“Leadership is the ability to guide, influence, and inspire individuals or groups toward achieving shared goals or objectives,” said the AI ChatBot. “But isn’t leadership also the act of being a witness,” thought the confused undergraduate student, “to the creation of something greater than ourselves?”

Leadership has long been associated with authority, control, and power. From monarchs to modern politicians, the title of a ‘leader’ conjures up an image of an invincible, omnipotent, and almost divine figure (King et al., 2009). However, leaders are far from invincible. Today, leaders face challenges that are no longer about commanding control but rather about bringing authenticity to a world dominated by social media echo chambers and the uncreative outputs of artificial intelligence. These challenges are acutely felt in organizations—from small start-ups to multinational corporations. 
        Global challenges—from social inequality to climate change—call for an urgent reform in leadership strategies. Scholars argue that facilitating change requires leaders to transcend narrow and profit-driven goals and integrate a higher consciousness with inclusive purposes that benefit the individual and society (Maheshwari, 2021; Polman & Winston, 2021; Gulati & Adam, 2022; Quinn & Thakor, 2019). Creativity is at the heart of addressing these challenges. In a mixed-methods study, Oke et al. (2008) found that one of the biggest challenges faced by contemporary leaders is guiding creativity and innovation within their teams. However, leadership is an indispensable antecedent to creativity (Lee et al., 2019). Leaders can design systems that foster new ideas, encourage adaptability, and promote collaborative problem-solving in their teams. Transformational leaders, for instance, are considered sources of inspiration for their teams—encouraging members to transcend self-interest and embrace a shared creative vision (Northouse, 2004). Thus, the question arises: In a world where creative agency and curious wonder are rapidly declining (Doshi & Hauser, 2023), how must leaders foster creativity and innovation in teams? 
        Today, leaders are compelled to be more than mere ‘managers.’ The role of a leader might be to “guide, influence, and inspire” individuals towards shared goals, as the AI ChatBot suggests. Instead, might the role of a leader be merely to witness? To witness the creation of something much greater than the sum of its parts? 
        Conscious leadership shifts the focus from controlling outcomes—be it guised as guiding, influencing, or inspiring—to creating environments where creativity and innovation naturally emerge through curiosity, dialogue, and collaboration. Conscious leadership embraces the fundamental human aspect of creativity and innovation, recognizing that the best ideas often arise from climates for initiative that foster psychological safety and trust rather than from authority or control (Baer & Frese, 2003). By creating spaces where individuals feel empowered to experiment, take risks, and rise from failure, conscious leaders act as witnesses to creative emergence rather than enforcers of outcomes. This paper provides a toolbox for leaders to become conscious leaders by embracing their authenticity, acknowledging their fallibility, and cultivating followership, even while in leadership positions.

From Control to Consciousness Leadership often comes with the illusion of control—the belief that a sheer force of will can dictate every outcome. This illusion of control is particularly relevant in ego-driven leaders, who pursue authority and dominance to reinforce their power (Sloof & Siemens, 2017). Such leadership behaviors align with reactive or dominant leadership styles, which are self-serving, controlling, and harmful to the group (Ronay, 2024; Lin & Carley, 1993; Bwalya, 2023). More often than not, stifling authority can suppress the conditions required to cultivate creativity and innovation, especially in organizations (Schuh et al., 2013). Conscious leadership—which aligns with non-hierarchical, proactive, prestige-driven, and purposeful leadership styles (Ronay, 2024; Lin & Carley, 1993; Bwalya, 2023; Maheshwari, 2021)—provides an alternative strategy. Conscious leadership reinforces structures for creative production but refrains from imposing oppressive top-down control that can quash creative emergence. 
        No leader, no matter how skilled, can dictate every outcome (Seyranian, 2012). One of the central tenets of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, is the principle of nishkama karma (self-less action). This teaching emphasizes that one may only have control over one’s actions—not the effect of one's actions (VivekaVani, 2024). This idea emphasizes that a leader's true purpose is one of creating a space for creativity and innovation (Maheshwari, 2021). This highlights the humility that is needed to understand that one cannot dictate the outcomes of their actions. 

• “Karmany-evādhikāras te mā phaleshu kadāchana mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te sango ’stvakarmani”
  
  
• “You have the right to work only, and not to the fruits of work.         Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.” 
  
  

        — Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47 (VivekaVani, 2024)

Attachment to results is a function of the ego, which craves recognition and fears failure (Martin & Marsh, 2003). Conscious leaders recognize that they must relinquish all desire to control the outcomes of their actions. Conscious leaders focus their energies on what they can control—specifically, the environments they create through their leadership styles. This self-less approach, often correlated with qualities of servant leadership, not only empowers teams but also liberates the leaders themselves from the anxieties of failure and the pressures of external validation (Wu et al., 2024). Conscious leaders remove themselves from the position of active participants and occupy the space of witnesses—witnesses to creativity and innovation in teams that are empowered to experiment and learn from their mistakes in the case of failure.
        To achieve conscious leadership, leaders must see themselves as authentic, fallible, and akin to their followers. First, authenticity allows for creating environments that foster trust and self-expression within teams. Second, fallibility normalizes failure and encourages a culture where risks can be taken without fear of judgment. Third, leaders’ exercising followership empowers leaders to step back and enable team members to take ownership in areas of their expertise. Conscious leaders focus their energies on their purpose as leaders: the purpose of crafting the conditions necessary for creativity rather than controlling every aspect of the creative process (Maheshwari, 2023). Conscious leaders recognize that to lead with consciousness is to lead to a higher purpose of creativity.  
Leader as Authentic Authenticity in leadership focuses on the genuine and true representation of one’s identity—be it one’s values, qualities, or skills (Ogunyemi & Ogunyemi, 2020). Authenticity entails a sense of self-awareness and reflexivity, allowing for a less biased analysis of the self and one’s abilities—usually one less distorted by egoistic tendencies. In many ways, being authentic means disengaging from exaggerated self-expression or self-promotion, which requires letting go of the need to control how one is perceived. 
        Conscious leaders are authentic leaders—and their authenticity is highly contagious. Self-aware leaders can inspire their team members to practice a similar process. Authentic leaders increase their team members' self-esteem, hope, trust, resiliency, and optimism (Černe et al., 2013). A study by Kim et al. (2023) showed that trust from co-workers increased when leaders exhibited authentic self-expression, while the converse was true for leaders who exhibited exaggerated self-expression. Trust, in turn, is correlated with team performance by reducing interpersonal barriers and fostering a shared sense of purpose (Hakanen et al., 2015). In any collective process, especially creative contexts, trust, and self-expression indicate a relinquishing of the illusion of control over how others respond and perceive one another. Černe et al. (2013) showed that team members who perceived their leader as authentic were likely to develop creative and innovative solutions due to the psychological and emotional safety leaders foster. Members become more proactive in utilizing their strengths and improving on their weaknesses; eventually, they tend to surpass their own limitations (George et al., 2007). 
        For conscious leaders, authenticity is the foundation, but by no means the end. Authenticity is not about achieving a definitive ‘true self,’ which may, in fact, be an impossible endeavor (Ford & Harding, 2017). Instead, it is about creating an environment conducive to creativity by fostering trust and promoting self-expression within teams and organizations.

Leader as Fallible Leadership often comes with the expectation of perfection. Conscious leaders challenge this notion by acknowledging and accepting their own fallibility, which is an inherent part of the human condition. Still, many leaders succumb to the illusory belief that to admit their mistakes signals weakness. On the other hand, conscious leaders accept that they cannot control the outcomes of their actions—and that they, too, are prone to mistakes. As a result, conscious leaders dismantle unrealistic ideals of perfection and use their own vulnerability to create a culture of learning through failure and errors. This is especially important in creative and innovative contexts, where failure is an inevitable part of the process. 
       Eskreis-Winkler et al. (2024) caution against “success overestimation,” wherein individuals overestimate their chances of success following failure. This commonly-held belief erroneously assumes that learning from one’s mistakes is automatic. This underscores the need for structured support mechanisms to scaffold growth following setbacks. Conscious leaders relinquish the illusory control of being perfect and focus their energies on areas which can be controlled—such as creating structures for providing feedback. These might include regular reflection sessions, one-on-one meetings, or team-building activities to encourage dialogue and shared problem-solving (Crans et al., 2022). These practices can normalize feedback-seeking behaviors and turn critique into actionable learning opportunities while developing a resilience mindset in individuals (Crans et al., 2022). 

      Conscious leaders create the right environment for the provision and reception of feedback. Zou and Chen (2022) showed that leaders who exhibit humility enhance psychological safety and self-efficacy in their teams. Such behaviors signal openness to mistakes and receptiveness to feedback that can encourage employees to voice their ideas and concerns without fear of judgment or failure (Zou & Chen, 2022). This enhanced self-efficacy encourages bold, iterative, and resilient thinking, vital for creative and innovative thinking. Such learning-oriented leadership behaviors strengthen team members’ confidence when navigating the inevitable uncertainty of creative challenges, building collective resilience (Crans et al., 2022). 
        Collective resilience is commonly seen in teams led by conscious leaders. Conscious leaders can empower teams to be more experimental and take more risks by modeling their own fallibility and prioritizing learning over perfection. Such an iterative, growth-oriented mindset ensures that challenges in a group are not merely endured but rather leveraged as opportunities for the future. This resilience, which is sustained by a deep intrinsic motivation that conscious leaders instill in their teams (Ilies et al., 2005), enables teams to confidently navigate uncertainty. 
        The takeaway is simple: conscious leadership is about shifting focus from avoiding mistakes—a relatively futile and stressful exercise—to actively trying to learn and grow from them. Leading by example, conscious leaders create environments that practice learning from failure rather than fretting about unnecessary perfection.

Leader as Follower Aristotle said “He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader." In other words, leadership begins with the ability to follow. This requires letting go of the self-importance and ego that often accompany authority. Dominant, ego-driven leaders struggle to relinquish control as they perceive this as threatening their power (Ronay, 2024). Conscious leaders acknowledge the fact that they don’t have the skills or expertise to handle every type of situation, and there are times when they need to differ to those who have more knowledge and proficiency. Here, accepting one’s fallibility becomes a prerequisite. In these moments, conscious leaders know that handing over the reins and providing the opportunity for others to lead is not a sign of weakness but rather trust in their teams (Humberd & Latham, 2024). 
        This practice challenges hierarchical structures and nurtures a culture where leadership roles are defined by expertise rather than bureaucratic markets of position (Billinger & Workiewicz, 2019). This form of leadership by the team—where the responsibility and weight of decision-making are distributed amongst members based on their expertise and abilities—is known as rotational leadership (Bonini et al., 2024). This model mirrors natural systems. Couzin (2009) describes models of decentralized leadership in schools of fish or flocks of birds, wherein individual members of the collective take turns guiding the group. In a flock of birds, for instance, leadership roles rotate to distribute the physical strain of flight—ensuring the overall success and efficiency of the flock. Similarly, rotational leadership can maximize a group’s abilities as it allows the most knowledgeable individuals to lead when their expertise and skills are the most relevant to the task at hand (Bonini et al., 2024). With the highly uncertain and constantly changing needs of creative environments, rotational leadership not only makes the team more proficient in achieving their goals but also efficient by distributing cognitive load (Bonini et al., 2024). Bilsen (2010) showed that rotational leadership amplified improvisational abilities in teams since all team members were given equal opportunities to control the process and take the freedom to experiment. Similarly, Davis and Eisenhartd (2011) showed that in intra-organizational collaborations, rotational leadership was associated with more innovation as it involved alternating decision control that borrowed from the respective strengths of each organization.
        In most organizations, however, top-down hierarchies persist, creating clear distinctions between those who ‘do’ the work, such as designers, engineers, and developers, and those who ‘manage’ the work, such as product managers, vice presidents, and c-suite executives. Conscious leaders challenge these pre-determined structures by placing trust in their teams and differing control to benefit the larger group. Specifically, in high-stakes situations where the impulse to dominate is strongest (Miller, 2019), the conscious leader’s willingness to step into the role of a follower can empower team members to take responsibility and ownership of their contributions (Wernsing, 2017). 
        Conscious leaders who take on the role of a follower create an atmosphere that not only divides the burden of decision-making but also breaks down hierarchies, promotes shared accountability, and results in the emergence of creativity and innovation. 

The Paradox of Conscious LeadershipLeadership, in its traditional sense, assigns power to a single entity. Referring to oneself as a ‘leader’ upholds an innate hierarchical structure and an identity that is strongly associated with control, authority, and dominance. On the other hand, conscious leadership means letting go of conventional ideas surrounding leadership. The work of a conscious leader is to transcend the hierarchies implied by the very semantics of leadership and embrace the idea of nishkama karma—acting without attachment to the results. In this sense, to lead consciously means to accept that the outcomes of an action are beyond one’s control. In embodying this, leaders exercise humility and reframe leadership as an act of authenticity, fallibility, and followership, which creates the conditions for a collective vision to emerge. This idea presents a paradox: Is it possible to dissolve the ego, as conscious leadership demands, while embracing a role that presupposes influence? 
        Conscious Leadership as Creativity. One way to resolve this paradox is by reframing leadership as an act of creativity in itself. Puccio et al. (2007) argue that leadership is inherently linked to creativity. Both leadership and creativity require risk-taking, a tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to work collectively (Amabile et al., 2004). More importantly, creativity is a practice of self-less action, much like leadership. They are both acts of service to a collective vision transcending individual egos and motivations. A conscious leader’s ‘creation’ is the environment they craft for their teams to succeed. This shifts the focus from leaders to their teams and the creativity and innovation that arises from them. 
        Conscious Leaders as Witnesses. In its essence, conscious leadership is merely the act of witnessing the emergence of something larger than the sum of its parts. By expressing humility and authenticity, embracing fallibility, and empowering teams to lead collaboratively, conscious leaders can forego the urge to control the results of their actions—and be witnesses, unattached to the fruits of their labor. 

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