Red to Teal: Leadership Has Come A Long Way & So Can You
We began our journey with the Evolutionary Guide To DEI by looking back over 10,000 years of management evolution. Starting with the Red (Impulsive) leadership orientation, we’ve traced our way forward in evolutionary time through Amber (Hierarchy), Orange (Meritocracy), and then the Green (Values & Morals) worldview that emerged about a century and a half ago. We’ve identified how many aspects of each of the preceding approaches keep leaders and organizations from becoming inclusive. Now let’s dig into the paradigm that drives the opposite results and represents the wave of the future: Teal (Evolutionary Purpose-Driven).

The Future Is Teal
The Teal approach to leading originated about 50 years ago. This emerging consciousness values authenticity, spontaneity, flexibility, limited hierarchies, and free-will choice. From a Teal perspective, the world is an amalgam of natural flows and interrelated creative systems continuously evolving. Opposites can become complementary and integrated into a comprehensive whole that is self-sustaining. Teal leaders recognize being and becoming as more important than doing because change is inherent in all living systems, including organizations. Uncertainty, complexity, and a commitment to shared accountability are all seen as part of collaborative human momentum that doesn’t require forced direction.

Teal Organizations Are Their Employees
Teal organizations manifest certain principles honoring their people:

• Human wellbeing is first priority, in particular promoting psychological safety, inclusion and belonging
• Individual vocation, calling, purpose, and mission are understood to feed the whole, collective system
• Leadership is based on a deep, abiding commitment to the authenticity of each individual 
• There is a commitment to conscious and supportive relationships that honor interconnection and value collaboration
• Ethical, social and ecological responsibility are seen as ours to foster together

Teal Leaders Bring It All Together
Since the Teal leadership paradigm prioritizes people, Teal organizations are much more successful than those at other levels to manifest inclusion:

• Teal leaders are less focused on outcomes, granting them a nuanced perspective on data that means understanding people rather than just quantifying them. By contrast, leaders at the Orange Level often fail to question data that is incongruent with their own worldview. For example, an Orange leader will think of the number of minority individuals who are hired or fired merely as a function of competition and meritocracy. Teal leaders are more apt to consider how and why employee experiences manifest in recruitment and retention trends.
• From a Teal perspective, leaders are better at leveraging emotional insights. While emotions are always present in the workplace, some leadership styles such as Orange tend to ignore them or see them only as distractions from efficiency and productivity. Green-style leaders, in another instance, may over-emphasize emotion such that staff are polarized as advocates for a mission and the risk for burnout is simultaneously higher yet constantly downplayed. Teal leaders, by contrast, tune into emotions to inform change and promote employee wellbeing.
• Teal leaders are also able to tap freely into their intuition. The complex interplay of factors in the business world can’t always be captured in an analytical framework. Intuitive knowledge can support a more holistic understanding of the deep nature of today’s organizational problems. Leaders operating at the Teal level can make better decisions by accessing a higher spectrum of human experience combining logic, emotions, and intuition.

• Paradoxes reveal incoherencies in logical systems and signal tensions in actions, behaviors, and systems within organizations. By embracing life paradoxes and moving beyond “either/or” thinking, Teal leaders can facilitate a deeper understanding of complex organizational challenges and find more opportunities to further organizational development and growth.
• In  Teal organizations, the emphasis on interconnectedness promotes collaboration, wholeness, and community  that feeds the  potential for innovation while  breaking down the damaging silo approach characteristic of other levels of development.
• Teal leaders seek to bridge differences rather than tolerating them by creating safe, judgment-free organizational spaces. While those operating at the Amber and Orange levels of development tend to judge differences and promote employee assimilation to an organizational culture, those at the Green level view differences as fodder for unnecessary conflict. Teal level leaders instead practice deep and generous listening to help employees discover their unique voices.

Teal Leaders Reap The Benefits
It is no coincidence that the many business benefits associated with inclusion show up in Evolutionary Purpose-Driven organizations. Research shows that in Teal organizations:

• Stress decreases and employees have a prevailing sense of personal well-being 
• Staff feel a stronger sense of connectedness to one another and to the workplace as a trusted community 
• Productivity, performance, and resiliency increase 
• Employees are more likely to approach their work as a commitment to a mission with a sense of hopefulness and meaning rather than merely a job to get done
• Workforces tend to be more diverse, equitable and inclusive
  

Starting With Yourself, Lead Everyone Forward

As you and your organization move vertically up the levels, you never lose your old ways of thinking. They just take a backseat to your new outlook. They’re always accessible as building blocks and points of reference whenever you call upon them from a more highly developed version of yourself. 

You can more effectively and inclusively lead with others. Your work is positioning others to best meet the demands of your shared mission, together. Keep in mind this important truth—a leader can only accommodate—that is, get the best from, inspire, and guide others—who are at the same level of development, or below, their own. So start—and continue to grow—by asking these important questions: What level are you at now? What level do you aspire to? Who will you bring along with you in your personal and organizational evolution?