What is a ‘healing leader’?

The short answer is someone who’s actively working on doing less harm. Today is a milestone birthday for me, and I am reflecting on my decades of experience from public service, to startups, political campaigns, and now management consulting and executive coaching. Here are some of the lessons and frameworks I’m reflecting on of the wide range of ways leaders fail themselves, their teams, and the impact they can create — and how some of them have managed to turn it all around.

I’ve worked with some talented and externally successful people and teams. The pattern I’ve witnessed, and what I’m focusing on this year, is the concept of a healing leader — someone who’s simultaneously doing the inner work of deepening their knowledge and connection to themselves as they transform their communities, stakeholders, products, services, and teams. I’ve personally experienced or have coached dozens of people who are recovering from the trauma of working with leaders who tout or recruit for equity, inclusion, being trauma-informed, or shifting systems change on the outside or from the political pulpit — and have disastrous relationships with themselves, their egos, and the way they treat their staff, co-founders, and colleagues. The following five themes cut across hundreds of stories, and interactions, and creates a pathway from harmful and toxic leaders toward reparative leadership and collective healing…