About 9 Leader Touchstones
Building healthy organizational culture is the most essential tool in a leader’s tool belt. But to build enduring organizations in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world, we must look at learnings from the past through a new lens and look to the future with fresh eyes.
In the past few years, the workplace has changed more rapidly than at any other time in history. Unfortunately, the internal workings of organizations, including how we lead people, have not broadly changed in response. In 2021, 47 million people left their jobs. This is forcing leaders to rethink their approaches to leading people. While the pandemic provided heightened awareness about the state of work, we have been barreling toward a shift for some time now. In some workplaces, as many as five generations work together. Millennials represent the largest adult generation. By 2025, they will make up 75% of the workforce. And what was once only concern about the widening leadership gap has morphed into something more regrettable. Repeated scandals have rocked the global economy over the past two decades crushing consumer confidence and destroying employee trust.
The Leader-First® Leadership model and the research in 9 Leader Touchstones encourage you to think differently about organizational growth. Creating the right conditions inside the organization starts with you. It also challenges you to think differently about how you lead people and how your leadership approach affects you personally. You lead during a time like no other. How we’ve led people during the last 30 to 40 years no longer works in our current reality.
Taking this trek means challenging the status quo, which is sometimes a difficult and lonely road. I often think of Robert Frost’s poem, A Road Not Taken, when I need to summon my Courage to take the more challenging path. Leader-First® Leadership equips you with the foundation to build dynamic, enduring organizations, but to do it, you must courageously take the road less traveled.
