What is Meaningful Leadership? – 4 Common Threads

By Linda Fisher Thornton

What is meaningful leadership? I recently wrote a 5 part blog series exploring different facets of that question.

Part 1 of this series looked at how leaders generate meaningful environments where others can thrive. Part 2 explored a leader’s own quest for authenticity. Part 3 looked at the role of powerful conversations and a focus on relational ROI. Part 4 examined how meaningful leadership requires truth-seeking based on ethical values. Part 5 focused on how meaningful leadership makes a difference by building a better society for the future.

Common Threads

There are four common threads that emerged from exploring the topic that I want to share today.

These are ways that leaders think about and approach their role that helps them create meaningful work experiences:

Thinking global – considering the full impact of decisions on a global scale
Valuing authenticity – seeing the leadership role as a process of growing into higher levels of leadership, not a position of power over others
Seeking collective success – working with others for the good of the group, not the good of the leader
Seeing beyond portfolio growth to human growth – valuing each individual and nurturing them to reach their potential (which requires seeing well beyond the bottom line)

The Leadership Mindset

It is interesting, but not surprising, that all of these approaches rely on the leader being able to take a long-term, “self-aware but humble” view of the leadership role.