Leading Like a Living System
Most of the leadership habits we carry into work every day were designed for machines. We were taught to prize efficiency, control, and constant output, and to treat a struggling team the way we would treat a broken engine, by finding the faulty part and swapping it out. That inheritance runs so deep that few of us ever stop to question it. In our most recent C-Suite Coach LinkedIn Live, founder and CEO Angelina Darrisaw sat down with executive coach Estrella Dawson to do exactly that. Estrella is an ICF certified executive coach who spends her weekends learning regenerative biointensive farming, and that hands-in-the-dirt education has reshaped her entire philosophy of leadership.
She opened by naming the assumption that governs so much of modern management, the belief that an organization is a machine to be optimized. That mindset, she explained, "is about maximizing efficiency, predictability, standardization, control, and productivity. And when something's broken in the machine, you fix that part and then you put it back together and then it should be working again." The approach works for actual machines. The trouble begins when we apply it to human beings, who carry relationships and interdependence into everything they do. The alternative she proposed reframes the entire job of a leader. As she put it, "shifting from thinking about this machine mindset to a living systems mindset is moving from the idea or the philosophy of controlling people to cultivating conditions where people can thrive." When an employee is underperforming, that shift moves a leader's attention away from blame and toward the environment they actually shape.
The most vivid version of that idea came straight from the farm. Regenerative farming, Estrella explained, "is not about growing plants. It's about growing soil. And when you are able to build and cultivate healthy soil with the right nutrients and the right pH balance, plants will grow." The plants are a lagging indicator, because the real work happens underground. "If you walk into a garden and your plants are struggling, you're not going to assume that the plants are defective," she said. "You're going to say, what's going on in this environment that's not giving these plants what they need?" In a workplace, that soil is made of psychological safety, trust, clear expectations, sustainable workloads, and meaningful feedback. When a team shows high turnover, burnout, and conflict, the living systems leader examines the conditions those people are being asked to grow in. That reframing is compassionate, and it is also strategically sharper, because it directs energy toward the root causes that drive performance.
Healthy soil also moves in seasons, which led to one of the most freeing ideas of the session. Estrella pushed back on the belief that a good organization produces at full capacity all the time. "Nature is incredibly productive," she observed, "but it is not always in a constant state of output. And that's what makes it sustainable. So when we expect to be in a constant state of output, that's when we get to burnout." Winter, in her framing, is a season where growth happens below the surface rather than a failure. She offered the example of a Bay Area bakery co-op that closed for a full week so its employees could rest, proof that honoring natural cycles is a real business option. For leaders, the translation is to build recovery into the workflow after a demanding stretch, whether that looks like time off, meeting-free blocks, permission to use PTO without guilt, or walking meetings held outside.
The farm reshaped her view of diversity as well, through the practice of companion planting, where crops are grown together because they help one another thrive. Beans feed nitrogen into the soil for their neighbors, and herbs like lemon balm repel the pests that would threaten a nearby crop. Industrial monocropping, by contrast, stretches a single crop across hundreds of acres and grows fragile, dependent on heavy fertilizer and pesticide because it lacks the resilience that variety provides. When a team brings together people with different life experiences, perspectives, and cultures, it gains the capacity to innovate, adapt, and serve a wider range of communities. In her framing, "diversity isn't about representation. This is about having a whole full healthy system, and full healthy whole systems require diversity," which lifts the conversation out of compliance and into strategy.
Estrella was honest when the discussion reached resilience, especially for leaders of color who are so often expected to demonstrate it without pause. She named plainly that the more marginalized identities a person holds, the more resilience the surrounding systems demand of them, and she declined to treat resilience as the endurance of endless stress. "The way that I define resilience," she said, "is the capacity to come back to being grounded and centered and regulated with whatever tools, time and space you need." That capacity grows by protecting the things that fuel you, whether movement, rest, or community, which widens the window of tolerance a person has before they are knocked off center. Resilience, understood this way, becomes a practice a leader can cultivate.
That sense of agency carried into her closing thought for anyone who feels trapped inside a difficult system. A leader may not control the whole organization, she acknowledged, "but you're controlling the climate with your team." Through transparent communication, inviting questions, and normalizing mistakes as opportunities to learn, a leader tends the climate immediately around their people, and even fractured trust can be repaired. The throughline is that leadership improves when we stop trying to control living things and start cultivating the conditions in which they flourish, a shift that begins with the soil right in front of us.
If something here stirred you, pick one idea and act on it this week. Follow Estrella Dawson on LinkedIn for more thinking like this, and explore the C-Suite Coach network to find a coach who understands the landscape you are navigating.
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