We need wiser leaders

Woden Consulting came about in a response to the ever-changing landscape of leadership and a need to return to the age-old values that crafted leaders of folklore and more modern legends.

Wisdom is a product of experience that has been turned into meaning. It’s hard-won and never lost. It helps leaders to navigate the complexity of the modern era as well as the inherent unpredictability of leading people and dealing with change.

Leadership development needs to change with the times, knowledge is cheap and we have millions of gigabytes of data at our fingertips. This is why we emphasise the vertical growth of the leader - to new levels of development and insight in order to irreversibly increase their capability. This requires more intentional (inter)actions, more reflective decision making and more courageous action.

Wise acting leaders have the following traits:

- Unbiased social judgement

- Intellectual humility

- Aware of varied contexts

- Appreciate differing viewpoints

- Transcend egocentric impulses

- Reconcile opposing viewpoints

Wisdom isn’t built quickly but turning existing wisdom into wiser actions can happen quickly and there are various tools and techniques that can build wisdom over time. The work we do whether in life coaching, executive coaching, leadership development or team development, doesn’t deal with surface issues, it works on deeper-seated challenges and problems for sustainable change.

This is also why the programmes we create are a combination of very old disciplines such as philosophy (especially moral and ethical philosophy) as well cutting edge social, management and psychological science. This allows our leaders to benefit from answering moral and ethical questions often left out of leadership development. It also allows the modern leader to benefit from the wisdom of millennia-old thinking as well as the latest scientifically grounded development.

Stripping back leadership it almost seems too simple to be true: Better people make better leaders. Not ‘better’ in any moral sense. The more grounded, aware, fearless and compassionate you are, the more effectively you will lead others. This leadership will manifest in the living life that is true to you where you are seen as you really are act in alignment with your values. You can lead whether you are the CEO of a large organisation or a freelancer. True effectiveness is calm and creates space for strategic insight and acting without inertia. The best leaders are able to demonstrate both courage and love in how they act which is borne from, and further grows their wisdom. This is why implicitly or explicitly everything that we design at Woden challenges leaders to dial up these three qualities.