Co-Active Leadership, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

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Co-Active Leader Beside

There’s an African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”¹⁴ When someone is walking beside us, we have more courage to walk into the unknown and risk the dark and messy places on our journey. Most of us knew this instinctively as children. We would bring a sibling or a friend with us when we knew we were in trouble with parents or authorities. We would take a dare from that same friend, testing our courage in a way that we would never dream of doing on our own. We were often more alive in those relationships than we were anywhere else. When did we grow up and begin to think it was somehow better to do things alone?

One-dimensional leadership models foster the myth that it is ...