Where Is Your Leadership Living: Past, Present or Future?

🤔 Where is your leadership living: past, present or future?

Many leaders I meet are excellent at working in one of these spaces, but far fewer can move between all three with ease. But wise leadership requires it.

🗝️ When we ignore the past we rush into action without first understanding the story we have stepped into. The history. The highs and lows. The unwritten rules.

From a systemic perspective it’s also important to be respectful of the past, and I’ll say more about this in future posts. When we step in to new teams and contexts we never truly know what it was like for those that went before us.

🔭 When we neglect the future the team’s energy scatters. Others get so caught in today’s delivery that the future becomes fuzzy. Without a shared picture of what success will look like team’s aren’t aligned or feeling the buzz of a shared challenge.

🫥 And when we are never really present, here in the now, we cannot build the relationships and trust that make progress possible. Being fully here with your people, your challenges, your opportunities is what allows wisdom to emerge and flow.

Wise leadership is knowing when to look back, when to be fully in the now, and when to create the future. The art is moving between them with purpose.

Past, present and future lenses are valuable applied to us each as individual leaders and in our personal lives too.

You have more inner resources than you realise. My Lead from Wisdom approach is an invitation to explore them and to lead with more confidence, balance and trust in yourself.

💡 Today, take a pause and notice:

Where is most of your attention?
What is the quality of your attention here?
What’s is it costing you, your team or organisation?

Images below are a glimpse into my past. An old polaroid (remember them!) of Christmas celebrations with me on my Nana's knee at 23 months and my maternal grandparents, Eva and Leslie Clinton.