From Public Service to Polymathic Leadership: Honoring My Lineage and Extending It Forward

From Public Service to Polymathic Leadership: Honoring My Lineage and Extending It Forward

There’s a quiet kind of lineage that shapes us.

Not just through blood, but through ideas. Through tension. Through vision.

Through work we inherited before we even knew it was ours.

As I reflect on my years at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI), and on the leaders who influenced me—directly or indirectly—I want to take a moment to acknowledge Dr. Frank Sherwood and Dr. Alexis Halley.

Their work focused on something vital: How do we properly develop public servants, especially at the highest levels of government?

And I now see that their efforts planted the seeds for what I have come to call Polymathic Leadership—a leadership model we desperately need in this age of artificial intelligence, system collapse, and exponential change.

Frank Sherwood and the Foundations of Ethical Public Leadership

Dr. Frank Sherwood was a pillar in the world of public administration.

He believed that civil service leadership wasn’t just about management or compliance—it was about ethics, adaptability, and wisdom in complexity.

He understood that public service required more than technical skills.

It required judgment. Flexibility. The ability to hold multiple truths and still act in service of the common good.

Sherwood’s influence reached many—including Dr. Alexis Halley, my supervisor for two and a half intense years at the Federal Executive Institute.

Alexis Halley and the Practice of Executive Development

At FEI, Alexis and I managed a portfolio of leadership development programs for members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) across the U.S. federal government.

Our formal mission was to “develop visionary leaders to transform government.”

I always loved that mission — it resonated deeply with my values and my hopes for what public service could be.

But I also found myself wondering, often painfully:

Were we actually transforming government? Or just polishing the surface of a system designed to resist change?

The federal bureaucracy is immense. Complex. Often rigid.

And it was clear to me, even then, that no single training or leadership retreat could untangle the deeper structural inertia built into the system.

Still, I believed—and still believe—that developing leaders with vision, courage, and systems thinking is a necessary step.

Even if the transformation is slow.

Even if the system pushes back.

Government, at its best, should be a living institution. It should serve. Adapt. Evolve.

Alexis herself was shaped by Frank Sherwood’s belief in principled public leadership. And despite the personal difficulty of our working relationship,

I now recognize that she played a role in shaping me, too — through exposure to high-level strategy, systems-level education, and the painful clarity that comes when you realize what leadership should be, even when it’s not.

Interestingly, Dr. Alexis Halley earned her doctorate from the University of Southern California, where I also completed both my B.A. and M.A. degrees.

I like to think of that shared academic soil as part of our overlapping story — a reminder that ideas live not just in minds, but in institutions, cultures, and generations.

Even when paths diverge, the roots can run deep.

A Personal Note: When the Leadership Model Isn’t Lived

As someone who co-led federal executive education for years, I’ve seen the paradox of leadership development up close:

We often teach models we don’t personally live.

In 2018, Federal Manager Magazine published an article I wrote about adaptive leadership, decentralized authority, and networked intelligence. I believed (and still believe) in all of it.

But inside the very organization tasked with developing visionary leaders to transform government, the internal culture did not always reflect the ideals we taught.

My supervisor, Dr. Halley, held formal authority and was seen by some as a thought leader in public service development. But my experience working under her was painful, disempowering, and ultimately unsustainable.

She micromanaged instead of empowering, analyzed instead of adapting, and sought the safety of replication instead of innovation. I was never going to be a “mini-Alexis.” I had stronger social intelligence, and I valued collaboration over control.

The irony was not lost on me:

While I was valued leadership as decentralized, adaptive, and human-centered, I was surviving a daily environment that embodied the opposite.

Ultimately, I left FEI because I could not thrive under leadership that refused to model the very evolution we were supposed to be facilitating. I cried too often be because of how I was treated at work. I felt stifled. I knew I needed to lead from a different place.

Why I Believe in Polymathic Leadership Now More Than Ever

Experiences like that are exactly why I believe so deeply in polymathic leadership.

Because polymathic leaders:

      •     Empower instead of diminish

      •     Sense complexity instead of over-controlling it

      •     Model growth and humility instead of just managing perceptions.

Polymathic leadership isn’t about being good at everything.

It’s about being able to see across, connect widely, and elevate others — not demand carbon copies of oneself.

It's about recognizing that no one person can know it all or fix the government's flaws, so we need leaders who know how to tap into the capability of intelligent, neural-like networks - both human and tech - to solve the great problems of our time.

The old school, top-down hierarchies common in government don't allow for this distributed intelligence to thrive. 

Command and control style leadership is for the old world. In the new world, intelligence and power must be distributed so that collective intelligence can emerge. 

The article I wrote on Complexity Leadership Theory (featured in The Federal Manager) was a direct response to that time in my life.

In it, I argued that leaders should think of themselves as enablers of a larger network, not controllers of subordinate behavior.

I still stand by that truth.

What’s Missing: The Leap to Polymathic Leadership

What I see today—what I feel called to carry forward—is this: The next leap in leadership isn’t just ethical. It’s epistemological.

We live in an age of:

      •     AI and automation

      •     Decentralized intelligence

      •     Planetary crises

      •     Rapid paradigm shifts

      •     And an accelerating collapse of neat boundaries between disciplines, roles, and sectors.

In this world, specialized leadership is no longer enough.

What’s needed now is Polymathic Leadership—the ability to:

      •     Think across systems

      •     Integrate knowledge from many domains

      •     Adapt dynamically

      •     Hold complexity without panicking

      •     Synthesize humanity, technology, ethics, and vision into one practice of public service.

This is not the kind of leadership that most government agencies are currently built to cultivate.

But it’s the kind they will need if they are to survive—and serve—in what’s coming.

Polymathic Leadership in the Age of AI

AI is not just another tool. It’s a mirror. A threshold. A new context.

Government will need leaders who are not just experts in policy or management, but who can:

      •     Understand how algorithmic systems affect democracy

      •     Bridge law, data, psychology, and equity

      •     Speak fluently across departments, agencies, disciplines, and even ideologies.

In other words:

Leaders who are deeply human, deeply systems-aware, and deeply polymathic.

Sherwood and Halley saw the need for ethical leadership under complexity.

What I now offer is the next evolution of that vision — one that honors their foundation but stretches into the cognitive demands of our future.

In Honor and Continuation

I won’t romanticize my time at FEI.

It was formative, and it was difficult.

But it was also sacred. Because in that crucible, I began to see the bigger pattern: that leadership is evolving, that government must evolve with it, and that polymathy—the ability to think, learn, and integrate widely—is not a luxury for public leaders. It is a necessity.

So today, I honor Dr. Frank Sherwood for seeing what public leadership could be.

And I commit to carrying that lineage forward—into the heart of this century, into the hard problems, and into the future that is asking us to think bigger, broader, and braver.

We don’t just need better leadership.

We need polymathic leadership.

And the time to begin building it is now.