Organic Growth

  One of the keys to being a good leader, so I begin to reflect, is having the flexibility to embrace change of any kind--not just falling into the category of "desirable" changes. That is, many would-be leaders are fixated on a certain picture of growth that is strictly linear. They have bought into the narrative that we can only grow by seeming to improve on our previous self, when in fact, it's sometimes in the process of failing that this "self" is only a partial self. When I have let go of the self that I am supposed to become, or at least hold it a bit gentler in mind than I am now, I start to see that leadership is not so rigidly tied to a strict model of growth or linear progress. We can move a few steps forward and then a few steps back, and this is an okay or adequate model of progress. It challenges the view that even failure is bad, by suggesting that there could be advantages to not getting things the way we want them to be.