in action—stories and Examples
Chapter 9—Presence: Exude Energy and Inspiration
Emotional Intelligence for Leaders
Spiritual Development for Leaders
How it looks in action—stories and Examples
Building Communities of Global Collaboration
Praise for Inspirational Presence
INTRODUCTION
When you pray, move your feet.
—Native American saying
There is a little known reality associated with the skills of leadership. As a leader’s sphere of influence increases, the requirement for skills related to emotional intelligence goes up as well. In fact, as much as 90 percent of leader success can be attributed to these skills (Goleman, 2003). Along with that reality comes an associated challenge. That is, it can be difficult for leaders to see or accept this shift. There is a simple reason for this challenge, and it has nothing to do with leaders being slow, dumb, or incompetent. On the contrary, it has to do with people being quick, smart, and competent. The entry point for most organizations requires a high competency in technical ability. Success, as it relates to job mobility and promotions, comes early from using this, which becomes a self-validating reality. This is also true in educational settings. Success comes from what you did last, not where you are going next. However, predicting future success from the use of these technical abilities is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. It doesn’t tell what will create success where you are going.
To further compound this, these transition points for leaders are rarely taught from the perspective of requiring new levels of relationship skills. A natural progression of leadership, without a conscious change in path, would have a leader continually attempting to lead from technically based strategies that served in the past but no longer serve the current situation without a support network or guide to show a new path. Growing into leadership requires courage, as the new challenges of expanded influence require new and often untested approaches for the leader. This overall generalization led to Laurence Peter’s book The Peter Principle, in which his premise was that in a hierarchy each employee rises to his or her personal level of incompetency. While this has been used by various people as either a joke or a fact, there is an element of truth within the premise. It can be true of how hierarchies function, but it does not represent an absolute truth about human ability. It is simply a perspective of human development that recognizes the need to use different skills as the situation changes, and these skills are often not obvious to the leaders who need them.
LEADERSHIP FROM THE INSIDE OUT
The skills and approaches that will guide leaders through a journey of expanded influence are known and learnable. These aspects can be found in the research on high-performing organizations and the research on neuroscience. This research is now becoming clear with regard to how a leader’s engagement style can be quantified through performance measures. While there are many correlates to success in emotional intelligence for leaders, we start with two fundamental differences in approach.
The first perspective is one of self-preservation. This makes a leader conservative and cautious. The primary aspects you will see from this perspective are related to control and predictability. These leaders want to be able to repeatedly and reliably replicate the past and thereby produce stability. The strategies at play with this perspective tend to be slow to change and quite risk-averse.
Second, we can operate from a perspective of self-realization. Leaders in this mode are far more experimental and innovative. These leaders tend to become skeptical of previously used strategies and tend to want to leverage them into new ways of operating or achieving new goals. These leaders are change-ready and willing to take risks. They tend to not feel a strong linkage to or need for authority, and they tend to question the value of stability.
In The Heart of the Soul, Gary Zuckav brings this down to much simpler terms. He states (and I firmly believe) that we are, at all times, either acting from “love and trust” (self-realization) or “fear and doubt” (selfpreservation). This is probably the most basic component of our work. Through this, we work with inspiration, helping leaders connect to the deeper parts of themselves. From there, we take action on that inspiration, in an intentional and connected way. This work will help leaders understand those callings and teach them how to move those ideas into action in ways that support large-scale organization change.
This
