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Achieving potential

Guest post by: Douglas Long

Article Overview: If we want to achieve results in today's world - whether in the personal, organisational, national, international or any other arena - we need to be "whole people". "Whole people" are those in whose lives all areas - cognitive, moral, interpersonal, spiritual, and affective - are integrated and consistent.

Achieving potential

There is a lot of research showing that if we are to fulfil our potential we need to have total integration of our very beings. This includes all areas of our life - Cognitive, Moral, Interpersonal, Spiritual, and Affective

One of the key problems through the ages is that these are seldom integrated – we approach different situations as though we can separate discrete parts of our very selves. Let me illustrate from the world of business:

Recent (2010) major research on corporate decision making in Australian and multi-national companies elicited comments from CEO’s and Senior Executives. Typical of the hundreds of comments were:

· 'Are the management team incentivised for strategic thinking? I think not. They're incentivised as everyone's told you by short-term goals. Also, we don't expect to last more than 3 or 4 years in the job so what's our incentive? It's not LTI (long-term investment) it's short-term bonuses; short term survival.’

· ‘Sometimes, you get seriously under pressure and when you are under pressure you get seriously into defence mode and you’re making sure that you defend number 1 at the detriment of anything else.’

· ‘... quite often we [CEO’s] know that it’s the wrong decision... [but] we have a set of instructions, we have a set of deliverables, and we know it can’t be done... but it still has to be done – you’re told “just do it!”. I’m told to cut my costs by 20% and I know I can’t do it because I’m already lean – the only way to do it is to cut into muscle and that means I won’t be able to close deals in 6 months time. The Board knows the impact but the financial release to the market is coming up in a few weeks and that means I have to cut [to meet market expectations]. As a CEO, you’re between a rock and a hard place.’

All of the people interviewed (and there were lots of them!) were people of undoubted moral character and are considered to be pillars of the community. They are people who most of us would be proud to call “friends” – yet they themselves know that they are “situational” when it comes to the crunch.

Traditional approaches to leadership very often, even if mostly unwittingly, exacerbate this situation.

The leadership approaches that have given us everything to date – both the very best and the very worst of everything that has happened throughout the world over countless ages – can generally be classified into two types: “First Generation Leadership” and “Second Generation Leadership”.

First Generation Leadership is based on the premise that hierarchy is the best way of getting things done and that those in charge know best. It requires that those in power and authority are automatically respected and obeyed without question. In this approach there are generally punishments of some or another kind for a failure to show respect and obedience. The approach can be summarised as “you will …” . It is a command and control situation where compliance is required and enforced.

Second Generation Leadership evolved out of this from the 1950’s and is the most common form of leadership found today and taught in almost all leadership classes and workshops. This is based on the concept of rewarding those who conform to the leader’s wishes and requirements. To achieve this conformance our leaders are taught various ways of communicating their messages so that there is the maximum potential that the followers will buy into what the leader requires. Of course, with this “mailed fist in a gloved hand” approach there is always the underlying potential for negative consequences should conformance not occur! The approach can be summarised as “will you …?”

Today the demand for “performance” is greater than ever – whether “performance” is in the individual, familial, commercial, social, national, international, or any other arena. Life is increasingly more complex – yesterday was simple compared with what tomorrow will be. And in this drive for today’s and tomorrow’s performance, we increasingly encounter our past – the internet and social networking means that almost anything we have said or done in the past could be resurrected and used to highlight any lack of integration between what we know, what we believe, what we espouse, how we interact with others, etc. The recent (and on-going) Wikileaks disclosure of diplomatic cables is a graphic example of this.

Our traditional leadership approaches are fast reaching their ‘use-by” date. We need a new approach to leadership. We need Third Generation Leadership.

Third Generation Leadership enables us to live an integrated life – the cognitive, moral, interpersonal, spiritual and affective aspects of our beings can come together and enable us to maximise our performance in every area. It does this by:

• Focusing on listening. Most of us listen either to have confirmed what we already know or believe or we listen in order to argue against a proposition we believe to be ill-informed or wrong. We need to learn to listen in a way that focuses on other people and their potential to solve issues themselves (empathetic and emergent listening) – to become as integrated as we ourselves would like to be.
• Focusing on understanding ourselves. As the poet Robbie Burns said, “would we had the gift a gie us, to see ourselves as others see us”. Listening in an empathetic and emergent manner enables us to receive vital messages that all too often we miss.
• Focussing on developing unconditional respect for all people. Our existing leadership approaches have taught us to respect those who relate positively to us (ie conform in some way) while permitting us to behave in a different (although ‘non discriminatory’) way with others. Empathetic and emergent listening enables us to distinguish between “the person” who is always worthy of respect and that persons “behaviour” which often leaves much to be desired.

These listening behaviours – which can be learned – underlie a necessary shift in the areas of our brain that control our approach to life – the “red zone” of fear (our normal default) to the “blue zone” of courage: from our childhood mind to one that is fully adult.

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Article Tags: decision making listening, emergent listening, empathetic listening, Integral behaviour, personal feedback, Third Generation Leadership



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