How would you define a good leader today?

Margaret Wheatley: The definition that I like best right now is by Mort Meyerson from Perot Industries. (It’s a strange source for this kind of thinking.) As CEO, he said, he realized everything he knew about leadership was wrong. Then he came up with these new definitions in which he said: the first task of a leader is to make sure the organization knows itself.

We need to think of the leader as a mirror, or as a supporter of the processes by which we know our competencies and we know what interpretations of our history we’re willing to enter into. We need to make sure we know our customers, we know one another, and we know why we’re in this business or in this public sector organization.

There is so much that an organization needs to know about itself. But it needs to know it; it doesn’t ever respond to being told what it is or what it’s supposed to do. It’s just not in our capacity as human beings to take direction. I don’t actually think it’s in the capacity of anything alive to take direction when it’s trying to exercise its creativity in response to what you just asked it to do.