Eight ways ecocentric and shamanic stewards differ from traditional leaders

Most leadership assumes the leader stands apart from the system they lead and that they are an individual directing something separate from themselves. Yet when founded on an ecocentric perspective where everything is understood to be deeply interconnected, leadership starts to look very different. When a steward does not separate themselves from the system they serve, how do this translate, day to day, when working with their teams, organisations, or communities?

Below we outline eight differences in ways of knowing, relating and being of shamanic stewardship to conventional leadership.

1. A steward acts as a relational intermediary: In Western leadership the leader moves a group toward a vision and destination they have identified, working more like a compass, pointing a group towards a particular direction. The shamanic steward, however, works more like a tuning fork to help the whole community find its own resonance from within. A steward holds the centre, supporting relationships, sustaining trust, ensuring care, rather than necessarily determining the group's direction.

2. A steward supports the community in being the agent: A Western leader is typically understood to be the one who drives a group forward as the primary agent of change. A shamanic steward, however, recognises that it is the community itself that is the primary agent of its own movement. The steward's task is to support the relationships within a community or organisation and hold space for resolution of the difficulties that inevitably arise.

3. A steward understands change as something to cohere within, not control: Whereas conventional leadership treats change as a disruption to be contained and a transition to be executed, shamanic stewards understand change as something the whole system is always already moving through, with its own cycles, intelligence and tendency for the emergence of new possibilities that are not always easy to foresee. The steward's task is not so much to direct that change but to help the community find coherence within it. This involves understanding where a system sits in its own cycle, holding it with patience, and trusting what cannot be entirely controlled.

4. A steward looks inward and downward, not forward: Conventional leadership is fundamentally forward-facing, oriented toward vision, strategy, and future goals. In contrast, shamanic stewardship investigates the roots: what is this community experiencing in this moment? What history does it carry? What unseen dynamics are shaping what is currently possible? What emotional undercurrents, repeating patterns, or unspoken grief and fear are operating beneath the surface? In this understanding the governing questions are not "where are we going?" Instead, they are "what is asking to be heard?" or "what does this living system most need right now?"

5. A steward’s authority is earned, not appointed: While Western authority is conferred by appointment, title, or position, shamanic authority is earned through a demonstrated capacity to see what others cannot yet see, and through the ability to translate that perception into something useful. It accumulates slowly, through sustained attentiveness, the willingness to name difficult truths with care, and the quality of presence someone brings to their work. Authority cannot simply be handed to a steward through a job title.

6. A steward receives rather than asserts: The Western 'strong leader' archetype prizes clarity, confidence, and decisive assertion. A leader who 'arrives with the answer'. Shamanic stewardship works almost in reverse. The steward learns to hold their own perspective lightly enough that they can genuinely receive what a situation is asking for, setting aside their own assumptions and conclusions long enough to be open to what the community needs rather than what they as a leader have already decided it needs.

7. A steward decisions draw on both ordinary and non-ordinary ways of knowing: Western leadership draws mostly on rational analysi; data, strategy, reasoned judgement. The shamanic steward maintains access to this but also to other ways of knowing: intuition, journeying to transpersonal realms, and the knowing available when they open themselves to the resonance of a wider field. Their dual awareness, the rational and the transpersonal, allows both the visible and invisible dimensions of a situation to be read at the same time.

8. A steward’s idea of 'the organisation' is expansive: Western leadership tends to work within a narrow idea of what constitutes an organisation, such as its finances, its technical capacities, its people viewed mainly as a set of skills and functions. Shamanic stewards view their organisations in a much more expansive way: as a living entity, situated within a much wider ecosystem of other organisations, made up of people who are more than the roles they occupy, and inseparable from the more-than-human world that sustains it. Stewards engage as if they are their organisations, and that their organisations are a wider, living whole.

Overall, shamanic stewardship does not remove the weight of responsibility that comes with holding a leadership role. In many ways it can be even more challenging, given it operates in a way that is poorly understood or recognised, within a world more used to conventional leadership. Yet ecocentric or shamanic leadership is often more like learning to trust your innate capacities rather than learning specific techniques. So, rather than diving in with solutions for problems that need 'fixing', simply try stepping back and asking what it would be like to listen more attentively to what your organisation is, or where it wants to go. Perhaps give yourself permission to be different and explore how you and the way you work with others might change if you applied some of the insights above.

In short: what kind of steward would you be if you walked in the world as if you are whole?