There is a dawning of a new form of leadership within business that we can refer to as Abundant Leadership. This form of leadership holds the standard of all forms of business deals, goals, and growth being a win-win for all constituents involved from the leader, the company, the client, the stakeholders, the environment and to the supply chain.
We are all familiar with a form of leadership staunch capitalistic stereotypes, where the greedy business person desires to “win” in the form of money, power and position at the expense of others. The executives at the top might run away with a lot of profits while they underpay their employees, exploit people within their supply chain and create products that are good enough to sell but not deliver true quality and value to their consumers.
In more recent years, there is a form of leadership that is focused on serving others at all costs. The leaders in these organizations are willing to not take a salary, or work themselves ragged in order to create value to their internal culture or to their customers. Abundance is being created from the leader, it’s just not being equally enjoyed by the leader as it is to those they serve.
Both of these forms of leadership do create abundance, the first example for the leader and the second example to those that they lead or serve. When we look at “true abundance,” no one is left out, no one is exploited or marginalized and no one is martyred for the sake of another. This requires more than just new strategies and tactics, it requires a shift in identity about how business and leadership is conducted.
An abundant orientation to leadership requires that leaders commit to looking for the win-win-win approach to every conversation, deal, hire, and basically all decisions that need to be made. In many ways, this is a commitment to seeing life through this lens of abundance for all involved. This lens of course cannot be synonymous to rose colored glasses; leaders do need to be conscious of the complexity and factors at play that seem like there are limited resources to be allocated.
Yet if leaders believe the “pie” of resources is definitively limited, they will be operating from one of the previous views of leadership. They will either take as much of the pie as they can to “get theirs,” or they will forfeit their piece of the pie so others can have enough. Both of these positions assume the pie is only so big. Another way of saying this is that they are oriented from a scarcity perspective.
What is an Abundant Leader?
When one chooses to look for an abundant approach to leadership, it brings forth Einstein’s often quoted saying, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” An abundant leader realizes that their view of scarcity is simply a vantage point. It might be vantage point that has a lot of data they can point to that corroborates their scarcity perspective.
The truly abundant leader sits with a situation and asks him or herself, “what am I not seeing, that can make this situation a win-win for everyone involved?” It is through that line of questioning and vantage point, that insights, opportunities, and new ways of going about familiar processes, begin to emerge.
How Epic Impact Supports Abundant Leaders
At Epic Impact, we support leaders in conditioning this new abundant orientation towards leadership via tactics, strategies and perspectives and more importantly, supporting them in upgrading their inner operating system to be able to authentically lead from this abundant perspective. While this might seem daunting, our world is calling for business leaders that abundantly resource the system they are a part of, the impact that system has on the environment and culture, as well as resource their individual needs. This challenge is calling for visionaries to step into creating a larger pie and realizing there are infinite possibilities and resources. We just need to be in the abundant mindset to tap into those resources.
Learn more about Epic Impact by following the company on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.