Our Story

Kallion Leadership, Inc. is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in July 2019 by a group of professors and researchers who believed that leadership development should be informed by the study of the humanities. Kallion’s approach to leadership development was to be distinct from the approaches taken in business schools, military academies, political science departments, or other areas of leadership study. The co-founders felt that language, symbols, images, stories, emotions, values, ideas, and ideals should form the foundation of how we think about and practice leadership and that the study of the humanities was our best resource. From that time the Kallion mission has been advanced by a diverse and intergenerational community of staff, board members, and advisors in leadership roles in academia, law, government, politics, education, the military, the arts, the sciences, and the media. Our community continues to grow with members whose careers and character are a testament to the Kallion vision.

Mission

Kallion Leadership, Inc. designs and develops communities around the study of the Humanities, in order to unlock the human talent for creative, benevolent, and lasting improvements to our common condition.

Vision

Humanity’s collective record of art, literature, philosophy, and history is a rich resource of wisdom for confronting the challenges of the human condition. Kallion believes that engaging with the Humanities helps improve crucial aspects of leadership like empathy, mentoring, story-telling, vision-creation, and decision-making in private interactions and in the public discourse. Kallion envisions a world that is not divided into leaders and followers but instead comprised of empowered agents who respond to common needs according to their particular skills and opportunities. Kallion believes those who teach the Humanities should be recognized as leadership trainers and those who perform leadership roles should harness the power of continual reflection within a life of action.

Values

Kallion Leadership, Inc. is…

for everyone.

  • Kallion believes that anyone can be empowered to exhibit leadership behaviors necessary to improve the human condition. Kallion welcomes diverse venues and radically inclusive approaches to leadership, to include various cultural, experiential, educational, generational, and ethical perspectives. Since leadership should be within everyone’s reach, Kallion seeks to make its programming accessible to the widest possible range of participants.

by everyone.

  • Members of the Kallion community treat each other as equal partners in the mission, not in spite of their different backgrounds, but because of them. We are all both teachers and students of each other. Within the organization and in the world Kallion works to create, a single individual often moves between diverse roles or may hold them simultaneously. Our mission is advanced through respectful disagreements, openness to honest feedback, and warm fellowship.

reflective.

  • In an ever-accelerating world, Kallion creates times and spaces for deep contemplation. Careful, critical examination of one’s self, one’s world, and the experiences of one’s fellow humans from different cultures and times is the strongest foundation for profound, lasting growth and renewal for individuals and communities.

creative.

  • Kallion values leadership as an artform analogous to what a painter, a novelist, or designer does. Kallion’s community approaches the Humanities as a space for exploring and experimenting with ideas and approaches to persistent challenges of the human condition. Rather than feeling restricted to repeat the past, Kallion believes that the Humanities can help us tap into our imagination to make tangible improvements in our world.

kind.

  • Kallion recognizes that historically humans have engaged in leadership activity under a variety of motives: a quest for glory, attention seeking, a desire for power, a love of personal gain, a need to be in control. Kallion recognizes that even holding a leadership role can cause a person to see others in a dehumanizing way, as not one of their own. But Kallion promotes leadership practices rooted in a place of kindness. It studies and celebrates our capacity to treat others as one of our own kind and to experience joy through the growth and prosperity of our fellow humans.