Legacy Leadership: your path to a new world order

By Nicole Barrett

May 24, 2021

You now stand at the 11th hour.

At midnight, everything that you did, or didn’t do, will be revealed.

It can mean the difference between extinction or flourishing - however, you won’t know what has been successful until the 12th hour.

What do you do?

How do you respond?

Many highly skilled and emergent leaders now find themselves in this very position, attempting to use the same tools to solve never before seen problems. Not because there is a lack of recognition that their approach is anachronistic, but because they and/or their organisations are stuck with limited time and resources to envision and enable a new reality.

In a rapidly changing landscape, where all that we knew has plunged into disruption and transience, how do you create the space to find meaning and rethink how you show up as a leader?

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary leadership to successfully navigate increasing complexity and create a legacy that benefits us all. Yet we continue to observe and work with leaders trapped in reactive actions, trying to re-establish the status quo and holding on to habits of thought and modes of behaviour that simply no longer cut it.  At best they self-limit their ability to adapt and thrive in meeting the demands of our current context. At worst they are on a downward spiral and taking others, even their organisations, out with them.

Both history and research are littered with examples where transformational change only occurs when there’s a burning platform - when the pull for something bigger or new is so profound that there is really no option other than to let go of the old, step into the void and evolve. NOW, is one of those lifetime opportunities to significantly elevate a new world of leadership that is willing, ready and able to take us into the future.

Last year I collaborated with a remarkable team of industry thought leaders, organisational analysts and psychologists to unpack these challenging times. We share a yearning for systemic change based on our collective experiences and the cries for help being heard across industries and continents. In the beginning, we were just trying to make sense of it all and what a ride it was… Blood, sweat and tears, joy and gratitude!

By holding the metaphor “you cannot facet a diamond with an axe” firmly in mind, the end result of our partnership is the birth of an unconventional leadership development program that purposefully attends to what the world is calling for in this very moment.

Legacy Conversations™

“The two biggest things are to actually think about what I am feeling and not intellectualise everything. The second part to that is to actually do the analysis of what I am feeling and why. Becoming more aware of that has been a real growth journey. I had a few of those ‘ah ah’ moments and it’s really been quite enlightening”. 

Adopting a powerful experiential peer learning group approach, the Legacy Conversations™ cohort discuss the undiscussables and safely engage in exploratory dialogue to facilitate actions that are both real and relevant to the current and emerging challenges being faced. Legacy leaders find the space to test old patterns, sit with the discomfort of ‘unknown unknowns’ and collectively make meaning about what’s driving their decisions, reactions and behaviours. They work from the outside in and the inside out to evoke higher levels of consciousness and sustain structural change. Legacy Conversations™ invite leaders to face their learning edges, generate diverse thinking and apply the necessary tools and resources that equip them to develop a clear sense of purpose and actions for the issues at hand.

“Legacy Conversations are conversations that I don't have with anybody else. It highlighted for me that we can all be talking about something, yet, we've got really really different views about it. That level of diversity of thinking is something that I've not reflected on enough. I tend to operate in the here and now and I’m not used to being alive to what’s actually going on beneath the surface. It’s been invaluable and I’m very grateful for the opportunity.”

If you’re looking to take your leadership to extraordinary levels or feeling stuck, isolated or overwhelmed, then Legacy Conversations™ is for you. Here you will discover new paradigms, new tools and new ways of working that leverage breakthrough insights for regenerative outcomes.

If this is you, we'd be delighted to answer any questions or you can find more about Legacy Conversations™ here

Register for the next mixed leadership cohort starting in July here