Adaptability, not just adaptation
The model that worked with your longtime counterparts no longer holds with the new generation. Refining it isn’t enough anymore.
Side conversations derailing a meeting, a colleague who gets under your skin, processes questioned yet again: there’s no shortage of chances to react instead of drawing on your creativity. Sound familiar?
The Leadership Circle, the leadership development model created by Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, maps five stages in a leader’s evolution: egocentric, reactive, creative, integral, unitive.
This article focuses on what separates the second stage from the third: moving from reactive, anchored in the search for safety and control, to creative, oriented toward trust, learning, and a chosen purpose. The authors offer several levers to get there: feedback, coaching (as a coach, I can hardly disagree), and self-assessment.
I’d add daily writing to that list: it serves exactly that function. It trains you to notice what’s happening before you react, and to name what you’ve noticed before another day goes by without it.
I sometimes hear that a journal isn’t a working tool for a leader: “a personal development thing, maybe even a bit girly,” one executive once told me, half-joking.
Personal development isn’t the issue: it supports leadership development; it doesn’t compete with it. What’s at stake here goes beyond easing tension: perceiving what’s happening before reacting to it, naming what you’ve noticed without holding on to it.
This work becomes more demanding, and more necessary, as contexts grow more complex. The richer your environment, the less likely the people you meet in a single day are to share the same reference points: generational, cultural, and functional.
Perceiving accurately and naming what you’ve perceived instead of waiting for the other person to guess it, is exactly what a diverse context asks for
One client, caught between competing priorities, dismissed the idea of a journal outright (much like he dismissed breathing exercises, for that matter).
Then, one day, frustrated by a pile of AI-generated documents he’d accumulated without really thinking through any of them, he accepted a challenge: write by hand for a few days, starting from a simple question, with no expectation of results.
On the third day, one sentence was enough to surprise him: with a colleague whose tone had been grating on him for months, he’d been reacting before he’d really listened. Nothing forced that pattern on him, just an irritation he’d never named, replaying itself in every exchange. He wouldn’t have seen it any other way. Since then, he approaches those conversations differently: less quick to respond, more curious about what the other person is actually saying. He still writes two or three times a week.
In the creative register, perceiving before choosing maps onto what the Inclusive Leadership Compass calls Presence.
A Hungarian sales director and a French intern read the same silence in a meeting in two opposite ways: strategic withdrawal for one, tacit agreement for the other.
Training yourself to name that kind of gap each morning in writing sharpens your capacity to catch it later, live, in a meeting, with no notes at hand.
The other creative function, less visible, belongs to Clarity: Name. Align. Naming a need or a value, or holding your own conduct up against a clear standard, makes explicit what would otherwise stay lost in unspoken inner static.
A leader convinced he encourages initiative discovers, by writing it down in black and white, that he actually only rewards decisions that echo his own.
What stays implicit scatters. What gets explicitly named can align and get done.
This isn’t just a coaching hunch. The McKinsey HR Monitor from January 2026 confirms organizations’ growing demand for problem-solving, creativity, and reasoning (precisely the register Leadership Circle places on the creative side), rather than for narrow technical skills.
Handwriting itself also has a documented effect on this specific ground: it forces you to reformulate rather than transcribe, with better results on conceptual questions (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; an effect nuanced, not erased, by a 2019 replication).
No study, to date, explicitly links journaling to the development of creative, inclusive leadership. But the link between regular handwriting and creativity, Presence, and Clarity in complex, high-pressure contexts is easy enough to see.
Daily journaling isn’t for everyone, I’ll grant that. But this practice, whose value I hope this piece has shown, can be built gradually. To trigger writing, my programs include a daily personalized prompt, further shaped through our coaching sessions.
For a preview, receive seven prompts, one a day, no strings attached.
The model that worked with your longtime counterparts no longer holds with the new generation. Refining it isn’t enough anymore.
AI can analyze conversations and reveal participation patterns. But leaders still need presence to interpret context, trust, power, and risk — and to turn shared contribution into better decisions.
Recognizing a power play isn’t enough once the reference points shift. “Presence” to catch the signal before reacting, “Courage” to turn tension into something co-constructed — two directions of the Inclusive Leadership Compass for leading well when the rules stop holding still.