Cultivating Leadership - "It is time for growth."

 Cultivating Leadership

Politicians, educators, business owners, and other organizational leaders don’t seem to know how to handle the world of the 21^st Century.  Most are “doubling down” on behaviors that “always worked before.”  While these decisions to continue with previous methods are not being successful, current leaders, nonetheless, don’t appear to know what to do next. 

 

It is time we realized that the past will not work in the future.  Our population, cultural norms and functional needs are changing rapidly.  Meg Wheatley (1992, 2006) identified this process in her book Leadership and the New Science:Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. In the text, Wheatley tells us,

 

The world has changed. It blares from news reports and blazes across our screens in the terrifying images of these times—wars, terrorism, migrations of displaced people, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis. Chaos and global interconnectedness are part of our daily lives. We try hard to respond to these challenges and threats through our governments, organizations and as individuals, but our actions fail us. No matter what we do, stability and lasting solutions elude us. It’s time to realize that we will never cope with this new world using our old maps. It is our fundamental way of interpreting the world—our worldview—that must change. Only such a shift can give us the capacity to understand what’s going on, and to respond wisely.

 

“Our worldview – that must change.”  Yes.  We must move our worldview from looking at profits and costs with money as the outcome to having profits and cost be about people.  We must realize that “WE are the change needed in the world” – “WE, the people.”