Leading Like Water: The Tao of Leadership
I most recently read John Heider’s The Tao of Leadership, and it struck me how refreshingly different it was from most leadership books. No long checklists. No rigid frameworks. Just short, poetic reflections that felt more like a gentle nudge than a marching order.
One line stopped me in my tracks: “The wise leader’s ability to follow flows from strength, not weakness.” In other words, real leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room or forcing everyone into your plan. It’s about strength in flexibility, about shaping conditions so people and systems can naturally do their best work.
That wisdom came back to me not long ago when I worked on a project to roll out a shiny new analytics tool. The vendor promised it would be “plug and play” (famous last words in tech). Leadership was excited, already dreaming of the profits and dazzling user insights it would deliver.
But like the Tao reminds us, what looks simple on the surface often hides a river of complexity underneath. And in this case, that river flowed straight through a legacy platform tangled in old code, dependencies, and non-negotiable standards for reuse, security, and performance. “Plug and play” quickly turned into “pause and pray.”
That’s when another Tao passage came to mind: “When the leader trusts the process, the process yields results.” It reminded me that leadership sometimes means slowing down when everyone else wants to speed up. Instead of shoving the tool into production, we asked harder questions: What insights truly mattered most? How do we deliver value quickly without breaking trust? And how do we design this in a way that can grow, not just solve today’s problem?
The Tao often compares leadership to water: soft, yielding, yet powerful. “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” That metaphor became my compass. We didn’t smash through obstacles — we flowed around them. We found the natural path forward.
And here’s the funny thing: what looked like slowing down actually sped things up in the long run. We avoided rework, earned trust, and laid the kind of foundation that could actually scale.
That’s the Tao of Leadership in action — progress without forcing, strength in flexibility, and the reminder that technology may move fast, but wisdom is what makes it last.
