Why Ecocentric Ways of Being Changes Everything about Leadership

Most leadership development starts from the assumption that the leader is a distinct individual, standing apart from the system they lead, tasked with figuring out where that system should go and directing it. In this conventional view, the leader provides the vision, authority, agency and direction. Many leadership courses, books or frameworks build on this assumption and many leaders operate from it. This is especially for early career leaders who often don't notice they are making these assumptions at all.

Shamanic and Ecocentric Traditions – We are not separate from what we steward

Shamanic and other ecocentric traditions start from a very different position. They have a different understanding of the nature of the reality they are engaging with, what change means and what it means to support others. 

At the heart of this understanding, is that everything in the world is alive and interconnected. Humans are not separate from the world around them and are instead just an expression of it. An analogy is a wave. It has a distinct, recognisable form. You can point to it, name it, describe its shape and motion. And yet it is still, entirely, the ocean. It has no existence apart from the water that makes it up, no boundary that separates it from the whole.

In shamanic or ecocentric understanding, we, as individuals or whole organisations, are like that. We are not individuals standing apart from our colleagues in an organisation, and our organisation is not separate from the natural environment or the other organisations we interact with. Instead, we are just a wave that, for a particular moment, flows through and surfaces as a ripple in an ocean. When this is understood deeply, the sense of separateness between a 'leader' or an 'organisation' and people, other organisations, land, and living systems dissolves. This changes the very idea of what a leader or an organisation is, and what it then requires us to do.

In these traditions the word 'leader' is often absent from their vocabulary. There is not just a different style or technique but a very different way of being. Shamanic leadership, for example, is more akin to a form of stewardship. The steward supports and nurtures relations, allowing those they assist to grow more organically and in line with the wider fields of energy and patterns unfolding around them. They steward collective forms of leadership, rather than lead a group of individuals directly.

From this perspective, two core differences between ecocentric stewards and conventional leaders stand out: stewarding as a relational intermediary and viewing oneself as being the change rather than something that is managed.

Stewarding as a relational intermediary

The first key difference between a steward and conventional leader is a shift towards working to nurture relationships towards coherence and an emergent whole. The conventional Western model of leadership comes directly out of a cosmology of separation. It assumes the leader stands outside the system, that they can know what it needs from that outside vantage point and that their central task is to identify a direction and point the way. This is sometimes done gently and at other times more forcefully.

Many indigenous and shamanic stewards, however, view themselves as a relational intermediary, someone who holds the centre of a community rather than pointing the way forward from the outside. The questions such stewards asks are not "where should we go?" or "how do I direct this?" but "what is alive here?”, and “what does it need?" This is not a passive process but one that is more about listening for what the system itself is already trying to become and then helping to align with this change and nurture the alignment of efforts that happen around this direction. 

Attending closely and accurately to a living system, and responding appropriately, is not easy. It calls for a different set of capabilities — perception, patience, and relational sensitivity — rather than clarity of vision and force of will alone.

Change as something you are within, not something you manage

A second core difference between conventional leadership and ecocentric or shamanic stewardship is the way change itself is understood. Conventional leadership treats change as something external to be managed, such as a disruption to contain, a transition to be planned and executed according to a timeline. From an ecocentric perspective, however, change is not something a steward stands outside of and manages. It is something the steward, like everyone else, is always already within. Change usually moves through its own cycles, rhythms and intelligence more than we might realise and irrespective of whether anyone is trying to influence it.

The leader's role, from an ecocentric way of being, then shifts from directing change to helping a community or system find coherence within it. It involves recognising where a system currently sits in its own cycle, holding it with patience rather than rushing to restore a false stability, and trusting processes that cannot be entirely controlled from the outside. This asks for a kind of trust that a living system, attended to well, has its own intelligence about what it needs and where it is going. This is a capacity rarely developed in, or supported by, organisations with conventional leaders.

A different foundation, not just a different technique

The idea of stewards as relational intermediaries operating from within change cannot be bolted onto an otherwise unchanged model of leadership where leaders are assumed to be separate, to stand apart, or that they know best. Instead, becoming a steward is a process of cultivating a new way of being, including supporting deep shifts within yourself towards being able to walk in the world as if you are the whole. Stewarding is a gradual process of letting go of your sense of separateness and returning to the whole of what you already are.