QUOTE: What should leadership look like?

Ever since uncertainty became our insistent twenty-first century companion, leadership strategies have taken a great leap backward to the familiar territory of command and control. . . . How is it that we failed to learn that whenever we try to impose control on people and situations, we only serve to make them uncontrollable? All of life resists control. All of life reacts to any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself. When we deny life’s need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organizations. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.

– Margaret Wheatley