly but surely becoming ‘wikis’ where rather than a small group of people write the encyclopedia and then publish it for the rest of us to read, more and more of the learning, more and more of the content of who we are, how we operate and what we do, is being written by a much broader spectrum of people in the organization. For example, boards are inviting staff at different levels to strategic planning sessions, intra company sites and forums are the norm, and broad based idea generation are the norm in most design companies. The new Blackberry Passport apparently was an idea being played with a few years ago in the middle of the design teams.

All of this to say, we are not simply ‘personnel’ or ‘assets’, we are the hearts and minds of the organization we work for, and that is not only a power, it is a responsibility. We are citizens, not employees. We are contributors, not cogs. As leaders, we need to recognize this emerging trend, and in the words often attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, “there go my people, I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

May this week find us all leading and following.