Abundance Leadership

Abundance Leadership

One of Australia’s leading management consultants once characterized my leadership style as being one of “abundance”.

I didn’t know what he meant, so asked him to describe what he meant.

He reminded me of a time we met for breakfast just a few weeks before he was flying to deliver an MBA program in China.  He’d neither taught an MBA unit before nor lectured anywhere but in Australia.  He did not know what to expect, educationally or culturally, nor how to teach and facilitate with success in an international context so different from our own.

Being familiar with the same feelings, I gladly told him the story of my teaching experiences in China, mentioning what to do, what not to do, and what to never do under any circumstances!  I left with him a complimentary copy of my textbooks as well as a new and relatively rare text that discussed the implications of traditional management theories for the Chinese management and organizational context.

“That’s abundance leadership,” he said.

Thus, when recently asked by a group of executives for my definition of leadership, I offered the following,

Leaders are values-driven and abundance-centred.  They make the decisions that ensure organisational vitality and sustainability, today and tomorrow, and create the contexts for others to do the same.

Abundance leaders make the pie bigger for everyone.  Everyone’s slice becomes larger.  Even those with the smallest slice feel more rewarded, more satisfied, and more involved in the work for which they have responsibility.

As well as providing examples from his own career, Dr Dave offers examples of abundance leadership from leaders as diverse as Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and Gordon Bethune, who led the turnaround of Continental Airlines in the mid-1990s.