What's your leadership myth?
“The complex system that is the body is a field of ways of knowing, all of which work together ecologically to provide the necessary information.” ~ Nora Bateson
There’s a generally accepted myth that imagines that organizations are made by acquiring, arranging and rearranging parts—individual contributors, teams, departments, managers. Leaders think of themselves as strategists and architects who develop a plan and fashion the business in accordance with that plan, or artists who impose their will on the “material” and bring their creation to life.
But organizations are not put together or molded. You don’t work on them from the outside in, like a potter works with clay. Organizations are living organisms that grow from the inside out. They expand and blossom, and, like a human body, progressively complicate themselves in order to stay healthy and to flourish. And so that’s how we should lead them.
We delegate responsibility to our body. We give up cognitive control to its natural intelligence, trusting our organs to do what they’re supposed to do. The stomach cares about what the stomach cares about, and so it does what it wants to do to keep the body running smoothly. If the head tries to control the stomach, the body won’t function properly.
The head can interfere with the natural rhythm of all of the organs through environmental influences like fear, worry, and stress, as well as considerations like nutrition, exercise, and rest. A leader’s ultimate responsibility is to be sensitive to those influences and to accommodate the natural intelligence of the body to ensure that what it wants is what it is allowed to spontaneously do, without interference.
That’s my leadership myth.
Stay passionate!