What Is A Leader?

With Greater Awareness Comes Greater Choice.

Today’s prevailing and failing management theories drag us through history and are excruciatingly screaming for change. Through the past century, we’ve experienced massive innovation, scientific and biological discovery, and exponential information gains. The phones in our hands have a million times more computing power than the IBM mainframe used by NASA to send men to the moon and back.

Every area of life has been affected and has evolved into a new state. Yet our approach to leadership remains rigidly beholden to a centuries-old model.

Our ability to understand the world has evolved in all areas of life, science, and business. We have knowledge and choices as never before. This knowledge ranges from deep space to the ocean floor to the tiniest cells in our bodies and floating particles we breathe. We have evolved in understanding how our minds and bodies work. In less than a human lifetime, we have gained instantaneous access to global information that previously required decades to amass only a small portion. It’s a different world. Every area of life has been affected and has evolved into a new state. Yet our approach to leadership remains rigidly beholden to a centuries-old model. Truly baffling!

We’ve sped past the repeatable, process-orchestration, algorithmic period of the past 30 years at an incredible pace, compared to the industrial eras of the previous century. Today we are awakening to the realities that we’re in a new paradigm. This new era is more complex, disruptive, and different from previous eras. Change is more significant and is accelerating more rapidly. We will see greater shifts in the next five years than the previous 20.

As businesses race to catch up to these rapid transformations, traditional limiting beliefs, behavior preferences, biases, and burdens in the workplace resist the inevitable: Traditional leadership models must change – now.

From early Mediterranean variances through the enlightened Renaissance period and into the Industrial era, leadership ideals and archetypes have contrasted, shifted, and weaved in parallel. Many more variations are found through time and geography, including Stoic/ Philosopher, Warrior/King, Innovator/Visionary, and Governor/ Uniter. With thousands of written accounts and references, it’s not hard to discover a definition of a leader. The critically important challenge we face today is emancipating business from the predominant leadership models that have far exceeded their time of relevance.

~From BELIEVERSHIP, The Superpower Beyond Leadership – Volume 1, The Experience