The Ladder and the Landscape

We’ve built plenty of ladders for careers to climb: job titles, promotion tracks, leadership pipelines: all carefully mapped rungs of advancement. What we’ve built far fewer of, however, are measures of whether the places we’re climbing will still stand when we are gone.

A résumé is a record of your ascent. But work, if it’s worthy, looks more like a landscape: soil replenished, watersheds protected, species that keep returning. Aspiration asks, “How high did you get?” But organizations ask a different question: “What did you make possible for those who follow?”

That tension between personal ambition and public sustainability, sits at the heart of modern leadership. Do you chase the next rung, or do you tend the ground? Do you build a career, or do you leave behind a system? Are you more devoted to your career or to the work? What happens when ambition rubs up against the organization’s long-term health?

The Difference Between Altitude and Groundwork

Nature illustrates this dilemma vividly. A field of annual flowers bursts with color for one season, then leaves the soil exhausted. Perennials, by contrast, invest in roots and rhizomes. Most of their progress is invisible, until drought arrives, and you discover which plants were actually preparing all along.

Organizations follow the same logic. Teams survive not because of momentary brilliance but because of quiet, often unseen work: shortening feedback loops, strengthening the seams where one function hands off to another, mending trust before it breaks. You can’t pin a medal on it, but you can count the failures that didn’t happen because of it.

This is where the ladder metaphor falls short. We reward the climb. Nature rewards the groundwork.

The Cult of Now

Modern leadership is partial to spectacle. Launches get celebrated, not the architecture that makes the next five launches smoother. We bonus the quarter that “pulled deals forward,” not the cadence that prevents the need for pulling in the first place. We spotlight the rescue, not the design that quietly prevented failure.

In a living system, these choices carry hidden costs. The field may look lush, but the soil tells another story. By the time our dashboards start flashing green, the ground beneath may already be weakening.

Nature keeps time differently. Prairie grasses drive roots ten feet deep. Oaks add strength ring by ring. Coastal species endure precisely because they move with tides and seasons instead of pretending the tide obeys them.

If you are serious about legacy, you begin looking for the organizational equivalents of roots and rhythm: maintenance funded before features; trust protected at the seams; decisions held where the expertise lives; review cadences set by the risk of the work, not by status quo. While none of these read as big, they do read as durable.

A Story of Longer Horizons

Paul Polman’s tenure at Unilever offers a living example. In 2009, he told investors the company would no longer issue quarterly earnings guidance. At the time, the move seemed reckless. There were safer ways to build his own reputation: announce a flashy acquisition, slash costs to boost earnings, orchestrate a headline-grabbing turnaround.

Instead, Polman shifted focus to a longer horizon. He asked Unilever to invest in resilient supply chains, to reduce energy and water intensity, and to build brands on trust rather than short-term advertising. He even told impatient investors to take their money elsewhere.

Predictably, the market was less than enthusiastic. Analysts doubted whether a consumer-goods giant could afford to ignore the game everyone else was still playing.

Then came real tests. Commodity shocks exposed fragile supply chains. A hostile takeover bid in 2017 threatened the company’s independence. And yet, Unilever held steady. For more than a decade, it produced growth that didn’t depend on cannibalizing tomorrow to please today.

Did Polman’s career advance? Yes! But the more telling measure is what remained after he left: durable practices, embedded deeply enough to outlast a single tenure.

This is the fork every leader faces. Use ambition to extract; burn tomorrow for today, or to cultivate; improve the conditions so better outcomes keep appearing, with or without you.

Ambition as Energy, Not Extraction

Ambition isn’t the enemy. In living systems, energy is a gift; if it’s channeled. Unchecked, ambition behaves like an algal bloom: blazing, then choking the lake. The challenge isn’t to suppress ambition, but to redirect it. From extraction: what can I take for myself? To cultivation: what conditions can I leave behind that keep producing, with or without me?

Three shifts make that possible:

1. Shift the time horizon. Keep score in ways that reward the moves making tomorrow’s work easier: cycle times falling without Herculean effort, rework declining because interfaces are clear, incidents dropping because near-misses are reported without fear. If a metric doesn’t invite better behavior, ditch it.

   
   

2. Shift the center of decision. In healthy ecologies, information travels quickly to where it can be acted on. In organizations, that means moving authority to expertise, not hierarchy. When your calendar is clogged with approvals, you’re not stewarding, you’re hoarding.

   
   

3. Shift from uniformity to coherence. Monocultures thrive in good weather and fail together in bad. Resilient systems share principles without requiring sameness. Let methods vary by terrain inside a few non-negotiables: clear edges, short feedback loops, honest reviews, protected slack.

The Ecology of Legacy

If legacy is about what survives you, the rules are clear: invest in the parts of the system that compound slowly, survive shock, and benefit people you’ll never meet.

• Edges matter. Biodiversity is richest where ecosystems overlap. In organizations, the seams, where product meets compliance, or IT meets patient care, are where systems either tear or strengthen. If you improve those seams, you leave behind resilience others can trust.

  
  

• Maintenance matters. We may treat it as a tax on real work, but nature treats it as the work. Coral reefs require constant repair or storms erase them. Bridges are safe not because of ribbon cuttings but because someone painted the steel on time. In companies, maintenance means patching, testing, documenting, training. Budget for it first. Protect it, even when your own career might benefit from cutting it. That’s legacy.

  
  

• Slack matters. A marsh might look inefficient, but when a hurricane comes it acts as natural armor. In organizations, slack might mean a cross-trained teammate, a second supplier, or an intentional gap in a timeline. Costly in spreadsheets, but priceless in crisis. Leaders who strip slack for quarterly gains don’t leave legacies. They leave kindling.

When Rungs Win and Work Loses

Left unchecked, the incentives of ascent push leaders toward choices that look like progress but function as depletion. Pulling revenue forward that won’t arrive next year. Centralizing discretion in the name of alignment that only slows the system. Announcing programs that collapse under their own weight.

You can climb an impressive distance by burning behind you. But the forest does not forget. Living Systems Leadership offers a different approach:

• Write an explicit interface contract between two teams that keep dropping the ball, and defend it when politics encroach.

  
  

• Reduce approval chains to the few that add meaning, then accept the discomfort when mistakes get corrected closer to the work.

  
  

• Match reviews to risk: hourly for safety, daily for flow, quarterly for strategy. Stop manipulating reality to fit a calendar.

  
  

• Retire metrics that don’t change behavior. Celebrate the few that do.

These aren’t grand gestures. They’re choices that convert ambition into something inheritable.

The Personal Reckoning

There is always a moment: after the applause, after a recruiter’s call, after watching a peer leap into a bigger role; when you realize you could make a different decision and be rewarded for it.

You could add your name to a project you didn’t lead. You could defer maintenance to hit the number. You could pull back authority you just distributed because letting others make mistakes feels harder than hearing your own voice in the room.

That moment is the test.

The ethic of stewardship isn’t self-denial. It’s a stance toward time. You behave as though your signature will be read by someone you’ll never meet, and you want them to nod, not curse. You keep asking, in quiet, unfashionable ways: What am I building that will be better because I was here, and still be here when I’m not?

Closing

The ladder promises height. The landscape promises endurance. One is about how far you rise. The other is about what keeps growing after you’ve stepped away.

The real measure of leadership isn’t how brightly you burned at the center. It’s what conditions you left behind: the roots, the rhythms, the systems that don’t need you to hold them up.

Ambition will always push you upward. Stewardship asks you to spread it outward. And in the long run, it’s the landscape, not the ladder, that tells the truth.

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To learn more about how Living Systems Leadership can help you build a satisfying career and a thriving organization, schedule a free call today.