The Leadership Lifecycle

The natural stages of leadership are discovery, growth, maturity and legacy. This “lifecycle” is an important sequence of steps that can’t be accelerated. Rather, each stage must be embraced and nurtured as a leader gradually develops on the path to his or her full potential. What stage are you in? And how can you best make the transitions from one stage to another? Listen as Bill and Ralph discuss and offer suggestions to effectively manage your leadership lifecycle.

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*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent Podcast, where we discuss leadership concepts and best practices. We like to provide ideas, concepts, and pragmatic experiments to help you develop as a leader. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone. If today, I just can’t wait. I couldn’t wait for today, we’re gonna be talking about a topic that I have no idea yet what I’m gonna say.

The life cycle of a leader. So, can you tell me what we mean by that so I can contribute?

Bill Berthel: Yeah, absolutely. So I think you know that old story, I think a lot of people have heard the story about the little boy that finds the butterfly cocoon, you know, maybe it was attached to a branch and it blew down in a storm, and he’s super curious.

He doesn’t even know what he has. He’s really curious about this cocoon that he finds and he holds it in his hand and the warmth of his hand starts to make the cocoon wiggle a little bit, right? He notices in a small crack, he figures out what he has and he’s so curious. Well, telling the rest of the [00:01:00] story is just morbid, isn’t it?

Right? We know that he forces the cocoon open prematurely and well, that’s not so good for the butterfly. Everything has a life cycle, and this can sound awfully morbid Sometimes we don’t think about this biological model too frequently in relationship to leadership, and I think it really could serve us as leaders to think about the natural stages of a leader, the life cycle of a leader.

Ralph Simone: So when we talk about it, are we talking about it in terms of helping leaders make the necessary transition?

Are we talking about it to help them think of evolution of their leadership and are we also thinking about it so that they don’t have an expiration date?

Bill Berthel: Well, let’s not go to the expiration date. Maybe there’s a best-used-by date. No, no, totally joking. I think the first piece, you said, Ralph, right?

There’s an important order. Maybe it’s an evolution, but it’s an important sequence that just like the cocoon can’t [00:02:00] be prematurely accelerated. Each step, each phase of this growth or development. If we think of it as that, a development cycle, really needs its appropriate time and development to