Our inner worlds effect what it is possible to achieve together. It is in moments of perceived conflict or polarisation that we are most likely to get trapped in our personal stories, unable to see beyond them to the human in front of us or the real situation at hand. Yet, most people don’t invest the time to become present to the stories around us. What would happen if we did?
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung.
The drastic social, economic and environmental upheaval we’re seeing is a rallying call to ask serious questions about the stories being told about leadership. What are your beliefs? Does change happen through a top-down hierarchy and transactions? Is it relational and inspirational? Is it an organic structure or organism? What does this mean in the metacrisis? Many great thinkers devote their lives to this question. No matter your perspective, we all agree that our fates are intertwined. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says: ‘Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest – whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.’
Businesses are now being designed around more collaborative ways of operating, we're more aware of transformative leadership models. We even hear established business and political leaders such as Paul Polman and Halla Tómasdóttir of The B Team and organisations such as the World Economic Forum talking about the Next Economy. We have access to movements like B Corps that aim to create a shift well beyond ESG and Corporate Social Responsibility. Stakeholder capitalism has been around for a while now, but what does it mean in practice? Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her powerful TED Talk “the danger of a single story” describes the risk it brings of a critical misunderstanding.
These are very specific macro spaces within which people are able to learn how to operate. It’s not necessarily that the expansive internal work is being done at an individual level of a leader. Certainly, our education system and much leadership development doesn’t encourage or value the inner worlds of our leaders no matter how much it’s been shown to help. It is like we assume that an invisible wall stands between the operating system of an organisation and the people that run it.
Until we see real leader willingness to engage in personal development, much of what we talk about will remain only aspirational. Because without this personal development at a leader level, without this capacity to see beyond the short-term gain of the individual and the ego, beyond ends justifying means, nothing changes. Unless the people at the top in the boardrooms buy in and take their personal development seriously, we’re never going to correct the course of our collective trajectory.
If we hope to see and be better leaders – leaders who are transformational, collectively minded and fit for the 21st century, leaders who have the capacity to innovate, learn and collaborate – we must be willing to do the hard slog of transforming our inner world and embracing a kind of full-spectrum being, intereconnected leadership. We cannot afford to keep gambling on our future based on the behaviours of the past.
So how do we move forward from here? How do we get to this place where our current leaders unlearn centuries-long corporate indoctrination? Can each individual leader move from a focus on doing to one of being, of listening to their body wisdom and engaging with their people and context from a place of empathy and holding? Is it possible to create environments that see, hear and allow people to be themselves? And how can we support more role models to lead the way?
These are the questions that have informed my enquiry into building better leaders that has contributed to the Interconnected Leader program at Small Giants Academy. It is time to nurture and grow transformational leaders who embrace interconnected leadership at scale. By integrating body based, science-backed practices into the heart of leadership, the hope is that we can remain present enough to surface new stories for leaders and help them learn how to lead in awareness of many stories, including some of the most challenging paradoxes of our day. This is critical work. One that effects every drop in the ocean and the ocean of droplets.
Evolving the individual is a collective benefit. Neither has to suffer to thrive. It’s time for the leaders of the world to see this.
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