What Would Nature Do: 3 Reasons To Learn Twenty-First Century Leadership From Nature

If you think that yesterday’s leadership styles are still working, you’re not paying attention. Everything about our jobs is different, from what we do, to where we do it from, who we do it with, and even why we do it. Little surprise then, that the leadership required is also different.

Lots of efforts are underway to understand what approaches to leadership work in this new context. Some of those efforts are earnest and well-thought-out. Others are reluctant, performative, and/or superficial.

Once we understand some of these promising new ways of leading, leaders have to learn to do them. And then they have to overcome the inertia of changing habits based on decades of learning, modeling, and practice in the old ways.

None of this is easy, although some of the a-has are simple. Such as, make people feel like they, and their work, matter. Others are more complicated and require organizational shifts in performance management systems, goal setting, and cultural factors related to inclusion, diversity, and working styles.

There is so much to be learned from the work done in nature. Photo Credit: Kym MacKinnon

What Would Nature Do

We’re overlooking a powerful teacher who has been orchestrating complex systems to do work efficiently and effectively for nearly 4 billion years…