The Laidlaw Scholarship has shown me that leadership is less one dimensional than I thought coming into the programme. Not only I have I learnt how research can proactively change the world to help those in need through good leadership but also how offering support in practice, giving more time to actively listen to diverse sets of people and communicate how you want to lead effectively can make a difference too.
The first year began with a residential weekend in Windsor with the other scholars. It was genuinely fun, but it was also the first time I sat down and thought properly about what leadership means. Actively listening to people, being inclusive, and understanding that people face different challenges and inequalities at work depending on who they are were key takeaways for me. Participating in these events with people I had never met before was scary to me at first but allowed me to open to new shared experiences. The weekend alongside the leadership weekends delivered throughout the scholarship taught me about building my character during leadership with new people.
The larger chunk of first year was my research project. I looked at how contract law remedies could be improved to deal with the inequalities LGBT people face when contracting and just going about everyday life such as consumer and business interactions. Doing that research made me realise how weak a lot of human rights legal protection is in practice, and how much support is genuinely lacking. But it also showed me that law can be used more proactively to actually help with distributive justice through effective leadership in government and private organisations.
In second year I learnt how organisations can proactively improve people’s lives in practice. I did my Leadership in Action project with Citizens Advice, advising clients on all sorts of issues. This taught me a lot about communication including explaining things clearly to people who are stressed or confused, being patient, and picking up research skills on the fly. It also showed the reality of structural inequality directly in front of me, through the broad array of problems people brought in and lack of resources charities such as Citizens Advice have to help with them. Working with the service also expanded my capacity to learn about new issues, research and offer advice on them and package this up with pastoral and emotional support required to ensure clients felt listened to. The ease at which longstanding volunteers and supervisors do this every day showed me the intersection of the different importance aspects of good leadership.
I am keen to maintain what I have learnt from the programme into my future endeavours. Listening to what people have to say has always been important to me and my leadership style and I believe the scholarship’s lessons on listening to those whose experiences are different from mine will allow me to put this into practice in a broader set of endeavours. I am determined to put my developed research, communication and problem-solving skills into use in ways that help people and help solve ongoing structural inequalities.