LAUSR

Leadership is vital to the sustainability and success of any profession, and occupational therapy is no exception. Effective leadership ensures our professional purpose, to enable people to engage and participate in occupations to support their health and wellbeing, is preserved and progressed. To advance occupational therapy in the future, it is important for us to discuss how we value, nurture and enact leadership principles which align with the social age in which we live. We see evidence of our social age at every turn: where protest movements rapidly and organically develop; where funding for innovations are crowdsourced through social media and people contribute money or ideas to causes they value; and when the Bank of England asks the United Kingdom (UK) public, rather than a formal committee, to decide who features on the design of the new £50 note. In this space, a different form of leadership has quietly emerged. Social leadership, based on bringing people together to share, to learn from each other and to co-create, is proving an effective leadership style to facilitate meaningful change. This leadership style chimes well with our profession’s philosophical values, and we are already seeing examples of how occupational therapists are emerging as natural social leaders. Today, formal and social spaces collide. Leadership happens not only from established hierarchy but also from our collective voices, interactions and passions. Social leadership occurs when a community is facilitated by people who are not necessarily in traditional leadership positions but are given authority by the community based on their reputation and network of relationships. Social leaders can often act in places where formal leadership does not reach. They establish themselves as humble, authentic and collaborative leaders, working ‘out loud’ with others as equal partners (see Stodd, 2016, part 1 for further reading). Social leaders tend to lead from behind, facilitating others to connect, to communicate and to generate responses to their own challenges. This style of leadership harmonises with the core principles of occupational therapy. We work with and for people, enhancing occupational performance and participation while navigating the complex interplay between people, what they want, need and have to do and the various environmental contexts within which they engage. Social leadership is complementary to rather than in competition with some of the more traditional and formal leadership styles, with the latter often based on