Since the end of April 2026, I have been an elected member of my town council and part of Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen parliamentary group. Of course, I thought carefully beforehand about whether I wanted to stand for election. But as with so many decisions in life, before a change you may have an idea of what to expect afterwards, but you cannot know the details: what it will actually be like, how you will feel, or what this “new” experience will do to you.
Furthermore, one perceives the new situation through one’s own personal lens. Thus, my initial impressions of my work in local politics are not primarily shaped by substantive issues or differing professional and political positions, but rather by observations of the communication and behavioral patterns of the people involved. My perspective from a systems-oriented viewpoint is, so to speak, always present.
Some of my core values such as respectful communication and interacting on an equal footing get compromised several times during almost every council meeting by members of other political groups. At the same time, I genuinely enjoy the debates and the political disagreements that take place in the council.
This new environment continues to confuse and challenge me. I am using this phase to observe myself and how I deal with new and uncertain situations. For now, the overall experience provides me more energy than it consumes. I believe this is partly because being part of a political group gives me a strong sense of “we” something I may have missed more during the past eleven years of working independently than I had realised.
My observations in this new environment go well beyond self-reflection. I regularly find myself wondering how the other political groups approach self-organisation, how much delegation and personal responsibility their respective group leaders allow, when individual opinions and perspectives are expressed, and when party discipline takes over. The concept of role clarity has taken on a completely new and much greater significance for me in this context.
Clarity of roles, in turn, is an aspect that is of great personal importance to me. How well can I manage to see the person who treated me very unkindly in Parliament (in their role as a member of a political caucus) as a private individual when I run into them on the street, in a café, or at the next town festival? What can I do to make it easy for others to differentiate when I am in my role as a neighbour on the street or in my role as an opposition politician in Parliament?
For the time being, I have come to the conclusion that mechanisms and attitudes that are helpful in organisations and companies can also be valuable in a parliamentary context. I would like to illustrate this with three aspects:
- Silo mentality causes harm: The “new” insight in corporate management that the silo mentality of individual departments or divisions undermines the success of the company as a whole can, in my view, also be applied to parliamentary work. I am convinced that taking all perspectives (and all political parties) into account leads to a better solution for the respective municipality. In my view, silo thinking of individual political groups means that ideas, population groups and potential solutions are too easily overlooked.
- Tolerating ambiguity: Different perspectives inevitably create greater complexity and with it ambiguity and disagreement. Representing your own perspective as an elected representative, standing up for it in the council and, at the same time, remaining willing to find compromises is, to me, one of the highest disciplines of democracy. And there is a clear parallel here with participative leadership in organisations.
- Role clarity: A clear distinction between role and person is important in many different contexts: in parenting, in organisational leadership and when acting as an elected representative and member of a political group. For our own behaviour, the challenge lies in being internally clear about the role from which we are acting at any given moment. When dealing with others, the challenge is to recognise the role in which the other person is currently acting while still seeing the individual behind that role based on the assumption: “People are fundamentally good.” For me, role clarity does not mean that our personality should disappear. We can still allow the human being behind the role to shine through and with it, show the much-discussed quality of authenticity.
In a nutshell: I have to acknowledge that my new voluntary political role occupies my mind considerably more than I had expected. On the one hand, there are the many policy issues and topics I still need to familiarise myself with. On the other, I find myself constantly comparing good organisational leadership with the way political work takes place in the council. My current conclusion is this: Political work across party lines can indeed benefit greatly from good leadership and a strong team culture. I’ll keep you posted on whether I still hold this view in the future!