Concept

Leadership Equation

conceptleadershipcoachingpsychologyresilience

Leadership Equation

The Leadership Equation is Jerry Colonna‘s model for how leaders are actually developed — improvised on a dry-erase board at Naropa University while he tried to explain what he does as a coach:

practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = enhanced leadership + greater resilience

The terms

  • Practical skills — the “how” people come to a coach for: how to do the job, how to live. The thing they think they need.
  • Radical Self-Inquiry — where Colonna “drives them crazy” by asking instead about their father, their relationship to money, their sense of self-worth. The questions one is socialised not to ask.
  • Shared experiences — talking openly about “the craziness in your head” with people who “just have your back,” who can hold the space without fixing or judging. The antidote to the entrepreneurial norm of bullshitting — “all our companies are moving up into the right, every product is working… and that’s just a lie.” (Reboot’s CEO Boot Camps grew from this — a “bait and switch” that promised practical skills and delivered breath-taking questions in a trusted circle.)

The circled term: resilience

When Colonna draws the equation, he circles “greater resilience”, because that — not “enhanced leadership” — is the real purpose. The biographical root: in his late 30s, despite outward success, his lifelong depression had become so severe he was suicidal. “I get you want to be a great CEO — what I really care about is you not killing yourself in the process.” The equation reduces to a single question: how do we become the adults we were born to be without feeling like crap?

It is a direct rebuttal to what Colonna calls the big lie socialised from childhood — that reaching success (the money, the house) will make you happy. The counter is the 19-year-old who, at one of his talks, summed up everything he’s about: “you don’t have to be an asshole to be successful” — with the corollary, “you don’t have to feel miserable just because you’re trying to create a career.”

Why it matters for teams

The equation explains Colonna’s claim that teams fail from unsorted baggage, not lack of talent (see the complicit question). Practical skills alone — public speaking, finance, email — don’t fix a struggling leader or team; the missing variables are self-inquiry and honest shared experience. Citing Jung (“until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”) and Parker Palmer (“if you choose to live an unexamined life, please don’t take a job that involves other people”): if you want a high-functioning team, do your work — and it starts with the person who has the most power.