By day, I'm a leadership and organization development consultant. Outside of that role, I'm an interfaith minister. In both roles, I help people feel a greater sense of connectedness to themselves and the world around them, and find greater purpose and meaning in their work and life.

There is a particular kind of leader I have had the privilege of working with over the years — not the most decorated, not always the most senior, but unmistakably the most generative.

You know them when you walk into a room they've shaped. Something is different. People are more themselves. There is less performance, less guardedness, more of the particular aliveness that emerges when people feel genuinely safe, genuinely seen, and genuinely part of something that matters.

When leaders first encounter the word "empowered," most of them think inward.

Confidence. Self-belief. The ability to make decisions without second-guessing themselves into paralysis. And yes — all of that is part of it. But in two decades of working with leaders, I've found that the leaders who feel most genuinely empowered are not necessarily the most self-assured in a room. They are the ones who know how to be in relationship.

I've worked with a lot of leaders who feel quietly guilty about purpose.

Not because they lack it. But because they're not sure they've found it — at least not in the way they were told they would. No lightning-bolt moment. No singular calling that reorganized everything. Just a persistent, underlying sense that what they're doing matters, interrupted regularly by doubt, fatigue, and the ordinary friction of a complex life.

I want to suggest that this is not a failure of purpose. This is what purpose actually looks like.

Today, I’m sharing a story about one of my clients, Mark (name changed), and how he was able to honor his late father's advice while he was meeting some leadership challenges in terms of how he developed the leaders who reported to him. In Mark’s story, he was protecting a leader who he perceived to be weak, but in doing so, he was allowing harm to come to other employees. Sometimes we can do harm by not doing anything.

Leading with Head and Heart

That is what it means to be an integrated leader – one who embodies being connected to themselves and others, and who can also rigorously think through complex problems. Easier said than done!

What does this REALLY require?

Today I’m sharing Amy’s* story: A leader who was already very successful and had just been promoted and given a much broader role in the organization. She was a dynamic doer and adept at mentoring and educating her people. They looked to her for answers. Her challenge was being an even more strategic leader who needed to learn about...

The pandemic amplified the conversation around mental health and the need to honor the worker and foster more compassionate work cultures. The current wars and strife in the world require this now, more than ever. The world is in turmoil, and yet our lives and work must carry on – but how? What role can you, as a leader play? How, and why, do you nurture cultures of care?

I just got off a call with a client, let’s call them Pat, who is working on being more influential with senior leaders. Pat is a senior leader themselves. They are highly affiliative and great at putting people at ease. They tend toward introversion and will let others talk. It’s not that they don’t have a point of view – they usually do. It’s that they take great care in allowing others to be heard and feel included. They don’t feel the need to compete for attention or to be heard. When they have something that they feel needs to be said, then they say it – calmly and deliberately.

And, their affiliative style can be an overused strength. We all want to be liked.

Suze Shaner is interviewed by Diane Halfman on her podcast “Live Your SPALife” (SPA – Seek Power Always).