Living Systems Leadership Awareness Item Number One: Stop seeing your world through a tube.
Domineering and passive leadership styles may seem like polar opposites, but they are almost always two sides to the same coin; successions of reactive, fear-based attempts to control or evade.
It’s quite common to get caught in reactive decision making, normal to become avoidant or controlling often without realizing it. We search for reasons things could go wrong, assuage insecurities, avoid risks and become oblivious to the third-order impact of our choices.
In its active form, fear-based thinking produces reactive, driven, perfectionistic, and autocratic leadership. Its inactive form produces elevated need to belong, eager to please, and the third rail of leadership; passivity.
It takes higher levels of Adaptive Development to thrive in complex circumstances, engage volatility, to tolerate ambiguity, and to apply higher order sense-making.
Forming vision, maintaining strategic focus, preserving sustainability, thinking and acting holistically, achieving results; these are the fruits of Adaptive Leadership Development.
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Next Fern EPC post: Living Systems Leadership Action Item Number Two: Not everything is fungible. (One size does not fit all.)
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Fern EPC is the Adaptive Development fast track for physicians and executives.
