What can Neville Longbottom teach us about leadership?

My final module at Turing, I led a “posse”, which is essentially a student club, called Armstrong. The previous leaders were focused on blockchain technologies. I’m very interested in blockchain technologies and volunteered to take over the group.

I believe in moving from capacity, meaning what I am capable of doing, rather than getting caught up in visions of grandeur. In this vein, I had to accept that I didn’t know as much technically as the previous leadership. In fact, I didn’t know much about blockchain at all.

Admitting my ignorance, the first thing I said is that we’re all in this together in our desire to learn as a research team. My goal as the leader was simply to set a tone and to create a space for my fellow students to encounter the ideas and learn together.

Basically, if you know more or find a cool resource, it is your responsibility as a member of the team to share that knowledge with the group.

I said from the first meeting that my priority was to give away leadership. The best strategy that I know for doing this is what I call the Neville Longbottom principle of leadership development.

It goes like this:

“I don’t know who among you will be a hero and end up cutting off snakes heads and other badassery. What I do know is that it is most likely not who I expect it to be.

So the question is how do we create a space where people have the opportunity and the encouragement to grow and contribute? My priority as a leader is to create that space where these people potentialities can become real.”

The most concrete, measurable way of doing this is giving away the meeting time. By the end of the module, over our four Spike sessions, 4 people gave lightning talks, 2 people led technical tutorials, and we brought in a guest speaker to talk about application design.