EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Increasingly, we are looking for material—articles, interviews—that will assist us all in learning about integral and developmental approaches to leadership that work. That is why you are seeing an increase in the number of articles and interviews by and with people who are actively engaged in bringing Integral Leadership to the worlds of business, development and governance. The set of materials included here are an experiment. We turned to one of our sponsors, the Stagen Leadership Institute, to create the opportunity to talk with C-level executives who have participated in Integral Leadership development programs conducted by Stagen.

Brett Thomas agreed to write an introduction that would explain a bit about Stagen’s leadership program so that in the interviews with the executives it would not be necessary to define and describe elements of the program itself. I conducted two interviews, as you will see, one with the COO and the other with the CEO of PrimeSource, a restaurant support company based in Dallas, Texas. I hope that we can all glean from these interviews a bit about what happens for executives, their leadership and their companies at least in part as a result in their participation in a program such as Stagen’s.

The hard part of doing this is that, in the spirit of the neutrality and preference for objectivity of this publication was to try to assure that this did not just become a commercial for Stagen and their programs—a challenge I point out in one of these interviews. I hope we have accomplished that, although it is difficult to deny that, if Stagen is able to create results like this with many of its participants, they must be on to something. Their work seems to be affirming the power and effectiveness of integral and developmental approaches. In the meanwhile, it is important to point out that there are other integrally-informed programs in leader development. We have already published some articles about a couple of these. We hope to publish more written by people who have designed and delivered such programs, as well as those who have been participants in the programs. We believe that this is a vitally important service that the Integral Leadership Review provides.

Finally, we include the PrimeSource Vision and Guiding Principles at the end of the interviews. I know this is a lengthy document. But it is worth it. It is as good a case study of an integral business and Integral Leadership as you are going to find published anywhere at this time.

If this feature resonates for you, and you know of others who have stories to tell that we can learn from, please let them know about Integral Leadership Review and how to contact us. Thanks.

—Russ Volckmann

Navigating This Feature

1. The link below takes you to Brett Thomas’ Introduction.

2. At the end of the Introduction is a link to the pages with the Interviews and PrimeSource documents.

Introduction to the Stagen Leadership Program by Brett Thomas