By Dr. Mary Lippitt, Enterprise Management LTD
What can a dragonfly teach us about leadership? More than you might think.
With thousands of lenses in its compound eyes, a dragonfly sees nearly everything around it. Leaders need a similarly expansive perspective. When conditions shift, focusing only on your department, expertise, or past successes can leave critical risks—and opportunities—out of sight.
Skills, styles, and experience matter, but so does the context. What environmental realities are you facing? Are you seeing using a 360-degree assessment, or are you operating from a 180-degree viewpoint?
Suppose you have a concrete, exciting change plan to introduce a new product; congratulations. However, if customer service representatives do not know about it, results will be disappointing. We need to check all organizational facets before a launch.
That is why effective leadership requires mental agility: the willingness to question assumptions, recognize bias, listen across professional boundaries, and adjust as new information emerges.
One practical way to widen your view is to examine challenges through six situational mindsets:
Inventing: What could we create, improve, or stop doing as technology and needs change?
Catalyzing: What are customers telling us, and where is the marketplace heading?
Developing: Do our structures, policies, and resources help people execute—or create barriers?
Performing: Where can we improve workflow, quality, productivity, and resource use?
Protecting: Are we building trust, developing talent, and preparing people for change?
Challenging: Which assumptions, outside trends, or emerging risks should reshape our strategy?
These perspectives work together. An innovative service may fail without adequate staffing. A productivity push may undermine trust. A familiar business model may become vulnerable as customer expectations shift.
No leader can see every connection alone. The goal is to ask better questions and bring more perspectives into the conversation.
At your next planning meeting, invite someone whose work connects with yours but whose perspective you rarely hear. Ask what they see that you might be missing.
Like the dragonfly, effective leaders gain an advantage by widening their view of their entire environment—and prioritizing their opportunities.