Michael Stern

Michael Stern

One of the brightest stars of the Integral spiritual scene, in my opinion, is Thomas Hubl, a young Austrian teacher who brings a clarity and depth of presence that is as profound as it is soothing. Thomas has quite a large following in Europe, but his popularity in the United States has only just begun to tap its potential. His first US tour took place in April, and he made a return visit in October. One Spirit Learning Alliance was fortunate to be his first stop, and Thomas led an intimate weekend workshop that took all 40 or so participants on an exploration of consciousness that was both challenging and deeply rewarding, and ultimately left us wanting more.

Thomas began the weekend with a brief teaching explaining some of the core concepts that characterize his worldview and practices. Thomas uses the language of energy, light and shadow to talk about how human beings are fundamentally similar to antennas – complex sensory systems that are continuously receiving and broadcasting immense amounts of information and that can be refined and strengthened through practice to increase the quantity and improve the quality of the information of which we are consciously aware. The bulk of the workshop then focused on exercises intended to help us attune ourselves to this information by learning how to be present with (1) what is going on within ourselves and within those around us (intra-personal), (2) what is happening in the collective field between us (inter-personal), and (3) the creative intelligence that is the source of all that is arising and exists in the spaciousness between the structures (trans-personal).

The spiritual journey, according to Thomas, is to discover the impulse that set us in motion and that is the source of our experience. We are all familiar with the motion that characterizes our normal waking lives, and most of us have some degree of familiarity with the stillness that gives rise to that motion. But being awake requires maintaining a strong connection to the stillness of Being even while remaining fully engaged with the movement of Becoming. Thomas calls this being-centered-in-movement “marketplace spirituality”, in which we participate in everything that the unfolding miracle of Life has to offer with an awareness of the energetic interconnectedness that permeates the entire experience. Those of us who can rest as spaciousness but participate fully allow the Clear Light of our Being to shine through and act as a mirror for life and for those around us.

For this reason, Thomas stresses the importance of “spiritual friendship”, defined as a community of people who support each other’s potential and remind each other when we are asleep. Since we can not see our Shadow – which may be parts of us that have been repressed due to traumatic events in our past, or aspects of our higher potential that are untapped or undeveloped – we must rely on others to reflect it back to us. We experience energetic contractions around these areas of our being, and these contractions create “symptoms”. Developing our ability to be aware of this subtle energy dimension of reality gives us access to the origin of these symptoms and thereby allows us to begin the healing process in others and ourselves. This kind of Shadow work is not about relating to a past story, but instead deals with unresolved energy that is stuck and “circling” right now and therefore having an effect on the present moment.

Engaging this type of Shadow work requires transparence, or the ability and willingness to allow others to experience us from inside our reality, without which true intimacy cannot exist. It also requires presence, or attuning to the intra-, inter-, and trans-personal energies as described above. When transparence and presence are combined we can have resonance, which is how mutual healing and evolutionary co-creation are possible. And when a group of individuals comes together in the spirit of mutual healing and evolutionary co-creation, the community becomes a portal for the manifestation of field consciousness. And this is the New “WE” of collective enlightenment that Thomas envisions for the world through his “Sharing the Presence” work.

I think that is as good a job as my third person perspective on Thomas’ work can do in terms of providing a taste of the workshop. In the spirit of integral transparency, I will now provide some notes on my experience from the first-person perspective.

During some individual communication with one of the other participants Thomas said that he sensed this person had developed an over-active mind to compensate for an unfulfilled emotional connection. This struck a chord with me, as did Thomas’ description of (the somewhat common experience among spiritually inclined people of) not having our spiritual intelligence fully seen by our family, peers, or caretakers, which leads to a mistrust that our core motivation is valuable in the world. This led me to a deeper understanding of some of my shadow issues that have been most relevant to me lately, including a tendency to be passive-aggressive and difficulty being assertive without becoming aggressive, a harsh inner critic with a penchant for subtle accusations of hypocrisy, a layer of emotional pain and sadness that emerges when I speak passionately about my deepest truths, and a fear of vulnerability masked by a sharp mind.

One exercise we did as a way to connect with our higher Self was to write a letter to ourselves from that perspective, using our intuition to tap into our innate ability to receive divine guidance. Here is the letter I wrote to myself:

Dear Michael,

            Don’t be scared. You will find your way. Keep practicing – all life is yoga. You are special. Have faith, be committed. Manifest your potential – the world is ready for you, and you are ready for the world. Trust your intuition, as for help, make mistakes and learn from them. Who is like God? You may find out. Be fully yourself – that is the greatest gift you can give. You are a leader of the warriors of Light.

[Note: Michael is a Hebrew name that translates to the question “Who if like God?” Michael is also the name of one of the primary archangels – the general of the army of Heaven.]

As a final remark, I just want to include a disclaimer that if I have in misrepresented Thomas’ words or message in any way it is an honest accident and is the result of my own ignorance and misunderstanding! It would be foolish to think that this short review could do justice to his work but I sincerely hope that it is of some small benefit to those who come across it, and I encourage everyone to experience Thomas for themselves, because his teachings really are about the connections we have with each other as human beings and there is no substitute for the real thing. Thomas will be back in New York in late March or early April, and until then there are “Practice Groups” that meet regularly to engage in the type of exercises we learned during the weekend with Thomas. If you are interested in learning more about these groups please email me at sternmic@gmail.com

About the Author

Michael Stern is an integralist evolutionary urban yogi. He graduated from Vanderbilt in 2006, embarked on his formal spiritual path in 2009, and discovered Integral theory and Evolutionary spirituality in 2010. He is a certified Hatha yoga instructor, a member of the Integral New York Leadership Team, and a part-time employee at One Spirit Learning Alliance. He lives in New York City, where he was born and raised and now dedicates his life to supporting the emergence of an enlightened culture.

Andrew Munro

“Decisions taken today are driven by our visions of tomorrow and based on what we learned yesterday.”
– Professor Bruce Lloyd

Andrew Munro

Executive Summary

The concept of wisdom is making a comeback (1). Following a period of business folly and fiasco, there is a growing realisation that classic competency frameworks fail to integrate fully the cognitive, affective and motivational dynamics of sustainable leadership. Abandoned some time ago as a quaint but non-scientific construct, wisdom is now regaining recognition as a key component of leadership. This article summarises the “seven pillars” of wisdom (2) and explores one pillar; “time perspective” to provide fresh insights to highlight different manifestations of foolish and wise leadership.

1. Wisdom: an Overview

In her analysis of “bad leadership”, Barbara Kellerman (3) distinguishes between incompetent and unethical leadership. No doubt moral bankruptcy has and will continue to be a factor of destructive leadership. More often, however, bad leadership is foolish leadership, a leadership outlook and operating set of priorities without the essential element of wisdom. Although we can draw on constructs that appear on the surface scientific, like cognitive complexity, emotional intelligence or learning agility, we propose that we access an established tradition and utilise the concept of wisdom for a better understanding of the dynamics of leadership that underpin long-term success and help explain the reasons for derailment and failure.

Wisdom is interpreted in various ways (4) reflecting a range of different perspectives from theorists and researchers, but typically incorporates such themes as: “practical knowledge” and the exercise of an “uncommon degree of common sense”; cognitive mastery and a kind of meta-intelligence that knows how to think; exceptional judgement that identifies and resolves the “wicked problems”; a special type of insight that has the penetration to “see beyond illusion”; or more broadly, a set of values and attitudes about life and how it should be lived.

What is remarkable has been the neglect of wisdom in the academic literature. Intriguingly the research enterprise, beginning in the 1980s, wasn’t triggered by any leadership thinker or practitioner, but by gerontologists looking at the aging process, and their interest in what was positive about aging. More recently the positive psychology movement (5) has raised awareness of the dynamics and outcomes of wisdom as a key domain of “strength”. The research now incorporates three strands (6):

1. Folk theories to evaluate what the general public think about wisdom and the attributes they associate with wise individuals
2. Wisdom performance and the study of individual performance in tackling wisdom-based problems
3. Survey measures to map out a coherent and robust framework for the assessment and development of wisdom

But it still early days in the research enterprise, and relatively little is known about the impact of wisdom on leadership effectiveness and organisational success.

2. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.”
– Proverbs 9:1

The “Seven Pillars” of wisdom is our attempt to outline a model that incorporates the spectrum of reflective, cognitive and emotional elements that integrate “mind and character” in the development of wisdom. Within this framework wisdom is not a unitary construct but emerges from the interaction of seven components, with all seven factors required for the full and consistent application of wisdom. Specific strengths in any one area do not compensate for a shortcoming within another pillar.

At one level this framework is a blueprint to inform the criteria applied in talent and succession management reviews and appointments decision-making to establish a more discerning evaluation of current and emerging leadership. Here the focus is on encouraging organisations to look beyond the “usual suspects” – often those individuals skilled in self-presentation and upwards management – to identify those individuals with the qualities that underpin executive wisdom. Here it should be noted that wisdom is not always the most valued or popular organisational attribute. It is wisdom that asks awkward questions, expresses doubt and misgivings, looks long-term rather than applies short-term expediency, ignores the trivia, and doesn’t waste energy on self serving, back covering exercises. Wisdom then may not necessarily be the smartest career tactic within some organisations, and wisdom may be a neglected priority for executive development.

At another level this framework can be utilised to create practical tools to support leadership assessment and development (e.g. interview protocols, situational judgement tests, experience maps to guide career progression). We are currently piloting two formats, a self report measure and a 360 feedback application (7), and initial findings are encouraging with, for example, correlates between individual perceptions and line management, peer and team member assessments of capability in managing cultural diversity, a challenge that requires in no small measure, practical wisdom (8).

3. The First Pillar of Wisdom: Time Perspective

“Leadership involves remembering past mistakes, an analysis of today’s achievements, and a well grounded imagination in visualising the problems of the future.”
– Stanley Allyn

If we are constrained by our past, caught up in the pressures of the present, or uncertain about our future, it is difficult to see how we can exercise wise leadership. Time Perspective is that pillar of wisdom which involves maturity of thinking about the past, present and future (9).  We can be connected to our past seeing it as a source of valuable experience and learning; or resentful about its impact, or nostalgic for happier times. In the present, we can operate in the current flow optimising our enjoyment of the present; or under siege and avoiding pressing realities, or simply living for the moment. Are we preparing to build a better future; or fearful of what lies ahead, or fantasising about unlikely possibilities?

These stances, towards the past, present and future suggest different leadership outlooks, either operating with maturity and wisdom, or with immaturity and distorted priorities.

Leadership as Connected to the Past

Carly Fiorina, an experienced AT & T and Lucent Technologies executive, entered Hewlett Packard in 1999 with a clear mandate: initiate the kind of change to revive the electronics giant, which despite its stellar track record of engineering innovation and progressive employee practices, was now slumbering. An aggressive push to move jobs overseas with extensive lay-offs was never going to be popular with the workforce. And masterminding the merger with Compaq was always going to meet opposition from the families of the founders who sat on the Board. In 2005 Fiorina was fired.

Maybe it was the replacement of founder Dave Packard’s “11 simple rules” with Carly’s 12 rules of the garage – the outcome of a weekend leadership brainstorming session – however that symbolised the problem. For Fiorina the famous HP Way was an “anachronism of a different and slower time”. Maybe. A connected leader would have been able to understand the fundamental dynamic of trust within the HP Way, and found ways to engage and revitalise that trust.

The mature outlook is that the past may foreshadow the future. This isn’t leadership that looks back with longing to better and happier times. Neither is it a pattern that is battle fatigued and scarred by past failures and now cynical about what is possible. It is the leadership mindset that recognises the importance of continuity from the past to the present and future. This is a leader with judgement who understands the enduring principles of success and failure and is grounded in the realities of business competition, and the dynamics of organisational culture, social interaction and human nature. As Jeff Bezos of Amazon observed: “There’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked, “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?”

Of course organisations need to revitalise and renew themselves, but the connected leader is sceptical of “quick rich schemes” and management fads and fashions. The connected leader is attuned to the business fundamentals that don’t change that much, and how to build on these to bridge the past and future.

Leadership as Resentment about the Past

This is the leader who just can’t let go of the setbacks and disappointments of the past. For the resentful leader the past has become a jailor that keeps them in a prison, constraining their flexibility to think and act strategically. The resentful leader can: sulk about perceived wrongs and injustice (think former Prime Minister Ted Heath) or persevere with the sunk costs of a failing decision, determined to prove that they were right.

Even the most successful leaders can sometimes find it difficult to let go of the past. Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric generally didn’t have any problems about the past. In his early years he sold off “sacred industries” ignoring the critics who claimed he was trampling on GE tradition. But he refused to part with Montgomery Ward, the tired department store. Looking to GE for a cash injection of $100 million to reverse its fortunes, Montgomery Ward came back, and back again, for more funding. To protect an initial investment, GE eventually wasted billions. Jack Welch later admitted that it was his ego that got in the way. He just couldn’t let a past investment fail.

Leadership as Nostalgia about the Past

For some leaders the past was a much happier and enjoyable experience than the challenges they face in the present and the future. The past was a time of achievement. Now is proving much tougher. Now it seems difficult to work out what the problems are, never mind what the solutions might be for today and tomorrow. It’s comforting for them, at least in the short-run, to revisit a strategy that once worked and delivered success. Of course as Marshall Goldsmith points out: “what got us here won’t get us there.” But for the nostalgic leader it’s tempting to remind themselves of what got them here and attempt to replicate their past successes again.

Arguably the story of the falling out of Steve Jobs and John Sculley at Apple was the clash between a leader who looked forward with plans for innovative product development and an executive, who looked back to a career where marketing was the key to business success. Sculley, the former Pepsi executive and mastermind of the brilliant Pepsi challenge, was hired to apply his marketing expertise to the Personal Computer market.  During Sculley’s tenure at Apple, Jobs was dismissed. As one analyst commented: Sculley didn’t get the reality that “in the world of technology, innovation trumps all other cards”. It isn’t about shaping perceptions of fizzy drinks; it’s about functionality that works.

Later, with Apple’s share price in sharp decline and posting losses, Sculley was then dismissed. On his return to Apple, Jobs “called in the engineers and placed before them a table of the products which had been in development under the old regime. “What do all these products have in common?” When no-one was able to answer he told them: “They are all worthless.” Jobs was getting ready to reinvent Apple around a new future.

Leadership In Flow with the Present

John Akers, former CEO of IBM, remained stuck in the past of mainframe computing. Whilst the rest of the world was moving towards PCs, unsurprisingly IBM struggled (posting a loss of $8 billion in 1992), and Akers had to stand down. His successor, Louis Gerstner, initially resorted to the classic tactics of sell assets and cut costs, a programme for survival. Astutely observing that “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision”, Gerstner focused initially on execution, decisiveness and speed to break the grid lock of the IBM bureaucracy.

But it wasn’t necessarily a strategy of revitalisation. It was only when Gerstner recognised IBM’s enduring strength – its ability to provide integrated solutions for customers – that IBM was able to reposition itself as a global services business. The key driver of this strategic shift: “listening to and acting on the recommendations of IBM’s 200 top customers”. Gerstner’s great success was to accept IBM’s current predicament whilst establishing a sequence of measures that would shift its business model for a new future.

This leadership outlook of In Flow with the Present is about maturity towards the present to see current challenges as objectively as possible. This cool-headed appraisal is to accept business life “as is” not how it should be: a replay of past strategy from previous success, or a fantasy about what might be possible in the best of all business worlds. This is the opposite of the “ostrich leader” who, reluctant to address pressing problems, denies the reality of the current challenge, or hopes that something will magically turn up to make things better. The in flow leader is alert to the issues as they are, sensitive to the organisational mood, and shrewd in timing the strategic agenda to face and engage with today’s realities. The in flow leader doesn’t promise the impossible. Instead the focus is on: what do we need to do now to make a difference? How will this reposition us for a more resilient future?

Leadership under Siege and Avoiding the Present

For this leader, today is too much. This is the leader who is burdened by the information overload of confusing and complex information and is struggling to juggle the demands of competing stake-holder expectations. Faced with a turbulent world that is moving too much and too fast, the under siege leader adopts any of the following tactics:

• a denial to block out the “brutal facts” of business reality. When Ed Brennan of Sears said “I don’t see any huge problems. I feel very good about how we’re positioned strategically”, presumably he hadn’t reviewed the market data to see the emerging threat of K-Mart and Wal-Mart.
• work harder and smarter to keep up. “Forget strategy, let’s improve execution”. This is the merry-go-round of reorganisation and restructuring that is typically the beginning of the trajectory of decline.
• find a simple strategic narrative that makes sense. This is the one thing mindset, otherwise known as wishful thinking. Rather than grapple with the complexity of the issues, the under siege leader tries to side-step them by focusing on that one aspect of the business they know well and understand (e.g. sales, finance, technology). This tactic may simplify business life; it may also create a lopsided strategy.

Leadership as Impetuosity to Live for the Moment

With a business background in operating motels, Bernie Ebbers’ initial purchase of an obscure telephone carrier and subsequent “17 year acquisition binge” turned WorldCom into the world’s biggest telecoms company, at least for a short time. Admitting “I don’t know technology and engineering. I don’t know accounting” Bernie did think he knew the art of ad-hoc deal-making. When his plan to acquire Sprint Communications for $115 billion was abandoned as the telecoms sector nosedived, WorldCom’s massive debt was exposed along with a series of fraudulent accounting systems. In 2005, Ebbers was convicted of fraud and conspiracy as a result of WorldCom’s false financial reporting.

This leader lives for the moment. This is the enthusiasm to seize the day to get things done quickly. This is leadership which generates “six impossible things before breakfast” in breakneck speed to move the business forward. It’s all go for the impetuous leader.

In the short-run it’s an exhilarating business experience for the leadership team. For businesses that have sunk into complacent lethargy, this leadership stance can inject much needed energy to catalyse an action orientation. In the medium term it becomes exhausting. Caught up in another interesting idea, executives have no time to stop, think and reflect on what is and isn’t working. Initiatives are begun, stopped and restarted; eventually the business begins to second-guess leadership motives: “is this one for real?”

And in the long run it becomes a strategic cul de sac. Without an overarching purpose that coordinates a coherent set of priorities, effort is dissipated in unproductive activity and unprofitable endeavours.

Leadership as Far Sighted about the Future

The final mature attitude identifies that leader who looks to the future. This isn’t the dismissal of the past or the neglect of present priorities; it is the recognition of changing times that demand a shift in thinking to respond to new challenges.

Dan Quayle, in a famous Quaylism, said “the future will be better tomorrow” to much laughter. The far sighted leader sets out a plan for a better tomorrow that establishes credibility and respect, not ridicule. The far sighted leader has the courage and confidence to balance two key dynamics of organisational life – fear (we might fail) and fantasy (things can only get better) – to formulate an inspirational message of future aims with the credibility of a plan to move from today’s realities.

This was the mindset of Andy Grove and Gordon Moore of Intel who astonished the world by abandoning memory chips – the core of their business – to switch to microprocessors. Grove and Moore sat down and asked the tough question: “if we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO what do you think that person would do?”

Courage no doubt helped their decision. But key to repositioning Intel for a different future was clear thinking and a willingness to communicate a vision that engaged others’ commitment

Leadership as Fear of the Future

The future is an intimidating and scary place for this leader.  Tomorrow is a place with unknown and uncertain challenges, with the threat of current, emerging and unknown competitors, changing customer expectations, and the arrival of new technology. At best this leader displays the kind of caution that is sensitive to risk and avoids the grandiose “bet your company” schemes that might jeopardise the organisation’s future. But more typically, this leadership stance is played out in:

• the stifling of challenging debate about change within the marketplace and the need for a strategic rethink
• the centralisation of decision making to maintain tight control, which managers and the work force find disempowering
• a culture of blame that drives out the risk taking of creativity and innovation

When “fear is in the driving seat” of the leadership team, the organisational dynamics shift to trigger the process of decline. What else but fear could explain the bankruptcy of an organisation like Polaroid, for example? With a proud record in innovation, by the 1970s Polaroid held a monopoly in the instant photography market. And it wasn’t that it didn’t recognise the impact of digital technology; as far back as the early 80s Polaroid were filing patents. Part of the reason for Polaroid’s decline was its assumption that customers would always want a hard copy print. And part was its leadership culture of “chemistry and media first”. They had a considerable amount of fear from the chemical and film people about what their job would be if we got into electronics.” Polaroid’s manoeuvres in the months before its bankruptcy indicate a leadership team without confidence in the business, more concerned to protect its own personal financial position than secure the future for the firms’ investors and workforce.

Leadership as Fantasy about the Future

For this leader, anything is possible. Maybe this leader has done the Tony Robbins fire-walk, because they look to “awaken the giant within” to dream big dreams and think big thoughts. The fantasist can often be the charismatic leader with an electrifying vision of the future and a strategy of radical rethink to prepare for a very different tomorrow. At best the fantasist leader engages with the “hearts and minds” of a demoralised work force to communicate a bright strategic horizon based on a compelling business logic.

More often than not however the fantasist leader – think John DeLorean, Robert Maxwell – is a “Walter Mitty” figure whose dreams are less about strategic realities to formulate a coherent business plan and more a projection of their personal hopes and aspirations. In this fantasy world, the tough reality of financial well-being, competitor threat or customer experience – is blocked. For the fantasist leader, the strategic future is a canvas on to which they paint their personal motives (typically, a variation of greed, ego and status). Unlike the Mafia boss: “It’s not personal, it’s just business”, for the fantasist the opposite applies: “It’s personal.” And it’s rarely good business.

Gerald Levin oversaw the integration of an old time media content company and an exciting internet  firm. This was the mega-merger between Time Warner and a vastly overvalued AOL in a $200 billion deal that is now established as “the worst transaction in business history.” A deal “motivated not by logic or strategy but by egos.” A shrewd observer of leadership psychology might have spotted the beginnings of Levin’s fantasy outlook: a preference to discuss books than review the balance sheet; his explanation to oust a long-term colleague as “I’m a strange guy”; spending entire weekends watching movies back to back. “I never feared failure going into the AOL merger.” said Gerry Levin. Maybe a degree of anxiety would have avoided a business fiasco. As one analyst noted: “a fearless CEO should scare every shareholder.” The fantasy continues. Levin now is a director at Moonview Sanctuary, a secluded California facility with “neuro-scientific technology” and “ancient wisdom,” for prices starting at a mere $175,000 a year.

Leadership Wisdom to Connect the Past, Present and Future

During Terry Leahy’s 14 year tenure at Tesco, profits, dividends and earnings per share doubled, delivering a compound annual growth rate of 10%. Tesco is now the world’s third largest retailer. How does Leahy think about time?

On the Past

Tesco’s business heritage lay in a “pile them high, sell them cheap” philosophy, an approach which Leahy’s predecessor Ian McLauren had repositioned and evolved into a winning strategy that was making serious inroads into the market share of the competition. Leahy respected Tesco’s history but he wasn’t in awe of it, a trap into which one of his competitors, Marks & Spencer, almost vanished. Leahy kept asking the question: “what do you think Tesco stands for and what do you wish it stood for?” This is leadership that understands how to build on the past to maintain momentum for growth.

On the Present

Leahy’s business philosophy is simple. “The best place to find the truth is to listen to your customer. They’ll tell you what is good about your business and what’s wrong. And if you keep listening they’ll give you a strategy.” This is leadership not guided by any ideology of what should be; it’s the willingness to face current realities and respond. For Leahy there are no short fixes; it takes many years to build a culture of sustainable success.

On the Future

At the beginning of his time as CEO, Leahy shaped some big goals for Tesco’s future. These weren’t unrealistic promises designed to impress. “All of them were audacious but the company achieved them because they were appropriate and just dramatic enough to motivate everyone. They tapped into what the people in Tesco wanted to achieve.” And Leahy knows the importance of building leadership bench strength for the future. It’s significant that Leahy is only the fifth individual to run Tesco since its founding in the 1920s. In standing down for insider Philip Clarke in a well orchestrated succession plan, Leahy passed on the baton for another chapter in the Tesco book.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “Nine tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.” Wise leadership is alert to the productive use of time. It also recognises the power of timing.  Wise leadership hinges on the maturity with which we view the past, present and future.  Above all, wise leadership realises that the distinction between past, present and future is made in peoples’ minds, and that the three are intimately connected.

References:

1. Kilburg, R. (2006). Executive Wisdom. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

2. “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” http://www.amazureconsulting.com/files/1/91276339/SevenPillarsofWisdom.pdf

3. Kellerman, B. (2004). Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press.

4. Richard Trowbridge’s summary of the literature is a superb overview of a range of frameworks and definitions. http://www.wisdompage.com/WisdomResearchers/RichardTrowbridge.html

5. Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6. Sternberg, R. and Jordan, H. (2005). A Handbook of Wisdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7. Anyone interested in accessing these pilot materials should contact Andrew@amazureconsulting.com for further details.

8. “Cultural Competence and the Art of Wisdom”

http://www.amazureconsulting.com/files/1/25898004/CulturalCompetenceAndTheArtofWisdom.pdf

9. Building on the work of Zimbardo (Zimbardo P & Boyd J (1999), “Putting Time in Perspective”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77), we developed a short on line assessment: TimeFrames. Its premise was very simple; how we think about time, our past, present and future, says much about us an individuals and our leadership outlook and priorities. On line resource is also available at www.now-itsabouttime.com.

9. Building on the work of Zimbardo (Zimbardo P & Boyd J (1999), “Putting Time in Perspective”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77), we developed a short on line assessment: TimeFrames. Its premise was very simple; how we think about time, our past, present and future, says much about us an individuals and our leadership outlook and priorities. On line resource is also available at www.now-itsabouttime.com.

About the Author

Andrew Munro (MA, C Psychol) is a Director of AM Azure Consulting, a consultancy specialising in the design of on line applications for talent management, career development and succession. Author of “Practical Succession Management” and “Now It’s About Time” he is a regular speaker and contributor to professional debate.

Scott Lichtenstein

Introduction: We’ve Been Practicing Leadership for Over 6,000 Years; What Else Do We Need to Know?

The Pharaohs leading the cadres managing the work teams that built the pyramids understood leadership (Dade 2008). The Imperial Emperors knew how to lead the Chinese civil service that held China together for thousands of years. The Moguls of India and their administrators understood how to lead. The Holy Roman Empire needed no leadership books or journal articles. Leadership as practised by the Egyptian Pharaohs and Chinese emperors still lives with us in our language today: “stepping out of line” and “getting the chop” referring to the soldier of the emperor and Pharaohs with a sabre on horseback that would chop off the head of anyone who literally stepped out of the single file line of workers.

More recently, the rise of professional management in Western economies has perpetuated a plethora of lessons in leadership. From Al “Chainsaw” Dunlop to “Neutron Jack” Welch, CEO of General Electric, one of the most successful corporations in the world, they all knew about leadership. Voted by Fortune magazine as Manager of the Century, “Neutron” Jack gained the nickname of the mythical bomb that killed people but left buildings standing by shedding 112,000 people in the beginning of his tenure, but left the factories they worked in still standing.

From the Egyptian Pharaohs in their temples to the glass palaces of the Masters (Bastards?) of the Universe on Wall Street, they all had the same approach to leadership. Dade (2008, p. 1) summed up this sentiment by stating, “It’s my way or the highway”. Further, “The use of hierarchical top-down power structures that institute a system of policies, procedures and programmes to ensure delivery of products and processes in a manner consistent with stated objectives. By any measure of success this works and in so doing has created the basis of our modern world”.

If the “my way or the highway” school of leadership has been working for thousands of years, why is the subject of leadership under such scrutiny? If we know the tried and tested “my way or the highway” approach to leadership works, why are there approximately 3,000 books a year written on the topic? One major reason is due to changing employees’ values, and in the aggregate, societal values. Societal values have changed and individuals with developmentally leading edge values have gotten into leadership positions and have changed policies and procedures. Without too much difficulty I’m sure you can think of at least one organisational policy that exists today that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Equally important, the values of followers have changed.

This article focuses on the role of values in leadership and how this unconscious and invisible force creates or stymies visible results. First, the impact of values on leaders is outlined and is followed by an examination of the link between leaders’ values and value creation. The concept of the values dynamic is introduced and illustrated by two mini-cases of leaders from Hewlett-Packard and 3M to show how the dynamic between the values of a leader and the culture impact sustainable performance. Next, why leaders and followers do what they do, based on research examining managers’ and leaders’ needs and values is discussed, and the mapping of an executive team’s values provided to offer a practical example of how these woolly concepts can be measured and used for deep dialogue to facilitate leadership and team development.

If societal and employees’ values have changed, in what ways do values impact leadership?

1.    The Impact of Values on Leaders

Personal values impact leaders in at least two ways: 1) as a perceptual filter that shapes decisions and behaviour, and 2) as a driver of their methods of creating value.

1.1 Values as Perceptual Filters

Hambrick and Mason’s (1984) Upper Echelon Theory and Finkelstein & Hambrick’s (1996, p. 54) extension to it (as seen in figure 1) provide a theoretical model that illustrates that personal values act as a perceptual filter for how leaders perceive the external environment and shape strategic choice, behaviour, and ultimately organisational performance.

Figure 1. How leaders’ values impact performance

In a study of 163 owners, senior and middle managers, Lichtenstein (2005) empirically operationalized the Values, Observable characteristics, Strategic choice & behaviour, and Performance elements of the Upper Echelon Theory. He found that executive values had a direct and significant impact on organisational performance, whereas age, tenure, functional experience, and level of education did not. This finding indicates that personal values are a more fundamental leadership attribute than the age, tenure, functional experience, and level of education in the process of how leaders influence organisations. Executive selection based on age, experience, tenure, and education to the neglect of their values ignores the invisible force that drives visible results.

Moreover, in a study of 75 in-work MBA managers, Higgs and Lichtenstein (2010) found no relationship between psychological traits based on the leadership “Big 5” five-factor model of personality (McCrae and Costa 1997) and personal values. This result highlights that “psychological characteristics” and “values” suffer from the “jingle fallacy” (Kelley 1927): “psychological characteristics” and “values” sound similar so they are lumped together. Values and personality traits are complementary but separate and distinct attributes of leaders and must be treated as such.

1.2 Values as a Key Element of Strategy

Leadership is not solely about making people feel good, but includes profit and loss responsibility, achieving operational and financial performance, and developing strategy. The personal values and aspirations of senior management have been identified by Porter (1980) as a key component of competitive strategy (see figure 2) but have been neglected by the field. Finkelstein and Hambrick (1996, p. 48) recognised the research void that exists in the examination of strategic leaders’ values and their relationship with strategy, noting, “Even though values are undoubtedly important factors in executive choice, they have not been the focus of much systemic study.”

Figure 2. Key Determinants of Strategy

Why has so little research been done in the area of values and its relationship to strategy despite values being identified as critical to strategy formulation and implementation? In part because there was no theory to understand this until Hambrick and Mason’s Upper Echelon theory arrived four years after Porter’s work. Also, the tools and techniques to measure values didn’t exist until relatively recently. This will be illustrated in the last section of this article. A lack of access to leaders allegedly not willing to have their values examined is also cited as another reason. In short, the field has focused on the difficult elements of strategy rather than the more challenging elements, and values are a more challenging element. Effective leaders know they need to focus on the difficult and the challenging elements of strategic leadership.

1.3 Values, Vision and Value Creation

Business now almost universally accepts that the primary leadership task is value creation for shareholders and stakeholders. This is especially true in the midst of an era when we’ve seen leaders’ and directors’ remuneration, stock options, and payoffs disconnected from company performance, and in some cases, value destruction. Since the bubble burst in 2007, one leadership lesson we’ve learned is that motive matters, which surely is at the heart of the current zeitgeist. The spotlight has been turned on leaders by their organisation’s stakeholders who are asking, “leadership for whose benefit?” and “value created for whom?”

The needs and values of strategic leaders shape their vision to create (or destroy) value. By uncovering these drives, leaders can motivate the workplace culture to implement strategies further and faster in the organisation. The conceptual framework in figure 3 illustrates that a leader’s values are antecedents of vision in service of creating value for shareholders and stakeholders.

Figure 3. Shareholder and Stakeholder Value Chain Model of Contingency Relationships

Lichtenstein and Dade (2007) refer to a chief executive’s motives for action and values as Reality 1.1. This is because it is the lynchpin of aligning the existing culture. that we refer to as “Reality 1.0” with the vision – the future state of the organisation – that we refer to as “Reality 2.0”[i]. Sustainable above average performance and value creation is achieved through aligning Reality 1.0, i.e., the organisation’s mission, goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics to Reality 2.0, the vision.

The values dynamic is the exchange process between the values of the CEO and the rest of the organisation, i.e., the culture. Leaders create or destroy value to the extent that they align Reality 1.0 with Reality 2.0 by implementing their methods of creating value (missions, goals, and strategies) further and faster throughout the organisation. But individual leaders can’t create and sustain the leadership required to align and shift an organisation: a vision that isn’t shared is an unrealised dream; a strategy without organisational commitment is a delusion.

Examples of values dynamic misalignment and alignment are briefly illustrated in the mini-cases of ex-CEO Carly Fiorina’s alignment of her vision for creating value at Hewett Packard (HP) in comparison with her successor Ex-CEO Mark Hurd, and James McNerney ex-CEO of 3M versus his successor CEO George Buckley. These cases contrast the dynamic between the leaders’ values and that of the organisations and the impact on aligning or misaligning their methods of creating value with the culture.

Hewlett-Packard

Fiorina served as chief executive officer and chairman of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. In 2005, she was forced to resign following differences with the board of directors about how to execute HP’s strategy. Ex-CEO Mark Hurd was CEO from March 2005 and resigned in August 2010. The company is renowned for its egalitarian, decentralized culture that came to be known as “the HP Way.”[ii] This involved one of the first all-company profit-sharing plans that gave shares to all employees, and offered tuition assistance, flex time, and job sharing.

Research carried out by Waters (2008) into how leaders’ values impact decision-making compared managers’ perceptions of ex-CEO Carly Fiorina and ex-CEO Marc Hurd. Regarding Fiorina, a common perception amongst managers was that there was a values mismatch with the culture:

“People talked about the HP Way a lot and Carly came along and brushed that under the carpet a bit and people didn’t like her for that.” (Manager 1)

“I was never at all sure, other than her desire to be showbiz, quite what her values were.” (Manager 2)

“With Carly Fiorina there were corporate values articulated and examples of things done by Carly which were disconnected and I think that is what made a lot of people feel uncomfortable.” (Manager 3)

In contrast, managers felt Mark Hurd did a far better job at aligning his method for creating value to the culture summarised by one manager:

“I do feel he (Mark Hurd) is more mapped to the basic core values of HP than Fiorina was; his wishes for operational tightness, profitability, and cost control are pretty much the same as the values fifty years ago”.

3M

Prior to joining 3M in 2001, James McNerney competed with Bob Nardelli and Jeff Immelt to succeed the retiring Jack Welch as chairman and CEO of General Electric. When Immelt won the three-way succession race, McNerney left GE and joined 3M from 2001 to 2005, holding the position as chairman of the board and CEO. Sir George William Buckley was named chairman and CEO of 3M in December 2005 following the departure of McNerney who left abruptly to join Boeing.

3M’s creative culture that once gave rise to the “Post It Note” phenomenon prided itself on drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past five years, and was underpinned by the “3M Way” that includes:

(i) Workers can seek out funding from a number of company sources to get their pet projects off the ground,

(ii) Official company policy allowing employees to use 15% of their time to pursue independent projects,

(iii) Ideas like the Post It Note are allowed to be fiddled with for several years before the product goes into full production, and

(iv) The company explicitly encouraged risk and tolerated failure (Hind, 2007).

Sound like Google?

The paper by Hind (2007) “At 3M, A struggle between Efficiency and Creativity” explains in-depth the changes wrought by McNerney and contrasts them with those made later by Buckley. When McNerney joined, “he had barely stepped off the plane before he announced he would change the DNA of the place” (Hind 2007, p. 1). McNerney began by implementing the GE playbook; axing 8,000 workers (about 11 percent of the workforce), intensifying the performance-review process, cutting spending and importing GE’s Six Sigma program – a series of management techniques designed to decrease production defects and increase efficiency. Thousands of staffers became trained as Six Sigma “black belts”.

The focus on efficiency began driving out the innovation culture. Remembering a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new Six Sigma process, Michael Mucci, a 27 year veteran at 3M recalls, “We all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post It Note would ever emerge from this new system” (Hind, 2007, p. 2). The Post It Note inventor, 3M scientist Art Fry, reflecting on McNerney’s culture change programme observed, “What’s remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart. [McNerney] didn’t kill it, because he wasn’t here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he could have” (Hind, 2007, p. 3).

Upon McNerney’s departure, new CEO Buckley reinvigorated the workforce by reversing McNerney’s legacy and getting back to the “3M Way” by scaling back on Six Sigma, boosting R&D spending, and rewarding risk taking. Reflecting on the process-focused approach of the past, Buckley remarked, “Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company – it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma – is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M” (Hind, 2007; p. 3). Tim Hammond, the director of strategic business development, states, “[Buckley] has brought back a spark around creativity.” Bob Anderson, a business director in 3M’s radio frequency identification division adds, “We feel like we can dream again” (Hind, 2007, p. 3). A contrast of the two leaders is found in figure 4.

Figure 4. A Tale of Two Leaders. Source: Hind (2007)

What are the leadership lessons of these two mini-cases? One relates to leaders and the other to boards of directors.

Leaders need to recognise that their values shape their strategy preferences, which influence the organisation’s culture that is termed the “values dynamic”: the dynamic between the leaders’ values and those of the employees. Leaders need to understand the dynamics of their underlying needs and values (Reality 1.1), and that of the culture (Reality 1.0). Managers manage from their own values, but leaders have to lead a whole culture. Therefore, they need to be aware of the diversity of values in organisations if they want their visions to become reality and their value creation methods to be implemented. Leaders like Fiorina and McNerney who try to bend cultures to satisfy their own needs and values without understanding the values embedded in the organisation will struggle to align the company to their vision and to create long-term value for shareholders and stakeholders

Regarding corporate governance, boards that become budget-driven rather than strategy-led are liable to appoint CEO’s to boost short-term performance who may not understand the culture or values dynamic, which is bound to stymie their attempts to create value in the long term. The ultimate strategic decision is appointing the right chairman and chief executive whose methods of creating shareholder and stakeholder value will support the culture (Taylor, 2010).

1.4 Effective Leadership that Creates Value

Boards would do well to remind themselves of the lessons of leadership and sustainable value creation. The only longitudinal study of the link between leadership teams and corporate performance is Collins’ (2001) “Good to Great”. He tracked 1,435 Fortune 500 listed companies from 1965 and found:

• 11 made the transition from good to great (outperforming companies in their sector), and

• High profile larger-than-life CEOs, correlate negatively with the progression from good to great.

The study of successful CEOs shows two vital qualities (Collins, 2001):

1. HUMILITY – being self-effacing and arrogance free, and

2. WILL – persistence in the pursuit of business goals.

“Quiet leadership” was the norm: leaders that created value over the long term dedicated themselves to building the organisation rather than their CVs, with an emphasis on starting with the RIGHT TEAM rather than the right project, product, or even industry.

Having examined the ways in which leaders’ needs and values impact organisations and the relationship between culture and methods of creating value, the next section examines what is directing the thoughts and emotions, and shapes the behaviour of leaders and others.

So what moves leaders and others to action?

2.    Why Do Leaders (and Followers) Do What They Do?

Understanding why people do what they do necessitates investigating the forces that drive behaviour, because people engage in the same behaviour but for very different reasons.

Clearly, if we want to influence the behaviour of others, we need to understand what is already influencing them. By the end of this section, you should be able to identify the different drivers expressed in the three statements regarding hitting stretch targets. As leaders, we can’t change what drives people – their values – but we can change their behaviour by understanding those forces and tapping and harnessing them through policies, strategies, and communication.

As long ago as 1961, Gordon Allport suggested that value priorities are the “dominating force” in life as they direct all of an individual’s activity towards the achievement of his or her needs. Values can be considered emotional states we either go towards or away from, which are directed towards individuals’ underlying needs.

From Values to Value Systems

The understanding of, and previous research into values has suffered from a focus on individual values that:

(i) result in low reliability (Bilsky & Schwartz, 1987; Schwartz, 1996);

(ii) ignore equally or more meaningful values (Bilsky & Schwartz, 1987, Schwartz, 1996); and

(iii) ignore the premise that individuals make trade-offs among competing values according to their values priorities (Allport, 1955; Hambrick & Brandon, 1988; Maslow, 1970; Rokeach, 1979; Schwartz, 1996).

Individuals’ values priorities underscore a critical characteristic of values: they are organised in a hierarchical system ordered by relative importance to one another (Bilsky & Schwartz, 1987; Maslow, 1970; Schwartz, 1992; Rokeach, 1979). Although there are universally held values, an individual, and in the aggregate, groups, will espouse a dominant set of values. “At the top of each person’s system are a small handful of dominant values of paramount importance” (Brandon & Hambrick, 1988, p. 6). Therefore, a dominant value system exists for each person that is more important to understand than single values (Brandon & Hambrick, 1988; Rokeach, 1979; Schwartz, 1996).

2.1 Needs, Values, or Levels of Consciousness?

Editor’s note – Readers of the Integral Leadership Review will most likely be familiar with Beck and Cowan’s “Spiral Dynamics” model of “levels of consciousness” based on the work of Clare Graves. This paper presents, as an alternative, research centred on the work of Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs model has received broader academic interest. Maslow and Graves were contemporaries whose theories have both similarities and differences. Of the two, Graves’ theory is perhaps the more complex, focusing on the dynamic interaction between the individual and his or her environment and therefore placing more emphasis on the context in which a person comes to value certain things. It might be considered, for example, that Graves saw the possibility that a personal hierarchy of needs can exist at, and within, different levels of consciousness and that the means by which a person chooses to satisfy those needs will be different at different levels. However, for the purpose of research within a particular society and culture, arguably it is more straightforward and parsimonious to apply Maslow’s model, which can be operationalized with greater simplicity and reliability.

From a research perspective, Maslow’s theory can be empirically tested using statistically reliable instruments, such as Rokeach’s Value Survey, Kahle’s List of Values and the proprietary instruments of Stanford Research International’s Values and Lifestyles (VALS) and CSDM’s Values Modes (Baker 1996), whereas the Spiral Dynamics model is considerably harder to test and has consequently received much less academic interest. In particular the higher levels (yellow and turquoise) of the Spiral Dynamics model present difficulties when defining parameters with which to test for their presence. Readers will no doubt however notice some similarity and overlap between the categories of needs found in this research and descriptions of the blue, orange, and green levels in the Spiral Dynamics model.

Maslow (1943) presents a model of human psychological development that facilitates understanding of the basis of human values and the way they can change over time from birth to death. His observations and qualitative research led him to the insight that human beings are all born with a set of needs that drive our perception of reality and behaviors. These needs are complex and form our “value system”. He proposed that it is these value sets that form the basis of differing individual needs. The changes are hierarchical in nature (i.e., some needs to meet before other needs become important as a determinant of attitudes and behaviours). A need satisfied is no longer a dominant need; as a need is satisfied, new needs emerge. We all have these needs, but each one of us has one or two dominant ones. There is no “better” or “worse” need, there just ‘”is”.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is usually portrayed as a triangle with different needs from bottom to top, including Security, Belonging, Esteem and Self-Actualization. In an attempt to make it more accessible to business people, Maslow’s framework has been adapted to make it more amendable to be used as a tool to understand leaders’ and employees’ motive for action as seen in figure 5. The bull’s-eye represents needs as the target of our behaviour and attempts to overcome the misconception created by the triangle that needs at the top are somehow “better” than the needs at the bottom.

As represented in figure 5, all human beings are driven by the same fundamental needs as popularized by Maslow: Certainty; Connection & Love; Significance & Achievement; Variety/Novelty; Growth and Contribution (adapted from Maslow, 1970 and Robbins, 2008).

Figure 5. The 8 Human Needs

The figure represented is generic, but is most powerful when used as a tool to determine how these different needs are satisfied at work. Additionally, it is important to reflect about what is at the centre of your bull’s-eye that is driving you, and similarly, your clients, employees, and leaders[iii].

Maslow (1970) proposed three core motivational domains, which were: (i) Sustenance Driven needs: physiological, survival, security, and a sense of belonging; (ii) Outer-Directed needs: recognition, significance, and self-esteem; and (iii) Inner-Directed needs: self-actualization, personal growth, and transcendence.

In the first operationalization of Maslow in a management context, over 50 years after it was first proposed, Lichtenstein (2005) tested Maslow’s assertion that executives’ personal value systems are related to Maslovian Sustenance Driven, Outer- and Inner Directed needs. In a study of 163 Owner-, Senior- and Middle managers, Kotey and Meredith’s (1997) List of Values (LoV) 28-item personal values scale was used to measure executives’ personal values. Drawing on Maslow’s (1970) theory of Inner Directed, Outer Directed, and Sustenance Driven value groups, a three-factor solution was extracted that revealed theoretically predicted results that were statistically reliable:

(i) the Sustenance Driven value system espoused the traditional values of Loyalty, Trust, Compassion, and Affection,

(ii) the Outer Directed value system espoused the core esteem-seeking values of Power, Prestige, Ambition, and Aggression, and

(iii) the Inner Directed value system espoused the entrepreneurial values of Innovation, Risk, and Creativity.

The results provided strong support for Maslow’s (1970) assertion that value systems correspond to the underlying needs that drive them, and for the three motivational domains or “worlds” of our leaders, employees, teams, companies, and societies.

Do you think your motivational domain would affect your leadership? The nature of the relationships you have? Your communication? What you wear? You bet. The consequences of our driving force and those of others are at the crux of leadership. Leadership and followership vary by one’s values.

How well do you understand the forces that drive employees and leaders to action? What percentage of each motivational group above would you except to find in an organisation or business function? Allocate to each group above, totaling 100 percent, your best guess concerning the top drives of an executive population. See figure 5 for the results, which have been replicated in two other studies of in-work managers with similar results.

Figure 6: Executive Motivation

2.2 The Values Dynamic

Do the numbers surprise you? Most executive groups are surprised by the small number of managers with Sustenance Driven needs and values and the large proportion of managers with Inner Directed needs and values. The results show a small percentage of managers categorised as Sustenance Driven, which supports published (e.g., Wilkinson & Howard, 1997) and unpublished reports (CDSM Ltd) on the decline of the working-age population in Western society who espouse traditional values.

This values dynamic shift, a decrease in the amount of managers with Sustenance Driven values, and an increase in the proportion of managers with Outer and Inner Directed values in our organisations, helps explain the nature of change in leadership and followership.

Based on measurement and observation, the top levels of organisations are heavily over-represented by Inner Directed executives whose dominant need for novelty and values of Innovation, Risk, and Creativity is likely to be perceived as a threat by those with different values. The innovation-based “further and faster” orientation of the Inner Directed may be lauded at Board level, but perceived by the Outer Directed – who are the organisation’s operators – to be too radical and to frustrate their ability to hit their targets. The Sustenance Driven, who prize safety and continuity of traditional methods, may just consider the orientation of their leaders to be madness.

Dis-ease in the culture is caused by leaders who fail to understand that what is “the ideal solution” and “logical” in the Boardroom and executive suite is perceived as “too much too soon” or not being “a safe pair of hands” by those with other values. The nature of this opposition is often not open to rational discussion. Many people will not even know why they are opposing the offered solution/strategy they are tasked with implementing – it just feels wrong. This is an indication that the opposition is based in the value system rather than in a straightforward examination of the facts. Thus, even more rational analysis will not convince them that the decision is right.

3.    What can leaders do?

Leaders need to understand how to use the insight concerning how their needs and values shape the creation of goals and strategies that motivate their staff and culture to create more shareholder value. They also need to accommodate their leadership style to lead a culture with directors, executives, and managers with needs and values other than their own, if they are to optimise value for shareholders, stakeholders, and society.

New methods to create shareholder value are unlikely to reach their full potential if Board members and leaders are creating dis-ease. To create more value, both at the level of the corporate and business strategies, leaders need to ask themselves a range of questions based on the insights discussed in this paper if they are to deliver superior performance.

• How do I determine the values, beliefs, and motivations of my Board?
• How can I improve my effectiveness by making sure I am appealing to those values at the basic level (i.e., gaining acceptance for policies at the level that feels right)?
• How can I determine the values, beliefs, and motivations of my main stakeholder groups (e.g., staff, suppliers, communities where we are located, customers, market analysts)?
• How can I alter my style but keep my policies, to ensure that I bring on board these other stakeholders, even when they have different values from the Board?
• How can I use this information and knowledge to develop better policies and strategies to increase shareholder value in the future?

The values of the top team can and do create “dis-ease” with employees with different values at an unconscious level, which gives rise to beliefs such as “too much too soon” or “they (leaders) have lost the plot” that can lead to active resistance to policies and strategies, and in some cases sabotage, thus stymying strategy implementation.

EVS Consulting (www.evsconsulting.co.uk) has developed a survey and reporting tool to help leaders gain insight to help answer these questions. The motivational map in figure 7 represents the values of a leadership team using a value system that has been tested for cross-culture reliability and validity, but is only just beginning to be used for business purposes. Going clockwise starting from 12 o’clock, the map below illustrates the Maslovian dynamic from the Sustenance Driven traditional value system of Conformity, Tradition, Security, and Power, to the Outer Directed value system of Achievement, Hedonism, and Stimulation, to the Inner Directed value system of Self Direction, Universalism, and Benevolence. Team members’ top two values are represented by stars with their unique letter and number.

Figure 7. Values Map of Top Team

The values dynamic of this team is hereby measured, which elucidates where they come together and pull apart.

One immediate observation is that the diversity of values in this team represents the diversity of values in organisational cultures. What makes this team particularly diverse is the unusually high proportion of managers with values in the Sustenance Driven motivational domain, as compared to the hundreds of other managers’ values we’ve measured. In the workshop when we presented our findings, the team couldn’t figure out why this was so, until it was pointed out to them that the Sustenance Driven managers came from India and Pakistan, as opposed to Europe, where the other members were from. Their knowing smiles immediately acknowledged the cultural dynamic affecting the team. This type of diversity is also found in cultures integrated by M&A.

With team members working in pairs, the results were used as a catalyst for a deep dialogue about the consequences of their needs and values for themselves and their leadership. This was authentic talk – a powerful antidote to the surface conversations they normally had. Participants were buzzing with excitement by the end of the session. They not only understood more about themselves, but also their colleagues. Implicitly, they developed empathy for colleagues who possessed different values from their own by understanding why they were different and appreciating their needs. Having a framework in which to understand needs and values, and data showing how these were distributed amongst the team, enabled them to connect to that part of themselves that others’ needs and values represented.

For leaders, this values mapping exercise provides data to benchmark and track the values dynamic underpinning their methods for creating value.

4. Conclusions

Values and motives for action are the crux of leadership and followership. Leaders need to understand how to use the insight of how their needs and values drive the creation of goals and strategies that motivate their staff and shape the culture to create more shareholder value. Leaders need to translate their missions, goals, and strategies into the operative values of their direct reports and employees to create tomorrow’s company today, as illustrated in figure 8.

Figure 8:Reality and the Corporatio

Leaders also need to accommodate their leadership style to lead a culture with directors, executives, and managers who have needs and values different from their own, to optimise value for shareholders and stakeholders. New methods to create shareholder value are unlikely to reach their full potential if Board members and leaders are creating dis-ease.

What this paper hasn’t addressed, amongst other things, is how values may manifest themselves in predictable patterns of strategic decisions and behaviour, which may be the subject for a subsequent paper. New focus group research findings are emerging regarding how the leadership style, seen through the eyes of followers, varies between Inner and Outer Directed managers, challenging historic assumptions that leadership is solely about the characteristics of the leader.

We call on leaders to create more shareholder and stakeholder value by determining sustainable visions for their organisations and by translating those visions, goals, and strategies into the operative values of their employees. By understanding the invisible forces of values, leaders can implement value creation strategies further and faster throughout their organisations, harnessing and unleashing the strongest force in business today: the motivational driving force within each and every employee.

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Wikipedia:

Hewlett-Packard, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard

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 Endnotes

Russ Volckmann

James O'Dea

James O’Dea is one of those people who hasn’t just talked about peace. He has had a career that has been dedicated to peace and human rights. He has a fascinating career with organizations that I’ve supported through donations and membership: Amnesty International and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He was the CEO of the Seva Foundation. He is also a member of the Evolutionary Leaders group spearheaded by Deepak Chopra. Wikipedia reports: “In August 2010 James was recognized with the honor of ‘Champion of Peace, Reconciliation and Forgiveness’ by the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance. His decades of service work in Social Healing, Restorative Justice, Local and Global Conflict Resolution and Healing has affected countless individuals and communities including those in Israel/Palestine, Rwanda, N. Ireland and other highly sensitive zones.

His woactivities today very much involves working in the area of peace. He has offered training for those working on cultivating peace through The Shift Network and his own practice. He is the author of Creative Stress. He is on the Advisory boards of the World Peace Festival and The Peace Alliance. You can learn more about his work at http://www.jamesodea.com/. James lives in the United States, currently, but he was born in Ireland and was a teenager in London where he attended grammar school and college.

– Russ

Russ: James, I’m wondering if you could give us a sense of your history and how that has brought you to this work that you’re doing today.

James: Yes, thank you, Russ. In some ways it’s an integral map. I started out working in the vice principal’s role in a school in Turkey. I saw the collapse of civil society there and eventually a military takeover. That gave me a passion for and interest in human rights and social order issues. I have had experiences in Beirut during the Israeli invasion and the subsequent internecine fighting and the massacre of the Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. That confirmed my belief that I need to work in this arena of human rights, laws and protection. That work led me to Amnesty International where I was Director of the Washington office of Amnesty for 10 years.

Here I am on a journey being compelled by these external events, these eruptions in civil society, these wars, these massacres and entering into an organization that seeks to end violations and end human rights abuses through public advocacy work, promoting international law, and promoting the prosecution of perpetrators. This is very important.

You know Amnesty’s work is about accountability. Unless there is government accountability for the violations of human rights then abuses are going to perpetuate. I was involved in meeting government leaders from around the world, testifying before Congress, meeting United States presidents – all in this effort to bring greater government compliance to and advocacy work for human rights, down to the nitty-gritty of how you get a Convention on torture through the Senate and things like that. And it was really in the later years of working at Amnesty International that I had a pivotal conversation with Jean Houston.

I didn’t know her well, but I had asked her to help me think about the death penalty. Amnesty was doing a report on the death penalty in the United States. She looked at the report and she said, “James, I’m afraid this report will not do much good, because it’s full of the imagery of violence. It is a kind of subliminal moral event for us all that our moral pathways are laid down with this history of violence. You are using that imagery of violence trying to correct that problem. What you need is to tell the story of human becoming. You need to tell the story of human possibilities, not the tragic ending that constantly occurs when humans fail and the prosecution of those who are involved in that failure.”

That was a powerful message for me, because it really went deep. I began to speak about the possibilities and think about them. But I was also still centrally a human rights activist. That is work where you’re trying to solve the world’s problems through interventions and laws and so forth, rather than the interior psycho-spiritual, emotional dimensions. Eventually, I said to people that I ran out of moral outrage after 10 years of everyday trying to rescue people from the torture slab and intervene to stop killings and so on…

Russ: Up to that time you had witnessed quite a bit of evidence of man’s inhumanity to man.

James: Indeed! When I left Amnesty there was a little bit of the pendulum swing. I became the Executive Director of the Seva Foundation, which does service and health work, blindness prevention and things that are really tangible benefits, again looking at how do we help humanity? Seva helped create the blindness prevention system in Nepal and one of the major blindness hospitals in India. In very concrete and tangible ways it had a major impact on speaking about the deeper ways to create that expertise in countries where it didn’t exist in order to do cataract surgery and then produce their own optical lenses and so forth. This was at the time when I started to ask myself the question that was not asked in Amnesty: How do we get to the root causes? This was the 50^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I was pondering that.

What are the causes to interruptions of our rights, our civil and political rights and even our economic, social and cultural rights? What is the cause of this wounding and these patterns of violation? I had some conversations with then President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Wink Franklin, and people at the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer asked me to host a meeting around this topic, which I called The Spirit of Human Rights.

So here I am now with my own integral journey looking to find in the inner realm what I can’t find in the outer realm. That began a whole series – many, many years – of dialogue funded and supported by the Fetzer Institute. I invited Dr. Judith Thompson, who founded Children of War and is a deeply spiritual person herself, to co-host these dialogues with me.

We really began to explore the experiences of torture survivors with people involved in the front lines of human rights. We explored how did we get so wounded as a species that we could do those kinds of things? Where does the pattern of wounding begin? We began to talk in terms of moving out of a paradigm of right versus wrong – of finding the perpetrators and prosecuting them as an inadequate way of addressing the scale of these problems and their root causes – and moving to a wounding-healing paradigm. One then begins to look not only at the actions and the behaviors of the perpetrators, but also at the psycho-spiritual and emotional dimensions of the perpetrator’s inner a life to see where the perpetrator is wounded and where the perpetrator is morally wrong. It was in that dialogic work that I began to have a deeper appetite to explore the whole nature and realm of human consciousness and the intergenerational transmission of our values, of our worldviews and our hurts, wounds and unskillfulness.

Then I became present of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization that explores the nature of human consciousness and our capacities. I saw there the new science and the emergence of the science that says that, indeed, it is not a Darwinian version of reality when you look at the deepest contemporary signs that were designed. We have, of course, fight and flight mechanisms, but we live longer, healthier, more adaptive lives when we’re altruistic and  empathic, when we’re relational. That then led me into a kind of a deep synthesis of those other elements of activism and work in the world with the inner exploration of wounding-healing consciousness in the latest healing paradigms. So the peace work that I do is really a synthesis of those worlds.

Russ: I’ve heard you talk about your experience in Rwanda. It seems to me that it’s very easy for us to be cynical and to feel as though we are at a loss when it comes to trying to promote peace or trying to deal with the level of violence in the world. The account that I have heard you give of Rwanda opened my eyes to a really important culture-based approach to dealing with the aftermath of such violence that I thought was quite extraordinary. Would you share that with us?

James: The context in which I was doing work in Rwanda was around those years of dialogue. We called on the spirit of human rights for compassion and social healing. We really picked up from Jean Paul Lederach’s [Professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame – Ed.] work on social healing as an emerging concept. All of the work we see in mind body health approaches we can use to begin to look at the social body and the social field and how do we heal the intergenerational transmission of wounds. This context is important because I’m in Rwanda looking at how societies heal from trauma. Social healing work is a multi-disciplinary approach – it’s really an integral approach – that looks at the psychological work, the inner worldview and belief systems, and the outer structural realities of power and social order and how they interface in ways that can, in fact, help societies recover.

In the case of Rwanda – thank goodness that there was a powerfully conscious leadership that came in after the genocide and took what happened in South Africa to the next level. This is why when you compare South Africa and Rwanda at the current time you see South Africa still has a lot of criminality and violence, levels of violence that are much much less in Rwanda. People are talking about Rwanda now as the Switzerland of Africa. This is not to say it doesn’t have huge problems, but there was intentionality in the government to go all the way through with the reconciliation process which of course has its cornerstone in truth.

I think your question was around the utilization by the government of an indigenous, tribal, local, rural justice approach called Gacaca.

Gacaca really means “on the grass”. It refers to that village tribal system where elders in the community or those who were respected in the community in various ways – up to five of them – would constitute the judicial panel. They would be empowered to call witnesses of either side of an issue. In the Gacaca process anyone in the village is able to attend and anyone is able to speak. I was given special permission by the government to attend the Gacaca trials relating to the genocide. It was deeply inspiring to see that every voice could be heard. What a remarkable idea! It stuns me now why we don’t have that element in the justice system that anybody who wants to may speak and anybody in the village who wants to can ask questions.

Of course they have to ask timely and short questions and they can’t go on. There’s a way of controlling that, but it gives everyone the voice. Everyone participates with this sense of growing drama as the truth is wrestled with. An idea may come to someone in the village and they will put their hand up: “But hasn’t this person seen that if they were at the corner at 3:00 the men with the machetes were there and they were congregating that hour already?” – some very important detail that struck them. Maybe it has struck everyone else in the room before hand and maybe I hasn’t. But there is that sense of  an organism of truth – that it takes all, it takes a community wrestling and finding out what is the truth. Amnesty International actually has complained that there aren’t enough judicial protections in the Gacaca system. But I found it deeply inspiring. I really felt over the day long process that I was involved in that there was a gathering momentum of irreversible truth. A sense of this is really the truth we’re getting at here.

90,000 people have been processed in Rwanda in these Gacaca rural courts. What happens is that if someone who is the presumed guilty party is cooperating with the truth – which in the Gacaca case I saw they were not – if the truth is fully revealed and everybody says that’s how it happened, that’s where it was, that’s who was involved, then the judicial panel can recommend community service work or work related to rebuilding structures that were burnt down or other service. In the case of somebody who is resisting the truth, but the truth comes out, they can then say that they need stiffer prison sentences. In some cases they will find the situation so intractable and potentially so much bigger in terms of the crimes that were committed that they’ll refer them back to formal courts and the judicial process.

So there are certain kinds of nuances and safeguards, but nonetheless it is about communities and societies participating in truth recovery and understanding. From one of the cases I heard a man – when he was asked why did you do this crime against your neighbor – said, “Because the government was telling me. I was listening to the radio and the government was telling me these are cockroaches. They need to be exterminated. They’re to be repelled from our society, so I was really following the orders of my government.”

Russ: How did the court respond to that? Did they treat that as a justifiable defense?

James: Yes. That happened throughout the Gacaca process. For people who were perpetrators it was part of their waking up process. It was part of their becoming conscious that in fact they were in an authoritarian structure in relationship to their government and the new paradigm was that you didn’t have to be in that subservient relationship. You could participate in society in the formation of democracy. So this was not treated as a singular justification, but as part of people understanding that people thought they were doing the right thing for their government.

Russ:  I would imagine it would be easy to romanticize an experience like that or a system like that. There would be social pressures. Especially if we’re talking about rural and small tribal based communities, family based communities, that when the truth was out that it would have some sort of social repercussions, even if there was not a prison sentence or other punishment to go with it.

James: Right! It would have potentially very divisive consequences, unless you had a form of consciousness that was not oriented to reactive punitive approaches. This gets us into a question of worldview, doesn’t it? Because, if you look at the West and you look at the United States, the United States imprisons 1/3 of the people on planet Earth who are in a prison or a jail. There is a worldview here that believes in punishment and believes less and less in rehabilitation. In the 60s there was some bold initiatives in rehabilitation approaches that were quite successful, but more and more we came to hear the view of three strikes and you were out and corporations getting the right to run prisons for profit.

And there is something from a more indigenous perspective. You see it in Native American tribal courts. They are much more oriented towards rehabilitation, to healing the social wound, to restoring the balance. The very word heal means to restore wholeness, means to make whole again. And so I love that in our global evolutionary process it isn’t a one-way street with one corner of the world going out as missionaries to say that this is how you all shall evolve and this is the truth, but rather an evolutionary process. It is a complex equation in which we have to learn how to synthesize the best wisdom of each of these ways of cultural knowing – the indigenous ways and the more reason-based approach.

I saw this very vividly in my work with the Seva Foundation. Seva is a Sanskrit word for service, by the way. The Foundation was started by people like Ram Das. We came across  traditional healers in Nepal who were having a big problem with cataract blindness, because they didn’t know how to cure it. There was a lot of social pressure on them. “Oh, you’re the healers; heal our blindness.” In some cases they were using thorns to scrape out the cataract and we came along to the traditional healers and said, “Don’t use the thorns; that’s going to permanently blind a person. We have a really good approach to taking out that cataract; in fact we can do it in a few minutes with skillful Western surgery. But we want you there for the healing of the other parts of the person that we can’t get to. That’s not part of our culture. You are wise and deeply knowledgeable about that.”

And so we created this collaboration where the traditional healers would actually help locate the cataract patients and help bring them in. Then, after the surgery was done, they would do their kind of medicine work. It was a deep collaboration of the traditional and the shamanic with the Western science. I believe that in our evolutionary process we can in fact have a creative convergence of those two. And that’s also integral mapping, because it’s skillful outer surgery and that inner process wherever it occurs that needs to come together.

Russ: That’s wonderful! What strikes me about the Nepal example is that it’s an example of Western and traditional approaches being integrated. But I’m wondering if there’s an example in Western societies where traditional is influencing the Western approach to healing, to peace, to social justice and the like. Can you think of an example of that?

James: Well, I do think that in the emergence of alternative medicine and integrative medicine –  sometimes referred to as integral medicine – is an example. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences we did a volume called Consciousness & Healing: An Integral Approach to Mind-Body Medicine. You see in that story that there has been a contribution of the shamanic; there has been a contribution of those who would say there is a spiritual dimension to healing. We know that changing beliefs activates our positive genes. This was how the traditional healers dealt with belief and intentionality. They didn’t call it so, but I do think that in the path to healing there is that connection. There’s also the path that we learn from indigenous societies about the participation of the whole whether it’s in the justice system or in the healing process.

You know we don’t heal in the fast lane. We don’t heal alone. We’re definitely relational beings. The more that our communities or our family systems or local networks participate with us in our healing process, the faster we heal.

Russ: Interesting. I’m talking to you from Tucson, Arizona, the home of Andrew Weil and the integrative medicine program and actually my doctor is an integrative medicine trained physician, so that’s a wonderful example. I hear very clearly and so I’m sure will anybody reading this interview the strong spiritual orientation that you have. You’re even living in a part of the United States where there seems to be a convergence of spiritual energy. Could you tell us a bit about your spiritual journey?

James: Yes. I was born a Roman-Catholic in south of Ireland and I think it provided me with this very good fundamental training to be brought up in that tradition. I once had a conversation with Mary Catherine Bateson, who as you know is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and she had done some study of how people transmit religion and spirituality within family structures. She was saying that it decidedly helps to have some kind of structure when you’re growing up and then you can leave that structure. Maybe it can become your training wheels or whatever, but she was saying that in family structures where there was no tradition there was very little evidence that the children picked up any kind of deeper spirituality transmissions in their own lives.

For me earlier on, the really deepest spiritual impulse was in the path of service. Certainly even as a teenager I was shedding any structures around guilt and things like that. I received an award in London as a teenager: I was Teenager of the Year, because I had organized young people to investigate the condition of senior citizens in the whole part of London. Then we reported out the failings of the social welfare system. It was that sense, that impulse to compassionate action, that was certainly there and a certain kind of activism that formed earlier that was an expression of that. I shudder now at the arrogance I had then, but maybe it was appropriate for a teenager.

I got so much attention as Teenager of the Year that the head of the Welfare Authority in London wrote me a letter saying, “It seems as if you have many issues to discuss concerning the welfare system in London on our treatment of senior citizens. I would appreciate it if you would come in and discuss these matters with me personally.” This was quite an honor for a teenager to be invited in, but my response was in a letter, “You know what you have to do and when you do it we can meet.” Now of course, I would be up for dialogue. In some sense it was the connection of spirituality to social service and karma work that led me on. I was deeply influenced by Sufism and its emphasis on opening the heart and really exploring the dimensionality of the heart. I love the fact that contemporary science in the last 20 years has discovered that the heart is so much more than a mechanical pump.

I’m invited to a meeting next year in Rome about second axial spirituality that holds the theory of the axial ages, that there was an axial age of spiritual significance in the 500 to 700 years before the birth of Christ. There we had the Buddha and Lao Tzu. We had a whole explosion of spirituality across different aspects of the planet about self-realization, the path to illumination, the work of loving thy neighbor and the path of service and so on. And now theologians and theorists in this domain are saying that it seems that conditions are ripe for a second axial age. And what does that constitute? It constitutes the end of dogmatic superiority, the end of any kind of notion that we have the truth, because global conditions, the knowledge explosion and the reality of how we live cannot support exclusivist truth claims by various religious parties.

And so the second axial age is about inter-spirituality, the communion of spiritual beings with each other, the co-teaching, co-mentoring, co-feeding each other. That does require that at certain times we take our own paths of rigorous practice and follow those not in an exclusivist way. The other dimension of spirituality, the second axial thinking around spirituality, seems somehow bereft of relevance if it’s not also addressing new forms of social justice and ecological awareness. And so as you mentioned I have come to live in a place that is hopefully a better mirror of the values I seek in Crestone, Colorado, where ecology, community and spirituality are central.

Some 30 years ago land was donated here to the spiritual traditions of the world. The basis on which the land was donated was that each tradition had to show a lineage of transmission. So you have the Carmelites, the Hindu Ashrams, Zen Buddhist monastery, Tibetan Buddhist Center, Sri Aurobindo Centre. It is less New Age, yesterday’s pop up angels kind of spirituality, which I should not in any way cast aspersions on, but there is a sense of spiritual depth here and in that depth they tend to explore the connection between these spiritual practices and revelations.

Russ: What really impresses me is that as all of these aspects of the spiritual journey are integrated. This seems to resonate very strongly with the notion of the path that is not just about the inner journey but also about making it real and making a difference.

James: Yes! I would say, Russ, that’s an excellent example that somehow spirituality is not about finding the escape route from a planet of suffering, but embodying the antidote, the medicine, so that we can experience the beauty revealed in existence. It’s a pernicious apparition that we  have looked upon a deity that said. “You know you shall be sent to this place full of suffering, but don’t worry. There’s an excellent escape route and I  hope you find it.” It dismisses the purpose of suffering in itself. In this spirituality that we talk about there’s a transcendent reality and there is an imminent reality. We can see both.

Russ: You are a part of the Evolutionary Leadership group that Deepak Chopra was instrumental in forming. Is the Evolutionary Leadership activity that you’re involved with there at all in that bodhisattva tradition or is it different from that?

James: I think the Evolutionary Leaders group at this point has been really more focused on mutual exploration and support and the attempts at mapping together what is emerging. It has not taken on major new tasks. It is more of a sharing and support group at this point

Russ: Have there been any significant takeaways for you from that experience?

James: It’s very, very rich, but at the same time my work is essentially about busting the myth of the average person: that there is no average person and so we’re all part of a unique creation and unique perspective and unique design and that we’re interrelated and interdependent. I see it is the so-called average people who cause me to fall to my knees in awe of them when others violated or tortured them or murdered their children. I like the intellectual and social dimension of the Evolutionary Leaders group, but I look to my real spiritual path in the heart of humanity.

Russ:  James thank you so much. We owe gratitude for the work you are doing. I hope that one of the things your message brings is that there is hope and that we don’t have to be stuck in pessimism and feelings of loss and despair, that there is a potential for peace, for caring, for love, for a generational future for humanity.

James: Yes, Russ, thank you. I would say that my work really leads me to believe that the healing capacities of humanity are part of evolutionary emergence that I’ve been privileged to witness in the darkest and most difficult places – the emergence of this capacity and hopefully its emergence as a species wide phenomenon. Yes, I am deeply hopeful about our future.

Graham Ward

Graham Ward

According to one theory of screenwriting, there are seven basic plots. Any book you read, play you attend or film you watch, will likely fall into one of these archetypal narratives. So what are these plots that so easily define our human condition? There are rebirth (Silas Marner), tragedy (Macbeth) and comedy (Arms and the Man), likely to be familiar to most. Slaying the monster (most James Bond movies) rags to riches (Oliver Twist) voyage and return (Alice in Wonderland) and the hero’s quest (Indiana Jones) make up the balance.

People’s lives also typically follow a narrative arc, albeit complicated. Much of this narrative is driven of course our personal background. Who does not know the poor boy that scrambled over from the wrong side of the tracks overcoming the odds to make his fortune? More subtly, picture an executive, once bullied at school, now plotting his way to the boardroom by destroying those who get in his way. We see people sometimes who, irrespective of their efforts, are subject to the vagaries of ill fortune playing out in a tragic life. On the other hand we observe people who we might consider as spiritual beings, driven to a life of service or love.  Many of us embody a number of these different complex stories.

Yet we are arguably the authors of our own scripts. We are free thinking rational beings that can, if we choose, self-actualize, moving towards an ideal path. We don’t if born poor, after all, have to go after the money. For those who fail to monitor their own stories, that rags to riches narrative might end up as a tragedy, in the graveyard of workplace stress. There is nothing endemically heroic about rebuilding your parents’ bankrupt family business if in the end you are miserable. Do we not owe it to ourselves to choose happiness? Sometimes, like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show, we might have a feeling that the die is cast, and that we are locked into a world we did not create. Other people behave as though they are on a metaphorical train hurtling down a track to a predestined terminus. In order to take control of our destiny and to create alternative destinations some of us may need an external intervention.

For some years I have been researching a group coaching intervention developed by the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre at the eponymous business school in France. The intervention involves putting a group of four or five executives through a day and a half of intensive group coaching, using a psychodynamic framework as the basis. When the faculty noticed, back in 2003, that this intervention was not only receiving rave reviews from the coachees, but also was getting some astonishing results, I started to look into it in more detail. The findings will be published shortly and the full details of how the process unfolds can be found in the chapter I wrote entitled “Something from Nothing”for the book “The Coaching Kaleidoscope”, published in 2009.  There are, for the coaching practitioner, a few salutary lessons which when exercised with skill can help clients immeasurably to live more fruitful lives.

It is here I will return to my earlier analogy. It is said, in movie circles, that “character is action under pressure.” In any great story, the central character, hero or villain needs to be put under pressure, squeezed to make a decision. When we watch a movie unfold the critical scene is usually when the protagonist reaches a decision point. All the bad movies you ever watched fudge that critical issue. Either the decision was not relevant to the story or no decisions were reached. Those stories are the ones that have you leaving the movie theatre disappointed, ruing the price of the popcorn. In our group coaching process we try to move each individual coachee to a point of decision, a tipping point. How do we arrive there?

We put a number of things at stake to reach that point. Initially we ask the coachees to draw an image-based self-portrait, containing a number of different dimensions, on large flip chart sheets with multiple colors. These dimensions include things like the past, images of work and leisure and gut feelings. When combined, the portraits tend to make interesting viewing. The coachees however go a stage further in these sessions relating their back-story, key decisions in life, family history and roles. The group becomes immersed in this story and takes time to question and reflect back some of what they hear. When this is adequately explored, we move to the present. Using a 360-degree leadership instrument called the Global Executive Leadership Inventory as a proxy for a courageous conversation, the coach debriefs the coachee on the 360 findings paying particular attention to the qualitative remarks. The coach then turns back to the coachee and asks for their agenda: in the light of everything they have learned from the instrument and the other commentary, what are they minded to do?

What happens next is unusual in coaching. Once the coachee has set their agenda, we place a chair away from the main group and turn it to face in the opposite direction, seating the coachee in it. We then invite the group to spend 15 to 20 minutes discussing the case: what are their fantasies, worries, thoughts or advice given the nature of what they heard. This displacement of the coachee has a powerful effect. The group works to understand where the coachee truly is, exploring the effects of his or her possible mindsets, values, goals and capabilities. Because the coachee is sitting a little apart, the group typically feels more at liberty to open up. People talk as if the coachee was not there. The rule is that the coachee can listen to, but not participate in, this creative dialogue. Moreover, this arrangement precludes the opportunity for debate or defensiveness from the coachee. Of course they are usually feverishly taking notes. This is the moment of pressure. By the end of this intense session our protagonist usually has all the information they need to make a decision as to how they wish to move forward. We pose them the question “whom do you want to become?”

What we have noticed is that the effect can be very powerful. Often the coachee is astonished by the feedback from the room. They are surprised that so many people who barely know them are able to provide such insightful links and interpretations in such a short time. We invite the coachee to make a few high-level reflections and illuminate what resonated most strongly. They then select a person from the room whom they would like to be their support and learning partner and we then ask them to formulate an action plan, which they have 24 hours to prepare. Naturally they stay in the group session, contributing, until everyone has been through the process. Each person has time to ruminate on what they have heard. We are interested to see twenty four hours later, what has stuck.

In these group sessions we witness a number of archetypes coming to the fore. As in a good story there is usually an antagonist, a supporter, friend, joker or rival in the group. The important point is there is broad diversity of opinion. When facilitated well, coachees move a long way in their two-hour session. The combination of drawing, narrating, exploring the self and receiving some coaching from the group leads to a kind of cognitive restructuring. It has three key ingredients: The psychodynamic exploration of the self leads to holistic reflection. The coaching provides a future orientation – a commitment with the implicit acknowledgment that the coachee knows what it is they need to do. The change occurs from a combination of group pressure and group support. All that is needed is a group of peers who find themselves at the same transition point, a skillful coach and a desire to do something new.

Introvert or extrovert, we all need other people to provide context. It goes without saying that any good drama needs a cast. And as human animals, we are given to cooperation, collaboration and grouping. It starts in the family and is thematic through life. What could be more natural than working with a group when we need help? Yet it is not an easy construct to access. What I learned as I researched the key ingredients to this powerful intervention was that, empirically, group therapy works, individual therapy works and coaching works. When you combine aspects of these three disciplines in an intensive short term coaching process, then they still apparently work, and rather well. By going through this process, thousands of executives have self-authored new chapters in their stories, charting courses to different destinies. If we believe in the power of the group, we coaches can help people navigate paths to happier more fulfilled lives.

About the Author

Graham Ward is Adjunct Professor of Leadership at INSEAD Business School in France and director of the Kets de Vries Institute, a global leadership development consultancy based in London. His work involves development of CEO’s, country heads and members of executive committees of multinational companies. He is an executive coach and co-author of Coach and Couch, The Psychology of Making Better Leaders (2007) and The Coaching Kaleidoscope (2010) as well as two academic articles. He is a coaching practice director of the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre. From 2000-2003 he was head of leadership development for the Equities Division at Goldman Sachs in London. His remit was the development of senior managers, succession planning and diversity across three geographies. Graham joined Goldman Sachs in 1987 and from 1994-2000, was co-head of European equity trading in London. He holds an MSc from INSEAD/HEC in Clinical Organizational Psychology and is a PhD student of the same at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. He is based in Stockholm. graham.ward@insead.edu

Nick Shannon

Anthony Grayling

Anthony Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Until 2011 he was

Nick Shannon

Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are “The Good Book”, “Ideas That Matter”, “Liberty in the Age of Terror” and “To Set Prometheus Free”. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian newspaper and now writes a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the “Thinking Read” column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine.

In addition, he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, the Patron of the United Kingdom Armed Forces Humanist Association, a patron of Dignity in Dying, and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He has served as a Trustee of the London Library and a board member of the Society of Authors. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Booker Prize judge, in 2010 was a judge of the Art Fund prize, and in 2011 the Wellcome Book Prize. He supports a number of educational charities and is a sponsor of Rogbonko School in Sierra Leone.

Nick Shannon (NS): My interest in talking with you today really came from listening to you give a presentation to the Oxford University Society a few weeks back. I suddenly became aware of what you are trying to do with the New College of the Humanities (NCH) and the stance you’ve taken on that. It occurred to me that you definitely had something to say about leadership in terms possibly of how people who take leadership positions are educated, and also in terms of the stance you saw NCH taking towards leadership in adult or higher education circles. So I am interested to explore that with you for a little while. I guess you could say also that there’s much, much talk of leadership these days, but rather less talk about how leaders are educated. And so I think this is very timely.

Anthony Grayling (AG):  Good.

NS:  Just to kick off, would you like to say a little bit about the idea behind the NCH and how it arose?

AG:  Well, I had for some time – I mean for more than a decade – been thinking that our higher education system in the UK is no longer quite meeting a need. That need is to send out into the world people whose advanced post-school education has done something rather specific in the way of helping them to reflect on and explore some of the wider horizons that are offered us by the insights and experience distilled in the humanities, by which I mean the best philosophical, literary and historical reflection on the human condition. In the process of acquiring a sense of this, graduates will have been helped to sharpen their ability to think. We always trot out this piety about a university education teaching people how to think. But I mean: to make graduates really questioning, searching thinkers, able to ask very good questions, able to put things into perspective, with many coat-hooks in the mind that they can hang things on so they can hang new ideas on them and see implications and work things through – in short, so that they can be very alert, informed and attentive. Study of the humanities, if conjoined with a vigorous intellectual training, provides people with that broader view and that ability to put things into context – to make sense of things – because they know something of the accumulated experience of humankind. They have, so to speak, eavesdropped on the conversation of mankind about the things that matter and so they are primed and equipped to make sense of them. But what we do in the UK on the whole is that we tend to keep on the narrowing process that starts at age 16 after GCSEs (secondary education examinations), making people do three or four A levels to get to university, and then to do just a single subject at university.

I have always thought that the American model is better because at the college level – the four years of undergraduate study – students do something a bit broader. Some then go on to become academics and specialists or professionals, for example as medics or lawyers. They get a rigorous training in those specialisations at graduate school. I’ve often thought that that is actually the better way to go and, moreover, it reflects the fact that really educated and trained people should have a much longer opportunity, a much longer time getting there. Aristotle studied with Plato for 20 years, which might be a little excessive, but if somebody has gone all the way through a US education and come out as a lawyer or an MBA, they’ve had six to eight years at university level at least.

But the one thing that can be missed in the US undergraduate model is depth and intellectual rigour. It can be a bit pick and mix because students can choose from many different courses. If somehow you could marry that model’s breadth to the depth that we achieve on the Oxbridge tutorial model, you would get the best of both worlds.

Some time ago I suggested to colleagues of mine that we try this, that we broaden the curriculum but make it the case that whatever the person is majoring in is taught very thoroughly through tutorials, which would be time-consuming and demanding on all of us. Even then, 10 years ago the tutorial model was slipping away; universities find it too expensive. Even at Oxford and Cambridge it now tends to be one to two or one to three nowadays. That is a different experience.

So that was the Utopian thing I felt I’d like to do, to make the best of what a post-school advanced education should be like. But the idea didn’t get a hearing, so there was no way forward on that. Then I began to think: well maybe, perhaps, I could do something independently. And I cast around for all the different ways to do that: set up a charitable foundation for education of that kind or start a new college. Eventually I hit on doing it the way that we are in fact doing it, which is to step right outside the publicly funded university system and try to start something afresh.

NS: A number of thoughts occurred to me as you were taking me through that and I have to say I owe a great debt to my tutors at Oxford in psychology and philosophy who, I think, passed on some essence of critical thinking skills. But after all this while, I find it quite hard to pin down what critical thinking skills actually are and certainly reading the psychological literature that doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of a knowledge base in terms of what critical thinking skills consist of.

AG: That’s true.

NS: On that, do you have a particular model or theory of that in your mind?

AG: We do; NCH is developing a course in critical thinking. A number of schools nowadays do this too, devising courses of their own. The main model is to take a text and to explore it or to give students an image and ask them to think about what the image is saying, what implications or assumptions are being made. All these techniques are good and they can certainly be part of a course.

But it’s not possible to be a really critical thinker or to get people to attain a desirable level of competence as a critical thinker without doing a variety of different things. One of these is that they have to know some logic. They’ve got to know the nature of argument, the relationship between premises and conclusions, the difference between deductive and inductive logics and how to evaluate validity in respect of form. They must also know how to spot the informal fallacies, the property of soundness in argument that comes out of the ability to avoid making the kinds of mistakes like equivocation and question-begging.

Knowing logic doesn’t make you a critical thinker, but it provides basic structural facts. So, too, does a knowledge of rhetoric, this being the technique of advocacy and debate in important part turning on understanding the nature of persuasion and the difference between factual and emotive uses of language. On the basis of logic and rhetoric one can begin to acquire the skill of critical thinking through practice, debate and analysis, both as a deliberately pursued set of techniques and as an essential part of study itself.

You can help people to sharpen their skills only if you challenge them with examples and with cases. You get them to explore them, analyze them, deconstruct them, and look at the conceptual framework that the argument or information is coming out of, and get them to examine it.

You challenge their interpretations, you get them to see implications, and you alert them to what is probably the best and richest example of forensic reasoning and that’s in the law. Legal argumentation at a very high level, such as in the Supreme Court, is tremendously interesting and instructive. There one sees the difficulties that people have in definitions and how in real situations where decisions have to be made. We don’t have the luxury of endless philosophical disputation; conclusions are reached.

There are a number of different strategies to put together. It’s a bit like teaching people how to recognize primary colours. All you can do is define them by extension, by pointing at them and saying, “This is an example of yellow; that is an example of red.” and thus just getting people to see what is meant.

Well, in the higher reaches of education, the effort is to get people to see, to get them to pick up by example what it is you are doing when you quiz them on the effort they put in. But if you can make it much more conscious and deliberate and give some of the structural techniques, then students can achieve this more effectively. You couldn’t, for example, write a text book about it and just leave it at that. The text book could only be the bare bones. There is the need for actual practice and the need for a dialectic process that terminates in the student’s coming to have that skill.

NS:  And I think that answers a question for me around why do this in the old fashion way with tutorials and face to face meetings when you could do something these days online and delivery is much much cheaper, people simply sit at home as I am now. Is that the way you see it? Do you see this model being taken up in a world where technology dominates and delivery of education through the Internet seems to be taking over?

AG:  If education shifts exclusively to the electromagnetic means of delivery, you would lose something tremendously important. It’s not just an old fashioned piety on my part. I think you have got to have personal contact, face to face, and to be there, be present, because at the very highest quality level of education there is something about the transmission of a skill which requires catching a nuance, recognizing a moment or having an opportunity to latch onto an idea, a meaning, which at that level is the crucial point. You’ve got to have that personal opportunity to do it; you can’t do it if you are not actually there in the same room. It would otherwise be a bit like trying to teach somebody to do surgery online.

You have a camera and the person is watching on screen. But somehow they are going to miss that glistening or that swelling or that little bubble of blood, which to the practiced surgical eye is an indication of something deeply significant. When they see it they can say “Did you see that? When you see that happen, this next thing is going to happen”. Somehow it’s those nuances that help you to genuine understanding. I am trying to convey the sense that there is something in this great, great tradition of ours – the educational tradition – where the key things somehow manifest themselves and can’t be said. They can only be shown.

NS: That makes it sound very visceral and almost that one needs all the senses in order to teach and to learn.

AG: That is so, but primarily of course it’s the intellectual sense. I think the best metaphor is that of music. The dynamic of music is such that there are important passages that are played very, very quietly and some that are very loud. To catch the quietest passages you do best to be there in the orchestra. If you are listening on the car radio, much of that nuance would be lost, or if you were listening online some of the subtlety and quality will be lost.

I know that to some people this will sound like special pleading in favour of saying that education has to retain something of its traditional form in order to be really high class. And the point you just made about the cheapness and the breadth of reach of online education is terribly attractive, especially for example when you think about providing educational opportunities to people in developing countries. It’s a brilliant way of doing it. Of course you could do quite a lot of the fundamentals – basic literacy and numeracy can be done in that way, indeed, could be done even better because with graphics and animation you can help people get a better grasp of arithmetic. But here we are talking about people reflecting about and examining complex ideas and arguments and seeking the kind of insights that come through the study of history and literature. That, I think, needs something different; there’s a much greater need for intellectual intimacy in that.

NS: Very interesting, thank you. Can I move on just a bit to talk about the project? It’s quite a big thing to start an educational organization from scratch, even if you do have a model and quite a bit of time to think about it and to plan it. How do you see the project going so far and what has it been like for you?

AG: It’s going very well. We are right in the middle now of tightening all the nuts and bolts: things like signing leases on property and contracts with our full time academic and administrative staff. We thought we would start getting student applications early in 2012 and begin the process of interviewing students during that winter and spring. But we’ve already had scores of applications and we’re well into the interview process. Indeed we’ve already awarded our first scholarships and exhibitions, which we offer because no educational institution at any level should exist exclusively on ability to pay. We are so structured that nearly 25% of our student places will be supported, either fully on scholarships, with no fee to pay, or very deeply discounted – about the equivalent of the lowest level fee for mainstream universities from next year onwards, about £6900. We are hoping to increase that to over 30% of our student body.

I see NCH as the acorn of which Harvard is the oak tree. It will take us a bit of time to get near the endowment they’ve got of 20 billion dollars. But once we’ve got a big endowment we will be able to support even more of our students. We are just in the process now of organizing our final structure into three linked entities. There’s the college itself. which is not-for-profit. There is a charitable trust to raise funds for student support and there is a service company that provides the college with all its services, and will provide services to other institutions if they commission them.

I have already appointed key staff for most of the subject areas and everything is going swimmingly. We take our first students in September next year. The key thing all along has been to find and appoint good people – the right people – and to let them get on with it. That is one essential aspect of leadership; the other is vision.

On that first aspect of leadership I think it involves recognizing the quality in other people, giving them their heads, letting them make their mistakes, giving them the opportunity to find their way to doing what you picked them to do. Generally speaking, you find that if you trust people and they feel that they have some ownership of what they are doing. They’ve got your support – and your generous understanding that all things human are fallible – then they will do their best for you. I am surrounded by people who are doing fantastic jobs. I sit back in admiration and let them get on with it.

NS: Yes, the euphemism that’s touted in business goes something like “Get the right people on the bus and then you will head off in the right direction.”

AG: That’s definitely true.

NS: It just occurred to me hearing you say that you had a very clear idea of what your role is in this project. I was wondering if you might say a little bit about how far you see that continuing.

AG: Well, there are different chapters to this story. One is to formulate the concept and then to go out and find people who will see what you are trying to do. When I started this off I realized that I was going to have to start from scratch. I began to speak to people who might be potential supporters of the project, because obviously you have got to raise more than start up money. You have to raise funds that will see the project right through. If you are going to take students you have got to see them through to their degrees. It’s got to be something that stands up. You have got to have enough funding for this right from the onset.

But also it struck me as being tremendously important that the funders should be the right funders. Early on in this process, I was offered, on four separate occasions by four separate corporates, all the money I needed and more. On the very first day that I went to speak to possible investors I was offered everything, but it was by a big corporation. I said to them, “Look, there is a concept here, an ethos that I want to develop, a way of doing this, and I would need a lot of autonomy, I don’t want it being interfered with”. And they said “Absolutely; you know our problem is to find people like that, to find people who we can appoint and let them get on with it. That’s our difficulty; it is not that we will be constantly looking over your shoulder.”

But when I went away and pondered a bit about it, I thought “Hang on a second, this is probably not going to work like that. Apart from anything else, to be seen as to some extent what happened in the early furore when we announced the college – as a kind of get rich quick scheme. Or, to be part of the corporate sphere would mislead people as to what I’m trying to do, which is a serious educational thing.” So I chose not to go that route. What I wanted was to get individual investors who see the point and want to stick with it, who will be in for the long term; who understand what the idea is. It took about a year to get together a team of just such people, high net worth individuals with a great interest in education. They are tremendously supportive.  There is an element of investment in an individual and his idea, which is very heartening. And when I got them together that was Chapter One.

Chapter Two is the setup. The setup needs efficient managerial people who can do the job of dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s. Chapter Three is having my academic staff around me to have my conversation with them about what I want from them and what I want for the students. All these chapters are now fully in process. Chapter four is the arrival of the students and the real beginning of what we are all about.

What I want to achieve on behalf of the students, but in partnership with them, is that when they graduate they will really have acquired a tremendous amount of added value. The value will be for them personally, in the sense of an intellectual and individual enrichment affecting the way they see themselves and the world around them; and in the sense also – and this is equally important – of readying them for greater achievement in life and work. Success in these latter respects makes life all the more worthwhile, and all the better as a platform for doing good to and for others. Education in the fullest sense is about enrichment of the whole person and his or her whole life: that is what it is a preparation for.

And I said to the academics that I’ve appointed,  “In the ordinary academic set up, your contract says you are going to do a third teaching, a third researching, and a third administration. I’m going to release you from admin. Although I want you to do research because I think academic teachers ought to be busily engaged with their subject and writing about it, I don’t want you to be on the hamster wheel of a research assessment exercise. You don’t have to produce two research papers every three years. You can take 20 years over a great book if you like, but if you are researching in the subject that you profess and love then that’s fine by me: you divide your time between that and teaching.  That is what the life of the mind should be about; it should be about finding out stuff, and engaging with and learning from your students as well.

“So I liberate you from admin, I pay you a bit more than you get paid in an ordinary university, I liberate you from the research assessment exercise, and I say: teach and research. But, on the teaching front I really want you to take it seriously. I want you to be dedicated. I want you to remember your own best teachers – the people who made a difference to you, who inspired you. Try to be like that, really put some muscle into it.”

Far too few people who teach at universities are like that. There are some really dedicated teachers and they are admirable. Teaching is a noble calling. Dedicated teachers are worth their weight in gold. They are the sort of people I am looking for in my staff, and I think I have found them.

Likewise, I want to encourage the students and say to them, “This is a tremendous opportunity. Take it! Really, really take it!” There are lots of aspects to this opportunity and I’ll talk to the students about them. I’ll talk to them about maintaining a lively interaction with us so that if they get downhearted, as anyone might, or if they’re struggling with the work, they must always come and talk, because it is a kind of a partnership. I aim always to keep the college small, about 1000 students when topped out in a few years time, so that there can be this collegiate model, the very best of which is that we are all together. We are all working at this great endeavor that is moving forward and developing and maturing. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have bright young people between the ages of 18 and 21 and to partner with them in the development of their minds.

I am sounding very idealistic here, no doubt, but I’m highly interested in this process and I think it can be done. You can turn people out who have had their capacities, abilities and talents enhanced and enriched, and who will go on to make significant contributions in their lives and endeavours.

NS: Well I think that’s a wonderful vision and, as a psychologist interested in human development the combination of challenge and support is one that I see is vital for students. So it sounds to me that the first year students will be a very exciting bunch of people and there will be a very exciting culture in the place.

AG: All the more so because the people who are coming to us, who are signing up for what is a new venture that has not been without controversy, are pioneering in spirit. It is very interesting in them. We set our entrance level very high, at three As. We are keen on people who have done pre-Us, the IB, or extended projects in the 6^th form, that kind of thing – showing independence of mind. In the applications we are receiving, we have been getting students at that standard or better, which is absolutely thrilling. The idea of having the kind of students that I had when I taught at Oxford – quite frankly I think I was as much educated by them as they were by me, because it was so stimulating to hear their essays and to discuss ideas with them. They were a hardworking bunch and I think they were so because they responded to my enthusiasm. You always get something back from students, which is really stimulating.

NS: I wonder if we can move on a little bit since you’ve talked quite a lot about your leadership role in this project. I would like to talk a little bit more about leadership in a philosophical sense, since leadership is these days touted as the solution to all of our problems, whether economic or ecological, political or social. You talk enthusiastically about philosophy as one vehicle in educating peoples’ minds. Do you see that in some way as contributing to better leadership?

AG: I think education certainly does. It needn’t just be philosophy, but I do think that wrestling with some of the big questions does have a good effect. It makes you confident once you’ve been out there in the far reaches of thought; it’s like paddling a long way out on a surf board and then you come back in again and the closer inshore waters seem much more manageable. But it’s also history, literature. It’s the law, economics, politics, international relations. It’s psychology – all these different pursuits are informative in both senses of that term: informative in the sense that they provide information; they provide a perspective; they provide material for further reflection and recognition; and informative in the sense of shaping and structuring the intellect. I earlier employed the notion of ‘coat hooks in the mind’. If you have got one coat hook you can hang only one or two coats on it, but if you have lots of coat hooks, you can hang lots of things on them. They will make sense to you as you encounter them in the world because there is a place for them to connect in your mind.

So being informed in the sense of being equipped with a knowledge of theories, views, practices – that is very very important. But the other sense of being informed is shaping, as the etymology of the term tells you – you in-form something, you put a form into something. It’s like placing a pastry cutter onto the raw dough on the kitchen table to give it a shape. And that happens with people. People come to you with their native abilities and capacities and their level of intelligence. You can have highly intelligent people who know nothing because they have had no opportunity to learn. And there are people who have learned masses, but they’ve got no intelligence. Intelligence is a kind of nimbleness in being able to move things around, to put things into connection and see those connections, see implications. As a teacher you help that business of informing or shaping a way of thinking.

Whatever it is that people do as their main subject, you get them to see that it’s something that they can apply. They can apply their subject to new situations or to their daily avocations. That’s where the value of education lies. It is a sort of broadening. I liken it to taking people up to a vantage point to see the view. The wider the view the more you can put things into context and make sense of the geography that you look out over. This is why leaders have to be educated in that sense. We all know the cliché about leaders and managers in which managers operate the machinery as it is and leaders see the direction that it’s all got to go in, anticipate new challenges, or consider alternatives.  All those sorts of mental and personality skills are ones that I think a really good education provides.

NS: That’s very interesting because it’s taking us into the area of having the motivation and the confidence to put these tools and this learning to work. That’s not always something that people end up with at the end of their education. It seems to me that’s something over and above what most schools and universities try to achieve.

AG: You identify something really important there. One thing you will notice about most of the people you knew at Oxford is that having been there gave them confidence. Confidence is always 98% of the story, isn’t it! You feel that it doesn’t matter if you make a mistake; you are prepared to have a go. That kind of confidence is crucial. A manager, a technician, a person who has been an operator, has been taught how to work the machinery. That doesn’t need confidence because they have got the routine – they have been taught how to do it and they have practiced it. But it’s when you are in new territory, or when you’re taking people somewhere who haven’t been before, or when you have got to try something new or turn something around, or change something or persuade other people that this is how they should be doing things – these are paradigmatically leadership roles where if you didn’t have confidence, if you were timid, if you didn’t believe in yourself, if you didn’t have the chutzpah to have a go at it, you certainly won’t be able to do it, because confidence is a key ingredient.

NS: So I am thinking there that if you see this notion of confidence as becoming more important today than ever before in the sense that, much clichéd, the world is more complex, change occurs more rapidly, but also in connection with what you see as the decline of religion and dogma and the rise of a secular society.

AG: That’s an interesting invitation to make some big connections. It’s a good point that you now raise because of course confidence can seriously spill over into arrogance. People who succeed too often out of confidence can eventually fall off the cliff, because they become over confident. Therefore, confidence always has to be tempered. It always has to be accompanied by judgment and the ability to look in the mirror and to ask oneself some hard questions, though not the kinds of questions that are undermining.

Lack of confidence is the result very often of self observation: Can I do this, aren’t I really making a fool of myself, what happens if I’m wrong, what happens if I make a mistake? That kind of self-monitoring is destructive. Arrogant people don’t have that self-monitoring. They just assume that everybody agrees with them, that they’re the best thing since baked bread.

So, judgment and the capacity for a kind of sober-minded, mature reflection on what it is you are doing, alongside confidence, is important. This is where, in a kind of indirect and oblique way, it touches the fact that the world is becoming much more secular. Religious certainties once gave people a quite different kind of confidence – more than confidence actually. It gave them the sort of certainty that can be all too deadly: they’re absolutely right and everybody else is wrong; if anyone doesn’t step up to the mark he will have to pay the penalty.

Being confident is having a goal, wanting to achieve something that, after reflection and on the basis of good data, you are clear is the right thing to pursue. That is the confidence people have when they have given up on iron-hard certainties and have accepted that we can all make mistakes and that things could shift before we get to the target – but nevertheless they go for it. They are not paralyzed by the fact that it’s all too complicated or too uncertain. Equally, they are not blinded by some of the over-weaning kinds of dogmatic certainties that were once the very framework of the way people thought about the world.

NS: So we are talking here a lot about intellectual tools that enable people to take risk and also give them the sense that their chance is as great as anybody else’s, because they have had debates, they’ve thrashed things through, they’ve talked to very brilliant teachers and they have managed to develop for themselves a kind of platform, if you like, of confidence in their ability to think and solve problems. Is that how you see it?

AG: Exactly, and I suppose the best way to summarize all that is to say that the aim is to develop a certain kind of intellectual personality, one which is sufficiently self-reflective but at the same time capable of acting. It’s not a self-reflection that is self-subversive in any way, but results in a steady nerve once decisions have been made.

People who are not quite sure about what they’re doing or if they will stick with their choices, or will be able to know or sense when they are heading in the wrong direction, or when it’s time to stop or time to pile on the pressure – people who are always uncertain and hesitant about things – are in danger of failing for these very reasons. But similarly people who are arrogant and just barge ahead, who don’t pause to listen or to look around, are also heading for trouble. If they succeed, its going to be out of luck. But the person one admires is the person with steady nerve, a self-reflective person who has a goal in mind, reflects on it, tries to put the elements together to make it work, and then keeps his or her nerve doing it.

It’s quite hard when people are criticizing you when you make a mistake. You know most people are a bit nervous about going along. They come up with all sorts of reasons why you shouldn’t be doing it and tell you all the difficulties you are going to face. If you spend all of your time dwelling only on the difficulties, you are not going to succeed. To be determined is to be the sort of person who has the kind of intellectual personality that allows one to cope, to keep going, to be steady, and to be honest with oneself if one’s intuitions don’t really feel right.

NS: I was reflecting that it’s possibly in the British mindset – I don’t like to stereotype but it’s possibly in the British mindset – to be somewhat fearful and somewhat contemptuous of failure. Perhaps what we are talking about here is a willingness to accept failure as part of the effort of succeeding?

AG: Oh yes – no question about it whatever. If anybody makes up his mind at the very outset to say, if he does fail, “Well I tried and I failed and I think it’s a heck a lot better to have tried than not to have tried”, he has my admiration. How much more pusillanimous is it to say, “I might fail therefore I’m not going to try”.  As you say, that’s so commonplace. I think of Dr. Johnson here: in the first edition of his dictionary he defined the pastern of a horse as its knee – you probably know this example – and of course it’s the horse’s heel. A woman asked him, “Dr. Johnson, why did you define the horse’s pastern as its knee?” and Johnson said, “Ignorance madam, sheer ignorance.”  He was completely unfazed by it.  He just didn’t know, but he put it right when he found out. I think that’s a great attitude and it’s the attitude that people need to have: “I’m going to give it a go, I will give it my damndest and if it fails I will say I tried and I failed.” That’s the way I think about this college.

 NS: Professor, thank you very much. I am tempted just to try to finish off with two questions if I may?  One is do you think this idea of the New College of the Humanities is something that you might have attempted earlier in your career?

AG: I don’t think I could have done it earlier. It was only when I’d got to a certain point that it was possible to attract support for it. I wasn’t well enough known or had done enough, earlier in my career. If I’d gone 20 or 25 years ago to the people who have become the backers of this, they would have said, “Who is this bloke? What does he know and will he be able to do it?” But when you get yourself to a certain point then you can leverage that. If you have some reputation, you can go to people and pitch them your idea. Then, if they believe in you and they can see that you’ve done something and that you can carry through, they are much more prepared to back you. So there is a right time to take an initiative, but one has to be judicious about when that is.

NS: And following on from that, are there ambitions lurking in there somewhere that would surpass even this legacy that you will leave if it is the success that we hope it will be?

AG: One’s life is always a multiple-stranded thing. It’s like a cable with lots of threads wrapped around each other. For me teaching has always been central. Right from the time that I became a university teacher I have done a lot of public lecturing, as well, outside the university and a lot of public discourse all as part of the great thrust to teach – a sort of addiction to teaching in a way. That’s always been one strand and it will continue. I don’t think I would ever want to stop doing that. Being involved in the college project means I can keep doing it until I become incompetent or drop. So that’s brilliant! I won’t have to retire.

But I also have a commitment to lots of other things: I do some human rights work, I’ve got a series of books contracted that I want to write, and have other things to say and do. So one or more of those things might also bear fruit in their way. This year I published The Good Book, a secular bible that I put together in the same way that the religious bible was put together, but with a completely different intention. I speak to you from Portugal in the midst of doing publicity for the Portuguese translation, which has been done beautifully here. So, it’s about keeping pressing on, on all fronts; but central to it is trying to convey a message. It is the collective message of all the people who in the past have been serious-minded about how you might open peoples’ eyes to how they can make their lives good and flourishing. That seems to me to be a good thing to be trying to do.

NS: Indeed! Well, thank you very much. That’s a great note to end on.

Donna Ladkin

From the end of the 1990s to the present, a growing shift can be seen in the leadership literature away from predominantly cognitively-based accounts to those which recognise the emotional (Bono & Ilies 2006), affective (Naidoo, Kohari, Lord & DuBois 2010) and aesthetic (Hansen, Ropo & Sauer 2007; Ladkin 2008) aspects of leadership. Each of these approaches is grounded in an appreciation of leadership as a phenomenon that occurs through the interactions of sensing, perceiving bodies. This article adds to those voices by introducing ideas from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and considers their implications within the leadership context. In particular, this rendering highlights the critical role of embodied perception at the heart of leader-follower relations. Additionally, it introduces Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh”, which provides a new way of thinking about the “between space” in which those relations are enacted.

Though often overlooked, I make the case that highlighting the role bodies play in the enactment of leadership brings new insight into the way that the qualitative experience of leadership is generated. Doing so brings to our attention the fact that bodies are the locale of our felt, sensual response to the world around us, including the multitude of “others” we meet. It is through our bodies that our first judgements of one another are made, including whether or not we trust those purporting to be our “leaders”. There is important and powerful knowing here that is overlooked by more rationally-based accounts.

I begin by briefly considering theories of embodiment before moving on to introduce particular ideas from Merleau-Ponty. These ideas are then explored within the context of leadership through a case study example. The article ends by considering the implications of appreciating embodied cognition and leadership as “flesh” for leadership practice.

Theories of Embodiment

The study of embodiment and the role it plays in learning, cognition, and perception is on the rise, captured by the term “the corporeal turn” (Sheets-Johnstone 2009). Foremost among those writing about embodiment are psychologists and neurologists who are focusing particularly on “embodied cognition”. For instance, Rohrer (2007) suggests there are at least 12 different ways that embodiment can be defined in relation to cognition. The most prevalent one (and the one adopted here) is in its philosophical sense and as a counter to the mind/body split so often identified with Cartesian philosophy. From this point of view, rather than being separate and independent, it is important to recognise the mind as inseparable from the body. This has important implications for our understandings of learning and relatedness, as highlighted by Wilson (2002) who writes that cognitive processes themselves are “deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world . . . [and furthermore that] the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to the physical body that interacts with the world” (625).

A key component of that world is the other people who inhabit it and the roles they take. Gallese (2003) speaks to the issues relevant to individuals taking up leader-follower roles by suggesting that “all kinds of interpersonal relations depend on the constitution of a shared manifold space . . . which furthermore is characterised by automatic, unconscious embodied simulation routines” (517). Closer to the field of management and leadership, Hosking (2011) writes extensively about relationality and what she describes as an “inter-active” space. What these writers allude to, but do not explicate fully, is the role that “felt-sense” – the sensual awareness of the body – plays in generating the experience of this shared, relational space.

Rather than elaborating on how an embodied cognition approach might contribute to our understanding of the role embodiment plays in leader-follower relations, I turn to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to conceptualise the “between space” of leader-follower relations. Many scholars theorising relational leadership agree that relational space arises through perceptions (Murrell 1997; Brower, Schoorman & Tan 2000). However, what is often overlooked is that perception cannot occur without bodies to perceive and to be perceived, a point central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. It is therefore embodiment that is fundamental to perception and is thus highly implicated in the creation of relational dynamics. When followers perceive a leader, they are doing so, literally, from a certain embodied perspective. The perspective arises literally from a particular physical location and the response to the leader is located in the physical body – often spoken about in terms of a “gut feel” reaction and sensory response. Similarly, leaders know their followers through the energetic quality of their engagement – those who rely purely on spoken assertions of “buy-in” often find themselves disappointed!

At a mundane level, the importance of embodied assessment underpins the oft-repeated phrase: “he does (or does not) walk the talk”. This judgement tells of the importance of congruence between what one is saying and what one literally, physically embodies. Studies have long indicated that body language and tone of voice carry more meaning than the actual words used to convey messages (see DeGroot & Motowidlo (1999) for a summary of these studies). If this is the case, why do theories of relational leadership focus so much on minds and words, when other research tells us it is bodies and the sounds they produce that are really attended to in interpersonal communication?

Perhaps one of the reasons is due to the difficulties inherent in conceptualising the role bodies play in creating relational space. As the very basis of our cognition and language, bodies easily disappear from view. The next section introduces key ideas from Merleau-Ponty that offers a conceptual way into this territory.

Enter Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is probably best known for his major early work, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In this text, Merleau-Ponty asserts the “primacy of perception”, arguing that all of the “higher” functions of consciousness, such as reflection and volition, are grounded in “pre-reflective, bodily existence” (Audi 1999: 559). His ideas were developed further in The Visible and the Invisible, an unfinished manuscript at the time of his sudden death in 1961[i]. Together these texts build a philosophy of perception and embodiment that have been unsurpassed in Western philosophy (Leder 1990).

Merleau-Ponty and Embodiment

Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of embodiment is particularly radical by arguing that human bodies are both “immanent” and “transcendent”. Both of these terms have been extensively theorised. Here they are described in the following ways. “Immanence” refers to the material, corporeal flesh and bone aspect of the human body. It is through the immanent body that we experience sensation and are physically present in the world. “Transcendence” refers to those aspects of us that are not material: our intellectual, imaginative and cognitive processes[ii].

Within Western philosophy, certainly since Descartes, the transcendent aspects of being human have been privileged over the immanent aspects. Descartes’ famous pronouncement “cogito ergo sum” (I know myself to be a thinking being) (1988: xxii) has been the touchstone for this emphasis on the thinking, transcendent aspects of being. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy takes a radically different starting point for his understanding of being human – that without the immanent body, our transcendent consciousness would not exist. It is only because we are embodied that we are able to engage in constant interrogation of the world. Dillon (1997) explains this, writing:

I move in response to the demand of things to be seen as they are, as they need to be seen to respond to the reflexive questions that arise between us. The active, constituting, centrifugal role of the body, its transcendental operation is inconceivable apart from its receptive, responsive existence as flesh amidst the flesh of the world. The body does not synthesise the world ex nihilo; the body seeks understanding from the bodies with which it interacts. (146).

This quote highlights the pre-eminent role of the body within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. He suggests that we do not just interrogate the world around us through questioning it intellectually, but that our bodies prompt questions as well as responses to the world around us. We are “nested” in contexts that include relationships with people as well as with the world. Drawing links between this insight and the phenomenon of leadership, it becomes clear that as embodied beings, leaders and followers will first and foremost interact with one another as bodies, rather than as “creators of visions”, “authors of mission statements”, or even “hierarchically-determined sources of authority”.

It is important here to stress that the notion of embodiment being used here goes beyond that connoted by the term “body language”. Although body language is an important and often noticed aspect of embodiment, the way one embodies her or himself goes deeper than surface-level body gestures. This includes the way that one’s body holds patterns of tension, one’s energetic quality, the way that one uses his or her voice, patterns and styles of movement, and general quality of bodily presence. All of these aspects are apprehended at a visceral level by other sensing human bodies that respond with their own embodied reactions. Our hearts race with excitement in response to the energetic way in which a message is conveyed before we interpret that embodied response as ‘”feeling inspired”. When our bodies give off reactions congruent with enthusiasm and interest, those who lead us know at a bodily level that they are on the right track and have won our “buy-in”. Thus the space between leaders and followers becomes potent for its ability to inform us about the quality of our interpersonal connections. Merleau-Ponty also notes that within this space and through others’ embodied responses to us, we are also informed about who we, ourselves, are. This idea is elaborated below.

Reversibility and Human Bodies as “Percipient Perceptibles”

A second radical way that Merleau-Ponty conceptualises perception is as a two-way, dynamic and interactive process. In Merleau-Ponty’s rendering, it is impossible for humans to assume the “God perspective” in which they objectively observe the world in such a way that they are not affected by the world observing them back. Human beings cannot perceive without simultaneously being perceived[iii]. Just as I observe another human being, I am aware that he or she can perceive me. The awareness of another’s perception will subsequently alter my awareness of myself. This constant interplay of perception and its implicate sense of being perceived creates the qualitative experience of being in relation to another.

Merleau-Ponty coins the term “percipient perceptibles” to describe this essential way of being in the world and writes of it in this way:

As soon as we see other seers, we no longer have before us only the look without a pupil, the plate glass of things with that feeble reflection, that phantom of ourselves they evoke by designating a place among themselves whence we see them: henceforth, through others’ eyes we are for ourselves fully visible (1968: 143).

Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting here that it is only through another’s perception that we come to know ourselves. If I bang my hand on the table and raise my voice and others recoil and retreat from me, this tells me that I have been too forceful in this situation (whereas in other situations the same gestures might generate different responses). At close inspection this interactional dynamic is apparent in the relationship between leaders and followers. Leaders only come to know themselves as leaders by acting in relation to perceiving followers; followers too, rely on their leaders to create and contain a sense of identity. In this way, who leaders and followers are to one another is in a constant state of co-creation and flux, determined by perceptual interchanges in the space operating between them.

Merleau-Ponty reminds us that these interpersonal perceptions are based primarily in the experience of our sensate, physical bodies. I am only able to perceive a person as a leader because I have a physical body that stands in material relation to this leader, who in turn stands in physical material reality in relation to me. When I regard that leader from a different physical perspective, I can become aware of different aspects of him or her, and likewise through his or her altered gaze I can experience a change in my own sense of who I am. We are perhaps more accustomed to the way in which seeing another from a different imaginary perspective can change our view, but the important thing to note here is even such imaginal shifts occur because of our embodied ability to physically change where we are in relation to another.

There are a number of interesting implications of this notion of reversibility for leaders and followers. For instance, it is through the perceptions they have of one another, which are generated firstly from their own physical location in relation to each other, that leaders and followers make judgements about one another. For example, we know this from the media’s interest in the way that political and business leaders appear. The huge amount of media coverage and analysis of the photograph released of Barack Obama and his senior team during the operation through which Bin Laden was killed points to the need to arrive at the “truth” of what was going on through an assessment of those individuals’ body postures and tensions, rather than just relying on press reports.

Similarly, new leaders of organisations are often evaluated according to the physical way in which they represent themselves. A recently appointed CEO of a firm for which I consult is spoken about in terms of his lack of attention to his physical appearance. A surprising amount of talk among his senior team focuses on his ill-fitting suits and scuffed shoes. One of his direct reports confided in me, “He would do himself a world of good around the place if he bought himself an expensive suit and got a decent haircut”. Such a comment could be discounted as indicative of society’s over-concerns with appearances and fashion. Interpreted through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy however, the senior team of this firm is reacting to what their new CEO’s appearance says about them, who they see themselves to be when they find themselves being led by someone who comports himself as the new CEO does. The notion of “reversibility” alerts us to the important role physical appearance plays in creating the perceptual dynamic between leaders and followers. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy goes even further in conceptualising this dynamic through his notion of “flesh”, introduced next.

Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of “Flesh”

The notion of “flesh” takes reversibility one step further by suggesting there is visceral substance to intersubjective embodied perception. Not only does flesh encompass the space between leaders and followers, it also includes the “surrounding space” in which these relations are enacted. Perhaps a way of understanding the notion of “flesh” is that it is analogous to an “energetic field” that is both constituted by, and exists between relating entities.  Not actually “material” itself, it is experienced as a quality of relational engagement, a “feeling” which can transcend actual geographical distance[iv].

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh” alerts us to the visceral, invisible but substantive nature of the connection between leaders and followers and the context in which their relations are enacted. It is the energetic “stuff” that holds and carries the quality of leadership relations. For instance, from a Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) perspective, it could be that which distinguishes relationships that create in-group members from those that form out-group members. What the notion of “flesh” highlights that LMX theory does not, is that these relationships are first and foremost based on embodied perceptions.

Attention to the “quality of the flesh of leadership” might add a new way for leaders to think about those relationships. What might a leader do to “fatten” the flesh between him or herself and their followers? A good example of a means by which such relational “flesh” is created and maintained is exemplified by the way in which Obama ran his race for the US presidency in 2008, particularly in terms of the way that he used the Internet. Each morning when I turned my computer on to check my email, there would be a new message from the Senator, his wife, or his running mate, telling his supporters what he was doing and soliciting our ideas and input. Although conducted via email, the way in which he presented himself on the Internet, the visibility he gave himself by appearing on evening talk shows or even the Oprah Winfrey Show, made him available and thickened the “flesh” between himself and his supporters.

These three ideas: the centrality of embodied perception as the ground of interpersonal relations, the way these perceptions create identities through the notion of “reversibility”, and the idea of “flesh” as the “stuff” of materiality, as well as the conduit through which it is perceived, offer new ways of conceptualising the “in-between spaces” at the heart of leader-follower relations. In the section below, an example is introduced to explore their potential for illuminating dimensions of leader-follower relations that are overlooked by cognitive or linguistic approaches.

Embodied Relational Leadership in Practice

Jack Rice and His Team

Jack Rice (a pseudonym) is an ex-pat American working as the Managing Director of a group of Australian lawyers based in Sydney. He has held the post of MD for the last three years, having worked for the law firm for ten years prior to this promotion. Because of recent regulatory changes in Australia, lawyers are being encouraged to work in more collaborative relationships rather than operating as solo agents. This change has precipitated the need for a strategic change in the way in which lawyers in Jack’s firm conduct work.

Jack has attempted to implement this change through holding a number of meetings with lawyers in his firm in which he has explained the need for the change and has offered ideas for how they might begin forging new working relationships. Additionally, a fairly expensive poster campaign has been initiated – posters announcing the new “collaborative culture” were highly visible throughout the building the firm occupies. Jack engaged me to come to work with him because six months after the change had been announced, people’s ways of working had not significantly altered.

It is interesting to note my impressions of the way that Jack and members of his team embody themselves. Jack is a tall, rather large man who moves awkwardly. He does not seem “comfortable in his own skin”. Although he shook my hand firmly and caught my glance when we met, there was little warmth in his eyes and he quickly looked away. In contrast, for the most part, those in his team are physically fit, athletic and energetic Australians who spend their weekends playing hockey or rugby. As a group, they gave the impression of being “mates”, and from the outside, it was hard for me to understand why this “mati-ness” did not translate into collaborative working relationships.

Indeed, discussions with the lawyers revealed that they enjoyed working with one another, and could understand the need for Jack’s initiative. But somehow their acceptance of the needed change did not translate into action. Every time Jack attempted to push them, there was not so much open resistance as a sort of collective moving away. The lawyers politely, but clearly resisted Jack’s attempts to influence them. What was going on?

Interestingly, when I spoke with the lawyers, they almost uniformly made comments about the way in which Jack related to them from an embodied perspective. They didn’t like his “lack of eye contact”, and the way that he often walked by them without stopping to speak or the fact that he did not seem to know their names. They characterised his demeanour as aloof, and a number of them spoke of the way in which he did not seem comfortable with himself; therefore, it was not easy to trust him. A number of them mentioned the large American flag that hung on the wall behind Jack’s office desk as symbolic of Jack’s insensitivity to them and the Australian context in which they all worked.

Jack admitted he had very little contact with the team apart from the formal way in which they interacted. But he was surprised that this should make any difference to whether or not he could influence them. From his perspective, he was speaking the “right” language by explaining what needed to be done in a clear and rational way. What he did not understand was the way in which the rational message was being interpreted against a backdrop of embodied feelings and reactions to Jack at a much more personal level.

Analysing Jack’s Case from an Embodied Perspective

What insights might an embodied perspective bring to Jack’s situation? The notion of “reversibility” speaks of the way in which perceptions are reciprocated – as Jack sees the other lawyers in the firm, they see him but they also perceive themselves through his eyes. Only in this case, Jack provides very little by way of perceptual availability. He does not spend time perceiving them, and subsequently, they do not know “where they stand” with him. At the most basic level, by not holding their gaze or acknowledging who they are, Jack does not allow for the opportunity of perceptual dialogue.

That does not mean, however, that the lawyers have no perception of him as a leader. On the contrary, they watch for evidence of whom Jack is and how he wants to relate to them. In this case, the American flag that hung on his office wall served as embodied evidence that Jack did not consider Australia “home” and did not think of himself as “one of them”. When I asked Jack about the flag, he was again surprised that it should have any relevance at all to his being able to persuade the lawyers to change their working habits. Certainly, it would be impetuous to suggest a direct causal link between the two. However, an embodied perspective suggests that such material aspects are part of the context from which Jack’s relationships with the other lawyers arise, and thus will contribute to the perceptual dynamic dancing between them.

More strikingly, using Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh”, it is apparent that Jack has not facilitated the creation of much “flesh” between himself and the lawyers he leads. The interaction between them is sparse and formal. During our discussions Jack admitted that remembering people’s names was difficult for him, and that this often made him embarrassed to talk with people, as this might become apparent. To ward off uncomfortable social interactions, he often walked past people without saying “Hello”. At the most fundamental level of leader-follower relations, this resulted in very little association between himself and those who worked for him. His ability to influence them was drastically reduced because of this lack of a basic connection.

More specific to Jack’s desired outcome, he did not set an example by willingly and enthusiastically embodying more collaborative working relationships himself. Doing so would serve two key purposes; it would be instructive in that it would literally show his lawyers how such relationships could be forged; and secondly, it would demonstrate his own willingness to take the first steps in engaging with the unknown territory of collaborative working.

In summary, from Jack’s perspective he had done what he thought necessary to establish a change in the working practices of the lawyers in his firm. He had explained the necessity for the change and had provided examples of how they might do it. This message had been reinforced with posters that clearly emphasised this requirement. From his point of view, these actions should have prompted the required change. However, the story reveals a more fundamental issue about the way in which Jack and the lawyers in the firm relate more generally that was not being addressed.

The Contribution of an Embodied Perspective

By jumping too quickly to the assumption that cognition and language are the mediators through which leadership is accomplished, the important work that bodies do in creating the quality of leader-follower relations is overlooked. The role embodiment plays in both day-to-day interactions and more specific leadership interventions, and how the latter relies on the former is apparent in the illustration of Jack Rice and his team. Although he used the “right” language, Jack’s lack of connection with the other lawyers and the absence of embodied coherence between his statements and his actions were contributing factors in his failure to foster strategic change.

This insight has important implications in two different arenas. Firstly, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “flesh” highlights the lively dynamism inherent within the “space between” relational beings and the importance of attending to this space in order to create the basis for generative relations. It is, literally, where leadership happens.  After all, “leadership” is not located in “leaders” or “followers”; instead, it actually occurs in an energetic field through which leaders and followers move together towards purposeful action.  Both leaders and followers can influence this “between space” – primarily through revealing or withdrawing from it.  Furthermore, leaders and followers will each have their own perceptions of this space, which will further influence how it is experienced.

Drawing attention to the “flesh” of leadership this way means that leaders (or followers) might ask themselves questions not just about how they are doing as “leaders”, but about what they are doing to create the kind of leadership “flesh” they would desire.  For instance, they might ask: “How do I build the ‘flesh’ between myself and my followers?, How can I connect more strongly with my followers?” or “What might I do to enable my followers to reveal more of themselves within the ‘between space’ of our leadership engagement?”

There are of course questions for followers too, such as, “How do I communicate my perceptions to the leader in a way that is helpful and generative?”, “How do I do my part in building the flesh of this relationship?” In other words, an embodied perspective of leadership underlines the possibility of consciously creating the “between space” which holds leaders and followers in relation, rather than unconsciously letting it take care of itself. It will, of course emerge – but by attending to it and its qualities, leaders and followers can consciously create a more robust platform through which they can influence one another.

Secondly, an embodied perspective brings new insight into the important role bodies play in achieving desired organisational changes. In the case of Jack Rice, it became clear that he did not enjoy the necessary day-to-day connection with lawyers in his firm that would have enabled him to influence their ways of working. Without this foundational connection, when he initiated change there was little “stuff” of the relationship that supported him. His ability to instigate the desired change was further eroded by his lack of embodied example. The lawyers paid attention to what he did, rather than what he said.

Future Directions

Conceptualising leadership through the theoretical constructions of “reversibility” and “flesh” brings novel insight into the “black box” of leader-follower dynamics. Reversibility implies that this relationship is constantly co-created and that the co-creation process is fundamentally based on perceptual exchanges. Given this, if either leaders or followers want to shift the way in which they relate at the most basic level, either one can literally shift their perceptual location. Leaders and followers both might think of the relationship between them as composed of a “third body” that needs attention and nourishment in order for leadership to flourish between them.

An embodied approach highlights the limitations of studying leadership from an ontological position in which it is viewed as an individually generated phenomenon existing separately from its context and relational dynamics. It points to the appropriateness of methodologies that track “leader” and “follower” perceptions as “leadership” between them unfolds. Using methods based in an understanding of reversibility and “flesh” would necessitate fine-grained attention to attributions and sense-making, as well as how leaders and followers experience the energetic quality of relations between them both in the moment and after leadership events have resulted in outcomes.

Certainly empirically researching leader-follower relations from this perspective presents unique challenges. Because our embodied awareness operates at a pre-lingual, often unconscious level, it is difficult for people to “catch” and then articulate the bodily knowing that contributes to their reactions and responses to one another. Speaking about bodies is often taboo and fraught with sexual connotations that are often suppressed within organisational discourse. However, the difficulties associated with studying the role of embodiment within leader-follower relations should not override the important role it plays and the need to find creative ways of engaging with this invisible but powerful arena.

Perhaps most disturbingly to leadership theorists wishing to provide certainty about leadership and how it can be enacted effectively, the concepts forwarded by Merleau-Ponty point to the ever-changing and slippery nature of perceptions that fuel relational engagements. “Reversibility” and “flesh” highlight the fleeting and infinitely mutable nature of leadership as a meeting of individual perceptions embedded in unique contexts and historical moments, all adding their particular flavour and energy to the “space between” leaders and followers, where leadership happens.

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NOTES

”There is nothing in the world that does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good conduct is to see and seize this moment.” Cardinal de Retz

“Psychology must be gained for it is not given and without psychological education we do not understand ourselves and we suffer”. James Hillman 1926-2011

Nick Ross

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my dear friend Cam Danielson for all his help, guidance and support in bringing this model to the place it is today.

[It is our intention to publish Part 2 of this article with its focus on application in the march 2012 issue of Integral Leadership Review. – Ed.]

Abstract

Existing and emergent global challenges are placing ever greater demands on leadership today. In order to meet those challenges more effectively, there is a growing need for leaders to overcome the limitations of existing ways of thinking and operating. As the external world becomes more complex and uncertain, leaders must become more conscious of the nature of their own interior world, including the varieties of inner states, experiences and resources available to them to meet difficult and often ambiguous demands in more balanced and integrated ways. Tremendous contextual changes in fields including business, socio-economics, and politics raise fundamental questions about the actual purpose and practice of leadership today. There is an evolutionary impulse emerging today that invites a reappraisal of existing executive leadership models as well as an honest, creative dialogue between traditional and non-traditional disciplines. Evidence presented in the first paper seeks to develop this idea and suggests that different practices are available from a rich diversity of fields that could enhance leadership development.

Part 2 of this article will build on this theme in more detail and address the question of practical application. Drawing on personal experience and examples from his work with senior executives, the author will propose a series of practices designed to support both leaders and facilitators in cultivating a dynamic interpersonal leadership practice.

Introduction

The central argument of this paper rests on the following assumption: that the ability to reconcile the tension between a leader’s external and inner worlds is fundamental to 21st century leadership development (Jironet xii). Put another way, the psychological health of the leader will be a key differentiator in coming years. The external world is characterised as being essentially uncertain, complex, and subject to constant change. These are also characteristics of the leader’s inner landscape. It is the capacity to find alignment, coherence, and a dynamic harmony within and between these inner and outer states that reflects the leader’s capacity for greater mental complexity. The ability to self-organise across an array of mental states towards high levels of effectiveness in the world is critical for today’s leader.

The assumption is that the range and nature of worldwide challenges is so great and so different from previous experience that leadership development needs to be fundamentally redefined and reorganised in ways that mark this time as one of authentic transition–an “epoch of transformation” as Thomas Kuhn described it (in Holloway, 111). Einstein was correct when he said that our current problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them. The model presented here offers a frame for further research and discussion towards a new model of executive leadership practice.

Interpersonal Leadership

Business as usual will not be sufficient in coming decades. Leadership capability will be a key differential in the future, and this will require a new and different emphasis on the leader’s capacity for development. I have used the term Interpersonal to describe this model. interpersonal leadership reflects an approach to leadership development that is new and different for two reasons.

Firstly, the term interpersonal recognises that each of us as individuals is made up of a multiplicity of selves or states. We show up to situations in different ways depending on the context. A woman who turns up to lead a board meeting is in a real sense, different from the same woman who tells a bedtime story to her child. According to Daniel Siegel, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, the key to wellbeing lies in our capacity for collaboration across interior states required to meet a broad diversity of contexts not always consistent with one another. For the purpose of this model I refer to each of the leadership functions proposed here as states, as Siegel defines them. In using the term wellbeing, I am referring specifically to the development of mental complexity, resonance, and flow. This model will present four states that could work collaboratively to support greater wellbeing in this context.

Secondly, the term interpersonal references the principle of collaboration between diverse disciplines across an array of fields, leading towards more integrated and complex levels of understanding among individuals, groups and organisations. Interpersonal leadership invites diversity of thought and experience. It seeks to find common and new ground between existing practices and other, non-traditional learning frameworks. Thus, interpersonal leadership has both outward and inward movement based on principles of diversity, cooperation, harmony, and integration.

An Epoch of Transformation

Education always takes place within an existing framework or paradigm that defines the nature of self and reality and sets boundaries based on those assumptions around learning objectives and methodologies. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn reflects on the nature of paradigms. Kuhn notes that the history of science is marked as one of long periods of peaceful and stable research interspersed with brief, sudden ”epochs of transformation” (in Holloway 111). Each scientific revolution creates a new paradigm–a new worldview that forms an evolutionary description of reality. It is considered to be the truth. The paradigm remains for as long as it holds, and it is the persistence of unexplained anomalies that creates further crises. The vital point is that this process of change, adaptation, maintenance and collapse is not restricted to science but is common to all human knowledge (and life) in general. The implication of this is important–there is no final and absolute truth, but only a continuous unfolding evolutionary process with no end, always moving to overcome its own restrictions and limitations towards ever greater levels of complexity.

We can argue that executive development could and even should aim to model itself as an evolutionary process towards ever greater complexity and that it too is subject to periods of relative stability followed by epochs of transformation as old truths run up against persistent unexplained anomalies that force the hand of change.

Anomalies

A good deal has already been written about the nature and depth of the global crises we face in every field. These include energy resources, population growth, problems of obesity and starvation, food and water shortages, climate change, socio-political upheaval and profound economic uncertainty. These are highly complex times, challenging and difficult in ways and degrees that were inconceivable in earlier days of leadership development. The fundamental anomaly we face today lies with the struggle for leaders to meet these multiple and diverse problems effectively and with an eye to the long term. Important research highlights the problem.

Describing the tectonic shifts in the global marketplace and their implications within a leadership context, Cam Danielson notes the following:

Recent times have been dominated with technological innovations that connect people instantaneously around the world resulting in massive migrations of people (both digitally and physically) beyond their tribal or cultural boundaries. At the same time there have been major political changes such as the growth of the European Union; the breakup of the Soviet Union; the accelerated industrialization of China, India, and Brazil; and the emergence of radical Islam. The transformation of values in our age has been dramatic… A dynamic, global environment becoming more complex with less clarity of outcome creates the greatest degree of ambiguity and instability for collective endeavor of any kind.

The evidence suggests that leadership in the emergent world will need to be highly adaptable and creative, able to cope with extremes of complexity and ambiguity across cultural, political, economic and philosophical boundaries.

The 2009 IBM study, Capitalising on Complexity: Insights from the Global CEO, based on face-to-face conversations with more than 1,500 chief executive officers worldwide, anticipates a sea change in the priorities of CEOs. It draws upon four very important sets of conclusions in relation to complexity and creativity for emerging leadership:

• Today’s complexity is only expected to deepen;
• More than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage this greater complexity;
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers, and partners; and
• Creativity will be the most important leadership quality in coming years (IBM).

The headline here is really important: leaders need to learn to meet global complexity with greater creativity. The Oxford Dictionary defines creativity as “the use of imagination or original ideas to create something.” The physicist David Bohm describes creativity as an act of discovery and originality. Existing leadership development does not do enough to encourage creativity, originality, discovery, or the use and exploration of the imagination.

Keith Eigel conducted a longitudinal study of 21 CEOs of major corporations having average gross revenues of $5 billion. Individual leaders were evaluated on their effectiveness in terms of their ability to challenge existing processes, inspire a shared vision, manage conflict, solve problems, delegate, empower and build relationships (Kegan and Lahey 21-24). One critical finding from a business perspective was a strong correlation between the level of mental complexity and effectiveness in meeting these leadership functions.

In their book Immunity to Change, Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey note the natural tendency of leaders to develop mental complexity over time as a response to meeting greater challenges. They identify three clear stages of development in the leadership mind that they call the socialised, self-authoring and self-transforming. In commenting on the diminishing number of individual leaders meeting the higher developmental stages they comment:

there is a gap between what business expects and the current capacity to meet that expectation. Data drawn from research suggests that there is a significant gap between what is expected of people’s minds and what their minds are actually capable of. In two large meta-analyses of studies with several hundred participants a majority of respondents were not at the level of self-authoring (58%). Only about 50% of the ‘very promising’ middle managers were self-authoring and only 4/21 of the CEOs were beyond the self-authoring stage. Note that those who are, do better than those who are not (28).

To put it bluntly, the evidence suggests that our current leadership capability is not adequate to meet the global challenges that are now emerging. Too few people are actively engaged in a developmental learning process that has an authentically transformational trajectory. Meeting the leadership demands of the 21^st century will require some extraordinary efforts from ordinary people. Many of the developmental frameworks for leadership behaviour prevalent in the last decades of the 20^th century are incomplete and cannot offer a meaningful response to the increasing complexity outlined above.

Developing capacity means raising awareness by bringing into conscious practice what has previously been obscured or unavailable to the individual on multiple levels. Evolved leadership means aligned practice that maximises and leverages access to and development through the broadest possible range of perspectives.

The Self-Transforming Mind

As has been noted, Kegan and Lahey identify three key stages in their study of leadership development that describe an evolutionary trajectory of mental complexity: the socialized mind, the self-authoring mind and the self-transforming mind (Kegan and Lahey 17-20).

The socialized mind describes a sense of self in relation to the expectations of others. At this stage the self is shaped by the definitions and expectations of its personal environment. The self coheres by its alignment with and loyalty to that with which it identifies and expresses itself, primarily in it’s relationships with people, with schools of thought, or both.

At the level of the self-authoring mind, the sense of self is defined by one’s sense of purpose and an internal orientation that is primarily self-reflective in nature. One is able to step back enough from the social environment to generate an internal seat of judgement or personal authority that evaluates and makes choices about external expectations.

At the level of the self-transforming mind, the sense of self goes beyond the limitations of the personality to the essence behind individual purpose, essentially to a transpersonal orientation. The self-transforming mind is able to transcend conventional thinking and act in authentically transformational ways. From this perspective the leader can step back from and reflect on the limits of their own ideology or personal authority, see that any one system of self-organisation is partial or incomplete, be friendlier towards contradiction and opposites, and seek to hold onto multiple systems rather than projecting all but one on to the others.

Kegan’s and Lahey’s research suggests that greater mental complexity correlates with effectiveness and an enhanced capacity to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty in genuinely creative ways. According to Kegan and Lahey, developing creativity and the self-transforming mind requires that we transcend the limits of our current thinking and deepen our understanding of ourselves and our purpose. Herein lies the case for the development of transcendent and transformational states.

Paradigms

In considering a new model for leadership it is important to acknowledge paradigms that either form or could form our understanding of reality – the ”truth” as Kuhn puts it. Four frameworks are relevant: the rational dualistic, the contemplative sciences, the living systems, and the transpersonal.

Evidence from these disciplines presents a compelling case for an expanded practice of leadership development. The rational dualistic paradigm forms the basis of virtually all existing executive leadership education. Future developments must investigate wider concepts. Included in this assumption is a view that cultivation of mind and the transpersonal aspect of the self are essential to individual growth and development. Leadership therefore is understood to entail a journey towards psychological maturity across a broad range of intelligences. This type of leadership requires inwardness for 21^st century leaders. Learning frameworks that create opportunities for deep self-reflection to cultivate mind and build mental capacity will be of central importance to the next generation of executive leaders. Technical excellence and expertise within one knowledge system will not be enough.

The Rational Dualistic Paradigm

As a framework, the rational dualistic paradigm has been instrumental to stage development in the Western mind. Axioms of this paradigm include the absolute value of reason, the application of rationality in the resolution of problems, as well as the establishment of objectivism, reductionism and positivism as fundamental systems for understanding and defining reality. The rational dualistic frame is defined by the dominance of scientific method and the development of the concept of the thinking self–the Cartesian cogito–as the valid mediating system for human experience. At the heart of this worldview lies the principle of separation.

From a psychological perspective this worldview has promoted and inflated the position of the personal self or ego. Focus on the individual ego has led to the development of concepts such as self-determination, personal freedom, self-awareness, individual uniqueness, and the whole concept of self as understood in many forms of psychology and psychiatry (Miller 1). Whilst important, the supremacy of this paradigm as the basis for all business practice over the last 300 years has come with consequences to our wider sense of self, including our sense of meaning, connection, and place in the world both individually and collectively.

Richard Tarnas suggests that the negative consequence of the revolutions in science and philosophy was disenchantment with the cosmos:

In a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred. The soul of the world has been extinguished; ancient trees and forests can then be seen as nothing but potential lumber; mountains nothing but mineral deposits; seashores and deserts are oil reserves; lakes and rivers engineering tools. Animals are perceived as harvestable commodities, indigenous tribes are obstructing relics of an outmoded past, children’s minds as marketing target (56).

The issue today is not the relative value of this model but the assumption of its absolute value, dominance and rightness in determining our sense of reality, and our choices at the exclusion of other knowledge systems. The negative consequence of a one-sided approach to business and thereby leadership development is that leadership education has become trapped in a perpetual hall of mirrors and cannot evolve beyond its own assumptions. The rational mind is not reflective. Neither does it question its own logic. In fact, what it does rather well is defend itself against any other logic that might challenge it. Its unfailing certainty is its greatest weakness. Failure to recognise the ways in which the system perpetuates itself without courageous reflection in the face of new information means that a leader cannot be equipped to effectively meet emerging challenges. One wonders at what cost?

Living and Complex Adaptive Systems

The futurist Willis Harman described the Western industrial paradigm as “the science of separateness.” He described the emerging disciplines of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, living and complex adaptive systems theory, neuroscience and consciousness studies as the science of wholeness.

According to Harman and other commentators, in the paradigm of wholeness the world is experienced as a living, dynamic, evolving and participatory system. Underlying assumptions from this perspective include an understanding that the universe is fundamentally intelligent, creative, and experimental in nature, organising itself into patterns that are increasingly complex and that support more diversity and greater sustainability. It is assumed within this framework that people are inherently intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organising, and meaning seeking beings. Principles of interconnection, unpredictability and the relative nature of time are important here.

Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris suggests that we need a more complete model of the universe if we are to meet emerging challenges effectively. This is important in our reflection on an executive education in transition. According to Sahtouris education needs to give a central place to direct subjective experience as informing our understanding of reality. It needs to consider consciousness as axiomatic to a holistic understanding of the universe and to explore the idea of continuous self-creation (autopoesis) as a core definition for life. This is the process by which all galaxies, stars, planets, organisms, cells, molecules (including the trillions in our own bodies) atoms, and subatomic particles emerge and co-exist (Sahtouris and Lovelock, Earthdance).

The Contemplative Sciences

The contemplative sciences describe a body of practices specifically designed to support the cultivation of the mind. Daniel Siegel proposes that the mind itself is not the brain or an epiphenomenon of the brain. This is a common belief of the dualistic paradigm, but there is a third position that emerges directly out of the interaction between the brain and our relationships. Mind is what emerges in the tension between the external environment and our internal environment, and it is constantly evolving in the face of new experience. Cultivation and understanding of mind and the development of attention becomes fundamental to leadership intelligence.

According to B. Alan Wallace (Choosing Reality), the focus of contemplative science (including Buddhist, Yogic, and Taoist practice) is towards the nature of the mind itself, specifically ”the nature and problems of human existence and the untapped resources of human consciousness. Practices, developed in cultures over thousands of years are designed to deliberately cultivate the practitioner’s perceptions beyond those of the conceptual mind, sensory experience, and language to perceive the mind itself directly in ways that both include and transcend ordinary consciousness. Within this framework, disciplining the mind – ”calming the waters“ as Wallace describes it – and transcending the limitations of the ego are considered essential practices. Practitioners use an array of meditative and physical methods to explore the nature of mind, balance the body, and cultivate core qualities, including equanimity, compassion, joy, and loving-kindness.

Meditation has attracted a great deal of interest from researchers in recent decades. Evidence from numerous studies (Austin xvi; Segal, Williams, and Teasdale 311-232) demonstrates there is a strong correlation between meditative practices and coherent alpha, theta, and gamma brain states. These states are associated with mental well-being, mental agility, enhanced mental performance, access to flexible attention, self-regulation of the sympathetic nervous system, and an array of positive functions. These states of mind include improved mood, crisis management, resilience to stress, recovery from destructive emotional states, and the cultivation of holistic and creative psychological coping mechanisms.

The Transpersonal: A Jungian Perspective

The final framework included here is connected to the field of transpersonal psychology defined as “the study of experiences, beliefs and practices that suggest that the sense of self can extend beyond our personal or individual reality.” Important contributors to this field of enquiry include William James, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and Ken Wilber.

As a founder in the field, C. G. Jung developed the idea of the Überpersonliche (transpersonal self) in his distinction between the personal and collective unconscious. Jung identified the personal and transpersonal selves as different mediating functions in the process towards psychological maturity or individuation. Each perspective offers a different way of collecting and interpreting the available data in the journey of maturation.

The process of individuation begins when the relationship between the personality/ego, the authentic inner world, and the outer world–which form the vertical axis of this model–become irreconcilably conflicted and can no longer effectively meet the demands of life. In this process the ego proves inadequate to meet the psychological struggle experienced by the individual. According to Jung, the path towards maturation entails a renegotiation that must take place at the level of both the personality and the larger (transpersonal) self, between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the psyche. Anything less will not suffice. Human maturity demands a relationship with the transpersonal. If we assume that deep personal psychologos will be fundamental to future leadership, this must be taken seriously.

An Evolutionary Interpersonal Model of Leadership

The model that I introduce here proposes a leadership practice that consists of four core states: the transactional, the self-reflective, the transcendent, and the transformational.

Leadership development within this framework is an evolutionary process. Periods of stability within and between states are followed by periods of transition and development in a creative process towards greater complexity. Joseph Chilton Pearce describes evolution as, “the transcendent aspect of creation rising to go beyond itself” (xx). In this case it is a developmental journey of capacity building across four core states over time with no final destination. It is an inherently creative process of emergence, adaptation, maintenance, and collapse; it is a dance between the inner and outer world towards higher orders of expression. Within the framework it is assumed that the leader’s centre of gravity shifts across and between states with time, experience, and responsibility, as well as in relation to context. What is essential here, and is a mark of mature practice, is the leader’s ability to navigate across the four states, accessing and exiting each at will as context requires.

The four states, as a totality, are accessed through two discrete but complementary and cooperative aspects of the psyche–the personal and the transpersonal self. It is assumed that both aspects of self are necessary to support the individual leader to successfully navigate the tensions experienced between their internal world and their external environment. It is further assumed that the continuous reconciliation of this tension is strongly correlated to effectiveness in the world, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Interpersonal Model of Leadership. Source: Nick Ross, 2011.

The flow denotes a dynamic movement among the four core leadership states.

Terms of Reference

External environment (EE): This is the objective phenomenal world. The external environment reflects what is going on out there in the world. It may include our external relationships of all kinds with people, objects, situations, challenges, opportunities, daily work pressures, difficult staff, and the myriad other events an individual will meet every day. From a leadership perspective this paper argues that the external environment is increasingly defined by the triple pressures of accelerating change, greater complexity, and rising uncertainty.

Internal environment (IE): This refers to awareness of the various aspects of self and self states, access to the whole spectrum of body sensations, and information processing systems. These include visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, smell, taste, touch, feelings, emotions, thoughts, cognitive processes and phenomena, conscious and unconscious mental activity, habits of mind, the sense of time, and the experience of consciousness and awareness. The inner environment also reflects our emotional, cognitive, interpersonal and intrapersonal capacities for self-reflection, self-organisation, and impulse towards integration and coherence.

Personal self: “The individual person, from his or her own perspective” (Oxford English Dictionary). To you, self is you. To a different person, self is that person. The self is one’s consciousness of one’s own being or identity. The personal self has a number of aspects. From a Jungian perspective these include the ego, persona animus (female) and anima (male).

The ego closely reflects what is represented in this model and can be defined as a protective organising system of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that define our personal universe through the fear of losing our physical and psychological identity. The personal self experiences itself as subject, discrete and separate from other things that are experienced as objects depending on the quality of relationship between transactional and self-reflective capacities.

Transpersonal self: “Denoting or relating to states or areas of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity” (Oxford English Dictionary): The transpersonal self experiences states of consciousness beyond the normal range of sleeping, dreaming and waking. It is concerned with higher, or ultimate, potential and purpose, access to intelligence and information beyond the ego or personal self, including the collective unconscious, experiences of transcendence, peak experience, and the spiritual realms.

Introducing the Model

Mature executive leadership development is reflected here by the capacity to navigate across the four well-developed core leadership states. Each quadrant represents a means of being present to the world in a particular way (Figure 1). According to Siegel every living system has an inherent impulse towards a healthy, dynamic relationship between different states or aspects of self. As human beings we are hard-wired to connect–both to different aspects of ourselves and to others through these states. Integration is reflected in the system’s capacity for flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy, and stability. This is a useful definition of psychological wellbeing and a powerful working definition for the qualities of the self-transforming mind.

Siegel does not mean that we should become homogenous individuals. Far from it. We are vivid, living, heterogeneous beings with multiple selves that interact with one another in diverse and creative ways. Our health is determined by the flow of energy and information between the states, by the interpersonal relationship between our own various inner aspects, and our intrapersonal relationship within each aspect, as well as the internal coherence of each individual state in relation to its overarching goals and intentions. State integration, the coherent communication and relationship within and between the four quadrants in the model, is central. In a healthy leader, different states cooperate and communicate effectively towards mutually beneficial outcomes.

For Siegel, dis-ease is experienced as lack of integration between states. This emerges in behaviours that are either too rigid or chaotic, demonstrating a failure of communication and a lack of attunement within the system. The work of integration, which brings alignment and a sense of flow, will require leaders to access and develop a range of personal capacities and be prepared to address imbalances. This single commitment would represent a significant shift in conscious leadership behaviour.

Each leadership capacity invites response to a central question or meditation:

Q1 What can I achieve?
Q2 Who am I?
Q3 What am I?
Q4 How can I serve?

Executive development within this framework can be understood as the capacity to respond to each question in increasingly nuanced, integrated, and aligned ways. This is state integration according to Siegel. Evolution means alignment between states and towards ever higher purposes, whilst development refers to the conscious and intentional capacity to access and exit from the different states as context demands.

Primary Functions of the Four States

Q1: Transactional State:

The transactional state emerges out of the relationship between the personal self and the external environment. It represents the primary focus of almost all leadership thinking, practice, and education; and it provides the foundation for most organisational life and working relationships. Transactional leadership is defined as “setting clear objectives and goals for followers as well as the use of punishment and rewards in order to encourage compliance with those goals” (citation?).

The transactional state negotiates the external environment through the personal ego. It represents leadership development within a framework of esteem, status, ambition, drive, the will to achieve and succeed, and the desire to demonstrate and prove ability. Extrinsic goals are centrally important; career decisions made solely within the transactional state are aimed at enhancing personal position or status in terms of image, money, and popularity.

The transactional state is conventional. Experience is mediated primarily through the senses and intellect; thinking is linear, causal and literal. Its logic supports the truth of separation, creating a discrete identity separate from the world that is experienced as out there, but to which it is always relating in order to measure its sense of self-worth and value.

The transactional state is central to key capabilities including negotiation, competitive planning, day-to-day transactions with multiple stakeholders, short term goal setting and execution, the capacity to set and deliver targets, and an array of other skills considered essential to good business. Technical development and competency building (expertise development through instructional learning) have their root here and create a strong and necessary platform for future development and responsibility. Whilst essential for holistic practice, indiscriminate overemphasis on the transactional state as the modus operandi of business is fundamentally limiting in developmental terms.

Q 2: Self-Reflective State

This relationship within Q2 is between the personal self and the internal environment. The focus of attention is to influence and mature the correspondence between inner experience and the outside world, making this relationship more fluid, honest and conscious through a range of practices. Considerably less attention is paid to the self-reflective state within leadership development than is currently given to the transactional state. The reflective state represents an ego-activated approach to reflection, and its focus is on the continuing development of the personality/individual life in a context of greater success and effectiveness in the workplace. Its developmental focus is based on the integration of past experience (where have I been?) and future opportunities (where am I going?).

Self-reflection as a practice, including work on the individual shadow aspects of the personality, is essential to the process of psychological maturity. Self-reflection changes the experience of subject-object, allowing an individual to hold more as object the feelings and emotions, thoughts, beliefs and behaviours that they were once entirely subject to and therefore unconscious of. This shift brings choice.

Self-reflection can be enhanced through autobiographical work that offers a change of perspective and creates the foundation for genuine self-authorship. Useful work in this state can include processes such as life mapping and analysis of the tendencies of the ego, including the shadow aspect.

Life mapping is a process that I use frequently with leaders. Life maps create a sense of personal narrative and provide deep insights into the ways in which past experience can shape current choice making and future planning. As leaders, it is essential to know both what you are working on and also what is working on you. Self-reflective work is the work of personal integration. The process starts with understanding one’s current story, then moves into stories in transition, followed by shaping future stories.

Reflective processes allow individuals to nurture a healthy subjective relationship with their inner world in a way that can challenge existing operating assumptions and success strategies. Central to this capacity is the development of emotional intelligence, including qualities such as empathy, openness, objectivity, and emotional self-control. Emotional development is an essential precursor to more integrated leadership practice, and it has its roots in our capacity for self-reflection.

Autobiographical work represents a burden for leaders. Honest self-exploration can be extremely challenging. For these reasons, exploration of this capacity is at best inconsistent within current executive education as evidenced by the significant numbers of senior executives who fail to demonstrate authentic self-authoring qualities.

Q3: Transcendent State

The dominant relationship here is between the inner environment and the transpersonal self. The transcendent state represents our capacity to “go beyond normal or physical human experience and to exist apart from and not subject to the limitations of the material universe” (Oxford English Dictionary).

The transcendent capacity supports the development of an array of abilities that allow an individual to experience the world beyond the confines of their personality, to develop insights, and to access knowledge and information that are correlated with heightened and expanded states of consciousness. Opportunities to deliberately cultivate this capacity are rare within traditional executive leadership, and it is here that significant opportunities for development exist.

Access to different states of consciousness beyond the normal range of sleeping, dreaming, and waking are strongly implicated in the development of the capacity for critical existential thinking, meaning-making, symbolic and metaphoric thinking, the establishment of hierarchies of personal values, psychological well-being, greater interiority, extended states of flow, peak experience, access to intuitive thinking, synchronicity and other aspects of inner guidance, development of the imaginative capacity, personal vitality, the capacity to maintain high energy states, loss of self-consciousness, and high levels of creativity. It is not difficult to create a value proposition for the development of these qualities in executive leadership practice.

Practices that support the cultivation of the transcendent state include the arts, contemplative practice, and a deep engagement with nature–the wonder, awe, and beauty of the participation mystique.

The arts offer rich opportunities to access transcendent states. Art, narrative, drama, myth, and movement cannot be made, met, or understood by the left brain processes that anchor us to our ego centres. The arts speak directly to our right hemisphere; they transport us beyond ourselves in language that is metaphoric and symbolic. As McGilchrist points out, the right hemisphere “yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings in the context of a lived world” (TED Lecture). These are qualities of a creative mind at work in a living universe. From this place interconnection, change and evolution are life. Art is curious, exploratory and playful. It is a principal way in which we make sense of our lives and find meaning in the world in non-literal ways using symbol and metaphor.

At Olivier Mythodrama, we use the works of William Shakespeare to provide a powerful narrative backdrop to our practice with executives. We have found that these mythic stories provide a rich context and framework for learning that enable us to draw on universal, timeless themes of leadership in memorable ways. Participants are able to identify and work on difficult personal and organisational challenges by accessing an array of non-ordinary frameworks that are inherently creative and that can yield extraordinary insights into future practice.

In terms of intention, the transcendent state has an intrinsic orientation (as distinct from the extrinsic orientation of the transactional state), defined as autonomy (self-government), mastery (excellence), and purpose (service and legacy) (Huppert, Baylis, and Kaverne).

Q4: Transformational State

The transformational state represents the relationship between the transpersonal self and the external environment. Transformational is defined here as “making a difference” (citation?) and in its mature state this will have global implications. The transformational state is the seedbed of evolutionary thinking and represents our creative capability to transcend previous limitations and embrace new possibilities; to take “what is new and different from what has been inferred by previous knowledge” (Bohm, 6), to build new and more complex systems with a long term vision. Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi represent examples of action in the transformational state.

Transformational action arises out of meta-cognitive processes that include the ability to discern and explore different aspects of our lives as well as life in general beyond appearances. It enables us to recognize and act out of the transcendent aspects of life and gives the ability to perceive one’s own life and life in general from a viewpoint independent of numerous attachments (King). These perspectives give this state a quality of freedom of movement and expression alongside considerable energy and resolution.

Within the transformational state there is significant alignment between path–meaning recognition of the specific realization that wants to be expressed through the individual as a calling or vocation in this life–and the daily practice necessary to achieve it. This is the vocational state, and it is what gives the transformational state real power; it is the soul’s voice that speaks from this place. Networking and a diversity of relationships are important in cultivating this state; and the impulse to wholeness, both personal and planetary has its roots here.

Integration work in the transformational state can be facilitated greatly by practices that develop clarity of mind. Practices that still the mind and engage the body include mindfulness-based meditation, contemplation, yoga, and some martial arts–particularly Aikido and Tai Chi. Mindfulness meditation is becoming increasingly popular, and it is something that I teach with ever greater frequency to executives as an essential practice for self-development.

At the School of Inspired Leadership in Guragon, India, the faculty have produced a wellness programme for students using a range of yoga, breathing, and meditation techniques. These techniques are designed to balance mind, body and spirit. Within this practice students are taught the benefits of engaging fully in the business world from a calm, rooted, and healthy inner centre. Speaking as someone who follows the wellness programme, I can affirm the value added to daily living is in terms of the clarity, alertness, and presence that the practice affords.

Meditation is linked to numerous positive physical and psychological outcomes. Meditation gives access to the mysticism of life in a very practical way. The word mystical is derived from the Greek root muein, which means to keep silent. Meditation allows us to meet the world in silence on its own terms, without any judgement. An interesting paradox about the transformational state is that whilst it is a place of action, it is also a state of deep listening and liminality. Holding liminal space and being present to the world between states of knowing is a core aspect of the transformational state. Silence supports the cultivation of the listening capacity. Silent reflection brings us to the mystery of life, giving us the space to reflect on the nature of existence in very meaningful ways.

Discussion

As emergent demands meet the limits of current leadership thinking and practice, we find ourselves at an epoch of transformation in leadership education. Existing educational opportunities are largely transactional in nature. They are based on unexamined, outdated paradigms and operating assumptions, and are, therefore, insufficient to meet the challenges we face. By definition they cannot support leaders to go beyond traditional high performance transactional practices. Overdependence on one inner state always leads to incoherence and imbalance in Siegel’s model of psychological health. Wellbeing is the result of resonance and integration between diverse states. This is what is missing in current practice. Put simply, we need to become more: more aware and more conscious of the totality of whom and what we are. The model highlights both the limitations of current thinking and the direction of travel that might provide a route towards a leadership practice that will be fit for the 21st century. It is an evolutionary process of development and represents the creative impulse to overcome limitations that drives the transcendent nature of evolution.

Pearce (85) states that the ability to transcend limitations is a two-fold process: the first is to generate movement, and the second is to create that which lies beyond and manifests through that movement. The primary purpose of this paper is to create movement and then to highlight some of the ways in which we might create what lies beyond–the ways in which leadership capacity could be developed towards a more self-transforming trajectory. This could effectively narrow the gap between what businesses expect of the leadership mind and what the leadership mind is currently capable of.

Many questions remain regarding the ways in which appropriate development might take place. There is much work ahead if current assumptions about learning are to be challenged and overcome. Where a transactional bias exists, any discussion about reflective and transpersonal learning will be problematic, even conceptually, since it orientates to an entirely different and apparently counterintuitive operating logic. To the transactional mind, transcendent and transformational operating logics seem unconvincing at best, irrelevant at worst. A closed system always mediates itself to keep its own identity. Transpersonal education is always challenging to conventional systems of knowing favoured by the contemporary Western mind, but that is not a good enough reason not to act.

Sufficient examples of good practice exist in both consciousness development and the psychological work of personal development and integration that could provide a template for future practice. There is, of course, no one way to build a practice that addresses the development needs of all four states. There are multiple ways to build a practice around this model, and I list here a range of things that can be considered to leverage the model. It is not an exhaustive list, but I would suggest that it provides areas for further research.

Spiritual Intelligence

David King’s thesis ”Rethinking Claims of Spiritual Intelligence: A Definition, Model, And Measure” (56-117), presents a powerful case for Spiritual Intelligence (SI) as an emerging field with tremendous potential within executive leadership. King rigorously reviews existing data to present a compelling model for SI alongside tools for assessment and measurement of capability within this intelligence.

According to King, SI can be defined as” a set of mental capacities” that contribute to the awareness, integration, and adaptive application of the nonmaterial and transcendent aspects of one’s existence. King proposes four core components that comprise spiritual intelligence: critical existential thinking, personal meaning production, transcendental awareness whilst in the normal waking state, and conscious state expansion.

The concept of spiritual intelligence is important because it describes a range of mental capabilities and adaptive practices that authentically define it as a legitimate intelligence. The assumption is that it can be developed within an educational setting using a variety of methodologies. As such, SI becomes a focus for the intentional learning derived from new and ongoing practices rather than the description of an array of discrete extraordinary phenomenological behaviours or belief systems with limited application to leadership. King proposes that the development of the four core components of spiritual intelligence supports the cultivation of a range of personal, interpersonal, and global qualities that are of considerable interest.

The Role of Creativity in Leadership

Creativity is at the heart of the evolutionary impulse. The 2009 IBM study, “Capitalising on Complexity: Insights from the Global CEO,” cited at the start of this paper, concludes that creativity will be the most important leadership capability in coming years. Returning to Bohm, he states that creativity is “founded on the sensitive perception of what is new and different from what is inferred by previous knowledge” (6). This is the evolutionary impulse to move beyond existing limitations.

In Bohm’s eyes, creativity would reflect a call to a different kind of understanding, including the deeper purpose of leadership. Bohm suggests that creativity has a childlike quality or playfulness, that it can be nurtured and developed but that it gets easily lost in the confusion of our daily fears, desires, aims, securities, pleasures, and pains. The creative leader will be deeply interested in discovery and originality but also able to tolerate confusion and to self-organize around difficult feelings, distractions, and conflicting interests.

Creativity emerges when the conditions support it, and Bohm provides us with a rich template outlining both the kind of things we might expect to find in a creative executive programme and what we might seek to avoid. He argues that it is the natural condition of the mind to be creative and that it is both unnatural and unhealthy for the mind to think mechanistically. He suggests that mechanical thinking is precisely what leads the mind into confusion, dissatisfaction, and a variety of psychological problems.

Creativity is destroyed and mediocrity ensured by three things: fear of making mistakes (and the perpetuation of ego structures through the pursuit of perfection), mechanistic perceptions (dry learning and learning by repetition), and utilitarian thinking (unconsidered conventionalism).

For Bohm, as with Siegel, state of mind greatly influences the capacity to learn new things. Abilities derive from the practices designed to foster discovering and originality; the cultivation of a perception that is attentive, alert, aware, and sensitive; an understanding of universal principles including harmony, structure, totality, and unity; and a willingness at all times to challenge or overturn old structures and orienting systems in the face of new facts. This is the core of creative practice. This is surely an excellent description of the self-transforming mind.

Leadership and the Brai

A great deal has been written about the relationship between the brain hemispheres in processing and understanding data from the external world, developing a coherent sense of self, and supporting the formation of our understanding of the world. Whilst there is not space to discuss this in detail here, we can summarise that the Western rational dualistic paradigm that underpins most executive education is primarily an expression of left-brain hemisphere processes. This has been given pre-eminence in forming and articulating our understanding of reality. Right-brain processes, commonly described as holistic, individual, empathic, implicit, interconnected, and intuitive in nature, have tended to be less developed, and this has become a problematic bias. Iain McGilchrist quotes Einstein in a recent presentation on the brain: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift” (TED Lecture).

Leadership practices that seek to align, synchronise, and give equal weight to both the brain hemispheres and that can explore the wider implications of integrated functioning between the different aspects of the brain (brainstem, limbic, cortex, and prefrontal cortex) offer considerable opportunities for research and development. Evidence from fields such as neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology strongly suggest that self-reflective and transpersonal practices, including meditation and autobiographical work, have profound effects on key areas of the brain as well as on the way the brain organises and develops. Mind is not the brain, but it influences the brain directly through the conscious flow of energy and information. Mind has a profound impact on important regulatory areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex and the temporal regions with significant benefits to mental well-being and the development of coherent internal states, suggesting that mind-based practices could become central to future education programmes. Old limiting patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving can be overcome whilst more integrated ways of being present to the world can be developed at any age. Practices that develop SI also demonstrate very meaningful brain responses with positive outcomes across an array of positive health metrics (King 134 – 156).

Alternative Cosmologies

As has been noted, a period of transition is an invitation to examine the fundamental paradigms that are used to describe reality in order to address persistent anomalies and so that more complex organising systems can emerge.

The Native Science Movement (Cajete Chaps. 1 and 2) has sought to find a language to bridge the subjective experiences of Native peoples with modern science within an eco-philosophical framework. The collaboration, headed by the Native American Academy offers profound insights into the nature of reality and finds striking similarities between the concepts of the world as held by native people for millennia and the findings of quantum science and other disciplines. Logic systems concur in part and then expand beyond the axiomatic references of the traditional Western paradigm. The native paradigm is based on an extraordinarily rich array of sources including observation, experiment, meaning and understanding, objectivity, unity, causality, models, instrumentation, appropriate technology, spirit, interpretation, explanation, authority, place, initiation, cosmology, representations, human experience, ceremony, eldership, life energy, dreams and visions and the concept of pathways.

From the native perspective individuals are active universal agents participating in a living and mutually dependent world. The idea of mutuality and participation within a living and animate world is central here and could add significant value to existing rational dualistic systems. Practice is upheld by elders and leaders who are developed deliberately to have a profound understanding of and responsibility to the maintenance of balance and harmony in the world. In this logic, each person is a separate agent, but action is not driven unduly by individual motives. The position of the ego is renegotiated to a more balanced place alongside other systems of knowing. The Native Science Movement proposes a living practice that coheres in every aspect of life and that manifests as an agenda for a sustainable future. It is path and practice in genuine alignment and as such offers a rich template for further research.

Conclusion

We find ourselves at a threshold in terms of executive leadership education; a time of transition in which old systems are no longer adequate to meet emerging demands. Research tells us that there is a significant gap between the challenges we face and the current capacity for leaders to meet those challenges in new and creative ways. Without the conscious cultivation of greater mental complexity through the integration of core leadership states and with development opportunities focused primarily on the transactional and self-reflective functions, consistent transformational practice will continue to be haphazard and largely consigned to chance. It is important to recognize that the reflective, transcendent, and transformational states must be accessed and nurtured through an operating logic different from the rational dualistic frame. Different frames exist that can both support and go beyond the limits of the current curriculum with its anchor in transactional development.

The reality of our global situation requires that we think both urgently and differently about the way in which executive education is conceived, what its future focus should be, and what paradigms and frameworks it should be modelled on. This is the nature of evolution. We are being invited to go beyond our existing limits. The gateway into transformational thinking and action can emerge through the integration of the transactional and self-reflective functions, with the transcendent and transformational mediated through both the personal and transpersonal aspects of self. This process can support leaders towards the cultivation of states of greater internal coherence, of expanded awareness and towards capacities for thinking and action that exceed normal, conventional limits–defined here as interpersonal leadership. It is this step that can make transformational leadership development an authentic possibility. As educators and leaders it is something that urgently requires our attention today.

References

Austin, James H. Selfless Insight. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.

Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York: Routledge Press, 1998.

Cajete, Gregory and Leroy Little Bear. Native Science: Natural laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000.

Danielson, C. Leadership for the 21^st Century. 2011.

Harman, Willis. “Reconciling Science and Metaphysics: the Union Whose Time Has Come.”

Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Cannongate, 2002.

Huppert , Felicia, Nick Baylis, and Barry Kaverne. The Science of Well Being. Oxford University Press, 2005.

IBM. Capitalising on Complexity: Insights from the global CEO. Published study. 2009. http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/ceo/ceostudy2010/index.html.

Jironet, Karin Female Leadership. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Kegan, Robert and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Immunity to Change. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009.

King, David. “Rethinking Claims of Spiritual Intelligence: A Definition, Model, and Measure. Trent University, 2008.

McGilchrist, Iain. “The Divided Brain.” TED lecture ,October 2011.

Miller, Jeffrey. Introduction to the Transcendent Function-Development of the Ego in Western Consciousness. New York: Suny Press, 2004.

Pearce, Joseph Chilton. Strange Loops and Gestures of Creation. Benson, NC: Goldenstone Press, 2010

“Personal Self.” Oxford English Dictionary.

Sahtouris, Elisabet and James E. Lovelock. Earthdance: Living systems in Evolution. Lincoln, NE: iUniversity Press, 2000.

Segal, Zindel V., J. Mark G. Williams, and John D. Teasdale. Mindfulness based Cognitive Therapy for Depression. New York: Guildford Press 2002.

Siegel, Daniel J. Mindsight. Bantam Books, 2011.

Tarnas, Richard. The Great Copernican Revolution and the Crisis of the Modern World View. The New Renaissance Ed. David Lorimer and Oliver Robinson. Floris Books 2010.

Wallace, B. Alan. Choosing Reality. Boston: New Science Library, 1989.

 About the Author

Nick Ross, BA, FRSA, has been a leadership trainer and personal development coach for over 20 years.  Coming from a professional background in addictions therapy his work today includes delivery of extensive leadership development programs and executive coaching to global companies including Orange, ExxonMobil, Daimler-Benz, LaFarge, Fed Ex and McDonalds. Nick is a lead presenter with Olivier Mythodrama Associates where he also has responsibility for strategic partnership development. Nick has also been involved in collaborations with Oxford Said Business School in the delivery of the BAE Delta Leadership program and with Israel Mythodrama in leadership development with AMDOCS.

Nick has a longstanding interest in understanding human consciousness and its application in the development of organizations and leadership in the 21^st century. Nick draws his inspiration from time spent learning from a variety of aboriginal cultures and influential individuals including Elisabeth Kubler Ross and has a strong interest and developing practice in transpersonal, and archetypal psychology inspired by the practice of individuals such as Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina, Robert Moore and James Hillman. Nick has been involved in the use of Hemi Sync technology, pioneered by Robert Monroe, for nearly 25 years and is a member of the TMI Professional Division in Virginia.

Putting Wisdom to Work in the World

Adventures of Ideas

Mark McCaslin

[We are delighted to announce the beginning of a new column that will be appearing in each issue of Integral Leadership Review. Mark McCaslin is an innovator and is in passionate pursuit of learning through sense- and meaning-making. But he doesn't stop there. For Mark learning is most meaningful when it is applied in an ongoing dance of discovery and making a difference. Welcome, Mark!

– Russ]

Mark McCaslin

Upon considering the vision and mission held by the Integral Leadership Review it becomes apparent that there is something here for the leadership scholar and practitioner alike. I suspect that the real genius behind this leadership venue is how it manages to value historical leadership foundations without ossifying, to embrace cutting edge leadership scholarship without defending, and to potentiate good leadership practice without apology. Held at this intersection of foundational scholarship and good practice; “to make a substantive difference in creating self-sustaining and generative people, systems and earth through an integrative, developmental and transdisciplinary approach to leadership”, is a refreshing bold examination of the current rising vector and increasing velocity of leadership studies. Here at the Integral Leadership Review we gain access to emerging theories and creative conversations around how to place integrally focused leadership theory into practice. In short, together we are revealing and discussing how to put wisdom to work in the world.

To engage the world of emerging leadership ideas and to meet them pragmatically with strength, hope, and possibilities is the core purpose of this column. Ideas about the evolving nature of leadership, and in particular creative integrally centered empowering ideas, inspire dialogue and adventure. Alfred North Whitehead (a British mathematician, logician and philosopher who developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which has come to be known as process philosophy) spoke to what he called “Adventures of Ideas”. This resonates deeply with our purpose. The vision and mission held by the Integral Leadership Review gains favor and momentum when we embrace the notion of “Adventures of Ideas”. It is an inspiring, motivating and potentiating declaration. What Whitehead was directly addressing through his process philosophy was the historical proclivity we (teachers, scholars and leaders) tend to fall into where we lock on to some idea or truth and then, through scholarly defense and habits of practice, offensively lock out or drown competing or newer ideas trying desperately to push through the leadership substrate. Human phenomenon, with leadership being no exception, tends to take on a historic flavor. We tend to become more and more about the “history of ideas” than we do about the “Adventures of Ideas”. Looking back, as we often do, we attempt to make sense out of the emerging great age of leadership from the perspective of the ages gone by. Yet looking back now, at these great ages of leadership and the civilizations upon which they worked for the good of society, do we now simply stand in awe and attempt to mimic? Do we now, in face of this emerging age of possibility and potential, mutate our collective and creative purpose through imitation?  In taking this “history of ideas” perspective, bowing diligently to their original greatness of ages gone by; do we now dishonor their farther reaching intentions?

Also I suggest that the Greeks themselves were not backward looking, or static. Compared to their neighbors, they were singularly unhistorical. They were speculative, adventurous, eager for novelty. The most un-Greek thing we can do, is to copy the Greeks. For emphatically they were not copyist. (Whitehead, p. 273 -274)

Consider for a moment the following historical thoughts holding this adventurous perspective:

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

– Albert Einstein

If awareness of anomaly plays a role in the emergence of new sorts of phenomena, it should surprise no one that a similar but more profound awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory. On this point historical evidence is, I think, entirely unequivocal. The state of Ptolemaic astronomy was a scandal before Copernicus’ announcement.

 – Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3^rd Ed.), p. 67.

Each of these scientists/philosophers was holding something up for us to see and understand—this is true. But to stop here at truth alone would be to miss their central lesson as they were also holding something together for us all to discover, and this is beautiful, and they were holding something together they hoped we would find in ourselves, and this is good. This ‘something together’ I have struggled with as I searched for understanding, balance, evidence, and development of my own experiences and the experiences of others seeking outlets and avenues to express their innate potentials and original greatness. It is in the purposing of that original greatness that we discover the pragmatic heart of adventure—the innate ability we hold to transform ourselves and our world. To celebrate fully the “Adventures of Ideas” is the purpose at hand.

My approach to this column and to the “Adventures of Ideas” will be to take emerging and practical leadership issues and examine them along the upward way of the Integral North. This means of course that ideas must be approached with openness and careful understanding so as to learn from them. I will, and I invite you to as well, critically reflect on these ideas from the lens of creative self-reflection asking: “how do we put this to work in the world”?

In this column I will address emerging leadership issues and challenges at the intersection of disciplines, theories, and practices. From this perspective I hope we might illuminate real solutions for today and tomorrow. There is magic at the intersection as it is here that new ideas, new knowledge and integral wisdom are born into this world. They are informed by our histories yet standing at the intersection as we do the ideas emerging are more artful, peaceful, and adventurous. These are the ideas that grant us a glimpse of future possibilities and call us forward to meet them.

The emerging age of leadership goes by many names—spiritual, primal, resonate, authentic, potentiating… integral; no matter the name it holds a constant purpose. Held within this frame are two mutually supporting and adventurous ideas. The leadership of our future will simultaneously build the potential of the organization, school, community… civilization through the actualization of the potential of the people who work, live and love within these domains and it is aimed at building the potential of those who would lead. The potential leader, the integral leader, holds this adventurous idea sacred. It is an idea whose future has arrived.

There are of course many issues we can take on and discuss in such a leadership venue. We could discuss the notion of how we accelerate innovation,  build confidence, assemble transdisciplinary (cross-functional) teams, creatively ramp up productivity, build new leadership models, multiply success, build potential, inspire breakthrough experiments and creativity just to name a few.  Here within this frame we can creatively risk an adventure into how to we would approach the full range of the human phenomena we call leadership. Ideas for new adventures are always welcome.

Leadership studies, movements… ideas too have sprung from the “history of ideas”. Classically leadership studies are a reflection of the history of civilization. The great leadership movements—the great man, behavioral, transformative—were reactions to an open frontier, the industrial revolution, and the advent of the age of technology and information.  They were reactively formed and perfected around the history of ideas. What we need today is adventure. We will find that adventure in the emerging leadership age as it seems ready, able and willing to pull us greatly into the future. In this emergent leadership age we see and feel how theory and practice, philosophy and purpose, creativity and spirituality present a future where the “Adventures of Ideas” is well met by peace and art—power and loveliness—openness and potential. Are you ready for adventure?

About the Author

Mark L. McCaslin, Ph.D.  is a professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. As a career educator, he has a rich history of teaching, educational programming, and administration. His personal and professional interests flow around the development of philosophies, principles, and practices dedicated to the full actualization of human potential. The focus of his research has centered upon organizational leadership and educational approaches that foster a more holistic approach towards the fulfillment of that potential. At the apex of his current teaching, writing, and research is the emergence of Potentiating Leadership and The Potentiating Arts™.   potentiatingarts@gmail.com   mmccaslin@itp.edu

John Tuite

Why the Body Matters to Leadership

Some twenty plus years ago when I began training as a secondary school teacher, I had a few run-ins with a difficult class or two. There is a particularly sharp anguish that one experiences when a classroom of teenagers disintegrates beneath your hands. But it does compel a healthy desire to study good teachers handling challenging situations or tricky transitions in class. “Okay, that’s how you do it! That’s what you say!” I thought to myself at first. I entered my next classes re-armed. I had the tools I needed; I had seen them work. Opportunities to execute those same instructions soon arrived and I mimicked accurately the borrowed formula whose classroom potency I had seen working. It worked – not so much!

That’s because teaching (and leadership of all kinds) is an embodied skill. There are considerable verbal and cognitive skills, but these domains don’t capture some major essentials. If they did, just putting poets and scientists into our schools would do the trick. Many of the fundamental dimensions of the classroom are communicated through other means: posture, tone, breath, alignment, and the kind of energetic presence you bring to the room. Without this foundation the words and well-articulated ideas can just bounce off a tricky class.[i]

Later when I was in school leadership, I was responsible for pupil behaviour and the inclusion of challenging children. Often I was asked for advice on handling a difficult student or group. Sometimes highly competent teachers who had a host of working strategies for classroom management were simply looking for some understanding of a student that would reopen the way to some empathy or compassion for their weekly nemesis. Too often my best advice was well understood or the road to empathy re-found, but I suspected the commitment to it would not survive a hot Friday afternoon in Room 21 with Year 10.

Of course, sometimes in a school, like in any other organisation, there are whole days or weeks that feel like that archetypal discordant Friday afternoon. And then there are other days, where something different happens. Where the hard thing we struggle with suddenly finds its way and becomes easy. On these days the world has not abruptly changed, yet something in us has. Somehow we allow the internal space for something to come through us, and the exhaustive wilfulness of other days melts away. We have discovered the possibility of flow. Athletes know it as being ‘in the zone’. We glide down the school corridor dispensing justice and support with ease and grace, we find the right words to win the challenging parent, we catch a developing situation just before it congeals into something intractable. Yesterday we edged along overwhelm, today we feel “Bring it on, I can take more!” If we don’t take these moments of grace for granted a realisation occurs. We cannot change the ‘incoming’, but by shifting our state, we change how it impacts us and how we respond can be radically different.

I wanted a form of training and development that could survive that Friday afternoon confrontation. One that gave a better chance of sustaining the empowerment and compassion of the teacher or leader under whatever ‘incoming’ she was likely to meet. And one that worked with this understanding that by changing my state I could change the impact of the ‘incoming’ and my effectiveness in relating to it. Training that cultivated the purpose, aliveness and inclusiveness of a leader even under duress in the corridors and meeting rooms. In my twenty years of development as a teacher though, I didn’t get it.

My mind was consistently fed, but no one really addressed my ability to sustain an intention under stress, to build a larger and more generous presence in the midst of pressure, or to ‘embody’ my knowledge. The smooth plastic take-away folders, the boiled sweets and bottled water of the professional development hall allowed for a kind of learning that ignored the heart rate of a corridor confrontation, the snagged breath of a classroom challenge. Most teachers and all the school leaders I know have shelves of neatly bound training manuals, most of which haven’t been opened since home time on the day of the course. Training the emotional energy, the physical alignments, the ability to create presence and inclusiveness in our being, all these were largely by-passed. It was as if we were limited to being craniums trailing beneath us disenfranchised bodies, feelings and energies.

I believe this partial attention is rooted in the exclusion of the body from our developmental methods and that this exclusion leads to a frequent visitor in our professional lives: a pattern of great intentions followed by constricted performance, a pattern of mental development and ambition that is vulnerable to collapsing back under pressure because it has too little support or grounding in our other systems. I recognised and had studied this pattern intensely elsewhere. Elsewhere I had often known what I would like to do, what I should do, but under pressure I proved less graceful, generous, empowered, and certainly less dignified than I had seen in my mind’s eye. Elsewhere I had also experienced moments of grace and flow, of something marvelous and bigger than me coming through. It was the same dynamic I had worked with since my early teens in a very different kind of school.

In the 1970’s I began to study Nanshaolin Wuzu and Wuji, martial arts from the Buddhist temples of China. I have walked this particular path most of my life, with the same teacher, (now) Grandmaster Han Kim Sen. It’s where my own understanding of the importance of including and working through the body began. I am also a Conscious Embodiment teacher, a system of somatic practices founded by another masterful teacher, Wendy Palmer, based on mindfulness and Eastern martial arts (Wendy is a 6^th Dan Aikido teacher, and was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche). It’s in the testing arena of a martial arts hall that I learnt some of the lessons I believe fundamental to great leadership. Lessons to do with:

• Understanding our patterns of contraction under stress and the possibility of opening even inside pressure,
• Exploring skilful power,
• Developing the relationship between my internal depth and connection and my external possibilities,
• Letting go to allow something bigger to emerge.

Studying Contraction and Possibility

When our eyes are sensitive and there is more light than we can bear, our pupils contract. In the same way, when we experience overwhelm at work, or when the demands of our life exceed the inner resources we feel available to meet them, we can narrow the aperture of our entire being. We reduce our intake. We organise our self so as to not be touched quite so intensely by the world. This mental and energetic withdrawal is mobilised through patterns of smaller or larger muscular contractions, preparing us for fight, flight or freeze. A raising of the shoulders, a shortening of the breath, a holding in the belly. Each of us has our default pattern, as individual and as universal as a fingerprint. A pattern built to protect the particular arrangement of vulnerabilities in our core. Spend long enough inside this contraction and it becomes the way we make the world familiar and manageable. We can build a home with walls of muscle, an identity spread like a palimpsest across a hidden underlying structure of tension. And having built that identity we naturally find ourself defending it, protecting our very self-constriction.

As a somatic discipline, the path of martial arts studies this contraction intensely and repeatedly, continually exposing us to the places and activities where we hold tension. As we dissolve one constriction we are introduced to another one – perhaps deeper, more fundamental or intransigent than the last. We are placed in overwhelming situations. We are attacked by one, two or more people. As we develop in skill so does the skill and intensity of our assailants. The world contracts to the size of the space beneath our nose. Typically, we fail at first, or awkwardly, gracelessly, wriggle out of it. Inside this pressure zone we experience few choices. Perhaps we think our inelegant response was the only one possible? We get snagged; we get tense; we get caught.

Seeking a path of glory, the martial artist finds himself instead walking a path of repeated insult!

But then we are invited to the possibility of replacing our clumsy forced response with something more expansive, graceful, relaxed and skilful. And we learn that even under such pressure there were many choices, many paths through the problem. We can actually connect and build access to our larger self right inside the zone of overwhelm. Then we practice, practice!

In this process we pulse repeatedly between two possibilities, each latent within the situation we are confronted with. We start with an experience of acute personal scarcity and a universe that appears un-negotiably constricted. We then build right inside that situation a different experience, one of personal abundance and spaciousness. Each session we revisit this duo, at graduated but ever increasing levels of intensity. Each session we learn to tolerate a little more incoming energy, a little more discomfort, calling forth a little more grace and skill. And, often unacknowledged, if we undergo the process enough times we accumulate a quiet, subterranean foundation to our relationship with the world…everything is workable, if we can bring enough skill, awareness, and presence to it!

Here is the point. We build inside the pressure of the incoming. We develop while immersed in the energy of confrontation. Because of that energy.

The somatic approach of Conscious Embodiment loses the martial content, and slows down the rapid interactions of the martial arts hall so as we can more easily study ourselves, try out alternatives and build our capacity to access these alternatives under pressure. One of its revelatory insights is discovering just how little it takes to initiate our pattern of contraction. We learn it clearest in physical practices. Ask someone to push gently and steadily on your shoulder now, gradually increasing the pressure until you are off centre, and that’s where it will be. Often people find themselves organising physically around the push even before the hand touches. Our awareness funnels around the point of contact. There it is, our body’s fight, flight, or freeze response, showing up for duty. Sensitized to this, realising that even small amounts of mental and emotional ‘incoming’ create a similar physical response, a similar funnelling of awareness, and some of the exhaustive qualities in life as a leader are suddenly clearly explained.

If exhaustion were the only result of this contraction perhaps we could just tough it out. Drive through it on adrenalin. It isn’t. Most crucially for leaders entering a future of rapid complex change, contraction leads to loss of information. Our field of enquiry narrows, our creativity shrinks. We literally take less in. Accessing the bigger picture and our compassion become more difficult. In a body squeezed by tension, the energy of inspiration flows torpidly. Under pressure, the risky outlier components of us, capacities trying to establish themselves right at our developmental frontier, turn tail and repair to base. Our ability to hold a spectrum of possible views and choose from a range of viable actions reduces. (This is why great leadership is not simply a question of how advanced we might be along the various lines of development, but one of what our body can sustain, contain and support amid the pull and push of relationship and pressure.)

Often this contraction comes at exactly the moment where accessing these virtues are imperative. Like today.

If the world were not so rapidly changing and the demands not so urgent maybe we could continue a little longer with the adrenalin led, compartmentalised body of leadership we have cultivated so far. And continue with its companion; the wilful, efforting, partial ‘strategic’ mind. In the shifting terrain of the future a new leadership body, supporting a new leadership mind and heart, is required.

But there is something rooted and fundamental about this structure. If a fire breaks out in a stable, horses need to be pulled out by humans. If not they will stay there, the flames triggering a deep need for comfort, which they associate with their familiar place within the stable. When a flood comes, cattle often head down hill towards rising water. They were fed below, and previously found their comfort there. Blessed with a neo-cortex, human beings may think themselves beyond such mammalian folly. But too often we are rationalising rather than rational animals, and the pull of the familiar becomes even more magnetic the less familiar or safe our environment becomes. The body itself resists changes to its habits, returning to the neural grooves it has scored over years, giving off signs of distress when we ask for something different. From the body’s point of view we are always practicing something, and our reactive pattern provides a stubborn comfort despite being contextually dysfunctional.

Recognizing our Patterns

One of the major advantages of somatic work is its emphasis on the element of practice and its ability to work directly with this conditioned contraction of body and awareness, not getting caught up in the particularities of story. We recognise the repetitive nature of our response to incoming stimulation, discover how rooted it is in our own nervous system, and how shockingly independent of context and detail it is. Our attention begins to shift from the drama to our embedded reactions. (To give an example, my own pattern under criticism will be there regardless of the merits, groundedness, or intent of my critic: It starts with “My god, you’re right. I am not good enough!”, followed by, “Actually, you’re being unpleasant, and I don’t like you anymore!”. Followed by mentally trying to win the argument, in order to delay feeling it in my heart, and then worst of all, my guts. That all comes later, after the first few seconds or minutes. I over-engage in my head and shoulders and withdraw in the heart and hips area. This pattern is there beneath whatever social or professional veneer I have constructed. I might once have said I’m not proud of it, but now through somatic work I can catch myself sooner in the cycle, find it amusing and greet it like an old friend who shows up on the doorstep.)

Through familiarity (“Ah. There it is again!”), we begin to make friends with ourselves, including the dysfunctional, neurotic and embarrassing behaviours we maintain. In this way we begin to ‘have’ the pattern, instead of being had by it. (It’s simple subject-object stuff here.) We begin to see how we over-extend or hold our self small, both literally on a physical level and metaphorically in other domains. We begin to recognise how hard and funny our struggle is, and perhaps find a little more space and tolerance for the dysfunctions and struggles of others. If I know I am still working on my patterns five decades into my life, maybe I can cut others a little slack.

Perhaps the crucial step happens next. Somatic work offers centering practices that interrupt our pattern and the mental self-speak that supports it. We shift physically, using breath, postural alignment, our awareness of the space around us and our energetic presence. The shift on its own interrupts our habitual reactive pattern. And in the space provided by the interruption, supported by a consciously balanced, aligned and relaxing body, we open to possibility. Through practice we rehabilitate our capacity to move into a more generous, spacious relationship to our inner and outer world.

Working through the body in this way we can short-cut resistance, cutting directly through reactive patterns. We do not have to change our mind. (If the ‘mind’ could sort the ‘mind’ out on its own the path to enlightenment would be shorter and we would need fewer self-development books on our shelves.) Here, we do not even have to get rid off the reactive patterns of our personality. We do not have to finally ‘fix’ ourselves. Without this pressure we can even begin to appreciate them, as the richness of our life, the compost from which we grow. We only have to restore our capacity to enter a centered state, and learn how to pulse in and out of it.

The Body in Somatic Work

There are, of course, many approaches to somatic work today. Working through the body may start with elevated attention to such elements as posture, breath, skeletal alignment, and the tone and patterns of contraction and extension in the muscles. Yet the body is primarily a powerful point of entry and purchase into the mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual domains. Simply put, we work through the body to grow and refine awareness. The ‘body’ stands as gateway to the human being in its fullest, most inclusive sense. The body is the site, ground and vehicle for all our doing, thinking, feeling, and purposing, the tangible field in which these elements are actually negotiated, integrated or fractured according to the unique path of each. The particular pattern of an individual human life unfolds in and through the body.

Somatic work recognises the body as a source of its own particular wisdom. Intuition blossoms from gut feeling. Empathy from a heartbeat and breath momentarily entrained with another. Our common biology grounds us in the common needs of our species, enabling compassion to grow some roots. Without the contribution of the body, without its senses both externally and internally directed, the mind can float in a self-referential world of mirrors, can slip unhindered into past or future. The body returns us to the energy of the present moment. We are anchored. We break through our isolation, touching and being touched by what is ‘not’ us.

The body has its own level of engagement with reality, living its own story arc, with its own significant and sometimes non-negotiable events. Its physical demands attune us to the wider environment, and to other people. It speaks to us through complex voices, each possessing their own language, of emotion, poetry and metaphor. Through death, it whispers reminders of context, how the finite is made meaningful by the infinite.

Our sense of rhythm and timing comes from the body, each fundamental leadership capacities that are rarely addressed in developmental courses. We can speak right at the wrong time, we can miss the tempo of our colleagues when we are encouraging change. Attuned to our own pulse, we have the possibility of being attuned to that of others, increasing the possibilities of co-ordination and collaboration. Lose that inner sense of tempo and the best ideas are launched jarringly into the world.[ii]

When we are engaged in somatic work we are paying particular attention to the shape, quality and experience of aliveness in a person, their pattern of opening and shutting down their own excitement. Very often there is some underground stream of vitality that is looking for contact with the world, but which has been shut down by a rigidity in the torso, a clenching in the legs, a shallowness of breath. Sometimes the nectar of aliveness is curdling and souring in a thwarted individual. Awareness of the body’s holding patterns can return choice to the individual.

When we fully integrate the body we can hold together both a deep appreciation for our uniqueness, our unlikely and miraculous one-off occurrence in the world, and our commonality, our shared and humbling status as a member of a species and a mere link in the chain of evolution. This duality is the foundation for our intention, purpose and contribution, and for our compassion.

Ways of Power

Over the last decades we have developed many tools for exploring and deepening collaboration and conversation. Whether it is dialogue methods, world café, or the many other contributions, this area reflects an urgent need in the world. Less explored, but equally pressing for leadership, is the development of tools and methods of exploring power.

The skillful exercise of power is a fundamental human capacity, and in the next period one we need more of, not less. Good people need to find and become comfortable and skilled with power, and find new ways of being powerful. Indeed, connection, collaboration, compassion, these all become insipid without an infusion of power. (I have argued this elsewhere.)

Conscious Embodiment founder Wendy Palmer often remarks our culture teaches that it is good to be nice, or smart, but accessing the raw power that we hold in our core is much less appreciated. This is the kind of power you use when you are lifting heavy weights. It manifests unconsciously when a parent on a road sees a fast approaching car and with no negotiation or concern for their popularity drags their little one to safety on the other side. Sometimes it stirs in us and we shut it down, unable to endure its charge. It comes from our core deep in the belly, what the Japanese call the hara, and the Chinese the lower tan tien. Connecting to this place receives a lot of attention in Conscious Embodiment and all martial arts.

But this kind of power is a little scary for our culture. As a result we have been reluctant to explore or practice with it. Having made this refusal many good people and leaders fail to build a container for its skillful use, and therefore in the inevitable moments where we do use power, it is often less skillfully done than it could have been. We under or over-extend. We are too timid; we are too aggressive. We are rarely sharp, clean and precise like the prow of a well-designed boat. A blunted prow costs more effort and leaves a larger, more turbulent wake and disturbance behind. A blunted knife causes more damage than a scalpel.

Without support from low down in our core, we rely on over-extension in other areas, our heart and head. We mobilise excess emotion or cleverness to compensate. When we accept support from our core, we enter the relationship with more balance. When we don’t practiced connecting to our core, we are left with two sure fire ways to activate it:- fear and anger. Often with unskillful consequences. So our whole exercise of power becomes ‘problematic’. And a radical distinction gets lost:- the difference between force and power.

Cognitively, there may not be too much between these words. But as a felt experience, they are entirely distinct. For a martial artist the distinction between power and force is extremely clear, extremely tangible. Occasionally I have been repelled, and found myself sprawling on the floor, without a real grasp of how it happened:- power! Force on the other hand is both more common and more comprehensible. “I did this, you did that back… I ended up down here.“ One makes you laugh delightedly, the other makes you irritated or competitive.

These distinctions are available in our everyday experience. Teachers know the difference between a class where they have established a firm sense of their own power, and one in which they have to use ‘force’ (albeit of a non-physical kind). Actors or musicians know the difference between a performance unfolding from a natural power, and one that is laboured and inauthentic. A carpenter feels the easy power of the saw’s sharp teeth, or the forcefulness needed to push through wood when the blade is blunt.

Force and power are distinct. Somatically they have very different origins and entirely different outcomes. Force occurs when real power is absent. When people feel powerless at root, or divided in themselves, they reach for force as the nearest approximation to the power they are lacking.

Exploring and developing our own power requires more than thinking about it. It requires a physical, or somatic, exploration, enabling us to become more aware of what happens in our body and heart when we display or experience power. It requires us to work from the bottom up on how we shape our self and open or close down in the face of power, our own and others.

Working for centuries with power, practitioners of internal martial arts have learned to focus initially on building the somatic container to run increased amounts of energy associated with power. If you simply increase the power available without working on the container and opening the channels, people and leaders blow out. They get ill, they get nasty, they get burnt out. So we create better alignment, less constriction, more tolerance for enhanced energy. For leaders, we sometimes work with bokkens, wooden samurai swords that immediately amplify their sense of their own power. Then we help them shape, contain and settle it into something than can be used clean, precise and without aggression. They learn the feeling of ‘cutting an intention into place’ so they can locate that sense in their bodies again when they are in the meeting room, in the conversation.

Connecting, Aligning, Deepening

In Chinese martial arts we spend a lot of time working on the alignment of the head, spine, hips and feet. This emphasis on the vertical orientation blends us with the natural lines of force between heaven and earth, with the downward pull of gravity and the upward, centrifugal force of the earth’s spin. It is the source of much quiet strength. What’s funny and interesting is what happens when we are put in front of an attacker. Bang goes the vertical orientation, replaced by a rampant horizontal one. Suddenly all our awareness and energy is focused along the horizontal plane, determined to manage the incoming. A good punch does that to you, just like a disastrous quarterly return, or an irate line manager.

Part of our journey towards some kind of mastery is to gradually make our vertical orientation at least as resilient and magnetic as the horizontal one under pressure. We make the strength of our internal connection sufficient to meet the demands of the external world. It’s the same principle in nature. A tree establishes the downward vertical connection of its taproot before reaching out horizontally to the world. So we work on ourselves first. Before we enter difficulty, we get sorted. A less organic, but accurate, analogy might be the instruction to always put on your own oxygen mask in a flight emergency before putting on your neighbours, especially if they are your children. Somatically, this means as leaders under fire, we recover the dignity and balance of our upright posture as a first step towards meeting the incoming skilfully. Just this step alone can begin a cascade of possibilities.

In Conscious Embodiment we use a simple model of the human being. We associate the horizontal plane with what we call ‘personality’. This bit of us tries to manage the world, make it safe, or make it do what we want. It’s the bit that moves towards or away from pressure and danger. When operating from personality my head wants control, my heart wants approval and my core wants safety. Feeling its isolation, my personality desires connection. Personality is very concerned with managing the stuff of our lives, the people, the reports, the relationships, the things. Personality has an agenda. This part of us is not to be denigrated. It got us through many difficulties. It is part of our human richness. It puts the cornflakes on the table. And its drama is very compulsive viewing.

Yet ultimately the world cannot be made forever stable and safe. So our resulting tension can be exhausting if it is our only option.

The vertical dimension we associate with the state of being centred. Here our orientation starts by connecting and aligning within our self, and allows a connection to something bigger than our self:- the supportive quality of the ground, the generative and spacious quality of the sky. Experiencing each of these gives somatic support for our sense of groundedness, our ability to take a stand, our generosity, and creativity. Because centre is already connected it is not tied up with acquiring and gripping onto our connections with others. It can accept that whatever is arising is legitimate. The agenda is lost. In centre, instead of control, our minds access a natural wisdom and intelligence; instead of approval our hearts access compassion; and instead of safety, our core access confidence.

So somatically the first step in meeting incoming demands and conflict is to recover our vertical posture and energetic orientation.

If personality references on things and control, centre references on space. In personality it can be difficult not to feel that it is all down to “me”. In centre, aware of the space or field, we can begin to let something bigger come through.

Letting Something Through

There can often be an exhaustive wilfulness to leadership. Always pushing the agenda, driving the change, building, accumulating results. Of course this can be very affirming to our sense of our self. All that resistance consolidates the ‘me’-ness of ‘me’. But this individuation in an uncertain world comes with a price. Isolation, exhaustion, and fear linger in the shadows, waiting their moment. It can be easy to forget how we are participating in our own resistance, and to not see what simply wants to grow and emerge. When we are focused on the to do list we can lose sight of the field and its emergent qualities.

There is a moment deep into your training as a martial artist when you stop trying to add things, and start trying to remove them. You’ve worked in the sunlight and felt your movement suddenly lifted and filled by some insubstantial wind. You’ve felt your technique flip into a realm of effortless ease without your permission or participation. You’ve had enough experiences of something bigger than you and already there, to become really interested in it. You have recognised that your own tension and limited awareness have blocked it coming through. Now you want to clear internal blockages, open channels and release tension. The Tao Te Ching says, “In the pursuit of learning, everyday something is acquired/ In the pursuit of the Tao, everyday something is dropped.”[iii] Somatically this is signalled by a shift from reliance on contractor muscles to enlivening your extensors, ligaments, tendons and joints. The joints pulse open and closed rather than squeeze and grind. The emphasis now is on creating space in your body and relating to its flow, rather than the substance and solidity. Philosophically this moment is a fulcrum point, where you move away from feeling you have got to do it all yourself, to understanding that the energy, the alignments, the form of movement was always already there and you just have to find your way to joining it. You are entering a bigger universe than the little efforting self allowed for.

A similar moment can happen in the development of leaders. Arguably, all our greatest leaders have had this quality. Martin Luther King, Mandela, Gandhi. We felt that something grander than them was coming through them. Leaders need tools to relate to this bigger field when under pressure. In Conscious Embodiment we do this through shifting our attention to the space, inside and around us. We suggest that the space has intelligence. It is not empty, but has texture and potentiality, it has an energetic and generative field. When we are in personality, focused on things, the space separates us. In a centred state, it connects and holds us. Our sense of self dilates, like a tight bead of oil touching still water. This enlarged presence can fill the space, and we can invite people into our own energetic field with a sense of ‘we are in this together’.

Working through the Body and the Spiral of Development

A somatic approach to leadership emphasises taking skilful actions under pressure. Like meditation, it tends to help people at whatever level of development they are at, strengthening their functionality and the healthy aspects of that level. Sometimes it may speed their movement through one level to the next. For example, those at membership levels working with rhythm and the physical awareness of themselves and others in the space may be aided in their co-ordination with and sensitivity to others. They increase their capacity to read and integrate with the membership group. Here, in other words, it will increase convergence and harmony.

Those leaving membership levels will have tools that increase their capacity to take a stand, speak their truth without aggression, and to move through resistance. They will find in the body an independent and increasingly rich, diverse source of information and experience that will often be at odds with the socialised mind’s expectations. They may be expected to feel ‘this’, but their growing awareness of the somatic messages may deliver sensations that are “that”. (See panel.) Here, somatic approaches can increase divergence and autonomy. The emerging complexity and contradiction of actual sensations and internal experience propel people into the next stage of their development. Further up the developmental ladder, and the body becomes a rich source of voices, stirrings, flows and sensations. This richness is both generative of, and the supporting structure for, the development of multi-perspectival awareness. Our increased capacity to stay with our discomfort supports our capacity to tolerate ambiguity and conflict. We can as leaders and people take more in, reach out further.

As we reverse our withdrawal from the body we meet the involuntary nature of our own physical processes, the stubborn conditioned quality of our reactions, and the grandiosity and pride of our ego slips. Its fulltime grip on our identity falters. We sense more subtle and spacious flows and energies, and we find our very solidity dissolving in the heat of our awareness. Descending into the body we retrieve our ability to fly, to ascend and transcend our little mind.[iv]

The spiral nature of development is abundantly clear in the somatic tradition. We return again and again at each level to basics, to the building blocks, to practice. Last year, after 35 years training, I concentrated not on some ‘secret technique’ or complex esoteric set of movements, but on developing my ability… to stand up. Not some weird way of standing up. Just straight up and down, two-legs-on-the-ground-head-above-the-shoulders standing up. I am standing quite well now!

In somatic approaches the advanced curriculum looks very much like the beginner’s curriculum.

The Call: A Stable Centre to Meet the Centrifugal Forces

The world calls to us now urgently.

Each of us is called to think, feel, speak and act more wisely, more connectedly, and powerfully. Each of us is called to bring to the table the singular combination of gifts and talents we carry. We are not to hide. And crucially, because we have tended not to do these things well or for long enough, because we need to change, we are called to find ways to support all this, collective and individual practices that sustain and deepen this in order to find tools that allow the collective and individual body to make the shift.

While the call is pressing and many of its implications hard, we should not believe it is only onerous. Because it is a call at last to enter into the fullness of what we can be. It is a call to a greater connection and a deeper satisfaction than we have so far collectively experienced. We are called to remember beauty and joy as much as to realise grief and regret – a call to lighten up as much as to get down, to come home as much as journey into strange new lands. There is much to be glad about in this call.

We know more about the possibilities and dignity of individual and collective human life than ever before. We cannot walk into our future regardless of this knowledge, even if we fail to live up to it each day or year. It is there as a marker. “This is what we can be, this is what we must be.” Human beings have met each self-inflicted indignity of our history with a wave of impassioned reaching further into the kingdom of possibility with a reassertion that our fullest potential is our best worthwhile destination. At each failure someone somewhere responded defiantly by drawing the circle of human life a little bigger, a little more inclusive. “We are all us,” we declare in the face of the lord, the slaver, the bigot, the misogynist, the fascist. Each wave of human history leaves a tidal mark of human dignity higher up the beach, more inclusive, more complex, more comprehensive.

Further re-integration and healing of our fractured being is emerging:- between mind and body, male and female, between the sacred and secular, the powerful and the powerless. Even if we see only early, fragile or limited moves, the point is this:- when before have all these questions been simultaneously so high up on the agenda of human society?

So even as we move towards the multiple crises that grip us we can remind ourselves that if we are overwhelmed, it is also tribute to the rapid expansion of our consciousness, our acceptance of responsibility, and the raising of the minimum expectations of our decency. Our present overwhelm is evidence of our future ambition, and that is hopeful.

So we stand in this moment watching the positive and negative strands of possibility unfurl into the future, interwoven like the double helix of life. Perhaps never before has humanity and the planet been on the edge of so much greatness and so much destruction.

Across the centuries this call has been an invitation. But now the world needs us, demands us. Without us at our best these positive threads will fray and break. We are urgently called to be powerful and compassionate in our actions, wise in our discretion and choices, ever-widening in our circle of concern and inclusion. To transform our collective structures and processes we must individually be prepared to take a stand, and to forge relationships that have purpose and perseverance. And as a condition of all the above, standing before all these possible futures, both threatening and hoped for, a responsibility to match the centrifugal forces of the next decades with a centre that is calm, connected, enlivened and empowered. And in doing so, through our full presence, calming, empowering, enlivening and blessing others.

Bibliography

Palmer, W. (2008). The Intuitive Body. Seattle: Flying Kite Publications.

Palmer, W. and Kornfield, J. (2002). The Practice of Freedom. Berkeley, CA: Rodmell Press.

Strozzi-Heckler, R. (1993). The Anatomy of Change. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Leonard. G. (2006). The Silent Pulse. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith.

Wilber, K. (1979). No Boundary. Boston: Shamhala Publications, Inc.

Disclaimer

While my heartfelt gratitude goes out to my lifelong teacher, Grandmaster Han, and to Wendy Palmer, my Conscious Embodiment teacher, obviously any misunderstandings and mistakes are entirely mine to own. This is a truth Grandmaster Han points out to me weekly.

It also needs to be said that the examples cited above, while based on actual people and events, details have been changed to protect identities. I am of course deeply privileged and thankful to work with such wonderful people.

About the Author

John Tuite taught in London secondary schools for 18 years, serving on leadership teams in four schools. He was an Advanced Skills Teacher. Prior to this he worked as a builder, an arborist and a councilor. He now works full-time as a leadership coach, trainer, consultant and teacher of embodied leadership. He is a student of Wendy Palmer, founder of Conscious Embodiment. He is also the Senior Instructor of Grandmaster Han Kim Sen of Southern Shaolin Five Ancestor, a centuries old martial art born in the Buddhist temples of China. He has practiced within this tradition since 1974. He can be contacted through www.clearcircle.org or jtuitelondon@yahoo.co.uk.

 Notes