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The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 5 minutes

Welcome to the second issue of The Nature of Leadership and Career.

This is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 - 5 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a way that is inspired by one or more of psychology, neuroscience, the natural environment and biomimicry.

Today at a glance

Last week we explored the neuroscience and psychology of the scarcity mindset, and it’s impact on leadership + career.

This week let’s get into the ‘nature’ part of the Nature of Leadership + Career.

• Illustration of the week

  Finding your leadership flavour.

• The Nature of Leadership and Career

  5 Leadership + Career lessons from nature's secret to efficiency, diversity, and resilience.

Illustrations of the Week

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The Nature of Leadership + Career

Nature’s secret weapon to efficiency, diversity, and resilience (+ more)

What do trees, beehives, snowflakes, ferns, pine cones, clouds, rivers, lungs, veins, and arteries and have in common?

They are fractals.

Fractals are a natural mathematical phenomena of repeating geometric patterns. They retain similar form and shape through their full range of scale.

The easiest example to visualize is a a tree; from it’s trunk to the expansion of it’s branches.

The characteristics of fractals are one of nature’s key secrets to efficiency, diversity, interconnectedness, iteration and resilience all in one.

Apart from looking stunning, the characteristics of fractals can teach us a lot about leadership and career.

5 Leadership and Career Lessons inspired by fractal characteristics

1. Diversity and interconnectedness

Each pattern within the fractal is unique. The overall shape of the organism is the sum of unique, yet similar interconnected patterns that contribute to the overall pattern.

🌳 Leadership Lesson #1

Leading for inclusion, diversity, and belonging is one the trickiest yet rewarding challenges for a leader. One paragraph here won’t do it justice.

Based on fractal inspiration:

1. Make space (literal and figurative) for the uniqueness of individuals, and groups to be expressed, and heard.

2. Do the hard work of co-creating ways of working and tools for diverse perspectives to interconnect (inclusion). For me divergence and convergence techniques from human centred design, and tools from radical candour are two great starting points.

3. Highlight how the strengths of overarching pattern of the “fractal”, i.e. the team, and organization, is made up of multiple units of unique perspectives and interconnected.

❄Career Lesson #1

• Each part of snowflake isn’t comparing itself to the next part of the snowflake.

• In the same way all of our careers are unique in their make up and trajectory. Comparing ourselves to other’s is often a futile and joyless process.

• Focus on diversifying your skills and network and solidifying your strengths and passions. One of the best ways to do this is through via the concept of T-Shaping. More on this next week!

2. Repetition

Repetition of pattern at scale enables consistency, reliability, and efficiency

🌳 Leadership Lesson #2

• One of the holy grails for leaders is the ability to develop repeatable, scaleable processes as their organizations grow.

• Where this often goes wrong is when an idea or prototype is developed “in a vacuum” in one area of the business for one type of work or persona, and then scaled to fit many patterns of work and people.

• Instead, look at the patterns of work, patterns of teams, patterns in the flow of information, and patterns of behavior to help produce scaleable, repeatable processes.

❄Career Lesson #2

• The more you solidify core skills in your career through repetition, the more consistent and efficient you become at the process due to a mental process called automatization.

• Consistency and efficiency are perceived as being reliable by colleagues and leaders. This in turn is reinforced and rewarded.

3. Shape

🌳 +❄Leadership and Career Lesson #3

The shape of fractals enables efficient use of resources and exposure to the environment. e.g exposure to sunlight, exchange of oxygen and CO2.

Ask yourself:

• What is the optimal pattern and shape of my leadership and/or career which:

  1. exposes me to the right “elements” in current or future work environments; and

  2. enables me to best exchange ideas and information with people in my network or to grow my network.

4. Resilience

Fractals are able to maintain their intricate patterns, under external forces such as wind or storms, due to their structural stability

🌳 Leadership Lesson #4

• Determine and embed the structural building blocks that will contribute to the resilience of your own leadership, and that of your leadership team.

• The building blocks might look like a mix of the ability to unlearn, responding to change over following a plan, the ability to create, communicate, AND execute a purpose and mission. This helps the team endure during the stormiest weather.

❄Career Lesson #4

• Our careers are subject to external forces such as technology advancements, changes in the economy, and organizational restructures.

• Build strong structural patterns in your career through a mix of new and maintained skills and networks to build resilience.

5 Iteration

Fractals are created through an iterative process, where patterns repeat and evolve over time.

🌳 +❄ Leadership and Career Lesson #5

Definitely read books, listen to podcasts, watch videos have conversations, attend trainings.

Ultimately you will need to run iterative build, measure, learn cycles in your career and leadership.

Until you find your own beautiful, unique, resilient fractal pattern.

Finally, I apologize to my high school maths teacher, Mrs Wright, who was obsessed with fractals and gave us a project to discover more. I thought they were boring.

Turns out you were Right. Fractals are phenomenal. In the proper use of the word.

3 ways to continue the conversation

• Send feedback on a) this issue b) questions or topics you want to know more about.

• Reach out to collaborate on an illustration, or anything to do with psychology, leadership, career, or social biomimicry.

• Contact me if you would like to explore leadership or career coaching together.

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