Part 1: The Foundation of Worldview

Since 2018, I've been on the facilitation team for a 4 day construction leadership institute. I serve in this program 10-12 times a year with the opportunity to directly spend time 1-1 in coaching with 50+ leaders. The 30-year-old Leadership Institute program begins with a baseline teaching on worldview. Every leader wants better results, but working harder using the same tactical practice may not yield your desired outcomes. As my mentor Paul Stanley once shared, we need to rethink our thinking on leadership. Marshall Goldsmith posed a similar approach in his book What Got You Here Won't Get You There. It’s a caution when there's no time to think beyond tactics in the ready-fire-aim approach to strategies, decisions, and people management.

Worldview provides a lens through which we see the world around us, informing our values, beliefs, and biases. If you want to see different results from your work, it may be time to pause and consider your worldview.

During our leadership training, we have a worldview conversation within a small group setting where I'll ask, "Who has influenced your worldview, and how does that impact how you lead today?" It's fascinating to hear the stories of positive and negative examples from family members, athletic coaches, and first bosses. We all have people who have influenced our lives—good or bad—and their voices tend to reflect our worldviews. These people model a way of thinking that often translates into our expectations of people we live or work with day-to-day.

Challenging Assumptions: A Key to Leadership Growth

Most role models are never perfect, so we focus on the good of those who have a voice in our lives. However, even positive influences can create limitations we don't recognize.

Psychology offers additional frameworks to understand how our worldview evolves. Lawrence Kohlberg's moral development theory provides a valuable lens through which we can examine the maturation of our ethical reasoning—a core component of worldview. Kohlberg identified six stages across three levels:

Pre-conventional (focused on punishment avoidance and self-interest)
Conventional (centered on social conformity and authority)
Post-conventional (based on universal principles and ethical reasoning).

Leaders often progress through these stages as they mature, moving from rule-following to principled decision-making. Understanding where you fall on this moral compass can illuminate why specific leadership challenges emerge—perhaps you're operating from a conventional worldview in an environment that requires post-conventional thinking. This developmental perspective helps explain why our worldview naturally shifts over time through experience and maturity, suggesting that periodic reassessment is helpful and necessary for continued growth.

My mentor Paul Stanley introduced another powerful framework for understanding life stages that profoundly influences how our worldview evolves:

Learning (who am I?)
Building (what is my place?)
Focusing (why am I here?)
Investing (how do I finish well and leave a legacy?).

Each stage brings different priorities, challenges, and perspectives. For example, I transitioned to wearing glasses a few years ago. How we see the world changes with life stages and seasons. Knowing your season and those whose voice(s) shape your thinking and actions provides crucial insights into your present worldview. A leader in the Building stage will naturally have different concerns and perspectives than one in the Investing stage—neither is wrong, but awareness of these differences enhances self-understanding and interpersonal effectiveness.

Our inherited beliefs shape how we view our teams and challenges. In Part 2, we'll explore "trust statements" that reveal our underlying assumptions and how they manifest in our daily leadership decisions. Until then, reflect on how your worldview origins influence your leadership effectiveness.

Reflection Questions:

Who are the 3-5 people who have most shaped your worldview?
What specific beliefs about work, success, or people did you inherit from them?
Which of these inherited beliefs have you never questioned?
How might your current challenges connect to your worldview?

Action Steps:

Write down the names of people who significantly influenced your thinking.
For each person, note one specific belief you adopted from them.
Identify one belief that might benefit from reexamination.