As a leaderwhat kind of impactdo you have on people?
leadership in crisis
We continue to live in a time of enormous change, great uncertainty, and even tremendous hardship for some, and it’s not getting better. Most people’s lives have been negatively impacted by the cycle of seemingly continuous crises since the financial crisis after 2008. Climate, War, COVID, Grexit, Brexit, refugees, terrorism, election shocks: worldwide, we are jolted from one crisis to the next, all seeming to converge into one endless spiral of looming disaster.
The central issue in all of these crises has been leadership, or rather, most often, the lack of it. Whether it’s AI, the Ukrainian War, big banks, the tech companies, the UK, Russia, the US, or Europe, leadership is in crisis.
The leaders themselves respond and show up in very disappointing, and sometimes even shocking, ways. At a time where we had hoped that leaders had learned from the mistakes of the past, many seem to be hell-bent on making the exact same choices that lead to even bigger mistakes and catastrophe. Each time we think it cannot get any worse, it actually does.
Is it too much to expect our leaders to lead us out of a crisis?
what great leaders do well …
Steve Jobs will go down in history as one of the greatest business leaders of the last 100 years. When people talk about Steve, a couple of themes always come up: his visionary brilliance, his belief in making the impossible possible, and his ability to communicate this in such a way that the people who worked for him believed themselves that it were possible and moved everything to achieve that.
Often, people who equate leadership with strong management fault Steve Jobs for manipulating people to do his bidding and achieve his vision. From their point of view, his team could only have been manipulated against their will to deliver the impossible.
That Steve Jobs was a demanding leader is no secret, but it is not how he drove, controlled or manipulated his staff that ‘forced’ them to achieve the impossible; it is how he motivated, inspired and empowered them to believe themselves that the impossible was in fact possible. Inspiring them to believe in this so strongly empowered them actually to move heaven and earth to make it happen.
Great leaders inspire and empower their people to do exceptional things because they believe in them.
who are the great leaders
When I ask workshop participants which leaders they admire, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela most often get a mention. For some, however, it’s a lot easier to name the worst leaders than the great leaders.
What is fascinating, however, is that who we admire as leaders also tells us a lot about ourselves and our own leadership style. It’s a simple way of finding out where we are right now and what we aspire to.
Not everyone is destined to be the next Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. Still, we can draw inspiration from them and, with conscious reflection, develop our own version that fits our own situation and challenges.
why do people follow?
In their book “Strengths Based Leadership,” Tom Rath and Barry Conchie used a Gallup poll to identify the concepts that motivate people to follow others. In summary, they identified four main concept clusters: Trust, Compassion, Stability, and Hope. These concepts define the impact a leader needs to have on others in order for them to willingly stand up and follow.
Compare for example the message that Barrack Obama based his campaign on in 2008: Yes We Can resonated worldwide. The impact of his message can easily be translated back into these 4 concepts. Now compare these concepts to the message that Donald Trump usesd in 2016, and the impact is very different. Make America Great Again, plays on fear, xenophobia, name calling and bullying to cajole or manipulate voters to believe in his message of a future stability.
It is quite easy to understand why so many people worldwide were turned off by his style of leadership.
It is easy to understand that these concepts embody powerful values, and this is what sets authentic leadership apart from the various forms of manipulative leadership styles we have experienced throughout history.
The power of leadership lies in the fact that people willingly follow and support it because of the impact it has on them.
So, how can we, as leaders, improve the impact we have on others? Authentic Leadership development is about the consciousness with which we build awareness for the conscious choices we make. About how we behave, whether instinctively or after reflection, and how conscious we are of how our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions influence our choices and behaviour. And finally and most importantly, how to consciously choose to have a different impact on others by actively influencing all these variables.
So, is leadership for me?
Leadership is not reserved for a select few; it is for everyone. Whether you lead a sports team, a Fortune 500 multinational organization, a country, or a family, the essential principles of leadership impact remain the same. From a team captain to a mother in a family, the values demanded are essentially the same.
transcentic leadership: transformational authentic leadership
A professional coach holds no expectations of their clients but approaches and undertakes to serve them where they are in their lives at that moment and how they show up in that moment.
Most clients are focused on their private lives or careers, the roles they play in their respective organisations, and their ability to lead within their organisations.
Some clients hold themselves to a higher purpose and believe they have a more significant and fundamental role to play in leadership than simply leading their respective organisations or political units. They are passionate and dedicated to living their life purpose, conscious about making a more profound contribution to society or the world, and about authentically embracing the challenge of this calling.
They consciously want to develop their awareness, leadership skills and abilities to have the greatest impact they can and on as many levels as they can.
To help leaders meet this higher purpose and challenge, developing an even deeper level of awareness and consciousness is required. It also requires working with additional tools and models to facilitate this.
So if we reflect on this, if we had stronger conscious leadership in the world at the turn of this century, with less leadership focused on the sole purpose of maximising personal wealth, our world would have been a very different place for everyone.