Read The Room - A Lesson in Leading Without Fragility

By Belinda Knight

When you are fully immersed in the moment, you do not notice the passage of time.  And suddenly one day you are on the ‘Wisdom Panel’ with experience under the belt, and you have to wonder, “how on earth did I get here!”

The key leadership lesson I have learnt in the past 40 years is that you never arrive.  And.  You never see the next wave until it is about to break over your head.  Resilience is key to be able to weather the storm, but as I have learnt in the past decade, I have come to value something far more powerful, being anti-fragile.  As a woman in business, it’s how quickly one can recover, recalibrate, and reset. 

I recall being the only woman on a five-member Exco team. During one particularly tense meeting, I cracked a joke to lighten the atmosphere. The CEO turned to me and asked, “What exactly do you think a clown can achieve that the rest of us can’t?” He went on to talk about how humour is often used to mask discomfort… and so it continued. I could feel the discomfort ripple around the room—my colleagues looked relieved it wasn’t directed at them. It was a tough moment. I had to apologise, let it go, and remain composed and fully engaged for the rest of that meeting. No tears. No personal recriminations. But I took away a lesson I now often share: read the room. And if you misread it, don’t be fragile—learn and move forward. 

Leadership as a process is probably one of the toughest skills to engage and I do not believe we can ever truly master it, we are dealing with human emotion and bias after all!

And.  The willingness to learn every day, and not to shy away from feedback is at the heart of leadership lessons.