This Is Where Leadership Becomes a Practice
It is in these moments that I believe it becomes useful to think about leadership as a professional practice.
A practice builds on previous experience, but it also asks us to keep developing. It requires us to practice curiosity, creativity, reflection, and a beginner’s mindset. And, like any practice, it grows and changes over time. A practice gives us ways of operating when the answer is not obvious.
These liminal moments need us to rely on our intentional habits and rhythms that keep us centered, open, curious, reflective and present. At the moment. Not in the past and not focused on figuring out the future. When the compass doesn’t clearly outline the direction or something gets in the way of the preferred destination point, we need in those moments to lead with questions.
- What is happening here?
- What am I noticing?
- What assumptions am I making?
- What might I be missing?
- What becomes possible that wasn’t possible before?
And here is the catch, I have learned that in these moments the impulse to try and escape the feeling of liminality is precisely when we should sit with the discomfort of not being certain. During these moments, organizations want decisions, boards want plans implemented, teams want clarity of responsibilities. So there is a natural temptation to solve the uncertainty as quickly as possible and move on.
Knowing how to pause, observe, think, reflect and take in new information is where thinking of our leadership as a practice and not just a job can be effective. We are not pausing indefinitely or passively. We pause intentionally. To observe and listen deeply. To ask questions and gather perspectives. This allows us to lead in the in-between and notice what becomes visible precisely when the certainty has become disrupted.
Two Leadership Postures at Once
At Leadership+Design we work within three paradigms, reflective change-making, futurists thinking and human-centered design. Liminal leadership requires us to step into both the reflective change-maker paradigm and the optimistic futurist paradigm. Simultaneously. As a reflective change-maker we look backwards and inward. How did we get here? What are we learning? What needs to be released? What assumptions no longer serve us? What does this moment reveal about our organization?
And at the same time, we are practicing our ability to lead through ambiguity and uncertainty by staying open to possibilities and remaining optimistic about the future.
- What might now be possible?
- What futures can we imagine from here?
- What new conditions are emerging?
- What could we experiment with before committing ourselves?
Optimism here is not certainty that everything will work out the way you think but rather the willingness to believe that the future remains open. Honor what brought us here and remain open to where we might go next. Liminal spaces ask us to resist the urge to rush toward certainty and instead stay present to what is changing around us. They give us the chance to notice what is no longer serving us, what still matters deeply, and what new possibilities are beginning to emerge. Perhaps the mistake is thinking that liminality begins only when something changes. Change may simply make visible a condition that was already there. Organizations are never static. People are never finished becoming. The future is never completely fixed. Some moments simply disrupt our ability to ignore that reality. And if that is true, then the practices we rely on in liminal moments, curiosity, reflection, deep listening, observation, and a beginner’s mindset, are not tools for transition alone. They are the practices of leadership itself.
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