One of the primary responsibilities of leadership is to be focused toward the future. In this respect the future not as a series of business strategies or revenue growth but as a focal point of the inner growth of the whole group that one is leading.
I hesitate to bring this next point in, but it feels important in this context. I was sent a link to some extracts from a book by a German philosopher Günter Anders about the manipulation of the masses and in it said, “An uneducated individual has only a limited thought horizon and the more his thought is bounded to material, mediocre concerns, the less he can revolt.” He went on to say ‘‘One must stop the spirit from “questioning” or “thinking.”
As I read these extracts (and others from the book) I reflected that in many ways we do see this unfolding. If we decode what has been happening in the western world for centuries, we could argue that there has been a growing focus on keeping the masses relatively uneducated, relatively poor and sufficiently hopeful of a better future so that we don’t rebel. Mass marketing can infect the mind, reducing it to a mass of desire or numbness rather than considered thought.
Whether the subversion of the masses is true or not, it opens an interesting point of inquiry in leadership. Surely it is the responsibility of anyone who has access to ‘more’ to share that wealth to help others improve their own lives and wisdom. By more, we can consider health, financial wealth and opportunity. We can also consider knowledge, experience and wisdom.
As we assume this key responsibility of leadership, we must look to the future to intuit how we can create opportunities for a wholesale growth in human consciousness. Consciousness in the wisdom sense, in the capability sense, in the psycho-spiritual sense. A growth that invites us all to think, question and be in direct contact with our own spirit – opening ourselves to a collective vision of a better world for all.
As we focus toward the future we must seek to discover every single opportunity to open the doors to growth on the inner level. The inner level creates empowerment and surely this is one of the fundamental roles of leadership.
By sharing power, control, knowledge, insight we create a stronger whole. We create the possibility for creativity itself to enter the equation. We open the permissions that foster inspiration, hope and joy.
Imagining such a future is an expression of leadership at the highest level. Once imagined, we can then set about dismantling any barriers to its realisation. Now that’s leadership.