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Introduction
So you want to be an extraordinary leader? Great! Conscious leadership is a needed and worthwhile aspiration. Pursuing this endeavor will challenge, stretch, and transform you as a person. Good leadership opens doors of opportunity for your career, business and life. Far more important, it influences and changes lives—both yours and the lives of those who follow. Conscious leadership is a powerful tool that influences, builds, collaborates, and transforms when wielded with intention and humility. To wield this type of power requires that you deeply care about those who follow your lead.
When coaching small business and Fortune 500 companies in leadership development and mindfulness, I often encounter individuals thrust into leadership positions without the slightest knowledge of collaboration, emotional intelligence, leadership style, conflict management, or understanding of self and strengths. This is evident even at the highest levels of leadership. A few years ago, I coached a vice president from a prominent world leading software company. He manifested a traditional authoritarian coercive leadership style that produced a 40 percent attrition rate in his organization. Tenets and principles that seemed obvious tome were oblivious to him.
Today, I observe a similar predicament in both inexperienced leaders just starting their careers and seasoned veterans practicing ineffective leadership styles. They are tasked to lead teams, organizations, and groups with little knowledge of the people management skills, strategies, and basic conscious leadership tenets that shape and build legacy.
You can probably begin to formulate my reason, as a leadership development coach, for writing this book: It’s easier to reach and help more individuals. Let me share my second reason through an experience below.
Ubuntu
I had just been awarded the 2017 Association Talent Development (ATD) Consultant of the year in Sacramento. There I sat at the banquet table, riveted in my chair as best-selling author and keynote speaker Shola Richards gave a presentation about the spirit of ubuntu, a West African concept. Shola said ubuntu could be summed up in this maxim.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
An epiphany struck me, almost knocking me out of my chair. This was an answer to much of my frustration dealing with American Fortune 500 company leadership over the years. It was why I always felt out of place in a land that was supposedly “home of the free and land of the brave.” The predominant image of leadership in the West—an image reinforced through business schools, management theories, and old leadership principles—was based on a model of materialism and exploitation. Success was defined, measured and calculated by dollars and cents. I had a difficult time resolving this in my soul. While I disagreed with it, I still felt like I partially embraced the system of “go fast and alone” that perpetuated a destructive energy. I would not say that capitalism itself is wrong, but the way in which I experienced it being practiced raged against the ubuntu spirit inside of me.
In coaching business leaders of all sorts—executives, managers, supervisors, team leads—I encountered clients who practiced leadership principles that were very transactional in nature instead of transformative. As I facilitated conflict management, trust in the workplace, and team collaboration workshops, I noticed a common pattern: The leadership of corporations, government, and non-profit organizations often demanded development classes be attended by employees and staff but they themselves did not seem interested in learning or even attending. Development was everyone else’s problem, not theirs.
Let me share with you the ubuntu spirit that Shola imparted by paraphrasing the story he told that cool December evening in 2017 at the UC Davis School of Medicine.
An anthropologist visited Africa to study a particular village. One day he noticed a group of young elementary school kids playing outside. He approached them and shared a game he wanted to play. After setting a bag of fruit and treats, highly valued by the children, near a tree on the other side of the village, he instructed them to rush toward the tree. The first child to reach the tree wins all the treats. The kids never experienced anything like this before.
The anthropologist shouted, “GO!” But instead of racing to the tree, the African kids stood still for about twenty seconds. The children locked hand and arms together and ran toward the treats. The anthropologist looked shocked. He asked the children about what they had done. They replied, “This is Ubuntu. One of us can’t be happy if all the others are sad. This is Ubuntu. I am because we are.”
Wow! When I heard the story, I was struck by the children’s wisdom that stretched beyond their years. In my years of coaching, I have not seen many leaders, supervisors, managers, or team leads who start out embracing this mentality of humanity. It is counterintuitive to competition and racing to the top. The scramble for the dollar and our individualistic mindset often snuffs out the soul leadership that these African children—or should I say leaders—demonstrated.
Shola went on to share a picture that typified the leadership style I often experience in our culture. In the image, the boss sat in a comfortable chair on top of a pyramid, pointing toward the goal and barking at the workers while they dragged the giant structure toward the destination. Shola followed this with a second picture in which the leader stood at the front of the line, grunting and straining as he pulled the rope alongside the employees. This was the image concerning leadership that I embraced and attempted to spread via my leadership development coaching. No college, instructor, or coach certification had formally instructed me in this way. Deep in my soul, I knew that it was best to lead in a way that transformed all those involved. This is how leaders serve as a catalyst rather than a hindrance.
This short book simply reveals what we all know deep inside our souls concerning conscious leadership principles, ideas, and strategies that truly transform leaders and followers. It is not about success measured solely in dollars, bottom lines, and transactions; these are only the icing on the cake, byproducts of soul leadership. Instead, this book reveals the things that guide us closer to being conscious and intentional leaders both in business and life. This requires that you lead them like you really care.
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