Con-scious – Having an awareness of one’s environment and one’s own existence, sensations, and thoughts. Conscious is a word that has been coming up for me a lot when dealing with leaders at senior levels within organisations. It means different things to me in different dimensions. At the personal level it means being truly aware of the impact of one’s leadership on others and the organisation over time. Do other people hear what I am saying and understand it in the way I intended when I delivered those words? Do I understand my impact on others? Is the person I imagine I am, the same person experienced by others?
Does my leadership have the best effect on others? Most people answer “yes” to all these questions until they elicit honest feedback from their manager, peers and/or reports. Organisational systems generally don’t create environments in which brutally honest feedback can be given and therefore requires leaders to either use third party confidential 360 instruments or to gradually show the people surrounding them that they value developmental feedback and consistently solicit that feedback. For most people the former is the only way.
We find ourselves in a radically different world today compared to the world we grew up in during the sixties and seventies. Organisations require skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes and uncertainty. Organisational Cultures need to be built where the best internal and external thinking and practices can be leveraged. The leadership and energy of each person needs to be leveraged and hence we need to use a leadership style that includes people and takes them along with us. The challenge of our time is we are currently living in the gap between the old and the new. By this I mean that many of us grew up in an authoritative and coercive world where we were told what to do. Today it is about inclusion, respect, transparency and trust. We can use the old school methods but these tend to lead to disengagement and talent attrition which is not what we need in order to create agile and High Performing Organisations.
Jim Collins in his book why the mighty fall, describes a key component leading to organisational failure as “Hubris”, basically meaning organisations thinking they are so good that they become arrogant and fail to see the changes in the competitive landscape. We as humans have many wired irrational faults described as cognitive biases. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias) Cognitive biases skew our judgement, leaving us thinking our views and perspectives are accurate when in fact, they generally have many flaws. The way to avoid such pitfalls is to engage others for their views and perspectives, a practice particularly difficult for those of us schooled in the old way of doing things. Many managers I have worked with over the years believed they engaged others sufficiently, but upon receiving their 360 reports, have been shocked to discover the contrary. Once they contemplate these new insights, they may be convinced to begin to lead in a more conscious or aware state and start the journey of growth. Learning starts when we can shift from a place of unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, knowing what we don’t know. It is therefore not a surprise that the bulk of leadership literature considers humility a key trait of successful managers. A healthy level of low self-confidence is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may assist us to engage others for their perspectives in order to consider that just maybe I could be wrong.
So how do we become conscious leaders? As I have stated above, we need to become conscious about how we are seen by others. This means we must be able to work with and integrate perspectives that vary from our own without pushing them away. This is very difficult for most of us as adults, and requires a focus and desire of wanting to learn and develop. We see the world through our knowledge or lenses and it is incredible how people and the teams they manage grow through acquiring new perspectives. I have met many good people working at senior levels over the years, some which have done a huge amount of damage without intending to. It is a pity that such people generally only start wanting to change when they make a catastrophic mistake or have derailed as executives.
Maybe we require that jolt to start looking inside. An ideal list of things to do and learn as a minimum requirement to start the journey towards becoming a more conscious leader would include:
- Understanding self emotionally and learning how to deal with our own stress and anxiety.
- Encouraging people to give you honest feedback and be careful not to be defensive when receiving it.
- Finding a good 360 process, and get feedback regularly.
- Learning inclusive leadership skills such as listening, situational leadership, coaching, giving and receiving feedback and team leadership.
- Learning about self: Psychological diversity or preferences, shadows, strengths and weaknesses.
- Learning to reflect as an individual and as a team.
- Reading widely particularly regarding self development and leadership.
A conscious leader can make a huge positive impact on Organisations and teams and is usually admired and followed by others. Conscious leaders build powerful Organisational Cultures that keeps the Organisation conscious about its internal and external environments and the strategy needed to pave the right trajectory. Fred Kofman in his book Conscious Business – how to build value through values, points out why we need such Organisations and what leadership must do to achieve them. In their book Conscious Capitalism, Raj Sisodia and John Mackey discuss the role of business in society and what needs to be done to create win win situations between all stakeholders to lead to sustainability for all.
