This story is originally published in our partner, the North American Business Press website.
In a world where leadership is too often imagined as a single figure calling every shot, the conventional image—a conductor orchestrating an ensemble, or perhaps a commander directing troops—is increasingly out of step with how high-performing organizations actually function. In this edition of Ahead of the Curve, we explore the work of Dr. Daryl V. Watkins, Professor of Leadership at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University‘s Worldwide College of Business. Drawing on a career that carried him from the deck of a Navy aircraft carrier to the leadership of a Southern California toll road operator and finally into academia, Dr. Watkins has spent two decades chasing a single, persistent question: what does good leadership actually look like when no one person can possibly be in control?
From the Flight Deck to the Faculty Lounge
Dr. Watkins’s path into leadership scholarship wasn’t planned so much as accumulated. He spent sixteen years in higher education, but the questions driving his research took root much earlier. “I was a Navy pilot for the US Navy, [working in] a fairly complex environment operating off of aircraft carriers,” he recalled. “I was fortunate enough to work with leaders, both great and not so great.” That contrast followed him into the private sector, where he later served as general manager at the 91 Express Lanes—a toll road operation whose leadership at the time he described as “all over the place.”
It was that friction that pulled him toward research. “I’m a very curious person by nature, and so it kind of got me wondering a little bit more about what are the theories behind good leadership,” he said. “Why are some people good leaders and others not? How do we create good leaders in environments where we also rely on them?” As that curiosity deepened, it became his two-decade goal to answer some of those questions.
Leadership Without a Conductor
That two-decade pursuit recently culminated in “Complexity Leadership: The Fourth Decade (2012–2021),” published in the Journal of Leadership, Accountability, and Ethics and co-authored with Dr. Steven M. Walker of National University and Dr. Matthew P. Earnhardt of Howard Payne University. The study synthesizes 520 peer-reviewed manuscripts published between 2012 and 2021, tracing how three once-distinct schools of thought—Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT), Adaptive Leadership Theory (ALT), and Complex Adaptive Leadership Theory (CALT)—have moved from competing frameworks toward a converging, increasingly porous body of research. The study is the third installment in the Complexity Leadership series.
Much of Dr. Watkins’s research challenges the instinct to picture effective leadership as centralized control. He illustrates the point with an analogy drawn from nature and sport alike: “If you think about something like an ant colony or a soccer team, it’s almost like a concert. Ants are scurrying around doing their jobs, football players are scurrying around the field, and yet there’s nobody sitting there in the moment saying, ‘you go here, you go there, you go do this.'” People, he argues, simply have to understand their role well enough to operate successfully without someone managing every move.
That insight reshapes what good leadership looks like under pressure. “People might expect that good leadership looks like a person who’s got a lot of experience, […] orchestrating things much as a conductor might in an orchestra,” he notes. “But that’s just not the way that it can work when you have so much information coming at all times.”
Instead, he argues, “teams and individuals need to be empowered […] to exercise their judgment, and […] to make decisions with the good of the organization in mind.” The paradox, he notes, is that tighter control often backfires: “the more control that the leader tries to assert over the unit, the less effective it is likely that people will be.” The paper itself puts it more bluntly: adaptive capacity isn’t the trait of one leader, but the emergent intelligence of a system that can learn and reorganize on its own.
The Coaching Superpower
A practicing Professional Certified Coach himself, Dr. Watkins believes the next evolution in leadership education has less to do with theory and more to do with a specific, trainable skill: listening. “The coaching competency—being able to listen and take in information, being able to ask good questions—is a critical competency of great leaders,” he explained. “You might even consider it to be a leadership superpower.”
If given the chance to reshape leadership curricula, he says the addition would be straightforward: leaders should be “trained in how to do professional-style coaching: being able to listen and ask great questions, then reflect back to their people that they’re working with.” It’s a principle he’s already helped put into practice; Embry-Riddle, he notes, has already incorporated coaching into its leadership degrees.
Building a Career, One Stage at a Time
Dr. Watkins is candid that the demands of academic life shift dramatically as a career matures, and his advice changes depending on which stage a colleague is in. For early-career academics, the temptation is to chase everything at once. “[…] Focus on an area of research that you’re truly passionate about, that you’re willing and able to devote yourself to, as opposed to doing a buckshot where you’re trying to do everything.” Later, he says, the job description quietly changes: “as a person progresses in their career, you get to be a professor or a department chair or a dean […]. I think that the role has to focus more on coaching and mentorship, and helping to bring along the next generation of people.”
A People-First Philosophy
For all the systems theory and academic framing, Dr. Watkins keeps returning to a remarkably simple idea: leadership, at its core, is relational. “It’s always about the people,” he said. “It’s creating a spark between two, [ten, or even] 100 people. It’s the way that the world goes around.” He’s wary of what happens when that gets lost in the noise of daily work: “too often we get wrapped up into the details of a task or a project, and when we [do], we lose sight of the person that’s on the other side of the conversation. Nothing good ever comes of that.”
That same conviction shapes what keeps him in the classroom after two decades. “I am a learner, and so my curiosity drives my intellectual pursuits,” he said. “I am very passionate about developing the best possible leaders that I can, because I think that we need more great leaders.”
A Message to the NABP Community
When asked about what he’d want to say to the broader NABP readership, spanning academics across the globe, Dr. Watkins didn’t hesitate. “It really drives home the breadth of [these] connections,” he said. “[…] My request is for people [to not] be afraid to reach out across the world to form partnerships with other researchers. [It’s] always wonderful when we can bring diverse thoughts, ways of thinking, [and] skill sets together to create better research. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think that we should all endeavor to do more of that.”
As organizations everywhere grapple with volatility they can no longer plan their way around, Dr. Watkins’s work offers a quietly reassuring reframe: the goal was never to find a leader who can control everything. It’s to build the conditions where everyone, in their own moment, can become one.