In this series on next-Level approaches to success, I’ve been offering leaders at all levels of an organization a chance to break through from the limitations of their current way of leading, by opening up to new ways of perceiving success. In my other posts, I described the move from skills to results, and from tangible results only to holistic approaches to success. Today, I’m excited to move into one of my favorite transformations: the transition from holistic success to evolutionary success. This is my bread and butter—coaching people through this transformation is what I love most.
Let's dive in.
Anytime as a leader you find yourself stuck, repeating the same issues, or feeling overwhelmed, it usually means a belief or mindset is holding you back. The invitation here is to transform into the next-level leadership—a new way of thinking, being and acting that represents an evolution of consciousness and identity. Today, I want to share how success changes when we're holistic leaders and still find ourselves a bit stuck. I’ll discuss the benefits and limitations of holistic success and introduce the next-level approach: evolutionary success.
Holistic Success: Balanced or Scattered?
As a holistic leader, success is about learning, growth, well-being, balance, and building deep, trusting relationships based on healing, empathy, and mutual learning. This approach emphasizes authenticity, adaptability, and a growth mindset. It encourages constructing your own unique story and path in leadership.
For example, imagine a leader named Emily, who works for a manufacturing distributor. She values personal growth and strives to create a nurturing environment where her team can feel seen, heard and appreciated. Her focus is to build deep relationships with her colleagues, fostering a sense of authenticity and trust. She believes that doing so will lead to successful outcomes naturally. Emily is receptive to different people and appreciates their unique perspectives, creating a culture of curiosity and continuous learning. Most of her team sees her as an empathic and thoughtful leader.
Benefits of Holistic Success
Personal Growth: You learn a lot about yourself and others. There is no failure, only learning.
Deep Relationships: Building strong, authentic connections based on mutual recognition and empathy, instead of instrumentalizing the relationships for a pre-determined goal only.
Adaptability: Appreciating and accepting differences, instead of trying to homogenize or avoid conflict.
Unique Leadership: Crafting your authentic way of leading, free from the strict confines of conventional norms and expectations.
As beautiful as this sounds, even holistic success has its limitations. You can get lost in endless questioning, learning, and storytelling without direction or focus. This lack of grounding can lead to a state of being unmoored. An overemphasis on humility and not knowing can erode confidence and the team’s trust in you. As a leader, this perpetual self-questioning can be risky, throwing your team into confusing and stagnating processes. Every team needs some sense of direction, clarity, and purpose.
Sarah, a holistic leader in a beauty products company, is deeply committed to her team's well-being and personal development. However, she often finds herself caught in endless discussions and reflections, struggling to make decisive moves. Her team appreciates her empathy but sometimes feels lost without clear direction. Some of her team members have begun to distrust her motives because accepts different staff proposals even if they seem to contradict each other. In her mind, she appreciates the benefits of many proposals from her staff but can’t seem to bring them together in a coherent way. She increasingly feels anxious and overwhelmed, stuck between the need to grow her team and the need to grow profits. Furthermore, her attempts to support her teams’ learning and growth end up backfiring, with some of them fed up with her unending processes and questions. She’s often deeply hurt by how misunderstood she is. It’s a lonely place to be, and there seem to be few colleagues who can understand her.
Evolutionary Success: The Compass of Whole System Flourishing
Now, let’s explore the next-level leadership approach: evolutionary success. Success as an evolutionary leader is about serving the actualization of the whole system and ensuring the long-term sustainability of the organization and its multiple stakeholders.
As an evolutionary leader, you tailor your leadership style to each person’s stage of capacity and align their greatest strengths with the organization’s greatest needs. Amidst the endless sea of possibilities, perspectives, and paths, you focus on the most impactful actions, identifying critical areas that need attention and directing your energy there. This success is about integrating and managing opposites or tensions, such as decisiveness with participation, individual work with teamwork, and qualitative with quantitative measures. These are called polarities. You recognize that by identifying the polarities at play in any given situation, you can systematically integrate both sides over time for optimal resilience, wholeness, integrity, and sustainability. Indeed, you recognize that it is a fool's errand to try to permanently anchor one side of a polarity and neglect its opposite, as it will inevitably cause symptoms of failure and distress in any individual or organization.
Meet Johan, an evolutionary leader at a biotech company. He actually treats everyone slightly differently on purpose, because he understands that each team member has different needs and capacities. For example, he sees that some of his employees need abundant direction, guidance, and supervision to stay engaged and on task, whereas other employees have a greater capacity for self-direction and simply need informal conversations to align on initiatives. He also recognizes that each employee has a different personality type: different lifelong strengths and tendencies that will not likely change but instead can be leveraged for the company’s success. John zooms out often and focuses on the organization's most pressing needs and deepest currents of opportunities, knowing that his impact might be invisible and take time to manifest. He skillfully balances opposing needs in a way that others can get behind, ensuring both individual and collective growth. While careful to highlight small wins and frequent tangible results, he trusts deeply in a longer process of unfolding where small actions work their way mysteriously into grand successes over time.
Key Aspects of Evolutionary Success:
Tailored Leadership: Adapting to each person’s development stage and personality type allows for the optimal relationship, outcome, and transformation.
Impactful Focus: Identifying and addressing critical areas of leverage, knowing when to pause and redirect for the sake of the whole system.
Managing Polarities: Incorporating opposing needs into a paradoxical dance, with a clear intention and practice to integrate them over time.
Long-Term Vision: Ensuring sustainability and growth, trusting that both of these take time and continuous tending.
At this stage, you realize we live in an interconnected, evolving “field” of interdependent processes and people. Success is about making an impact that fosters integration, wholeness, and interconnectivity. You listen deeply to what’s needed and make decisions that incorporate input and trust your own wisdom. As an evolutionary leader, you understand that evolution is moving through you, participating in a larger process that has been evolving reality from the Big Bang up to now. As such, you don’t have to prove yourself, posture, or put up facades; rather, you attune and adapt to what’s needed in each moment.
Laura is an evolutionary leader at a mission-driven environmental conservation organization who recognizes the interconnected nature of her organization and the broader environment. She seems to have an uncanny ability to weave a network of stakeholders together– employees, community volunteers, large donors, politicians – in a way that is in alignment with the organization’s values. She listens deeply to her team's needs, makes informed decisions, and trusts her intuition. Conservation work often feels impossible and draining to her team, which is why Laura is so revered for her focus on fostering a culture of well-being and integration, where every action contributes to long-term sustainability and growth. She inspires her team by reframing even the most painful setbacks as catalysts for fulfilling their evolutionary mission.
A Call to Evolve Your Impact
If you find at a point where holistic leadership is no longer sufficient, consider the next-level approach of evolutionary success. Open to the possibility of moving beyond only personal growth and deep relationships to a focus on long-term transformation, system-wide flourishing and sustainability. Embrace the interconnectedness of your organization and the larger world, and tailor your leadership to meet evolving needs. As you deepen your own personal evolution, you evolve your ability to impact the system around you. Indeed, there is no separation between you and anything or anyone that you are leading. Since that’s the case, you can rest and listen deeply to the leadership that is calling you.
Take a look at my brief webinar now to uncover the blueprint for leading your organization authentically and holistically:
Work with me!
I coach leaders to realize their Next Level Leadership, no matter where they are in the organization.
I am certified as a Leadership Maturity Coach by Beena Sharma and Susanne Cooke-Greuter of the Vertical Development Academy and a Certified Unique Self Coach by Claire Molinard of the Unique Self Institute. If you're interested in learning how I can coach you through your vertical development, please reach out to me at David@evolutionaryemergencecoaching.com. You can also find more at www.verticaldevelopment.com.
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