Introduction

Who Benefits from Graceful Leadership? Everyone.

Do you have an established career as an effective leader yet feel as if something is missing?

Do you feel as if you’ve sold your soul in the name of professional success?

Have you been taught to forge ahead at all costs, never showing weakness, abiding by the mantra “Results, results, results!”?

Are you partitioning off parts of yourself at work? Do you have a strict divide between your personal life and your professional life?

Do you have a gnawing feeling that you’re not connecting as deeply as you could with your peers and subordinates? Do you not feel seen or heard? Have you ever thought, If they only knew me!

Do you ever look in the mirror and wonder how you got here? Do you worry that your path has led you to something you don’t even want?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re not alone. I’ve seen these patterns over and over again throughout my practice, within all levels of leadership. The good news is that there is a better way, and together we can find it. It’s called graceful leadership.

How Grace Can Help

When people hear the word grace, they often think of religion. While religion can play a role in grace for some leaders, grace, as defined here, is not about religion. Rather, grace is the practical expression of a loving, connected compassion with self and others. It is the ability to see yourself in the other.

Grace is beauty and strength combined. It has a warrior energy to it. Grace does not equal doormat. Rather, a graceful leader has a power that is accountable. Graceful leadership offers a two-way street of connection: the graceful leader is felt and seen by the people, community, and organization they are leading, and those who experience the graceful leader are similarly left feeling seen and heard.

Graceful leadership is the most integrated form of leadership. It allows you to form a bridge between personal and professional, align yourself to your purpose, and adapt as required for each unique situation.

The journey into our gracefulness is a gritty one—bumpy, messy, and one of the most refining experiences we will travel into. The humanness that is us creates a journey that will be revisited and refined over one’s lifetime. Entering into your inner grace is one of the most accountable journeys you will ever take.

Integration: Bridging the Internal Divide

The tipping point of becoming a graceful leader is first expressing loving, connected compassion for yourself. When you offer this compassion to yourself, you give yourself the opportunity to become more integrated. Instead of having several different versions of yourself—the you at work, the you at home, the you in your community, and so on—there is only the one unified, connected you.

I’ve worked with countless people who were toxic, nasty people at work. Then I would witness them in a different area of their life—volunteering at the local food bank, biking at the fitness club, or simply shopping at the grocery store—and I would discover that they had the most compassionate hearts. What the heck is happening here? I asked myself each time I came across this pattern. Why can’t these leaders be compassionate in their professional lives as well as their personal lives?

This imbalance works in the opposite direction as well, with people needing to bring aspects of their professional selves into their personal lives. I’ve seen many people, especially women, who are powerful leaders at work. Then, at home, they become doormats, abdicating all power and responsibility to their spouse. In the past, I certainly needed better boundaries in my personal life. I let my former spouse speak to me in ways that I never would’ve tolerated at work. If a peer or even a boss had said some of those things to me, I would’ve chewed them up and spit them out for lunch. This incongruence made me unpredictable, resulting in confusion for me and those around me.

We’re taught that we can be only one thing at a time: compassionate or powerful. It’s a lie. You don’t have to be one or the other. You can be all of you. In fact, you will be infinitely more powerful if you embrace the wholeness of yourself.

A lack of balance between one’s personal and professional lives is a huge internal stressor. Segregating yourself into different “yous” is exhausting and can lead to emotional breakdowns and serious physical ailments. It’s one of the main reasons people come to me, looking for another way. They can feel their personal and professional selves grating against each other, and they want to figure out how to bridge the two, forming a holistic, consistent version of themselves. Grace is what builds the bridge.

Alignment: The One You

Grace with yourself is a meeting of your internal and external landscapes. It is a congruency between what you do and who you are. When you become a graceful leader, you understand your desires and your purpose for being on the planet, and you act in accordance. Aligning yourself to your underlying purpose in this way allows you to achieve synergy of self, and it holds you accountable.

For me, my driving purpose is to create safe places for souls to show up. When we have an environment of safety, we all get to show up with our full brilliance, allowing us to achieve the greatest results. That purpose is who I am—my internal landscape. It is the filter I lead through. I am only human, and so my external world—what I do—does not always match that internal landscape. To create the congruency, I am always asking myself, “Am I creating safety? If not, what do I need to do to change that?” By returning to this compass, I can ensure that who I am and what I do are aligned more often than not.

One cannot be graceful without being aligned. This will require an honest inventory of where you are and where you wish to be. The judgment you place around the divide will be explored and over time redefined to create the balance and love that are required internally to uncover your purpose, the one you feel and crave access to. It is only when we dedicate ourselves to our purpose that we can fully unlock the power of the graceful leader.

Flow: Adapting Fluidly

Grace allows you to adapt to any given situation in a fluid, intuitive manner. Graceful leaders are never stuck in one position. They are wholly integrated—mind, body, and soul. They have access to all that they are, at all times. This means that they can call forth whatever aspects of themselves are needed for a particular situation. In one moment, they can draw on their compassion to comfort a team member who has suffered a personal loss, and in the next, they can lean into their firm confidence to deliver an important presentation. Because of this flow between roles and strengths, graceful leaders have far more tools to employ in every situation.

You may have heard the term servant leadership before. This view of leadership upholds that a leader’s primary role is to serve. Very rarely does the leader need to lead from the front. Instead, they spend their time in the back, removing barriers, creating opportunities, and generally supporting their team. Graceful leadership builds upon and extends this idea of servant leadership. The graceful leader understands that nine times out of ten, they will be in the back serving. In that rare instance that they need to lead from the front or side, they will flow seamlessly into that position and adapt their leadership style to fit the needs of the situation. The epitome of a graceful leader is knowing where to be, when to be there, and how to be there. It’s like having a playbook in football, where you know exactly where you’re supposed to be on the field.

The infinity symbol is a good representation of this concept of flow.

The graceful leader is constantly flowing from one part of the symbol to another. At any given moment, the leader understands where they are needed along the infinity symbol. Instead of trying to push or pull people along, the graceful leader’s power lies in being in the right position at the right time for the situation. The followers will naturally cluster around wherever the leader is, like a flock of birds flying in a V.

The graceful leader is present in the moment and understands when to take action and when to be still. Many leaders attain results by force, by pushing and driving. Yet, though it is a skill not many acquire or master, stillness can be a leader’s greatest asset. In a crisis, you might need to take charge and employ traditional command-and-control leadership methods. If a normally high-performing team member begins struggling, you might instead need to be still, sitting with that person and giving them the needed space to open up about the issue. Grace encourages this flow between action and stillness.

Graceful Leaders among Us

The easiest way to understand graceful leadership is to look at examples of it. Graceful leadership can take many different forms. Despite their seeming differences, Rose Marcario, Martin Luther King Jr., Hamdi Ulukaya, Jane Goodall, and Maya Angelou are all excellent examples of graceful leaders.

My whole self is here. My values, my passion, my sense of urgency.

—Rose Marcario

As Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario herself attests, she brings...