A New View of Leadership
By the age of 26, I had worked directly under three groundbreaking, female leaders. Each leader inspired me, and every one of them intimidated me.
One leader had numerous Tony Awards, another had received the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and another graced the cover of Forbes while raising a global fund and earning a spot on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list. My twenty-something brain was fairly convinced that becoming a leader required 3 things: charisma, control, and accolades.
But in the decade that followed, I collected data that completely upended these notions.
At Columbia University, I studied leadership through comparative profiles and conceptual models and I devoured the insights of Kurt Lewin, John Gardner, and Warren Bennis. I learned that becoming a leader is..
...not rooted in select personality traits
...not about individual authority
...not predicated on talent or achievements
Leadership is an interactive phenomenon.
It is interactive because... a leader only becomes a leader when they have individuals who follow them or cooperate with them. This requires being actively aware of the self, the collective, and the context, and working in purposeful alignment.
It is a phenomenon because... a leader only becomes a leader when they share immediate experiences with their followers and gain new understanding. This requires showing up, paying attention to what is true and what is needed, and creating a better way forward, again and again.
Now, if leadership as an “interactive phenomenon” sounds a bit esoteric, here is a new framework for leadership that might be more actionable and more useful.
This framework was born out of research, deep discussion with colleagues and mentors, and direct work with clients. Its simplicity is intentional, and each corner is a doorway to countless efforts an individual (or team) can commit to learning.
So no matter who you are - a mother or father, a teacher, a veteran, a musician, a nurse, a corporate lawyer, a producer, a surgeon, a student, a program manager, a senior vice president, etc. - you can start exercising phenomenal leadership, wherever you are.
