Academy

Global

EN

In light of the current climate crisis, the world needs a new kind of leader. Not a leadership coup, but perhaps an internal self-directed coup, in which our higher self displaces our lesser self. In this final article in the series, we outline how to access our best thinking, our higher nature, the person we are and are yet to become. Because it is the leaders that successfully find that higher self – and live from it – who will be the key instigators in turning the business world toward reversing climate change.

Everything is connected

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a 1000 invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” – Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick

If anything is certain, it’s that we need other people to stand any chance at all of accessing our higher self. But the purpose of others is not simply to gain perspective on our blind spots. It is not just about strengthening our position as individuals but becoming something other as a group.

Daniel Schmachtenberger, co-founder of Neurohacker collective, speaking on the principle of emergence and collective becoming says: “All issues are now global issues, because the part affects the whole.” Or in other words, there is no true self-actualisation without the actualisation of others around you. To grow independently, interacting with wider issues only when necessary, is to skim the surface of who we are capable of becoming. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”

We have to be diverse

 “The more time we spend with people that we are predicted and programmed to like, the less we can connect with people who are different from ourselves. And the less compassion we need, the less compassion we have. “ – Margaret Heffernan

The key to the successful emergence of new properties in the whole is diversity among the parts. If we surround ourselves with ourselves, we will become nothing but ourselves. But if we build meaningful connection with those who think differently, are skilled differently, possibly work in entirely different fields to us, then collectively we might become something more.  

What if business executives worked alongside climate protesters? Or executive leaders welcomed friendship and feedback from those several salary grades lower? Or leaders from different cultures took time to learn about each other’s collective history and personal journeys? We might become something with properties we have not seen before.

Braver thinking is needed now

“Anyone who tries to tell you that they know the future is just trying to own it, a spurious kind of manifest destiny. The harder, deeper truth is that the future is uncharted, that we can’t map it till we get there.” – Margaret Heffernan, former CEO

At the 2019 TED Summit, Margaret Heffernan outlined the dangers of prioritising efficiency at the risk of missing the best part of humanity. She noted that efficiency relies on a predictable future, but in truth the future is unpredictable and in constant flux. She added, “But that’s OK, because we have so much imagination — if we use it. We have deep talents of inventiveness and exploration – if we apply them.” 

There are higher levels of thinking available to us, but often, in the haste and noise of life, we settle for efficient thinking, so we can keep pace. If we are to access our higher self, personally and collectively, we need to stop prioritising external demands that prevent us from slowing down enough to build friendships, to deep dive into creativity and stay in touch with our humanity. As Margaret Heffernan says, “We are brave enough to invent things we’ve never seen before.” But we too often make efficient choices instead of brave ones. And we will need those brave choices if we are to adapt as leaders within this changing world. Marc Benioff, CEO of SalesForce discovered, “the essential nature of what a business is, and how it should operate, needed to evolve. These weren’t temporary, or incremental, shifts, either. They were structural and permanent.”

We need action prompted by better questions

The real heroism of leadership involves having the courage to face reality — and helping the people around you to face reality – Ron Heifetz

At TPC, we had to make a choice about what we wanted to prioritise. We had to define our values and then constantly interrogate our processes and personal thinking in order to stay the course. We created our manifesto. And set ourselves the ambition that leadership solutions would activate the imagination and inspire a sense of adventure, nurture vitality and sustain growth, develop unity and drive skillful action in the service of people, clients and planet.

The reason we are talking climate change is because we consciously placed the “and planet” in our mission to offer leadership solutions. We realised that our organisation does not exist for its shareholders, but for all its stakeholders: our people, our clients and our planet.

The climate crisis needs to be urgently addressed, but it is also a symptom of a deeper issue. A fractured unconscious attitude in leadership that has filtered down into our operational systems, causing us to hesitate from enacting real change. We cannot address it with words only, or with minor changes to our supply chains. If we are going to create a seismic shift, we need an entirely different way of thinking. And we need to access our higher self. The planet depends upon it.

To find out more, please get in touch.

If we are to grow as leaders without burning out, it is necessary for us to understand ourselves. For many, this (never-ending) journey of understanding starts with the Myers Briggs Personality Indicator and the process of identifying themselves among sixteen types.

Much controversy has surrounded the personality test; Merve Emre remarks in the critically appraised What’s Your Type?,“There are times when, confused and lacking direction, we speak the language of type to affirm our understanding of ourselves and the people we love, and there are times when we want desperately to guard our individuality from type’s sly encroachments.”

Psychological type theory does not begin with Myers Briggs, but with Carl Jung. It was he who acknowledged that understanding our type, “creates individual lines of development which could never be reached by keeping to the path prescribed by collective norms.” And this is not something a leader can afford to ignore.

Myers Briggs et al. is still essential

“There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of his individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function…” – Jung, Psychological Types

The most widely understood (though often misapplied) aspect of the Myers Briggs’ Personality Indicator is introversion vs. extroversion. People with a tendency for extroversion usually get their energy from acting and interacting with the world. Those who lean toward introversion find energy in withdrawing a little, finding their own space and having opportunity to think.

But the implications of type for leadership focus stretch far beyond someone’s comfort in a social setting. Learning our strengths or weaknesses for intuition, sensing, thinking, feeling, perceiving and judging is to hold up our true strengths against what we believe the characteristics of a leader should be– and to notice the discrepancies. It is to confront the gap between our capacity to impact the world and the expectations that are placed upon us, or the expectations we have of ourselves.

The true characteristics of a leader are different for everyone

The leadership qualities we understand to be effective are often at odds with our true competencies. As Jung explains in his Psychological Types, the way we are wired to draw and focus our energy is “the line or curve representing the optimal discharge of energy and the corresponding result in work.” It is the sweet spot in which we can operate optimally: work, live and make decisions.

That sweet spot is, according to Jung, “simply the expression of flowing and self-manifesting energy… the predetermined course along which a constantly self-renewing current is directed.” In other words, for our leadership focus to be optimal, sustainable even, we have to engage with the strength we have, rather than the strengths we do not have. Otherwise we might climb a ladder of promotion, but lose ourselves and our true impact along the way.

Successful leaders are free from imitation

“In a flash I knew that what I was superior at – dreaming – was the cause of what I was inferior at = paying attention – something that in turn my mother, my father, my teachers and my peers had all tried, with little success, to shame me into being more responsible about…” – John Beebe, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type

John Beebe was suffering from depression before a therapist opened his eyes to the fact that his lack of focus was tethered to his capacity for dreaming. Before this realisation, he had been trying to force his leadership qualities into a shape that would not hold for him.

“Realising that I was an intuitive type gave me a lot of energy,” John explains, “the opening up of my typology led to a great deal of energy pouring into my psyche from the Self. My new problem, replacing the depression I had come to therapy with, was a tendency to get too excited.”

While the Myers Briggs’ indicator has its limitations, getting to grips with it has unlocked previously overlooked capacities for countless leaders. It’s a starting point to understanding your truest contribution to the world – something of simplicity to expose the wood we have long missed for the trees.

To find out more, please contact us.