‘All great discoveries come from a deep inner journey’  - W. Brian Arthur

‘To become a leader, look within’ - Deepak Chopra

‘The way to do, is to be’ – Lao Tzu

Leadership: a vague, ill-defined buzzword, or the ‘blind spot’ of our time?

By being part of the MSLS programme, we get in touch with some of the finest leadership literature, research and practitioners, while at the same time, in the ‘outer world’, there seems to be a serious lack of leadership in institutions of every kind, whether they are public, private or in civil society. As a student in the MSLS programme it is easy to forget the ‘real world’ outside of campus, while being surrounded by so many inspiring peers and professionals in and related to the programme. Two prominent thought leaders that provided guest lectures over the last months include Göran Carstedt, former CEO of IKEA and Volvo, and dr. Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at MIT and founder of the Presencing Institute. What has their thinking contributed to my view on and connection with leadership?

What does leadership mean to me?

The concept of leadership being rather intangible and elusive, it is hard to define, and more meaningful to experience and practice it, or to come up with defining characteristics. However, based on a couple of conversations, my experiences in the MSLS ’11 class so far and some of the readings, I have noted down some reflections that from my point of view could describe the building blocks of leadership.

First of all, leadership is about truly becoming human, finding inner peace, or, as Otto Scharmer (2007) puts it, connecting with one’s highest future potential. It is more a way of fully living your life with a higher purpose, and serving that purpose, rather than aspiring to an elusive archetypical idea of a leader as an hierarchical role or a title someone has. It is about becoming aware of and serving this higher purpose and passion, and thereby releasing and generating potentially vast amounts of energy in one’s private and professional life. As George Bernard Shaw (in Senge, 2005) put it, ‘being used for a purpose you consider a mighty one’.

Leadership is also about finding and maintaining a balance between family, friends, community, and work, being your self in every situation. This suggests that a good leader is living according to one’s personal values, while being sensible and open to learn from other’s values (connecting your personal with your professional life). Self-awareness plays an important role here: good leaders are self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses, their inner state and how to relate this to others (social and emotional intelligence). Good leaders are good learners and listeners.

Good leaders are people who can either inspire a shared vision for a group of people (any kind of organisation, community, friends, family), or people who can bring a shared vision out of a group. These two ‘categories’ of leaders could be described as either ‘narcissistic’ leaders or as ‘servant’ leaders (shepherds). Not one is better than the other; one kind of leadership might be more relevant in a certain situation than the other. The common denominator is that leadership goes far beyond mere problem solving, and is much more about seeing a vision that is not yet existing and bringing this vision into reality. With other words: listening to what wants to evolve, understanding what way the universe wants to go, creating and nurturing a learning environment, and enabling people to learn and develop. In Göran Carstedt’s words: learning is not only about filling oneself with information or data, but it is essentially also about being part of a meaningful community (Carstedt 2010).

Göran Carstedt delivering one of his lectures in the MSLS '11 class. (photo: Xavier Koenig)

As W. Brian Arthur put it, ‘the quality of an intervention depends on the inner state of the intervener’. This goes far beyond self-awareness alone: it is about being able to listen to the Self, being open for what wants to evolve from that inner state, and being open for the future that wants to be created. Göran Carstedt asked a strikingly relevant question here: ‘what is the future I want to be part of creating?’

More and more, I have the perception and feeling that leadership is also about having a sense for being at the right place on the right time. This was reconfirmed by Göran Carstedt and in the message of Joseph Jaworski’s (1998) book ‘Synchronicity, the inner path of leadership’. Synchronicity, according to Jaworski, inherently means that a series of events, times and people cross each other’s paths, either by chance or by fate, thereby cross-pollinating each other.

Last but not least: good leaders are inherently self-less and extremely good listeners: they are able to be totally present in that specific moment – they are able to put their energy to work for a higher purpose which is entirely self-less.

How does the above characterisation of leadership relate to my own personal actions, experiences and ambitions? Many, if not all of the leadership thread sessions, assignments, presentations, and discussions with colleagues over the last months, made be look at leadership through another lens. My initial perception of leadership mainly having to do with charisma, hierarchy, persuasion, and power, has been quite radically shifted towards a much more personal or ‘human’ form of leadership, an inner state of being, that everyone potentially has as a personal characteristic, in every situation ranging from friends and family to community and work situations. The essence to me is, in order to be an effective agent of change towards sustainability, we first need to re-conceive the world (Carstedt 2010), see the world with ‘new eyes’, and act accordingly to bring a shared vision into reality. But we also need to be healthy or at least have a reasonable extent of fulfillment or satisfaction of our mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and financial ‘capital’ (inner state).

An insightful comment by a classmate that resonated well with me is that leadership consists of a twin thread: both being (working yourself, self-awareness, and inner state), and acting (with intention, e.g. bringing a vision into reality). Both threads have to be put to work in successful leadership.

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