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 wisely, sustain healthy relationships, use power responsibly, and create environments that bring out the best in people over the long term. Equally, when we’re more internally resourced, we have greater energy, perspective, and emotional bandwidth to contribute beyond ourselves. Thriving doesn’t guarantee wise or life-giving leadership, nor is it a prerequisite for meaningful contribution. Yet the quality of our inner lives affects what we have available to bring to our leadership, our cultures, our institutions, and ultimately the future we create together.
Our inner state does not remain neatly contained within us. It enters our conversations and decisions, shaping how we respond when we feel threatened, how generously we listen, whether we become reactive or reflective, and how we use our authority and influence. As leaders, we’re always affecting the environments around us whether we realize it or not. In other words, a focus on thriving was never simply about helping people feel better or function better.
It was about deeper questions: What human capacities are required if we are to engage in complexity wisely? How can we cultivate systems that are regenerative rather than destructive? And what might become possible if we use our own capacity to thrive in service to something larger than ourselves?
These questions feel increasingly urgent today.
The Systems We’ve Built Are Exhausting Us
We are living through a period of profound acceleration, fragmentation, and human exhaustion. We face a perfect storm of economic, social, technological, political, and ecological upheaval, all while being expected to deliver high-quality results at speed. We’re carrying a level of strain, individually and collectively, that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. At the same time, many of the assumptions that shaped modern organizations are proving insufficient for the realities we face.
I don’t say this as an outsider. As a business owner, I’ve felt constant pressures to scale our work and stay relevant, pressures that are normalized in our leadership culture. We equate scale with success, rarely questioning continual growth as the ultimate measure of worth.
In my conversations with Dianne Culhane, a philanthropist and former global executive in the beverage industry, she’s highlighted a dimension of our systemic exhaustion: how intensely our leadership cultures reward willpower. The ability to push through difficulties, override fatigue, and make things happen no matter the cost can appear as extraordinary leadership. It can even become part of our identity. Yet Dianne learned the hard way that relying so heavily on willpower had consequences for her physical health and narrowed her openness to other, possibly healthier, ways of being and operating. Her experience raises an important question: How often do we mistake the capacity to override ourselves for the capacity to lead?
Entrepreneur Jess Price has drawn my attention to another aspect of our systemic exhaustion. While technology and the pace of life have changed dramatically, many of our underlying assumptions about work haven’t. Instead, the very tools intended to create greater ease and efficiency have fueled expectations for immediacy: faster answers, faster decisions, faster outputs, more availability. What’s disappeared in that acceleration is an appreciation for the invisible human ingredients behind quality work, such as time, attention, reflection, relationship, imagination, recovery, and more. These resources aren’t inefficiencies to engineer away. They are part of how human beings create, discern, connect, and contribute.
We cannot continue defining leadership chiefly through performance and endless growth while ignoring the human and ecological consequences of how we lead. Nor can we continue reducing wellbeing to individual coping strategies inside cultures that are misaligned with human sustainability. Human beings are less apt to thrive in environments that demand adaptation without recovery, productivity without meaning, and performance without humanity.
Has Thriving Become Another Performance Standard?
For me, many conversations about thriving feel incomplete. Thriving is framed too often as an individual responsibility: meditate more, sleep more, exercise more, learn more, manage stress more effectively. These practices are vital, and our work at Wisdom Works has long emphasized the importance of personal wellbeing and inner development. But individual strategies alone cannot compensate for systems that deplete human capacity.
Conversations about thriving can unintentionally become another expectation that people should always be growing, always be healing, and always be emotionally regulated, purposeful, adaptive, and well. We can even turn wellness into another act of willpower: one more thing to get right and master.
I believe human experience is far more textured and complex than that. People are not machines to optimize or problems to fix. We are living systems influenced by relationships, histories, biology, and collective conditions that leadership models frequently fail to adequately recognize. This is why changing the systemic conditions matters as much as helping individuals adapt to them.
What Is Thriving For?
All this leads to a question I find myself asking more often after three decades in this work: What is thriving actually for?
I’ve come to understand thriving as something more complex than optimal functioning. It includes how we engage uncertainty, stress, paradox, trauma, responsibility, and change. It includes our ability to remain connected to ourselves, to each other, and to what matters most even in the middle of difficulty and disruption. It includes how we recover, adapt, reflect, grieve, learn, forgive, and bring about conditions that support life rather than devalue it.
Thriving is not perpetual optimization; it is the inner capacity to remain a full participant in our lives and in our shared humanity within the complexity of our world today.
And thriving for its own sake matters. There are seasons in life when reclaiming our own health, vitality, joy, wholeness, or sense of self may be purpose enough. We don’t need to turn thriving into another obligation to contribute more, achieve more, or prove our value.
I believe, however, that something changes when we step consciously into the orientation of leadership. Leadership asks us to consider not only, Am I thriving? but, What is my thriving in service to? From this orientation, we have an opportunity to put our life energy and influence in service to something beyond ourselves. Our capacity to thrive can become an intentional resource for helping people and systems thrive, creating greater steadiness, clarity, and effectiveness around us. In this way, thriving is both deeply personal and profoundly relational.
A greater capacity to thrive does not tell us what that capacity will serve. Nor does having a purpose larger than ourselves necessarily mean that purpose will contribute to the flourishing of others or the systems of which we are part. This is where wisdom becomes essential. Thriving can expand the life energy available to us, along with our readiness to contribute beyond ourselves. But wisdom asks us to discern how we use it: what we are serving, whose wellbeing we consider, what consequences our choices may create, and what we may not be seeing. Wisdom also asks us to navigate competing needs and unavoidable tradeoffs, including decisions that may cause real difficulty or loss, without disconnecting from their human consequences.
The experience of leaders we’ve worked with has complicated my thinking further. What many leaders are shouldering today is not simply stress. It is cumulative exhaustion, moral strain, nervous system overload, loneliness, and disconnection from meaning. Beneath many leadership conversations, I also sense deep grief: grief for lost certainty, grief for fractured communities and relationships, grief for the human costs of the ways we’ve been living and working, and grief for the widening gap between what many people know deeply matters and the systems within which they are trying to function.
Food business owner Nicki Sizemore has spoken candidly with me about reaching the peak of career success only to discover that she’d become separated from herself in the process. “At the peak of that experience,” she shared, “I burned out.” I keep thinking about what her story represents: success itself can become unsustainable when it requires us to disconnect from who we are and what gives our lives meaning.
Physician and stress expert Dr. Rachel Gilgoff has helped me see this through the lens of physiology. Countless people today are operating in states of chronic dysregulation as modern environments frequently train our nervous systems toward vigilance and depletion. Cultures of chronic stress erode not only our thinking and behavior, but our very capacity to remain connected and humane with one another. This understanding matters profoundly for leaders because organizations are not merely systems of strategy and execution; they are living networks of human nervous systems constantly affecting one another. The emotional state of leaders radiates outward into culture in ways we usually underestimate.
And here lies one of the paradoxes I continue to wrestle with: systemic problems cannot be solved simply by asking individuals to change, yet how each of us shows up contributes to the systems we collectively create.
Perhaps part of what leadership asks of us is to recognize and exercise our agency within that tension. We may not control the larger systems we inhabit, but neither are we powerless within them. We make choices about where we place our attention and energy, how we relate to others, how we use our influence and power, what we reinforce or challenge, and what conditions we help create. To me, agency is not about taking responsibility for what is beyond our control; it is about becoming more conscious of where we do have influence and choosing to use it in service to what matters.
Physicist Jude Currivan has inspired me to think about how our stories shape what we believe is possible. A defining story of modern culture is that we are essentially separate: individuals competing for resources, recognition, achievement, and security. Yet our thriving is relational. We become who we are through one another. Our choices affect the conditions other people inhabit, and our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our organizations, communities, future generations, and natural world are intertwined. We need a new story of our interdependence to step into.
My conversations with technology leader Nichol Bradford have also influenced how I think about thriving for the future of humankind: technological advancement alone will not determine our future; what matters is whether human beings develop the maturity and wisdom to use technological power and innovation responsibly.
These perspectives bring me back to the heart of the question: What is our thriving for? Does thriving deepen our shared capacity for discernment and compassion? Does it help us use power more responsibly? Does it expand our sense of accountability not only to ourselves, but to one another, future generations, and the living systems upon which all life depends? And does the way we lead amplify the possibility of thriving for others?
I believe these questions are central to effective leadership in our time.
Deep Is the New Growth
These questions also invite us to reconsider what we mean by growth. Global travel industry executive Aradhana Khowala has described our current world environment to me as one of ongoing perma-crisis and observed that “the old playbook does not work anymore.” She also said something I wholeheartedly agree with: “Deep is the new growth.”
This era requires leaders who can remain grounded within uncertainty, navigate tension without reactivity, hold complexity without retreating into oversimplification, and help foster organizations where people can flourish rather than be diminished. It also requires us to ask harder questions about growth itself. At what point does growth begin to erode the very conditions we claim to value? When growth, profitability, and innovation become ends in themselves rather than expressions of deeper purpose and stewardship, they can erode the human and relational foundations upon which sustainable success depends.
Jude has offered another lens for understanding this moment: we are living not only through a metacrisis, but also through the possibility of a metamorphosis. I find this distinction hopeful without being naïve about the realities we face. How are the disruptions we’re experiencing exposing assumptions that have reached their limits? How is this moment in our lives and work inviting us not merely to recover what was, but to evolve how we understand success, growth, leadership, and our relationship with one another?
Deep growth might mean something quite different from endless expansion. It may ask us to deepen our consciousness rather than simply increase our reach, our discernment rather than our speed, our relationships rather than our transactions, and our contribution rather than our accumulation. I have a sense that wisdom, not scale, is becoming the real developmental task of leadership now.
A More Human Future of Leadership
It is time to ask harder questions about what human beings truly need to thrive and, more importantly, what humanity requires from those entrusted with power and influence. We need to examine the costs of leadership cultures built on chronic urgency and depletion, while recognizing that thriving is not the absence of struggle, nor a permanent state of happiness or high performance. It is the capacity to remain humane, connected, discerning, ethical, and generative amid the realities of being human together.
I don’t believe the future of leadership will be determined by intelligence, innovation, strategy, or economic growth alone. It will also be shaped by whether we develop the collective wisdom to create ways of living and leading that are life-giving for people and the world we inhabit.
This is where three decades of exploring thriving and leadership has led me. Thriving matters in its own right. Every human being deserves the opportunity to experience health, vitality, connection, meaning, growth, and a life that feels fully lived. And leadership is asking something more of us: What will we serve with the life energy available to us?
For me, to lead is to put our capacity to thrive in service to something larger than ourselves—to use our presence, choices, power, and influence with greater wisdom, creating the conditions for people and the planet to become more fully alive.
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This Wisdom Works Leadership Perspective reflects an evolution in my own thinking shaped by nearly three decades of inquiry, our team at Wisdom Works, and our work with leaders, organizations, and communities around the world. I don’t offer this as a finished point of view, but as part of a living body of work, one we intend to continue questioning, deepening, and evolving as our understanding of thriving and leadership grows. This article was edited by Sage, our internal AI thought partner. Contact us here.
