Chapter 15
Becoming a SELFLESS Leader
Humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer once said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” Conscious leaders are acutely aware of the importance of service in helping their organizations realize their highest potential. They also know that helping others leads to greater personal fulfillment and happiness.
Such leaders have learned the secret of the helpers’ high: we feel good when we make other people happy. Servant leaders embrace transpersonal values—goodness, justice, truth, love, the alleviation of suffering, the salvation or enlightenment of others, and so on—that lift them to higher levels of consciousness.1
Muhammad Yunus on Selflessness
The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully. The selfless part of human beings has not been allowed to play out. As a result, we created a concept of business based on money-centric, one-dimensional human beings. But real human beings are multidimensional.
People climb to the top of Mount Everest. What’s their incentive? Making money is an incentive. But making other people happy is a super incentive. We haven’t explored that part of it. I’m inviting you to have a taste of it. If you like it you’ll make your own decision. I tasted it and I found it an exciting thing to do—more exciting than making money.
We’ve used our creative power to focus on making money—and we’ve done it like it’s the only game in town. It’s not. There’s a more exciting game in town.2
The essential elements of what it means to be a conscious leader can be captured in a single word, which also serves as an acronym: SELFLESS. A leader who operates with a primary emphasis on his or her self-interest naturally views other people as a means to that end. You cannot be a true leader if you operate at that level of consciousness.
The great Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote of “self-transcendence” as a state beyond self-actualization, which is the highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For a self-actualized person who becomes a leader, the sensibility can all become about “the grandness of you”: you see others as bit players in your journey of self-actualization. The organization comes to reflect your personal priorities and goals.
Self-transcendence is not about losing the self; it is about not getting stuck there. You could say it’s about thinking of the larger self—recognizing that we are all interconnected and interdependent and are serving the collective self. By thinking of this larger self, you become a much more powerful leader in service of something bigger than yourself—the well-being of all the people whose lives are affected by your actions. Selfless is the perfect word to encapsulate that sense of awareness. The eight qualities that SELFLESS connotes are strength, energy and enthusiasm, long-term orientation, flexibility, love and care, emotional intelligence, systems intelligence, and spiritual intelligence (figure 15-1).
Figure 15-1: Qualities of a SELFLESS leader
Strength
We start with strength, because leaders must be strong and resolute. They have to have moral fiber, confidence, and the courage of their convictions. They have to be unshakable, able to stand up to doubters or to opposition that is motivated by baser instincts. They are confident without being arrogant. The key is that their strength is deployed in the service of noble ends: the flourishing of all the lives they lead and touch. That strength is sourced both from within and from outside. They draw on the strength of their teams (without depleting the power of those teams), and they tap into the moral power of the universe, which is available to anyone engaged in genuinely right action. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Leaders who are trying to bend that arc away from justice will find their efforts ultimately stymied, while those who engage in right actions and pursue noble goals will find the wind at their backs.
Conscious leaders are not limited by their personal strengths. They recognize that their areas of weakness can be supplemented and complemented by others in their leadership team. You should lead from your strengths, but recognize that your strengths and what is needed in a particular situation may not be the same. Therefore, you’ll want to assemble a team that collectively has the necessary qualities to move the organization forward.
In the first column in the following exercise, explore your strengths as a leader. In the second column, list your weaknesses, and in the third column, list the names of individuals on your leadership team who can supplement your strengths and complement your weaknesses.
| Strengths | Weaknesses | Leadership complement |
Energy and Enthusiasm
Conscious leaders can tap into an infinite source of power because of their commitment to a higher purpose and a righteous path that is in harmony with their innate nature. This power gives them great energy and enthusiasm. This doesn’t mean that all leaders have to be extroverts. Introverts can make exceptional leaders, as many studies have found. When you’re aligned with your purpose, you can’t help but be enthusiastic. Passion is hard to fake if you don’t have it.
In the space below, describe the last time you were very enthusiastic with your team about your business. What made you enthusiastic? What can you do to experience this more often?
There is also the practical aspect of taking care of yourself so that you have the energy to accomplish the things you care most about (figure 15-2). Tony Schwartz at the consulting firm The Energy Project talks about energy as the new time management for the twenty-first century. Our ability to manage our energy and to deepen our capacity for it is critical if we want to show up every day and accomplish with enthusiasm our purpose. Sleep is also increasingly understood to be the key component of energy. It is hard for us to be at our best as conscious leaders when we are exhausted from a lack of sleep.
Figure 15-2: Energy for the journey to Conscious Capitalism
Source: Tony Schwartz, The Energy Project.
Long-Term Orientation
Conscious leaders operate on a time horizon that extends beyond their tenure as leaders, even beyond their own lifetime. They are trying to accomplish something significant. Leaders such as George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt took farsighted actions that had lasting consequences. The founders of the United States led with an eye toward eternity, putting in place ideas and principles that would endure for centuries and, hopefully, millennia.
The success of a leader is best gauged by what happens once he or she is gone. Does the organization continue to operate at the level the leader established? If it does, then the leader has put the essential elements into place, made them part of the DNA of the organization, and made sure that the right kind of leader takes over. Jerry Porras and Jim Collins in their book Built to Last compare these “clock builder” leaders with those who are “time tellers.” Clock builders create organizations that will endure once the leaders are gone, not organizations that rely on the leaders to “tell the time.” Good leaders build clocks so that everyone who comes after them can tell the time, too.
As a personal reflection of your own long-term orientation to the business you lead, list three long-term initiatives that only you could undertake to ensure that your organization will stand the test of time.
What could threaten these initiatives? How could you alleviate the threat? What is your next step?
Flexibility
We define flexibility, an essential leadership capacity, as “the capacity to switch modes seamlessly and to bend without breaking, as the situation or the context requires.” The bamboo tree is a great symbol of flexibility. It has become central to various sacred traditions for good reason, as it embodies uprightness, tenacity, elegance, and simplicity. The bamboo bends and sways as conditions warrant, but does not break, no matter how harsh the wind. Leaders also need to be able to bend but not break, adapting to circumstances in a principled way, without sacrificing their core values.
Every leader needs to develop a toolkit, like a golfer with many clubs. You have to identify the right approach in each situation and know how to implement it. In particular, conscious leaders have to know how to flex between “masculine” and “feminine” energy as the situation or context requires. Most of us tend to get stuck in one mode and don’t know how to cycle to the other. That’s the habitual nature of the mind. Yoga and Chinese martial arts and techniques such as Tai Chi and Qigong can be quite beneficial to help us overcome this inflexibility; when you make the body flexible, the mind becomes flexible as well.
Our friend (and Shakti Leadership coauthor) Nilima Bhat uses the phrase “wise fool of tough love” to describe a truly conscious leader. Such leaders can embody seemingly opposite qualities such as wisdom and lightheartedness, and toughness and love, simultaneously. They can draw on any of these qualities as needed in a given situation. Leaders have to be fully present in each moment to discern which approach is called for. The presence practice (which we describe in chapter 16) helps leaders cultivate deep presence and discernment.
Being flexible when you are not operating from a state of full presence can be disempowering and can come across as weakness, indecision, or a lack of personal conviction as a leader. But if, as will be described later, you are in presence and holding your center, you can exercise the needed flexibility without any loss of power.
Love and Care
A fundamental leadership quality is the ability to operate from love and care. Throughout human history, the great leaders (such as Ashoka, Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela) who transformed society in a lasting and positive way all possessed tremendous strength along with a powerful capacity for caring. They expanded their circle of caring to encompass more and more of humanity, even including their own perceived enemies. They truly, deeply cared about human beings and had a clear sense of right versus wrong. Leaders like Alexander the Great or Akbar the Great built vast empires and conquered many territories. These leaders built geographically huge and militarily formidable empires, but to what end? Did they fundamentally transform the world into a better place? In most cases, they didn’t, and their empires fell apart soon after they died. Those empires lacked a noble purpose rooted in human flourishing; they were driven by the insatiable egos and hunger for power of the leaders.
Truly great leaders take the world to a better place. They manifest love, rooted in a foundation of caring. When you come from a place of genuine caring and possess great strength, you operate as a peaceful warrior—a warrior battling all odds for a just and righteous cause.
The opposite of love is fear. Conscious leaders recognize the crucial importance of driving fear out of their organizations. An organization suffused with fear is inherently incapable of genuine creativity and innovation. Its people are condemned to lives of intense dysfunctional stress, unhappiness, and ill health.
When leaders combine great strength with a profound disposition of caring for people, they wield extraordinary power to do good. As King said, “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly … Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”3
The identification of love in an organization is not always easy. On the other hand, fear is much easier to identify. Look at your current practices, and ask if any of them are creating fear in your organization. Write them down, and think of what you could do to eliminate them.
| Practice that could cause fear | Actions to eliminate or replace the practice |
Emotional Intelligence
For leaders, high analytical intelligence is a given; by the time you get to be anywhere near the leader’s role, you have had to demonstrate that you are smart. In the past, most companies only valued that kind of intelligence. Today, we’re recognizing that other forms of intelligence are even more important, in particular emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and systems intelligence. The great news here is that while our analytical intelligence (or IQ) is fixed at birth and can only decline, these other kinds of intelligence can all be cultivated. Emotional intelligence can be developed through greater self-awareness, and spiritual intelligence can grow from having good teachers and being exposed to questions of meaning and purpose. You can learn systems intelligence by studying natural systems and becoming familiar with the tools of system dynamics.
Emotional intelligence combines intrapersonal intelligence (understanding oneself) and interpersonal intelligence (understanding others) (figure 15-3). Self-awareness is the first pillar of emotional intelligence. Empathy—the ability to feel and understand what others are feeling—is the second pillar. High emotional intelligence is increasingly being recognized as important in all organizations because of the growing complexity of society and the multiplicity of stakeholders who must be understood and communicated with effectively.4
A time-tested way to learn and grow, as Socrates said, is to “know thyself.” Self-awareness is one of the key qualities that Daniel Goleman identified in his influential book Emotional Intelligence.5 Growing our self-awareness is a continuous process that lasts a lifetime, since there is an entire universe within us waiting to be discovered. We can learn about ourselves by becoming aware of our emotions and by understanding why we’re experiencing them. It’s useful to ask yourself, “Why does this make me angry?” “Why am I excited about that?” “Why am I envious of that person?” “Why do I feel joyful about this?” “Why am I experiencing love?” Each of our emotions is a window into who we are and what we care about, often at a subconscious level. As Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
If we lack awareness and understanding of our own feelings and aspirations, we go through life following our own impulses and giving in to every desire without being conscious of why we’re doing what we are doing. Emotions arise from the interpretations we make about situations and events. But most of us don’t realize that we are free to interpret situations and events in different ways. For example, the emotion of anger is based on the interpretation that we have been somehow wronged and that some type of punishment is appropriate for whoever has wronged us. However, if we change our interpretation about what has made us angry, we are likely to find that our anger diminishes as well. We may not be able to fully control our emotions, but we can certainly be more conscious of them, take responsibility for them, learn from them, and transcend them when appropriate.6
As we become more aware of our emotions, we begin to realize that many of them, such as envy, resentment, greed, bitterness, malice, anger, and hatred, do not further our well-being; they are life-stultifying. They are all natural human emotions, but getting caught up in them seldom makes our lives better. On the other hand, emotions such as love, generosity, gratitude, compassion, and forgiveness are life-enhancing. We need to consciously cultivate life-enhancing emotions and learn to neutralize life-stultifying ones. This is the essence of personal mastery and emotional intelligence.
Conscious leaders transcend self-centeredness and cultivate empathy.7 The potential for expansive love is virtually limitless, but it starts with empathy. As children, we are naturally very egocentric, but as we grow emotionally, we develop the ability to empathize and sympathize with others. We begin to care about more than just ourselves, first with our love for family and friends and then toward our larger community. Beyond that, virtually every human being alive is someone we could care about, empathize with, understand, even love. And even beyond that, we can love animals and potentially all life and all existence.
Think now about the last time someone in your organization came to you for help. What kind of listening did you do? Were you ready to answer, or were you trying to step in the other person’s shoes?
The Four Levels of Listening
By Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Watch this video from Otto Scharmer about listening.
URL: https://www.ccfieldguide.com/otto
Search Words: Conscious Capitalism Field Guide Four Levels of Listening
After listening to Scharmer’s explanation of the levels of listening, fill in the following chart.
LISTENING LEVEL |
GIVE A RECENT PERSONAL EXPERIENCE |
| Downloading | |
| Factual listening (open mind) | |
| Empathic listening (open heart) | |
| Generative listening (open will) |
Systems Intelligence
Systems thinking or intelligence, another important type of intelligence for leaders, is “a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements.”8
Many conscious leaders are natural systems thinkers. They can see the bigger picture and understand how the different components of the system interconnect and behave over time. They can anticipate the immediate as well as long-term consequences of actions. Given their intuitive understanding of systems, conscious leaders are excellent organizational architects. They understand the roots of problems and how the problems relate to organizational design and culture, and they devise fundamental solutions instead of applying symptomatic quick fixes.
Many leaders in business and in politics lurch from problem to problem, repeatedly allowing situations to deteriorate until the problems reach a crisis point. They then take drastic actions to solve the crisis, but the responses often don’t work. The best leaders prevent problems from arising in the first place. Their genius may go unrecognized and even unrewarded, but they are the most effective leaders, with keenly developed systems minds and sensibilities.
Systems intelligence is a talent that most societies haven’t recognized, understood, encouraged, or rewarded. Yet in the twenty-first century, as our organizations become more complex and the world becomes increasingly interdependent, it’s hard to overstate how valuable this type of intelligence is.
How can we develop our systems intelligence? First, recognize that it is different from analytical intelligence but also complementary to it. Our analytical intelligence shows up in our ability to compare things and to break them down into parts so we can analyze them. As the basis for logic, it is a useful tool that our educational systems have developed reasonably well. But it isn’t enough.
One way to develop our systems intelligence is to study disciplines that clearly embody systems principles, such as ecology, which is the science of living organisms and the relationships between them and the environment. This type of intelligence enables us to see how things connect. Another good way to develop our systems intelligence in the business context is to practice thinking in terms of the stakeholder system. The stakeholders of a business all exist in relationship with the business and with each other. Conscious leaders know that every strategic business decision must be made after considering how it will affect and create value for each of the major stakeholders. Will the decision harm one or more of the major stakeholders in some way? How can we get around the trade-offs? Can we devise strategies that create more total value for the entire interdependent business system?
The exercises that develop emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence can also help develop our systems intelligence. Slowing our minds down is essential; the speedy, skittish mind breaks things down, while the less speedy but attentive mind is more capable of being in the here and now, noticing the relationships between things, and seeing the larger system.
Spiritual Intelligence
Conscious leaders frequently have high spiritual intelligence, which has been well defined in Spiritual Capital, a wonderful book by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall: “Spiritual intelligence is the intelligence with which we access our deepest meanings, values, purposes, and higher motivations. It is … our moral intelligence, giving us an innate ability to distinguish right from wrong. It is the intelligence with which we exercise goodness, truth, beauty, and compassion in our lives.”9 Spiritual intelligence helps us discover our higher purpose in our work and our lives. Leaders with high spiritual intelligence have a remarkable ability to align their organizations with their organizations’ higher purposes. They also have uncanny discernment to sense when things are beginning to go off track.
Cindy Wigglesworth, author of SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, defines spiritual intelligence as “the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the situation.” The attribute is most simply stated as living less from the “ego self” and more from your “higher self.” You might call this higher self by another term: authentic self, spirit, soul, Buddha, nature, or Atman. Wigglesworth describes the twenty-one skills of spiritual intelligence:10
The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence
AWARENESS OF HIGHER SELF |
| Awareness of own worldview |
| Awareness of life purpose (mission) |
| Awareness of values hierarchy |
| Complexity of thought and holding multiple perspectives |
| Awareness of ego self and higher self |
HIGHER-SELF VERSUS EGO-SELF MASTERY |
| Commitment to spiritual growth |
| Keeping higher self in charge |
| Living your purpose and values |
| Sustaining your faith during difficult times |
| Seeking guidance from a higher power, a spirit, or your higher self |
UNIVERSAL AWARENESS |
| Awareness of interconnectedness of all life |
| Awareness of worldviews of others |
| Breadth of time and space perception |
| Awareness of limitations and power of human perception |
| Awareness of spiritual and universal laws |
| Experience of transcendent oneness |
SOCIAL MASTERY AND SPIRITUAL PRESENCE |
| Having a wise and effective spiritual teacher or mentor |
| Being a wise and effective change agent |
| Making wise and compassionate decisions |
| Being a calming, healing presence |
| Being aligned with the ebb and flow of life |
Source: Conscious Pursuits Inc., all rights reserved/[email protected].
Assess yourself on each of these twenty-one skills, and identify those that you are most deficient in. Develop a plan to improve these weaker skills.
| Spiritual skill | Plan to cultivate |
Creating a Personal Leadership Development Plan
A personal leadership development plan starts with taking an inventory of yourself and understanding your own strengths and weaknesses: the areas in which you are especially good, extraordinary, decidedly mediocre, and simply terrible. Consider these in light of the qualities needed to be great leaders (e.g., SELFLESS). Some qualities could be considered good to have, but others are absolutely essential. You can recognize your blind spots and significant weaknesses, things that you really need to change because without them, you cannot be an effective leader (or a successful human being, for that matter). Some weaknesses might be okay; they have little impact on other people, and you can get your team members to compensate for these gaps. Once you recognize what you need to cultivate, you can use the toolkits designed for helping people make those shifts.
Psychologist and author Gay Hendricks has developed a framework called the zone of genius.11 He suggests that we occupy four zones for various aspects of our lives: incompetence, competence, excellence, and genius.
The zone of incompetence includes things that you are not at all good at. These just don’t come naturally to you, and even if you try very hard, you don’t seem to get very far with them. The general advice is not to worry about the activities that fall into this zone, unless they are really critical; you do need to discern what is critical and what is not. If it is not critical, you should just hire other people to do the activity that falls into the incompetence zone—or just do without it in your life.
The zone of competence includes things you can do quite well, but so can countless other people. Is it the best use of your time to do those things? Generally speaking, you’re better off outsourcing these activities to others who can do them better, faster, or cheaper. Sure, you can mow your lawn or set up a new wireless network, but somebody else could do in minutes what might take you half a day.
The zone of excellence includes things that you do very well and get paid well to do. Once upon a time, these activities challenged you and required that you function at your peak. But if you just keep doing those things, you’re not stretching yourself or growing. It just gets too easy, almost automatic. If you get stuck here, you hit a plateau.
Finally, there is the zone of genius: this is where you’re most alive, fully in flow and engaged. These activities stretch you and challenge you and force you to create rather than just replicate. The key is to understand what this zone is for you and then to spend as much of your time as you can toward that end of the spectrum, striving for a healthy and sustainable blend of excellence and genius. Let go of as much as you can at the other end. The zone of genius is where you will make your unique and most lasting contribution and find your deepest fulfillment.