A Few Thoughts on Leadership

I talk a lot in this here newsletter about leading teams and organizations, but today I want to step into a different conversation—one about leadership in uncertain times—and explore what is being asked of us as old worlds fall away and new ones emerge.

A tapestry of lights at the San Francisco botanical gardens.

There is an incomplete idea floating around in the leadership literature that in order to be a leader, you must have followers. In this view leadership is an outward journey into the future driven by a vision compelling enough to inspire action in at least a handful of people, if not an organization, city, or nation.

While not explicitly stated, the leader/follower configuration produces organizing structures that lend themselves to hierarchy and command-and-control approaches to work. Leaders are imbued with traits like autonomy and creativity, while followers, inspired by the leader, take on the work to build (or be) the machine that brings the leader’s vision to life.

There are places where this has worked out okay—the military, the 20th century, and the mafia are all good examples. The very nature of the military and mafia are predicated on command-and control leadership, and it seems to be a suitable organizing structure for these systems.

But the 20th century is 26 years gone and with it mistaken ideas of predictable systems that humans can control.

Today we live inside the consequences of our misunderstanding—a polarized world increasingly interrupted by discontinuities (pandemics, wars, climate disasters) that destabilize carefully optimized global systems, and all anyone can seem to say, in various ways, is “it’s gonna get worse.”

The natural response to bad news is to look around for someone who knows what to do. Which is precisely when many of us come to the horrifying conclusion that on top of everything falling apart, no one has a fucking clue¹.

We built a world of certainty on bed of sand, and now the foundations are eroding beneath us.

On the one hand, this is pretty terrifying. On the other, quite liberating! Sure, none of us have the answers, but I bet a lot of us together can sense, know, and figure out quite a lot. Not in the old way of “fixing” things, but in different, more collaborative ways of “shifting” things.

Collectively we are billions of minds and hearts, trillions of eyes and hands, each one of us holding a unique view of the world from our specific location within it. Each of these views, due to the nature of being human, are incomplete, including the views of “leaders”. And if all our views are incomplete, all our visions are too.

Silicon Valley and Washington DC are busy trying to revive the 19th century’s “Great Man” theory, doing their best to convince us that if we just let them do what they want, the future will be bright. There is nothing special about the visions these people hold (many of which I find anemic and daringly uncreative), but they’d like you to think otherwise.

Leadership is about making the future, but that future doesn’t belong to just a handful of people. Leadership is a birthright, something that is latent in all of us, and now is the time to claim it for ourselves. To recognize the profoundly personal ways the future beckons and the collective dimension in which emerging futures are enacted.

The profoundly personal

We have to do the work to discover how we are incoherent, what tensions exist, so that we can bring ourselves into deeper coherence. As we do our sense of purpose in the world becomes more clear, we have a sense of what matters, what we are.
—David Bohm

You have within you a sacred seed of knowing. This knowing will guide you, sometimes into work with others, but always to the work that is yours to do over a lifetime.

This work is not the job you show up to every day, though your day to day commitments may activate elements of it. It is a deeper work, one that flows from a small, bright light that lives in your heart. This light has always been with you, even in your darkest moments, steadily illuminating the way.

Inside this light is a secret that exists only for you, a special way of seeing and being in relationship with the world. A unique kind of understanding.

You must become quiet in order to hear what the secret has to share. You must sit with the fear, uncertainty, and not-enoughness that has us abandon the inward search and look outside ourselves for answers.

Keep going, deeper into your heart, into the knowing that is yours alone. The mind cannot figure this out or logic its way in, the only path is through the heart.

Nothing outside of you can make meaning for you. The techno-rational order is exhausted, it holds only partial answers. To look to these structures for guidance is to abandon our ourselves and to replace our light with the false certainties of our time.

It is within your heart that you find your home. The light, the seed, the knowing—this is your ground. From this place you can move in the world, make choices, and take action in alignment with what matters most, what gives you life.

Settling into the heart brings resonance with your true belonging. You are here, your participation matters. Not as a chimera of who you think you should be, but in the clarity of who you truly are.

This is the essence of leadership. To embody our individual and sovereign knowing and let that guide us in uncertain times. Each of us holds a key that unlocks something for the larger collective. We need to nurture and celebrate every unique way of knowing, being, and doing.

And while this is profoundly individual work, we are not alone on this path. The individual and the group come into existence simultaneously. Our human gift is to hold these sacred seeds and weave each facet of our knowing into a tapestry, connecting the uniqueness of each individual into the larger collective body of sensing, understanding, and creating.

The collective dimension

"Effective leaders enable followership of all, themselves included, to enthrone leadership and demote leaders.” —Mary Parker Follett

We are wired as social creatures, making our way through life in the company of others—in families, schools, teams, communities, businesses, organizations, and engagement in civic life.

Each group is led by some combination purpose and belonging, which is forever changing and being negotiated. This happens within the dynamics of the group itself, as well as externally in relationship to other groups and the wider environment.

You’d probably look at me sideways if I suggested the same person should lead each group. In addition to being a logistical nightmare, we all implicitly know that what makes a good leader in one context might be an abysmal failure in another.

And yet this knowing quickly disappears when we talk about leaders more specifically, treating the identity of “leader” as an indelible personal quality transferable to any situation, rather than a temporary role rooted in context and fit.

Writing over a century ago, management visionary Mary Parker Follett talked about leadership as the capacity to find the unifying thread in constantly changing circumstances. I’ve always liked this definition because it captures the essence of leadership without endowing it with special status or power.

What I take this to mean, this whole bit about the unifying thread in changing circumstances, is that leadership is the process of cultivating responsive purpose. We take action in the world in service of bringing desired futures into the present. Through these actions we shape the world. But the world also responds, and we must be open to this, allow ourselves to be shaped by what the changing circumstances ask of us.

Cultivating purpose in this way might sometimes be done by folks in formally designated leadership positions, while other times those with special knowledge, skills, or abilities might be the ones doing the work.

What is important to note is that purpose arises from the desires and activities of the group. It is a failure of leadership, not an expression of it, when a leader’s own purpose is substituted for the shared purpose.

Our individual ways of knowing are also alive in the group. The collective purpose isn’t some watered-down average of each person’s desire, but a shimmering, faceted, dynamic sense of direction that is always in conversation with the changing circumstances.

This requires that we stay profoundly attuned to ourselves while also tending to the collective. We do not need to look outside ourselves for a leader because it lives within each and every one of us. We can listen for the resonance between our heart and the common purpose, and work together in fractals of connection and belonging to steward a more just and meaningful world.

Leadership is so much more than we’ve understood it to be. It is not something that can be claimed by an individual for purposes of power and control, but something that lives in the collective that can amplified by each of us in our own unique ways.

Stay connected to your heart, and do not give your power away. You are the leader you have been waiting for.

I usually like to end these musings with something actionable, something you can take into the world and put into practice. But today, as I sit here making final edits, I don’t know what exercises or practices I could offer you.

What I do know, what feels most important, is to remind you that you matter. Your life and history and ways of seeing and being in the world matter. Do not abandon yourself, do not dim your light. Listen quietly to what is calling, and with gentle devotion bring that into the world.

With much love,

Andi