Rethinking the Relationship Between Thriving, Leadership, and What We’re Here to Serve For close to thirty years, our team at Wisdom Works has been engaged in a global conversation about thriving, leadership, and human potential. Through research, coaching, and partnerships with leaders across sectors, we’ve explored what enables people not only to perform effectively, but to live and lead in ways that are healthy, sustainable, and deeply human. When we began this work, talking about people-centric leadership in organizational life was uncommon. Leaders were focused primarily on productivity and results; the quality of the employee or customer experience was treated as a secondary concern, if at all. Much of our work involved helping organizations recognize human thriving as not separate from effectiveness and long-term success, but foundational to it. Over the years, we’ve described thriving as being internally well-resourced to meet our complexities and demands with a high quality of life, effectiveness, and growth. I still believe in that, even as my understanding of what it means to thrive has continued to evolve. I’ve also come to realize something else: thriving itself was never the point. Thriving mattered because when we’re depleted or disengaged, we have less capacity to lead…
One of the privileges of my work is having conversations with people who are asking expansive questions about the future of humanity. Recently, I spoke with Luis Miguel Gallardo, former Managing Director of Global Brand & Marketing at Deloitte and Founder & President of the World Happiness Foundation. While our conversation covered many topics, from happiness and consciousness to systems change, one idea lingered with me long afterward: Can we truly understand human thriving without also understanding human suffering? WHY STUDY SUFFERING WHEN OUR GOAL IS TO CULTIVATE THRIVING? The answer, I believe, offers an important lesson for all of us. We’ve become remarkably good at measuring many of the conditions associated with thriving. Organizations monitor employee engagement, wellbeing, retention, productivity, innovation, and customer experience. Nations compare levels of happiness. Researchers continue to deepen our understanding of purpose, meaning, relationships, and psychological health. At Wisdom Works Group, we’ve identified a growing number of tools designed to measure human thriving across organizations, communities, and nations. These measures are valuable. They help us understand what contributes to a life well lived, and they transform how we define organizational and societal progress. Yet they also raise another question: What are we failing to…
One of the great paradoxes of our time is that we are more connected than at any point in human history, yet many people feel increasingly disconnected from themselves, from one another, and from the larger systems they inhabit. As I work with leaders around the world, I hear this paradox expressed in many ways: a loss of trust, a diminished sense of agency, a longing for deeper connection, and questions about how to lead well in the middle of growing complexity and uncertainty. It also surfaced in a conversation I had with biotech leader Eva McLellan, who offered a distinction that I’ve been thinking about ever since. Eva shared that we’ve become accustomed to describing the world as fragmented. We see fragmentation in our organizations, our communities, our institutions, and sometimes even within ourselves. Yet she wondered if fragmentation is no longer the most accurate description of what many people are experiencing. Maybe, she suggested, we’ve moved into a period of fracture. For me, this raises the question: What is the deeper work of leadership in a fractured world? FRAGMENTED The world has always been complex. As Eva pointed out, it’s difficult to know whether our challenges are truly…
I recently sat down with longtime colleague and dear friend, Dianne Culhane, for a conversation about leadership, thriving, and the arc of a meaningful life. Over several decades, Dianne led large-scale transformation efforts at The Coca-Cola Company and later became deeply involved in developing the leadership strength of the College of Charleston. As we reflected on the experiences that shaped her life and leadership, I found myself returning to a central theme: the quiet but powerful role that vision has played throughout her journey. Dianne didn’t speak about vision in the conventional sense of an organization’s strategic plans, performance targets, or carefully engineered goals. She described something much more human and alive: an inner orientation toward possibility that often appeared long before she knew how it would unfold. Vision Often Arrives Before the Path Early in her career, Dianne identified three global companies she hoped to work for one day. She had no connections to them, no obvious path into them, and no clear strategy for how it would happen. She simply knew these were organizations she felt drawn toward. Years later, when someone at The Coca-Cola Company saw work she’d produced in a professional association competition, she was recruited into the company….
