Aid workers struggle with the concept of leadership as it tends to be confused with personality rather than authority. Clusters are no different. Partly, this stems from the fact that everyone involved in a Cluster is here today, gone tomorrow. Also, a Cluster is not like an aid agency or a business as everyone works for, and therefore has loyalties to, someone else. So, while training courses have ideas and theories of leadership on the curriculum, they find it very difficult to teach. So do business schools. This is not because those doing the teaching are defective; it’s because leadership can’t be taught in the classroom. Nevertheless, we all recognise good leadership when we see it.
A post like this will not transform you into a great leader. What it can do, though, is show you some of the consistent patterns of failure and success regularly faced by those in the humanitarian world that are expected to ‘lead’ … which includes Coordinators and Disaster Managers. If you have some concept of what these challenges are in advance, you’ll be better able to deal with them at the time.
The first thing to acknowledge is that you are not a technical expert. You may be a doctor, an engineer, or an architect, but you are not an expert at management. And even if you think you are, it will only take one inter-sectoral coordination meeting to realise that you are not, as everyone will be using their own particular form of techno-babble and management-speak most of which will be largely incomprehensible to you.