The age of AI is demanding a new leadership skill set.
It’s asking you to build your capacity to navigate more and more rapidly changing conditions. Artificial intelligence will continue to make tasks easier which leaves a lot of opening for innovation and creativity. And the leaders that future proof themselves, teams, and organizations are those that can optimize innovation, not only your own innovation and creativity, but also the innovation and creativity of your teams.
I’m excited about the potential of this technological shift to create a landscape that rewards each person’s unique voice, rooted in their diverse perspectives, cultures, ancestry, experiences, and choices. Each person carries a unique wisdom and the greatest creativity and innovation emerges at the intersection of that uniqueness.
So, the job of the Emergent Leader becomes quite simple. Instead of trying to increase productivity through sheer willpower, hiring increases, urgency, and busyness, the teams that future-proof themselves are the ones that create space for innovation while the others are busy trying to “do” more.
This requires a big shift in the typical way business has been done. It takes shifting the ways you learned to run a business. Up until now, it was enough to guide your company with your vision and to surround yourself with people that could help you bring it into reality. But now, to thrive, you need to activate leadership, creativity, and critical thinking at all levels of your organization.
Yet, surface solutions aren’t enough to do that. Perhaps you’ve tried to implement cross-functional innovation teams, flexible work weeks, freedom and autonomy of how work gets done, more time off, and/or skills-based training.
And, if you’re like most leaders, you’re probably frustrated to see that, after giving your employees the opportunities, education, autonomy, and agency they’re looking for, they don’t know what to do with it. And they end up asking for more direction and structure – the very thing they wanted less of in the first place.
The key is to not just shift the surface way of operating but to pull out the root of what blocks innovation: a mindset of conformity and control.
Most people on your team have been taught throughout their lives to survive and thrive by conforming and creating a predictable comfort zone. Yet, innovation requires unpredictability. It requires the capacity to navigate the discomfort that comes with ambiguity and the unknown.
Creating space for your team to create that mindset shift is the skillset of Emergent Leadership. It’s the skillset that the Age of AI is calling forward. And a sustainable mindset shift requires pulling the roots of old belief systems out of the unconscious mind and rewiring the nervous system.
The key to Emergent Leadership is becoming proficient in doing this for yourself so that you can then create the space for your team to do it as well.
Because we’ve all been born into a collective mindset and belief system rooted in centuries of momentum. With the advent of agriculture 13,000 years ago, children went from spending all day playing to spending 15 hour days in the farms to help their families grow food that would sustain their family.
In the Industrial Age, that turned into 15 hour days in the factories. In the Information Age, that turned into long days in the classroom. When the first higher ed institution was created in the 1600s, the upper class created it with the intention to create good soldiers, Puritans, and employees.
As our ancestors were learning how to navigate fast technological advancement, a growing population, and devastating events like the Bubonic plague, they made many questionable choices reacting from a place of fear, scarcity, and survival. This birthed slavery, colonialism, and oppressive patriarchal systems.
Then you were born. And so was your team. And you learned in your childhood through school, your parents, your peers, etc. that in order to thrive and survive, you need to fall in line and do what you’re told. And so did your team. This isn’t about judging our ancestors, parents, or teachers. They all did the best they could facing the conditions, unknowns, and change that they were facing.
But it’s also not about ignoring what happened. We’re again facing great unknowns, change, and challenging conditions once. And we get to decide what is the best that we can do.
Emergent leadership means seeing where those patterns still have momentum today, and are unknowingly being perpetuated through you and your team. Many of those patterns have fed the mindset of conformity that blocks innovation in your team and will continue to be perpetuated through the unconscious mindset of your team until they are brought to awareness. They usually show up on the surface as self-suppression, busyness, urgency, procrastination, defensiveness, self-doubt, etc.
When you bring awareness to the patterns, you have an opportunity to stop their momentum, to unwind that mindset from the team, and help the team rewire their mindset to be better able to navigate the unknown, rapid change, and discomfort that innovation requires and creativity emerges from.
You are then preparing your team for surface solutions like flat structures, innovation teams, and freedom of creativity because they’ll have the capacity to navigate the discomfort of that agency and autonomy. And, at the intersection of all the diverse voices of your team, something unique and incredible will emerge that only they could create.
There’s no prescribed leadership development methodology that’s going to be the fix-all. All the leadership and innovation you need is already on your team when you can help create the circumstances for it to emerge.
I hope this post sparked something within you and will support you and your team in asking new questions and exploring how to tap into all the untapped genius on the team.
Leave comments or questions below! I hope you’re having a beautiful day.
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.