How to lead through hospitality, rather than heroics.(Dr. Margaret Wheatley at National Institute for Leadership Development )(Conference news)

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it," Albert Einstein wrote. Western consciousness of the past 300 years gave us a paradigm of leadership based on individualism, fear and control.

Speaking at the National Institute for Leadership Development (NILD) conference in Phoenix in November, Dr. Margaret Wheatley said our image of a leader needs to shift from hero to host.

She's been writing for years about leadership and the new science, where self-organizing systems work through chaos and relationships. The essays in her latest book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (Berrett-Koehler 2005), find ancient roots for the "new" leadership, which emerges from community instead of trying to dominate.

"We are all bundles of potential that manifest only in relationship," she said. No living thing lives alone, a truth that Western organizational literature rejects as too touchy-feely.

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Suicide is one symptom of our isolating individualism. Economically impoverished Senegal has no suicide, homelessness or hunger, she said. Unlike Americans, particularly American male leaders, people in Senegal have each other.

People as machines