Evolutionary Provocateur

The Power of Presence-Part 2 of the Power series

The universal principle 'Show up and choose to be present' is what this is all about. Being present is more than physically being in the room. It is about being aware, there, and energetically present with all four dimensions on full throttle.

Most often we associate value with intellectual prowess, forgetting that there is no shortage of academics or executives/managers who have plenty of intellectual horse power but who can't relate or communicate, preferring instead to pontificate. The four intelligences that are reflected in the capacity to be present include your emotional, spiritual/energetic, physical (the body as a source of intelligence) and the intellect.

This only comes from a disciplined practise of taking personal leadership to a higher level. Occasionally individuals are gifted by a massive amount of charisma, but this does not translate into leadership until four domains are embodied in their character. A 'leader' with charisma, who is tempted by actions that reinforce a need for self-adoration, is not going to be taking the kinds of risks true leadership requires.

We have tossed the word leadership around a lot....quite simply because it is the only word that evokes an image most are familiar with. However, what has become associated with leadership is to be the one who knows it all, has all the answers. Being present and emanating the power of presence requires enough self-awareness and self-security to enable receptivity and curiousity to be the primary drivers of action. Each individual can then take in the unseen, the unsaid, and the hidden thoughts and merge them into a picture that can include seemingly competitive and polar opposites as many sides of the whole picture.

It is an art and a science in my experience. How about yours??

The Power of Communication- Part 1

Angeles Arrien in The Four Fold Way presented three universal powers: power of presence, communication and position. Memorable leaders exemplified all three: Martin Luther King and his unforgettable speeches, Ghandi and others who stand out.

The Power of Communication

Being skilled as a communicator amounts to merging content, context and timing. Obama appears to be a master orator who gains fans outside the U.S. quite simply because he is an effective communicator speaking from a real and genuine place. His core energy and presence, which carries the words, is aligned. The listener has no doubt that his word is good.

There was a time when a handshake confirmed a business deal that, even if it went wrong, the parties could be trusted to sit down and come to an agreement out of mutual respect. It was all in the trust that went with what you said was what you meant...to the heart and core.

When a saleperson does not speak from his own truth, but relies on formula, ultimately it is detected. Robots may be able to communicate but relationships are made with sincere people. Oddly, a quick look at sales blogs reveals not much in the way of the basic skills, even less about the need to be really you in terms of how you communicate with customers.

Self-leadership as it applies to sales at least, is a simple place to gain clarity. It is not in the words. Mastery is found in the zone of awareness where you are attuned to all of the cues that inform timing, , choice of words and the tone - the genuine feeling that each word carries.

Right now, everyone is a leader and leads themselves through each interaction. How you communicate is not a matter of being a master of the language, though that helps, but is more a matter of being a master of assessing the situation and speaking to what matters from a place that is true. Being impeccable with your word is a simple place to start. In environments where there are unwritten codes about conforming or adhering to a party line, that is much easier said than done.

All You Need is Love..

Dan Bobinski over at www.Management-issues.com just wrote an article entitled, How to kill morale and start an exodus. It is a classic story of what happens when managers forget that love is the most important generator of performance; when data drives action and disconnection to what has heart and meaning prevents clear vision. There are a lot of managers in that boat right now. Managers who  truly believe that it is all about control and all about the numbers.

We focus on the manager but what about the culture that values the numbers over performance. Where numbers do not accurately reflect the real dynamic and way that work gets done. Too often assumptions are made where curiousity would be a stronger ally in seeing the underlying forces.

Tim Sanders, with Yahoo has made the point that it is love, not greed that is the Killer App. Tim learned that the three elemental particles of Love are: knowledge, networks and compassion. That was in 2002. The words are even more true now.

Yet old habits die hard. It is easy to blame the people. The real culprit lies in the embedded habits of the organization which rewards data over intuition insight and wisdom.

Time for a rebirth don't you think?

Do you hear what I hear?

The Institute of Noetic Sciences has launched a wonderful series of interviews with thought leaders one of who was Jim Garrison from www.wisdomuniversity.com. Jim is currently working with Paul Ray of www.culturalcreatives.org to update research on a group who do not know they are a group. They are defined by having shared values, may not all be found at the same coffee shop and who, if their collective wisdom were applied, can move mountains and realign the planets.

So what does it take to unleash that kind of potential into organizations?

It calls for a suspension of judgement for starters. Listening to discussions of Gen Y,  X, Boomers or Traditionalists inevitably draws up character profiles of each group. All of this can be helpful until labels get applied. Labels like, The Entitlement Generation, distract from what talent, mission and purpose lies beneath.

Non-performers are judged as being non-performers rather than taking a more informed view to see that the non-performer is really an unengaged performer. This morning at a business meeting the whole conversation about psychopathic employees came up. Psychopath is a pretty harsh label to apply to someone and does not actually inspire anyone to reveal what they can really do. The word would appear to be closely associated with parasite.

Engaging employees boils down to seeing what lies at the heart of the matter. Earlier posts on this topic speak to the need to have a receptive mind so one can actually hear what has passion, meaning and purpose. Perception shifting as a skill is a huge part of this as is recognizing and eliminating judgmental language, thought and action.

Over to You! Have you ever been in a situation where you held yourself back because the working environment was so loaded with judgment that it was not safe to be you? 

Follow the Joy

This week on www.management-issues.com on the Evolutionary Provocateur podcast is an interview with Nick Zeniuk called Follow the Joy. The conversation is part of a larger dialogue through the recent Knowledge and Innovation Network meeting in Tucson which really points to the imperative to turn the hierarchical organization structures on its side, literally, in order to see the horizontal nature of accomplishment. Dennis Sandow, Anne Murray Allen and Nick Zeniuk have all done or are doing work in this area and are the Inspirators for a different model of supporting and enabling accomplishment or performance.

The implications for executives and managers are pretty clear. It means arriving at a much higher comfort with not knowing. In other words, embracing the notion that you don't know what you don't know. In the gap between knowing and not knowing thrives curiousity which creates a climate where discovery replaces convention or habitual patterns.

This is as applicable to personal lives as it is to organizational dynamics. What drives curiousity in your experience? What is the value of curiousity to eliciting joy?

Your comments are welcome!

2008-Shift in Action

I apologize for my absence. I got highjacked by Christmas holidays, a series of family events, and meetings in the U.S. which took me away from reflection and writing. Here we all are at the start of the new year well in motion along with the reminder that shifts in consciousness, in the evolution of humanity, in how we support and enable performance and people to contribute are at a tipping point.

Each one of you reading this is a part of that shift, otherwise you would not have been drawn to this site.

To start off the New Year's entries I have the permission of Richard Wilson, a brilliant poet/librarian and individual, to reproduce a poem he offered those in attendance at the Knowledge and innovation network meeting held at the Rex Ranch near Tucson, Arizona this past week.

Creating Community

We have an opportunity to create community
find a place for every age, religion, and race.
Humans individually searching for identity
collectively gathered here by design or fate.

Facing an alien future where
imagination dumbs
stagnation comes
abominations numb
sensations succumb.

Each person is vulnerable.
All children are valuable.
How does the future you want feel?
Do you wish for the pursuit of purpose to be real?

Risk your significance
to evoke emotion
provoke potential
give voice to vision.

Heart guides mission
memories teach
dreams reach,
and expectations become.

If it is believable,
then it is conceivable
for sustainable co-existence
to be achievable.

Posted by Richard Wilson Sat. January 19th, 2008

Competition or Collaboration

Tuesday night I attended a Festive Holiday evening made up of two women's groups. One of the activities, in addition to raffling off a huge number of door prizes, was a reverse count down on 40 bottles of wine. Forty bottles of wine is a lot of wine it seems to me, so I found it interesting when many losers later there were 4 women at the front of the room each of whom could potentially walk away with 40 bottles OR they could opt to cooperate and walk home with 10 each...still a good take.

Interestingly, they chose to compete. Down to two possible winner, the option to split the booty was presented again and this time they went for it so each left with 20 bottles each.

It left me wondering when is enough enough? When does the choice to cooperate over ride the need to win. Women pride themselves on being relationship oriented and certainly no one went home grumpy because things turned out the way they did. Yet subconsciously, it does beg the question: have we become so oriented to competition in the workplace that it now shows up in the social space as well?

When facilitating leadership learning programs in the mid-90s, my colleague inserted a simulation game from Thiagi into the program. It involved cash-real cash. Not a lot of it but enough that it revealed some deep truths.

The results were eye-popping! These were managers and supervisors who were pretty good at espousing values and principles that warmed your heart. But when the cash got short and the scarcity mentality grabbed hold, a whole different animal came out. One that was quite prepared to cheat and out manipulate to get the booty.

The good news, in an odd way, is that everyone in the room knew that the word was not to be trusted. Actions said it all. It is really unlikely that anyone in the room was aware of what drove those actions. It is certain that they knew what it meant in terms of their relationship...subject to change when the money, power (or anything in short supply) is at stake.

Since research shows that 86% of fraud is commited by male managers, perhaps playing cash games is not a bad routine test to see how what really motivates action. 

Label-Label-Label

In the original version of Scrooge, at the end of the story, Scrooge searches frantically for something to label his gift with while mumbling label-label-label. Label in that context, has a wonderful meaning. In organizations it has come to mean something else.

Personal assessment tools were originally intended to provide insight into your character. The idea was that by knowing yourself, your preferences and those of others it would be easier to understand one another and so work in diverse teams with greater success.

In companies where the practise is NOT to run around with your hair on fire reacting to each and every emergency there is a real potential that the information can be used wisely. Unfortunately, the sky is falling-my hair is fire approach to day to day corporate survival creates a situation where cataloging human behaviour and intellectualizing emotions has clouded the purpose and negated the value that this kind of information could bring to understanding dynamics of teams or selt.

Emotional connections are critical to being human. They are also critical to any company culture which hopes to retain talent, particularly in workers born between 1975-1995. These workers have zero tolerance for the  notion to 'suck it up' or for any incongruence of emotion and reality.

In the haste to catalog humanity as a label, we miss out on what it means to be human and different. We also miss out on all the creativity and innovation that comes from recognizing the power of that difference to realizing achievements that know no boundaries.

I am not that sure that collectively we can afford to do that. Are you?

Seeing the Whole and its Parts All At Once

A recent blog over at Leadership Now on integrative thinking caught my eye. First, when 92%of executives feel that the challenges they are facing are more complex than ever before it suggests a different approach is required. Steve Roesler's quote over at All Things Workplace, "Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better." -Sidney Harris, pretty much says it all when it comes to recognizing that to make a move, you have to make a move.

Secondly, integrative thinking, as noted at Leadership Now, is about recognizing that it is possible to see the parts and the whole simultaneously without bursting a brain fuse. For some people this comes naturally; for others it must be developed. The delightful aspect of that reality is that no matter what, it requires an expansion of how many ways there are of thinking about any given situation.

The fact that things are more complex creates a wonderful gateway for understanding just how you do think and when the boundaries are feeling pushed. This is typically the spot where rebound takes place, back to that safe place where everything was separated into its nice neat piles with clear demarcation lines. That road inevitably leads back to the tempation to simplify by falling back into rote and reliable thinking patterns that frankly, are not effective when the going gets more complex.

Seeing the big picture and its component parts simultaneously demands more advanced skills to see into the situation, using intuitive insight residing in everyone, and then working with the ability to visualize, also innate to all. The joke is you can't get there from here, where here means relying on the thought patterns and love to sort and catalog.

The first step is to know where logical analysis has become more dominant over intuitive insight. The second step is to know what you trust. When those two are clear, so are the options and a whole new field of choice.   

       

The New Psychology of Leadership

A recent article in Scientific American Mind by the same title presents the dual notion of leader being defined by the circumstances versus the circumstances defining the leader, the latter being more of a situational calling forth higher levels of leadership. It is an interesting question. Group behavior itself is leadership and is drvien by the social identity that helps group's coordinate and take action.

This brings the conversation back to the consciousness of the follower. If the follower follows blindly, then...well history shows us plenty of examples of the results. For many, group leadership is a matter of belonging, of social identity where values are shared and it may or may not include the capacity to stop the bus and make sure there is clarity on the direction.

Corporately, leadership is at an interesting crossroads quite simply because many of the things that we thought leadership was about: tough love, top down, or use of authority, are in question given the divergent range of values. Cooperation and support are the bylines for today's leadership. The characteristics of a leader of the past are not the same as the one's today.

The conclusion of the article is that 'for leadership to function well, leaders and followers must be bound by a shared identity and by the quest to use that identity as a blueprint for action.' This, for some cultures, could  mean a bit of a shift.

How well do leaders in your company embody this understanding and way of thinking?