Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Developing inner wisdom as a leadership strength
Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity presents the perspectives of leaders, social scientists, and educators from around the world on the topic of developing inner wisdom. Structured around the notions of spirit, presence, and authenticity, the book encourages readers to reflect on their own lives as they read about their colleagues' diverse experiences, all in an effort to address difficult global systems challenges with a foundation of various wisdom lineages and practices.
Each chapter is introduced by an editor with deep background experience in the topic at hand, and the book includes an examination of research on the essential nature of authenticity among leaders. Stories of leadership initiative from across nations illustrate the truly global nature of leadership inspiration, and accounts of teaching mindfulness, guiding leaders, and leading in the arts and humanities integrate critical theory with authentic leadership development. Topics include:
- Subtle interdependencies involved in modern leadership
- The contribution of sociological mindfulness to leadership education
- Authentic leadership as communicated through technology
- The role of spirit, and what the world needs from leaders
A diverse mix of contributors, including a Sufi teacher, a social science journal editor, and a CEO, provide a truly inclusive examination of the ways a leader is defined by self and others. Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity, a volume in the International Leadership Series Building Leadership Bridges from the International Leadership Association, helps connect ways of researching, imagining, and experiencing leadership across cultures, over time, and around the world.
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Seitenzahl: 410
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Contents
The Contributors
Introduction: Of Leadership and Light
Part One: Spirit
Awareness and Beyond
What Is the Relevance of the Concept of Leadership?
The Problem with Applying Spirituality to the Western Concept for Leadership
The Notion of Power: An Example of the Problem
An Experimental Phase of Finding New Ways: In Claritas
Leading with Spirit
References
Chapter 1: Connecting Inner Transformation as a Leader to Corporate and Societal Change
Bringing Life Purpose into Business
An Interview with Otto Scharmer
A New Type of Leadership
References
Note
Chapter 2: Cultivating Leadership through Deep Presencing and Awareness Based Practices
Deep Presencing
Deep Presencing as a Means for Engaging Soul in Action
Applying Awareness Based Technologies
Research
Stories
Concluding Reflections
References
Chapter 3: Enspirited Leadership in Japan
Background: Bob and Yuka
Stepping Stones
Enspirited Leadership
Three Questions
Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity
References
Part Two: Presence
Sociological Mindfulness and Leadership Education
References
Chapter 4: The Dance of Joyful Leadership
The Still Point and the Dance
The Dancers: Who We Are
Our Story: Reflections on the Still Point and the Dance
After the Dance: Closing Thoughts
References
Note
Chapter 5: Why on Earth Are We Staring at Raisins?
The Quest and the Test
Opening and Learning
Growing
Home Is Wherever You Are
References
Note
Chapter 6: Intergroup Dialogue
The Intergroup Relations and Dialogue Program at Villanova
Intergroup Dialogue and Nonviolent Communication
Mindfulness and Intergroup Dialogue
Authentic Leadership
Conclusion
References
Part Three: Authenticity
Appear Authentic!
Room for Reflection in the Daily Life of a Leader?
Online and Communicative Leadership in the New Global Social World
Training in Authentic Leadership or Image Marketing?
Being Authentic
References
Chapter 7: Leadership Values in Africa and Implications for Online Learning Communities
The Role of Leadership Values
About Servant-Leadership
The African Leadership Approach
Servant-Leadership and Online Learning Communities
Implications for African Online Learning Communities
Comparing Traditional African and Servant-Leadership Values: A Summary
Avenues for Future Research
Conclusion and Outlook
Note
References
Chapter 8: Reflection and Authentic Leadership
Overview of the Theoretical Model
Implications for Authentic Leadership Development
Implications for Research
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Embodying Authentic Leadership
The Great Dionysian Festival
Developing Authentic Leadership Through Theater
The Importance of Self-Awareness in Authentic Leadership
External Elements: Language, Voice, and Body
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Leaders’ Lived Experience of Authentic Moments
The Method
Essential Structure of an Authentic Leadership Moment
Essential Themes
Implications and Conclusion
References
Name Index
Subject Index
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End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 Embodied Leadership
Figure 5.1 Interlinking Attributes
List of Tables
Table 7.1 Online Servant and African Leadership Values
Table 8.1 A Model of Self-Reflection in Authentic Leadership
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Leading with Spirit, Presence, and Authenticity
Kathryn Goldman Schuyler
John Eric Baugher, Karin Jironet, Lena Lid-Falkman, Editors
A Volume in the International Leadership Association Series Building Leadership Bridges
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover photograph © Zeb Andrews | Getty
Copyright © 2014 by International Leadership Association. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leading with spirit, presence, and authenticity / Kathryn Goldman Schuyler, John Eric Baugher, Karin Jironet, Lena Lid-Falkman, editors. — First edition.
pages cm. — (International Leadership Association series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-82061-2 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-82048-3 (pdf);
ISBN 978-1-118-82069-8 (epub) -
1. Leadership. 2. Leadership—Religious aspects—Buddhism. I. Schuyler, Kathryn Goldman. 
HM1261.L434 2014
303.3'4—dc23
2014007797
The Contributors
Marco Aponte-Moreno, PhD, is an actor and academic. He has been performing in theater and film for the past fifteen years. He obtained his PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, specializing in Hugo Chávez’s political discourse. His current academic research focuses on the role of language and theater in leadership development. Aponte-Moreno teaches leadership and communication at University College London, where he is also the director of the graduate program in management.
John Eric Baugher, PhD, is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine. His recent research and teaching activities concern emotional and spiritual dimensions of transformational learning, bereavement, and end-of-life care. Baugher is a member of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education and the social science editor for the Journal of Contemplative Inquiry. He provides training in spiritual care to hospice and other organizations, and for more than two decades he has been following the lead of dying and grieving persons as a certified hospice volunteer.
Sylvia van de Bunt-Kokhuis, PhD, is co-director of SERVUS, the Servant-Leadership Centre for Research and Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has an international career in business, corporate governance, and academia. She has published extensively in international academic journals on higher education, talent diversity, community building, and servant-leadership. She is the author of Academic Pilgrims (1996), editor of World Wide Work (2006), and coeditor of Competing for Talent (2009).
Brighid Dwyer, PhD, is the assistant director for research and training in the Center for Multicultural Affairs at Villanova University and serves as one of the university’s ombudspersons for bias concerns. She is one of the co-directors of Villanova’s Program on Intergroup Relations, a faculty member in the program, and an adjunct faculty member in the Center for Peace and Justice Education.
Catherine Etmanski, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University and first-year program head for a master’s program in leadership studies. She is passionate about teaching arts-based and environmental leadership as well as action-oriented, participatory approaches to research. She enjoys integrating the arts into her work, and her doctoral studies employed participatory theater as a research method. She practices yoga and meditation.
Mark Fulton, MA, is a seasoned consultant, facilitator, and trainer with over twenty-five years of experience leading organizational effectiveness work—that is, helping organizations develop the capability to execute their strategy and achieve their business goals. He has worked with thousands of frontline leaders, senior executive teams, project teams, and groups of employees in a broad range of organizations from large multinational high-technology corporations to small start-ups. His MA from Concordia University is in human systems intervention.
Ralph A. Gigliotti is assistant director of Student Development for Leadership Programs at Villanova University. In this role, he coordinates the leadership education initiatives for aspiring and current student leaders. He has taught courses in communication, leadership, and public administration and is pursuing his PhD in organizational communication at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Kathryn Goldman Schuyler, PhD, has over twenty-five years of experience in leadership development, organizational consulting, and somatic learning. She has helped hundreds of executives to cultivate healthy organizations and is a professor in the graduate faculty of organizational psychology at Alliant International University. Goldman Schuyler has published widely on leadership and change and is the author of Inner Peace—Global Impact: Tibetan Buddhism, Leadership, and Work (IAP, 2012). In her private practice, she teaches children and adults with moderate to severe neuromotor challenges to move, learn, and live well.
Olen Gunnlaugson, PhD, is an assistant professor in leadership and organizational development in the Business School at Université Laval in Québec City, Canada. He views business education as a key societal vehicle for developing the next generation of self-aware, sustainably minded leaders. Gunnlaugson brings an increasingly multidisciplinary background to research and consulting in leadership, communication in teams, and executive coaching. His research has been published in several books and numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and presentations at international conferences.
Karin Jironet, PhD, theologian, Sufi murshida (guide), and Jungian psychoanalyst, is dedicated to leadership development in times of transition. Specializing in applying psychospiritual principles to boardroom dynamics for more than a decade, she counts as her clients the major international banks. Jironet is an internationally published author of articles and books on new approaches to organizational development and leadership. Her latest book, Female Leadership, was nominated for best book of the year by the Gradiva Award, New York 2012. She is a board member of the Dutch Association of Analytical Psychology and cofounder of In Claritas.
Linda Kantor, BSoc Sci, MA Psychology, is a counseling psychologist, hypnotherapist, yoga teacher, and mindfulness trainer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has taught mindfulness in various contexts from community to corporate. She is a part-time lecturer at the University of Cape Town, where she teaches mindful leadership. She is also a facilitator for the University of Stellenbosch certificate in mindfulness. She is undertaking her PhD, exploring applications of mindfulness in the corporate context.
Hanna H. Lee is the assistant director of the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships at Villanova University. In this role, she advises students and develops programming around nationally competitive scholarships and undergraduate research to help students reach their full intellectual, professional, and personal potential. In addition to fellowships advising and academic programming at Villanova University, she teaches in the Intergroup Relations Program, Global Learning Communities, Service Learning Communities, and Honors Program.
Lena Lid-Falkman, PhD, focuses on value-based, authentic leadership and on leadership as communicative and rhetorical. Her PhD thesis was elected the best in business administration in Europe 2010 by the European Doctoral Programme Association in Management and Business Administration network and was in the top three in the Jablin Dissertation Award for Leadership Studies. Her recent research deals with authentic leadership as communicated through technology such as social media. She is a Marie Curie Scholar at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain.
Guy Nasmyth, MA, is a consultant, trainer, and educator working in the areas of leadership and human systems. He is also associate faculty at Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria in British Columbia. His research and PhD studies have focused on collaboration and leadership as a shared or distributed phenomenon. He has worked in a variety of locations, including Cambodia, Thailand, and India.
Hellicy C. Ngambi is the vice chancellor at Mulungushi University in Zambia. She has over thirty years of management and teaching experience in higher education in Africa and overseas, including executive director, CEO, executive dean, principal, and managing director. She holds the following qualifications: DBL, MSc, MBA, BA, ITP, ACE fellowship, and Prosci certified. She has authored, edited, and published several articles and books, including RARE Total Leadership: Leading with Head, Heart and Hands.
M. Beth Page, author, educator, speaker, consultant, and Dream Catcher Consulting founder, helps people explore and act on their leadership vision. Her recent works include Change Happens, Done Deal: Your Guide to Merger and Acquisition Integration, and a chapter in the best-selling Awakening the Workplace. She holds degrees from Pepperdine University, Western Illinois University, and Carleton University. A certified Emotional Intelligence Coach (EQ in Action), she is pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Victoria.
Deana M. Raffo, EdD, serves as assistant professor of management at Middle Tennessee State University, where she coordinates the leadership studies minor. She has had rich professional experiences involving student services, student affairs, and leadership education. Her research interests include leadership and personal development, leadership education, and the introverted qualities in leadership.
Jonathan Reams, PhD, practices the cultivation of leadership through awareness based consulting and leadership development program design and delivery in a variety of settings. He has a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, serves as editor in chief of Integral Review, and is a cofounder of the Center for Transformative Leadership. He brings awareness based technology to focusing on how the inner workings of human nature can develop leadership capacities for today’s complex challenges.
Juliane Reams, MA, began her career in the fashion design industry, turned to tourism and adventure sports, elementary and primary school pedagogy, and earned a master’s degree in counseling. She works as a researcher on leadership development for the Center for Transformative Leadership and for Conscious Leadership Development, specializing in the field of cultivating wisdom.
Yuka Saionji is deputy chairperson of Byakko Shinko Kai, a spiritual organization dedicated to world peace and raising the consciousness of humanity. She is a board member of Miratsuku (“emerging future”), a nonprofit organization working on community building through dialogue. Saionji works with youth around the world on projects for peace and is a member of the Evolutionary Leaders and World Spirit Youth Council. She has a degree in law from Gakushuin University in Japan.
Subhanu Saxena is managing director and global CEO of Cipla and was previously a member of the Global Pharma Executive Committee of Novartis Pharma AG, where he had responsibility for marketing, sales, global medical affairs, and health economics. He is a highly accomplished global executive, with experience over the past twenty-five years in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. He holds an MBA from INSEAD–France and a BA (Hons.) in engineering science from Oxford University. Fluent in English, Hindi, and Sanskrit, with a good working knowledge of French, German, and Russian, he is also a lecturer and teacher of Sanskrit and ancient Indian literature.
Otto Scharmer, PhD, is a senior lecturer at MIT and founding chair of the Presencing Institute. He cofounded the Global Wellbeing Lab and is vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Leadership. He introduced the concept of “presencing,” learning from the emerging future, in his books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers). His new book, Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies, focuses on transforming business, society, and self.
Susan Skjei, MS, has been an educator, coach, and consultant for twenty-five years, specializing in leadership and transformative change. She is completing her PhD at Fielding Graduate University. Formerly a chief learning officer for a large technology company, she developed and directs the authentic leadership program at Naropa University and is a cofounder of the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute in Canada. She is an Acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and consults internationally through her company, SaneSystems.
Bob Stilger, PhD, is the founder and co-president of New Stories, a nonprofit that uses the power of story to help people create thriving, resilient communities. His work has stretched to many parts of the world, including Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Brazil, and Australia. Co-president of the Berkana Institute from 2005 to 2009, he teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and Gonzaga University. His PhD in learning and change in human systems is from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Introduction: Of Leadership and Light
Kathryn Goldman Schuyler
This introduction juxtaposes questions about leadership with questions and perceptions about life, since for me the two are highly interwoven. Walk with me metaphorically as I tell you about this book and my experiences in developing it. My intention for this book is to nourish the capacity to be present, so it seems fitting to walk, notice my surroundings, and reflect on them in introducing you to the world of this book.
The day moves toward dusk, with vivid light shining through wind-blown eucalyptus trees, tossing them into a swaying dance between me and the paling blue sky, its intensity shifting as the light changes. The birds make little sounds; I imagine they are communicating to one another about food for the evening, but who knows. Perhaps they are noticing the wind and the light as well. An intense fuchsia color on a small flower catches my eye. Each blossom looks fragile and brilliant at the same time, contrasted with the darker colors of the heavier, larger plants and trees nearby. Perhaps the intensity of a small bright flower makes as much difference as the long-lasting contribution of a bush, I muse.
Today, between the second and third virtual meetings with the three associate editors of this book, I watched the America’s Cup race from my office in San Francisco. I knew it was taking place somewhere in the billowing fog outside my windows, yet I chose to watch on screen, both because of the fog and because television can literally place the watcher on the racing boats, with the racer’s view added to the spectator’s view. An amazing aspect of our world: a technology that distances people from the things happening right outside our windows can also bring us close to them in ways that we could never otherwise experience. For me, the combination of these qualities of television as a medium and the race itself brings me closer to understanding what I want this book to be for readers. In the race, we see boats labeled “New Zealand” and “USA,” yet the teams are not necessarily from those countries. The science that developed these unique new boats, with sails thirteen stories high that can race at speeds of over thirty miles an hour against the wind, also cuts across our humanly created divisions into nation-states. The funding for the boats only sometimes comes from the countries named: the New Zealanders represent Emirates Airlines and the Swiss company Nespresso, for example. The skipper of the USA boat clearly sounds like an Australian. Only one member of the so-called American team is from the United States. So is this really USA versus New Zealand? What is it?
The America’s Cup as a Metaphor for Understanding Leadership
The type of leadership required of both captains is to be fully present to the demands of the moment. Past races must not overly influence them during the current one, and they need mastery of both the subtleties of interpersonal communication among the team members and the technological complexities of these new, huge, racing catamarans. There is no either-or choice: success requires mastery of technology, one’s physical and emotional self, verbal and nonverbal communication, the crafts of sailing and racing, and much more. It means being able to use analytical intelligence, technical knowledge, strategic thinking, and environmental sensing and to be inspirational to one’s team as well. In this instance, being world class and getting to the pinnacle of success means inevitably that one team must lose; that is the nature of this contest. Such winning does not come solely from the captain’s leadership on the boat. In this and many other settings today, leadership also means mastery of new technology, which may be contributed by unseen people behind the scenes. Changes made over the course of the series of races by technological wizards working in the background may have led to the dramatic shift in wins from one boat to the other in the middle of these sixteen races. In addition, decisions were made by other leaders off the water who inspired, managed, and funded the entire project. Leadership and winning were truly distributed and networked.
Much of this is true for leadership today. There is not just one training or way of developing leadership, and it is not just one thing. Excellent leaders may grow up in one country and lead companies or nongovernmental organizations based in another, with people on their teams from many different parts of the world. Just as the weather cannot be controlled and may be warm and sunny one day and windy with fog the next, leaders lead through all weather, all conditions, with all kinds of people. To accomplish this, they need high levels of mastery of their physical and emotional selves, verbal and nonverbal communication, the knowledge base of their endeavors, how to choose a strong team, and how to inspire appropriate, timely action. Leadership may look as if it comes from the person who is visible, but it actually depends on widely networked interactions.
Although the credit generally goes to the one person designated as “leader,” the America’s Cup race helped me see graphically how the team, the boat, and the leader can be almost indistinguishable in terms of their respective contributions. Is it the designated leader who matters most? The innate speed potential of the boat that comes from its technology? The talent of the team members and how they coordinate together? Or is success the outcome of the composite of all of these and other factors as well, like the “surround,” which in this case means the changing winds and currents? My vote is for the complex and intricate interdependence of all of these components. The issue for leaders, leadership developers, and scholars then becomes which of these we can influence and optimally effective ways to do so.
Although there is only one winner in the game of racing, this is not so in life, business, or global society. Creating a sustainable human presence on the planet means transcending old notions of one winner and many losers. We human beings are waking up to recognize the interdependence of our actions, organizations, and societies in time and in space. As one of my students recently commented after reading the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium (1999), “I saw how lazy my mind is: I think about cause and effect, but he sees long chains of causation linked with every act, every choice. I thought I was a good thinker until I saw this possibility. We are not accustomed to contemplating the interconnectedness of our actions. This interconnectedness provides a complex, comprehensive, frankly mind-blowing perspective on how we all affect one another.”
Embodied Being
It may not be chance that this book follows The Embodiment of Leadership, last year’s volume in the International Leadership Association’s (ILA) Building Leadership Bridges series. I submitted this year’s topic because I sensed that the ILA wishes to help its members and the larger community reframe traditional notions about the nature of leadership and contribute to increasingly healthy leadership throughout the world. This book and its structure grow out of an approach to the interdependence of embodiment, spirit, and leadership that has been developing in my work for many years.
Originally we four editors sought to include concrete stories from leaders and consultants about their work, illustrating how spirit, presence, and authenticity contribute to effectiveness in action. However, most submissions discussed concepts, reviewed relevant literature, or spoke to experiences outside the realms of corporate or political leadership. The most graphic examples came from educators who described how they incorporate these themes into their teaching. Perhaps as leadership scholars and practitioners, we are still drawing together knowledge and experience from a range of fields that rarely interact with one another, so our models don’t yet encompass the whole of what we seek to address, making it difficult to move to the stage of illuminating these models with specific stories.
For leadership scholars, educators, and consultants wishing to address leaders as full beings who are embodied, in touch with spirit, present, and thereby authentic, there are rich philosophical and practical sources to draw on. Conceptually the writings of Mark Johnson (1987, 2007), Antonio Damasio (1999), and others (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) portray human beings as embodied in ways that are different from most people’s commonsense notion of a physical body as a thing in which one lives for a while. Their work has not yet penetrated common social science ways of thinking and writing about what a person is as an agent of change. Few people draw on deep practices of embodiment to develop managers, leaders, and consultants. I know of none who have both consulted from such a deeply grounded embodied perspective and used this consulting experience for systematic action research. From my experience of drawing on professional somatic training in my work as an organizational change consultant, I believe that the leadership field as a whole will benefit if it is nourished by experiential forms of embodied learning that have rich theoretical and scientific roots. Among possible examples of such methods are the Feldenkrais Method (Feldenkrais, 1949, 1972, 1977, 1979) and Bainbridge Cohen’s (2012) body-mind centering.
Such perspectives posit that we as human beings can potentially sense ourselves down to the cellular level. We can feel consciousness in our cells, fluids, tissues, bones„in all components of our selves. Embodiment offers a potential for sensing our interconnectivity with one another and with the air, water, and earth with which we are in constant interaction. The mind is not a separate kind of entity that can think with clarity about the body: instead, it is an embodied process. “It is our organic flesh and blood, our structural bones, the ancient rhythms of our internal organs, and the pulsing flow of our emotions that give us whatever meaning we can find and that shape our very thinking” (Johnson, 2007, p. 3). Through the quirks of the way we perceive, this embodied foundation of thinking and understanding becomes invisible during what humans have come to regard as normal functioning (Johnson, 2007). The work of pioneers like Feldenkrais, Bainbridge Cohen, Varela, Johnson, and others suggests that this fundamental ground of being can be sensed, studied, and brought into leadership education and development. Embodied learning is grounded in understanding the way humans learn: through variation, noticing differences, and playful experimentation. Ideally, such learning also incorporates the human capacity for compassion, which comes from acknowledging the fundamental interdependence of all living beings.
Unending Unfoldment
Another perspective on the hidden-in-plain-view aspects of human beings can be seen in Tibetan Vajrayana traditions (Goldman Schuyler, 2012, 2013) and in Western philosophers like Spinoza. Both show how ordinary life and material things are not distinct from spirit, but instead can be seen as spirit manifesting in form. From this standpoint, one does not live, get points for being good, and then receive rewards later. There is no later. It is not a sequential process, as there are no “things” that are not also spirit. Materiality and spirit are enfolded in one another, perhaps as David Bohm (1980) saw them in describing the universe as “a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment” (p. x). This is similar to Chogyam Trungpa’s (1973) notion of authenticity in action. In this context, mindfulness or awareness intrinsically means connecting simultaneously with oneself as an embodied being and with the vastness and interconnected quality of life, developing a view of impermanence (as Buddhists call it) and the constructed nature of human societies.
While going through this experiment and working on this book, I often reflected on the difficulty of having leaders train extensively in meditation or mindfulness, given their time constraints and focus on action. In addition, over the centuries, it has been clear that even to develop wise spiritual leaders is a significant challenge, since they, like political leaders, are often caught by the attractions of power, wealth, and self-image. The action research process suggests one type of path forward. It is a path that connects with the work of Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge on presence. Instead of developing lengthy training processes, perhaps executive guides can support leaders in being fully present and paying attention, while reminding them of their already existing deep personal values and intentions.
Exploring Presence in Action: A Research Project
To explore this richness and complexity in a structured way, I co-created a collaborative action research project several years ago. We invited participants to observe themselves three to four times a week for four weeks during moments that they sensed themselves to be more awake than usual. The project coordinators did not tell participants anything about how they should hold the notion of awake, except for contextualizing it historically in relation to the words of several different spiritual traditions.
The basis of this research was my curiosity about whether human beings actually need to be trained to notice, pay attention, and sense themselves and their environment. Instead, in this research project we opted to regard these as basic capacities that come with embodiment as human beings, so that people do not need to be “trained” in them. I am guessing that the vivid connectedness with experience that human babies and very young children share fades for most people as they learn to talk, drive, think, and write. Perhaps people simply need to be reminded to pay attention, rather than needing training in awareness or meditation. This led to the design of our research as an action research experiment.
A core notion in this research project was that as humans, we have not learned how to fully use all of our equipment: we haven’t yet mastered the fine art of living with the rich and complex body/mind/sensing apparatus (or self) that we are. Rather than assuming that what is needed is ever more training, I became interested in questioning whether simply paying attention might trigger a different way of approaching life and action. This is similar to what I perceive in the method of dialogue, where participants sit together patiently, allowing silence and time between people’s words rather than jumping in with preplanned notions of what should go next. Both approaches give space for something new to emerge from being present to one another.
In our research project, we invited participants to pay attention and be aware of moments when they felt “awake” or present and to write or record notes about the experiences. As this book goes to press, my colleagues and I are engaged in analyzing the transcripts of the individual reflections and interviews that comprise our qualitative data. We already see that the participants experienced unexpected insight and support for being present in daily action and felt that this affected how they worked during the rest of the day while they were involved in the experiment. Such individual first-person research can provide a foundation for designing larger change projects. (See Figure I.1 for the way I have modeled this, based on my research, consulting, experience with Buddhist practices, and reflection.)
Figure I.1 Embodied Leadership
Copyright © 2013 Kathryn Goldman Schuyler.
Rather than doing lengthy training, perhaps leadership development can increasingly incorporate ongoing practices of contemplation (of all types and traditions) to bring leaders in touch regularly with the fullness of life within them (embodiment) and on the planet (spirituality), along with supporting them in actively engaging with the complex systemic problems faced today in our economies and cultures. Such awareness can be enhanced by simple training in easily learned compassion practices (Salzberg, 2011). As Senge (2012) has said, “Until you can stop the habitual flow of your mind, you cannot see what’s around you. If you’re going to be in a position of authority, you’d better have a high level of awareness of what’s going on. Otherwise, all you can do is project your inner dynamics on the outer world. You look at our world today, and we’ve got a lot of people in positions of authority who don’t know anything except how to project their own world-view on the larger world, so we have lots of problems” (pp. 326–327).
When executives sense that they are interconnected with all other sentient beings, they are likely to make different decisions than when they mainly sense pressure for quarterly results, as you will see in several chapters in this book. If CEOs are aware of their breath, their heart, and their feet on the ground and take time to gaze at the vast sky all around as they think about a difficult strategic issue, they may take different things into account in arriving at key decisions. Thus, I suspect that leaders do not need the depth of mindfulness training that has been provided throughout history for those who seek to become wisdom teachers; they need only brief training in awareness and compassion, combined with ongoing practice in being present to themselves, others, and life while working as managers, politicians, or military leaders. This might mean linking experiences in presencing and mindfulness with learning about adaptive leadership (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002).
A Glimpse inside the Creation of This Book
As with leadership, which seems to be an attribute of one person yet is something that occurs only in the midst of an interactive process, the creation of this book has been a team effort. Again, as with the boat, there is a key role for the designated leader, but the selection of the team members and the work of those behind the scenes are all critical components. The editorial team is composed of four people who have never met in person and come from very different backgrounds and experience bases; each graciously gave a great deal of their time to create a book that would make a distinctive contribution to people who care about leadership in today’s world.
We made time to talk over coffee virtually, to simply be together so we could speak from our heart-mind, not just from our intellects, even though I was in California, John was on a Greek island and then in Maine, Karin was in the Netherlands, and Lena was in Spain and then in Sweden. We did this so we could express strongly divergent opinions without feeling uncomfortable doing so, as happens much of the time in meetings. We sorted through 120 submissions without having any idea who wrote them, whether they came from widely respected scholars and consultants or from people new to the field, from mature professionals or newly minted PhDs. We read and talked to find those authors who spoke to us from a sense of their own real experiences, who shared data (whether research based or from experience as manager or consultant) and built clear lines of thought that seemed likely to be of interest to the current and potential members of the ILA. They addressed the theme we sought: developing leaders who are present, bring spirit to their part of the world, and lead in ways that enable more authentic action. These are leaders whose spirit, presence, and authenticity help them move their organizations or communities toward improved action on what Ron Heifetz (Parks, 2005) has called “swamp problems”„those problems no one knows how to resolve.
I read all submissions, and each associate editor read a third of them. Then we shared our views in writing, discussed them, and chose twenty that all four of us would read in order to select those that would make up this book.
Living in San Francisco, I often get to watch the fog come floating in and curl around the brightly outlined blocks of buildings as the sun sets. Soft gray fog, shining hard windows reflecting golden light, and sharp edges of buildings standing out against the blur of smaller structures and the gradual enveloping fog, as the sky turns pink and gray„the brilliant blue of the day morphing into a softness and subtlety chilled by strong winds. It is as though the buildings and the city are being packed away in cotton clouds for the night. How do we select pieces that will paint vivid pictures for our readers? Which of the authors will be able to take their submissions to new levels? It is never easy to know.
Our virtual meetings were among the richest I have ever experienced. We have come to know one another and appreciate both the similarities of what we value and the differences among us. I wish such meetings were common in all organizations, in all universities. When she comments, Lena Lid-Falkman brings warmth, experience editing previous BLB volumes, deep knowledge of the way that one exemplary leader (Dag Hammarskjöld) contributed to the global evolution of leadership, plus expertise in rhetoric and the ways that social media are impacting leadership studies. John Eric Baugher brings excellence in scholarly writing that is also personal and reflective, experience in Buddhist practice and research on end-of-life care, as well as extensive understanding of relevant sociological perspectives. Karin Jironet brings years of work experience as a Jungian analyst and executive guide, plus personal experience with Sufism and other wisdom lineages, enriched by having written a book on the feminine in leadership. All are excellent writers and editors who walk their talk of commitment to openness. I seek to bring understanding of interactive processes and a feeling for new possibilities that we are here to birth, honed by over twenty years of practice as an organizational and leadership consultant, decades of grounding in the fluidity and concreteness of the Feldenkrais approach to awareness through movement, and value for both shared silence and well-crafted words. I tried always to create virtual meetings in which we felt truly present with one another, so that our work was itself a manifestation of what we want the book to be in the world.
Finally, we also interacted virtually with Debra DeRuyver, who has managed the creation and evolution of the Building Leadership Bridges for the ILA since 2009. Her ability to be both friendly and highly organized through e-mail and by phone is a blessing in a project manager and contributed always to the quality of the final product. The role of the ILA itself in selecting this theme, placing resources behind it, and sustaining this series is a sign of its intent to make a unique contribution to leadership in today’s world.
Overview of the Book
The contributors to this book explored these and similar questions in their own ways. Each part approaches the theme from a different perspective. The associate editors introduce the contents of each part with a thought piece, so I will focus here on the thinking behind the overall structure of this book rather than on the individual chapters.
We don’t see spirit, presence, and authenticity as three distinct things; we treat them as related and interdependent lenses through which to appreciate leadership. As an example of the pervading trinity, Buddhist traditions speak of three kayas, or different ways of understanding the relationship between spirit and phenomena. Briefly, the first of these could be thought of as the underlying principle of enlightenment„the source of all and everything, which we are here labeling spirit; the second is how this enlightenment connects with life through light, which we are here labeling presence; and the third is how it manifests in beings who take action, here labeled as authenticity. The parts don’t follow one another in a linear way, but in a book, one thing must follow another.
My familiarity with these distinctions led me to sense spirit as a lens for something that is not concrete but influences everything else. Therefore, the book opens with part 1, “Spirit,” with chapters that offer a frame of reference for renewal of notions of leadership, grounded in theory as well as in daily practice. Another way of describing this part would be to say it provides an expansive view of the nature and role of leadership today, which Karin Jironet explores in her contribution.
Part 2, “Presence,” addresses the process of bringing this view into the world of human action. As Senge, Scharmer, Jaworkski, and Flowers (2004) have described presence, it involves experiencing the way the whole is alive in every part of a system, experiencing the “wholeness of nature” (p. 7). They have given the world presencing as a path for shifting from reactive learning to deeper levels of learning that lead to “action that increasingly serves the whole” (p. 11). This part contains programs for bringing mindfulness into educational systems. John Eric Baugher’s introductory chapter explores the role of individual mindfulness as a foundation, but only a partial one, for societal mindfulness, the direction we would hope such leadership will take in the world.
The book closes with part 3, “Authenticity.” To me, trained as a sociologist by Amitai Etzioni when he was focused on bringing about The Active Society (1968), authenticity refers to moving beyond trying to be present but really just pretending, to being able to genuinely live values that serve all participants in a given system. Our intent for this part is that it will raise questions for you as to what it is to be authentic as a leader rather than necessarily resolving your questions. Lena Lid-Falkman shares her view of authenticity in introducing the chapters in this part.
The sun has set now, and the sailing racers are long gone. The lights of the city and other cities across the bay sparkle, suggesting to me the many people invisible in the darkness who cause there to be light in this community and in the rest of the world. Even this light can be seen as a symbol of the way that human beings have changed the world we live in, as it makes it possible to live and interact 24/7 and at the same time creates light pollution so that the real points of light, the stars, become invisible.
May this book serve you, all other readers, and the ILA as a tool for asking new questions of yourself about leadership, its function in the world, and how to develop ever healthier leadership for the planet, and may it help you see the light of the stars during those times that we perceive as being dark.
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