The History of Leadership Development
In the 1920s, the predominant leadership theory was that people were either born a leader or not. By the 1960s, this shifted to a focus on how to lead based on behaviors, beliefs, motivation styles, and situations. It was very transactional in nature.
In the 1980s, transformational leadership emerged, with a focus on inspiration, vision, and leading vs. managing.
Throughout that time, the growing Leadership Development field tried to put Leadership in a variety of boxes that were simple to understand, easy to sell, and easy to apply. Everyone was trying to find “the” solution to Leadership. And thus oversimplifying it in ways that sound great, costs a lot of money, but often don’t get sustained results.
There is still a temptation to do that today but the last few decades have shown that prescribed “solutions” don’t get to the heart and root of what blocks true leadership from emerging.
Emergent Leadership and What’s In the Way of It
Leadership is naturally emergent, dynamic, and looks different with each project, team, and individual. The key is to allow the inherent leadership and creativity of any group to come to the surface.
For the natural leadership of any system, organization, or team to emerge, it’s important to stop looking at leadership as a problem to solve.
Instead, ask:
- What’s in the way of the natural leadership on my team from emerging?
- What needs to be given voice so that the untapped team wisdom can have safe space to express where it hasn’t before?
- How can we gently shift out of busyness, overwhelm, and other learned patterns that block innovation?”
These learned patterns operate below conscious awareness, at the level of the unconscious mind and the nervous system (psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural, and social patterns). They are patterns that you and your team unknowingly wired into your neurology and nervous system over the years.
Sometimes, they’re rooted in ancestry passed down through genetics, sometimes in childhood strategies of suppression used to survive, sometimes taught in school, and sometimes picked up from a society that demands conformity in order to thrive. Almost always, it’s a combination.
These patterns make sense given the history we’ve all been born into …
The Industrial Age demanded conformity, hierarchy, and authoritarian leadership. It required leaders to maintain control and guide groups in a linear direction.
The Information Age required more creativity from more levels of organizations. It required leaders to become more self-reflective and develop their ability to navigate rapid change and exponential growth. Although, for those less privileged in society, the Industrial Age ways were (and are) still suppressing creativity and expression.
The Age of AI that is now unfolding is requiring even more creativity. It’s requiring that leadership be activated at even more levels of the organization.
In order to break through the noise of the Information Age and be seen as a thought-leading, innovative organization, it requires a diversity of leadership styles rooted in a diversity of cultures, perspectives, and choices. That is where truly ground-breaking creative ideas emerge from: at the intersection and tension of creative differences emerging into something new and unexpected.
Using the 3 A’s to Build Capacity of Your Team to Navigate Change
That ground-breaking creativity requires letting go of the expected. Letting go of control. Knowing when to guide and when to allow for space. It requires an increased capacity and tolerance for difference, change and the unknown throughout your team culture. It takes collective courage to pause, notice, and slow down to speed up. And it takes cultivating this skillset within yourself and supporting your team to do the same.
This requires space, time, patience, and a willingness to speak what’s been unspoken. Yet, it’s hard to do that when old antiquated methodologies of the past are operating under the surface and fighting against difference, change, and the unknown – simply out of habit and learned survival strategies.
So the first step is to bring awareness to individual and team patterns that are operating below the surface – and give them voice, understanding, and acceptance.
These are patterns that have become the default and automatic for most. And they will remain that way until awareness is brought to them. If you don’t bring awareness to them, no amount of leadership training will overcome them as they will continue to sabotage progress in order to maintain control, predictability, and suppression in order to feel safe. If you do bring awareness to them, space can be created for something new.
All the leadership you could ever need already exists on your team. You first need to clear the learned clutter, build embodied self-awareness into your culture, and practice voicing and shifting these patterns.
Then, leadership training can actually be effective and sustainable, honing and refining the natural talent that is now free to be expressed.
For leaders to truly emerge in your organization and on your team, there must be time devoted for your team to build the capacity to step into their leadership. There must be the space to become aware, talk about, and explore the ways that creativity and leadership is unconsciously being suppressed on the team – at the individual level and the team level. And to collectively shift those patterns in a gentle way, with awareness and acceptance that they are no longer needed. That creates space to align to something new.
I call these the 3 A’s: Awareness, Acceptance, and Alignment instead of the 3 F’s: fixing, forcing, and figuring out.
It’s important to provide support for team members to explore where they hold themselves back without even knowing it. And to discuss and explore the ways that creativity is suppressed in group dynamics.
Invitation to Shift Your Leadership Priority
So, I’m inviting you to make it Priority #1 to unravel these patterns from the team nervous system so that …
- the untapped genius, creativity, impact, & profits of your team have space to emerge.
- everyone can shift into their correct roles where they’ll add the most value and feel the most fulfilled, rooted in their natural talents.
- the team is operating as an organism and resistance is removed before action.
- there is no longer wasted energy that manifests as busyness, overwhelm, frustration, silos, infighting, and burnout.
The answers you’re looking for aren’t in any new leadership methodology, neatly packaged into a 10-step plan.
That would be just another distraction from the simple but more challenging work: speaking the unspoken, feeling the unfelt, listening to the unlistened, regulating the nervous system – both within and around you – and in so doing, building your team’s capacity to navigate difference, change, and the unknown.
Simple? Yes.
Challenging? 100%.
Easier said than done? Absolutely.
Would the mind prefer to get lost in another 10-step plan? My bet is yes.
Yet, I’m inviting you to shift your way of being, build your capacity to stay in your center in more and more circumstances and be an embodied anchor of trust, collaboration, and creativity for your team – through practice and presence.
I’m inviting you into a remembrance and a return to a natural state – and to let go of the idea that you need to learn anything else. Learning comes later and will go so much further.
And it is tremendously rewarding as you break through and watch yourself hold more complexity and ambiguity as you activate the untapped genius of your team – not because of a strategy but because of how you’ve built your own capacity to do so through practice and embodiment.
Leave a comment below to let me know what thoughts or questions came up as you read this? What comes up in your nervous system or mind when you slow down during the day? What patterns can you bring more awareness to within you?
Hope this article was supportive for you and hope you’re having a beautiful day!
Orion
Opportunity to Practice Together – October 2023
If you’d like to practice and embody Emergent Leadership, future-proof your organization, and unlock the untapped genius, innovation, creativity, impact, and profit of your team…
Come join us in France Oct 6th to 15th, 2023! The Jacobson Institute of Grand View University and I are collaborating on an immersive 10-day experience to help you cultivate this capacity in your nervous system. I’ll be facilitating virtual classes before and after the 10-day immersive experience to help you prepare for and integrate your experience.
It’s called Emergent Leadership: The Anatomy of Innovation. You will learn and practice tools and techniques to build your capacity to create space for your team’s leadership, creativity, and innovation to emerge and set your organization apart. You’ll leave the course confident in how to create space for this to happen and build your team’s confidence in the face of change, difference, and the unknown.
Not to mention once-in-a-lifetime networking with leaders across industry and in one of the most innovative regions of the world in France. Spots are limited and first-come-first-serve.
Let’s grow together and co-create a transformative community of Emergent Leaders!
The leaders that will thrive in the constant and rapid change of the Age of AI are those that can navigate the unknown with confidence, by following your inner compass, and help their teams do the same.
This report gives you a map to how to listen to the wisdom of your body, to the 100,000,000 neurons of your gut and 40,000 neurons of your heart.
The Phoenix System is designed to help you bring awareness to unconscious leadership patterns left over from the Industrial and Information Ages. They block true innovation and creativity that can emerge when staying poised instead of reacting to fears and the whims of your mind.