This morning at sunrise, I stood by my window and watched something breathtaking. An eagle was returning to its nest. High in the trees just in front of my home, there’s an exquisite eagles’ nest. As the light crept across the horizon, I saw the majestic bird arc through the sky, then begin its descent toward home.
What struck me wasn’t just the beauty of the eagle in flight, but the intentionality of its landing. Every movement was strategic. It adjusted its wings like air brakes, slowed its body with subtle resistance, used its tail to steer, and with a final, deliberate motion, touched down on the branch. It was not effortful, it was elegant. But it was also earned.
What looks like grace from a distance is, in fact, a deeply practiced strategy.
Leaders, too, need a practice landing.
July offers a subtle invitation for leaders and is a natural pause point mid-year. It’s a moment that often goes unnoticed, yet it holds powerful potential. In a world where complexity is constant and demands are unrelenting; how can leaders make space for recalibration?
Like the eagle, we can learn to use small adjustments to guide big landings. We can become more discerning, more attuned, more intentional.
This month’s blog is an invitation to try a simple but powerful practice: L.A.N.D. It’s a framework for grounding yourself in the middle of movement inspired by some of the best minds in leadership.
L: Listen Inward
Leadership often demands that we listen to others about markets, teams, stakeholders, and design. Transformational leaders know the listening begins within. It’s strategic self-awareness.
What emotions are present right now? What thoughts are shaping your decisions without your awareness? What’s happening in your body that you want/need to honor?
Inner listening, as studied in the emotional intelligence work of Daniel Goleman and the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford, is foundational to clear, wise leadership. Leaders who tune inward can hear the signals under the noise. And those signals often hold the key to what’s next.
A: Acknowledge Complexity
The issues facing today’s organizations are deeply complex and senior leaders understand this is not the moment to reduce complexity but to acknowledge it. Naming complexity out loud, and even sitting with it without rushing to solve it, is a courageous act.
Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, in their work on adaptive leadership at Harvard, remind us that the most impactful leaders don’t pretend complexity can be controlled. They learn to hold tension, tolerate ambiguity, and resist premature solutions.
N: Notice What’s Emerging
In the joyful moments July may bring, patterns and possibilities that were harder to notice during the beginning half of the year begin to surface. This is the leader’s opportunity to notice, without judgment, what is shifting beneath the surface.
What conversations keep resurfacing? What’s the team reaching toward that you haven’t fully named? What personal questions are tugging at the edge of your awareness?
These emerging signals are gold. Otto Scharmer, through MIT’s Presencing Institute and the Theory U model, calls this the “sensing” phase. It is a capacity to perceive from the field, to tune into what’s trying to happen. Leaders who develop this muscle often anticipate shifts long before others and can lead from a place of knowing even in the face of uncertainty.
D: Discern the Next Best Step
Leadership at its highest level is not measured by the volume of decisions made, but by the precision of discernment applied. In this final stage of the LAND practice, the opportunity is not to create a flurry of new initiatives, but to identify the singular, most strategically aligned next step, the one that reflects both the complexity of the moment and the clarity of long-term vision. Discernment, in this context, is a disciplined act of leadership.
This kind of discernment is spacious. It resists urgency. It leans into wisdom. It asks: What is most essential now? What aligns with the future I’m committed to creating? What can I do today that would move the whole system, even slightly, in the right direction?
Bob Kegan’s work on deliberately developmental organizations reminds us that leadership development and organizational development are inseparable. When leaders slow down enough to discern, their clarity elevates everything around them.
A Summer Invitation
We often admire the eagle for its soaring flight, but as I witnessed this morning, it’s in the landing that its intelligence is most visible. Every slight adjustment, wings, tail, posture, is the result of accumulated wisdom. The eagle lands deliberately with precision earned through countless attempts, errors, and adaptations. Eaglets go through a phase called branching where they test, fail, adjust, and learn. It’s messy. And necessary.
As leaders, we are constantly navigating high altitudes, strategy, pressure, and performance. We all know soaring isn’t sustainable without learning how to return, to touch down, to recalibrate.
To answer the moments July offers is not about escaping or retreating from leading, although that is sometimes necessary too. The gift of July is to LAND more fully within your leader self.
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