The Disruptive Leader
Capital ‘L’ Leader
There's a big difference between a "person in a position of authority" and a capital ‘L’ Leader. And there's a big difference between a Leader in 2019 and a Leader post-2020.
Today, people want to work for Leaders who:
Value them as people before employees
Empower them to own their work
Stand up for what's right
And, as we've seen through the Great Resignation, if their current leaders don't meet this standard, people will not hesitate to move on to those Leaders who do.
The Disruptive Leader
As a Leader, you have the power and the responsibility to cultivate a human-centric environment, for yourself, for your teams and for your organization. We live at an exciting crossroads, where we get to shape a brand new relationship we each have with work.
But, in order to do this, we need to build Leaders who have the courage to challenge the status quo. We need Disruptive Leaders.
What does it mean to be a "Disruptive Leader"? I believe Disruptive Leaders exhibit a few critical, and learnable, skills:
Alignment to a set of core values
Self-trust
Grounded confidence
Courage
Vulnerability
Empathy
Bring humanity into the workplace
When I worked in the corporate world, I spent countless late nights at the office, early mornings checking emails before even getting out of bed, and experienced a constant state of worry that I wasn't doing enough. I tried to justify it to myself by thinking "This is just what work is, this is what it takes." And sure it might have paid off for a while: I got the coveted roles, I got the raises, I got the promotions. But it was never good enough, for myself nor my workplace.
It wasn't until I experienced significant burnout as a leader that I realized that something about our system is broken. So I got to work curating a program, with principles and techniques grounded in research, to build the leaders we need to create a more human workplace, in which:
People feel respected for who they are
Rest is rewarded
Our work is not our identity
