TiER1 Performance This article was written by Jim Ruberg, a business transformation coach.
What does conscious leadership look like? Here’s a real example: Ahead of complex projects, an organization sets up “war rooms,” dedicated spaces for teams to meet, strategize, and post big notes on the walls. It’s a place for teams to work through meaty issues. Signs posted outside the space read War Room. Do not move or erase anything.
Although the intention to provide teams with dedicated resources and space to work through challenges together is a good one, there’s a shadow side to this effort. Employees came to realize that the term “war” was changing what it meant to be at work. Did people really want to wake up and go to “war” every day? Was a “war” mindset really required to be successful and solve the business problems at hand?
Once leadership became conscious of how the “war room” construct was impacting the environment, they decided to rename it to “collaboration room.” By changing the name, employees were able to approach their work with a healthier, more positive attitude. Employees felt relief and energized by the fact that leadership empathized with their point of view and made a change.
Though simple, this kind of change makes for a stronger organization. What enabled the leadership to change direction? Conscious leadership.
Most people think of strong leaders as those who can lead what the business is doing. They visualize strong leaders who have great business acumen (high IQ), know a lot of stuff, and can do a lot of different things like:
The problem with this view is that it only accounts for one kind of strength: a focus on what should be done. While strong leaders can (and should) lead what the business is doing, the strongest leaders not only do that, but they also lead how business actually gets done.
The strongest leaders have a huge business acumen and something else that allows them to connect with people, be persistent in the face of adversity, and have a dynamic decision-making schema that is open to new perspectives. Some call this emotional intelligence or EQ, which was coined by Daniel Goleman. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins calls this Level 5 Leadership. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey of the Harvard Graduate School of Education call it the transformational mind. The term that resonates the most for me is conscious leadership.
Various perspectives of this term, including that of Conscious Capitalism, encompass leaders whose values and purpose drive them. Conscious leaders embrace conscious leadership in the broadest sense and are highly aware of how they run their business.
A conscious leader has awareness of all their business stakeholder needs: investors, customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities where they operate. Conscious leaders can shift their mindset and not get locked into a losing direction. Put another way, they can adapt and adjust on the fly in an agile, flexible way.
If you’re interested in becoming a stronger, more conscious leader (or in helping leaders at your organization become even stronger), here are some considerations: