Which Level Are You Leading From? A Research Framework That Will Make You Think Differently About Your Own Development

Here is a question that most leadership development programmes never ask you. Not 'what are your strengths?' Not 'what does your 360-degree feedback say?' But: from which level of your own being are you actually leading right now?

It sounds unusual. It is also, in my view, the most important question in leadership development — and it is the question at the centre of the research I co-authored with Professor Louis Fry.

Five Levels of Knowing and Being

In our published work on being-centered leadership and global mindset, we draw on a framework developed by Fry and Kriger (2009) that describes five distinct levels of knowing and being. Each level represents a different state of consciousness — a different relationship to self, to others, and to reality — and produces a fundamentally different quality of leadership.

At Level V, the most surface level, leadership is about having and doing. The leader focuses on traits, competencies, and task performance. Reality is what the five senses can verify. The organisational orientation is ethnocentric: our way is the right way, our standards are the standards. Think of traditional management — efficient, structured, and profoundly limited in its capacity to navigate genuine complexity.

At Level IV, reality is understood as socially constructed. Vision, culture, and values become leadership tools. This is where most contemporary leadership sits — and it is genuinely more sophisticated than Level V. But it carries a significant shadow: the vision and values at this level can be either genuinely other-centred or entirely self-serving, often simultaneously. This is the level where 'greenwashing' lives: the compelling sustainability vision that does not match the operational reality. Apple's environmental commitments alongside Foxconn's documented labour violations are a stark example we discuss in our research.

"The difference between a leader at Level IV who talks about values and a leader at Level III who embodies them is not a difference of intention. It is a difference of inner development. And it is visible — to your team, to your partners, to your customers."

At Level III, something genuinely different begins. This is where self-awareness and self-transcendence start to emerge. The Level III leader can observe their own thought patterns — can notice when ego, fear, or cultural conditioning is shaping a decision that should be shaped by something wiser. They are developing what the research calls conscious awareness: the capacity to be present, moment-to-moment, to what is actually happening rather than to their story about it. This is the level where authentic triple-bottom-line leadership becomes possible — not as a brand position but as a genuine orientation.

At Level II, the leader operates increasingly from love and service to others — a deep, stable commitment to the dignity and wellbeing of all stakeholders that is not contingent on recognition or reward. The examples in our research include Oprah Winfrey and Paul Polman of Unilever: leaders whose commitment to others runs through the texture of every decision, not just the headline vision. Very few organisational leaders operate consistently at Level II. But many can access it, and accessing it changes the quality of everything.

Level I is essentially aspirational in organisational settings: a state of transcendent unity in which the distinction between leader and follower dissolves entirely, and leadership emerges from the situation moment-to-moment. It is a useful philosophical horizon — a direction of travel — rather than a daily operational mode.

Why This Is Not Just Philosophy

The crucial insight of this framework — and the reason it matters practically for you as a woman entrepreneur — is that each level is holonic: it transcends and includes the levels below it. A Level III leader does not abandon task performance or vision-building. She does them from a deeper, more conscious place. She can see the cognitive filters she was previously trapped inside. She can hold complexity that lower-level consciousness has to simplify. She can build teams across cultures, because she is genuinely curious about perspectives different from her own.

And here is what I find most significant for women founders specifically: the qualities that characterise Levels III and II — empathy, service orientation, genuine care for the whole, the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously — are the qualities that women have historically been told to downplay in business. They are also, according to this research, the qualities of the most sophisticated and effective global leaders.

You were not developing softness. You were developing depth.

Research Foundation: This essay draws on "Cultivating a Global Mindset Through 'Being-Centered' Leadership" (Egel & Fry, 2017). The five-level framework of being-centered leadership is developed in Fry & Kriger (2009). The Unilever and Apple case studies are discussed in our chapter as contrasting examples of Level III and Level IV global mindset in practice.

Identifying which level you are leading from — and developing the inner capacity to lead from a deeper one — is one of the most transformative things I do with women entrepreneurs in my strategic advisory work. NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu                                         — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation