The Power Of Leadership: A Commitment To Wholeness

Effective leadership has never been more vital. The world is in trouble right now. Many of us feel we have used up the value of inherited business practices from a traditional business culture. A focus on short-term profit, including a narrow view of the role of employees, will only give us more of the same. Is it possible to turn to female leadership? Is it the gender that makes the difference? In fact, we have found that it is not the gender that matters. Rather it is a commitment to life-giving business practices—a commitment to life that makes the difference. Our umbrella term for this commitment is the femina.

The Femina

We have taken the root word of feminine, femina, to express a commitment to life and to creating living systems. If we align ourselves with life, what do we find? If we’re not working from the whole, if we’re not looking at our planet and the community and our mutual living together, then what are we looking at? How can families thrive? How are people themselves able to be fulfilled and prosper? The femina is a force operating within both women and men who are stepping up to create a more liveable world by reforming business. While as leaders we have many stresses and demands, we also have the necessary vision, the femina vision, to change the way business does business.

Bringing The Femina Into The Business World

Meaning is at the heart of the femina. Our sense of meaningfulness is key to a satisfying and fruitful life. In business, meaningfulness sets us on the path to discovering intrinsic, internal motivation—working for something greater than oneself, a cornerstone of employee retention. Research suggests that extrinsic motivators, such as salary, only go so far. Beyond a certain threshold, intrinsic motivation becomes the primary driver of workplace satisfaction and engagement.

For women and men in leadership, fostering an environment where intrinsic motivation thrives can be transformative. By demonstrating a genuine commitment to meaning in terms of employees’ personal and professional development and by aligning organisational goals with a sense of purpose, leaders can build teams that are high-performing and deeply committed to the organisation’s mission.

Meaningfulness requires committing to consistent practices of meaning. A spirit of inquiry, for example, engages employees in an ongoing dialogue about why we are here on the planet, what that calls us to do, and who that calls us to become.

Leading Differently

When we in leadership cultivate meaningfulness, we open up unexpected dimensions in a company. In a recent forum called “Presencing the Femina,” where ‘presencing’ is the blend of presence and sensing, one leader described an important change in building her client list. Instead of hunting down leads, she focused on drawing customers to her. This nuance values the art and skill of developing a customer list, rather than the image of the hunter finding its prey. Naturally, women and men both can and do lead from this awareness, moving away from a corporate culture inherited from a male-dominated business model. In our example, this particular leader centred her motivation internally. She brought clients to her by aligning the client’s goals and concerns with that of her business. She no longer needed hard-hitting pitches she’d been trained to give, pitches that did not resonate with her own sense of what brings meaning to her and her clients. When she focused on attracting clients, her approach became relational, valuing the clients in themselves and not only their contribution to the financial health of her company.

Benefits of Meaningfulness

When leaders cultivate an employee’s sense of meaningfulness, a hallmark of the femina—even apart from the employee’s role in the company—the results are striking. First, employees respond with an increased engagement to their work. Second, it is through meaning that creativity and innovation are tapped, which brings new direction to a company. Third, the continual practice of meaning, oriented toward life-giving outcomes, gives an organisation a tensile strength to prepare for creating new directions and entering into the not-yet- known, as leaders increasingly have to do.

Awareness makes all the difference in opening us up to the femina and its orientation to life. You may have heard the story of several blind mice defining the characteristics of an elephant. One, holding on to the tusks, described the hard pointiness of an elephant. Another grabbed hold of the trunk, maintaining that an elephant is like a pendulum. A third had hold of the elephant’s powerful legs and described the elephant as a pillar of strength. The awareness of the whole elephant was missing. Awareness shows us the way to a holistic perception of things as they are and the future as it is coming through. This is the power of the femina. It orients us towards wholeness, grounded in life-giving awareness.

The femina allows leaders to tap into the future that wants to emerge, fostering innovation and resilience. In practice, this means being attuned to both the details and the broader landscape, enabling visionary decision-making that benefits both the organisation and the world. It includes awareness of the interconnection of the living systems in our world without polarisation.

Written by Jill Taylor, 2025, for Success Savvy by She Rise Studios, 2025