Running a ‘Leadership Lab’ last week with 30 people was a truly inspiring moment. It was building on two international conferences where we are exploring the principles of ‘new’ Leadership. In the Leadership Lab participants spoke of how they had stepped forward, across an internal threshold to assume an even greater level of presence, visibility and responsibility to lead.
The inspiring thing was not only that we are all stepping forward but that we are really challenging ourselves to reflect on the essence of leadership. The leadership that is needed if we are to create a world where the greater good really prevails.
As we explored the qualities that we perceive fundamentally shift the dial we identified leadership through the heart to be one of the most significant. But what does that mean? Whenever we speak of the heart and love the mind almost always conjures up the ‘sentimental’ love we associate with family, lovers and friends. This sentimental love is vital, can be profound and shows us something of the wider aspects of love such as self-forgetfulness, humility, others before self and more. But there is still so much to be understood and explored about love in its purest form.
And when we seek to apply that to leadership it can become even more obscure. Our exploration so far has taken us into factors such as our ability to hold everything (the so called ‘good and bad’) without judgment and to seek to act from a place of balance. To expand our capacity to include – perspectives, people, ideas, difference – and to seek a new point of understanding based on a genuine commitment to see that we are all part of a unified whole. We are all connected.
These ideas can feel very lofty. Put simply though they invite us to examine how we think about others and how we enable all people to share their voice, to be heard and help create the conditions where we can all grow and fulfil our potential. We might call it a deeper sense of community. This means letting go of any sense of competition and moving more toward cooperation and inclusion. Imagine this applied to politics, religion, education, business, our own families…where, as leaders, we seek to see the whole and cultivate a culture and an intention where a genuine connection for the good of all informs our every act…a first step toward a new leadership?