Happiness in Leadership

Leaders are at their best when they are balanced, relaxed and happy. It is our fundamental nature to be happy. “Really?” you say, with a skeptical cock of your head. Then why is happiness often so incredibly fleeting and illusive?

We live in a culture that identifies happiness with material and creature comfort, and even though we may intellectually know better, most of us have bought into this paradigm. The truth is, happiness is not reliant on external factors, nor can it be obtained through our five senses. Our basic needs transcend the sensual, a reflection of the complexity of our species. There are people who have unending material comfort, and yet are not content. So, too, there are people that live under material deprivation or physical duress, and yet remain fundamentally content and joyful.

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When the Intellect Serves Intuition: A Portal to Innovation

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Albert Einstein Artists, innovators, and the wise have found a way to tap into a creative field that has no boundaries and is directly accessible to all. This infinite field is sometimes referred to as pure consciousness or pure awareness. It cannot be fully grasped by the intellect. Often, in the midst of a creative act, people say “my work comes through me,” an attempt to describe the experience of being caught in a creative stream that is beyond the mind. When we tap into this boundless field we find ourselves in a rich flow of energy, insight, and innovation, ushering in a tremendous sense of well being.

We access this interconnected field of awareness through our intuition. Intuition comes to us through direct perception. It is holistic, integrative, and it arises from within.

Our intuition is guided by the context in which it appears. A farmer’s intuition will serve his or her relationship to the natural world, an artist’s intuition will inform color, content, and style, and a business leader’s intuition will inform vision, strategy, the organization of complex variables, and the ongoing, moment-to-moment interface with others. High social intelligence, which is the ability to accurately read other people, is largely informed by intuition.

Many of us long for those rare occasions when we are caught in the flow of creative expression. When this happens the mind is relatively quiet, time stands still or disappears, there is a high degree of focus and presence, and, paradoxically, a greater sense of spaciousness. How can we more consistently access this state?

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Want to be a Better Leader? Deepen Trust

The foundation of leadership is trust. You can lead without trust if you base your leadership on fear. Arguably, this is coercion, not true leadership. How do you establish trust? Building trust begins by examining your underlying intent. Followers will ascertain, often unconsciously, “Are you serving the mission of the organization or bolstering your ambition and ego?” It is rare that a leader serves purely for the sake of the organization. Most leaders will, on occasion, unconsciously subvert the needs of the organization for an outcome that is, at some level, self-serving. However, trust can be established without perfection in this regard. As long as you primarily put the needs of the organization before the needs of your ego, career or department, trust will emerge.

However, sometimes the intent of the leader is trusted, but theintegrity of the leader is perceived as shaky, and this, ultimately undermines trust. In this context, integrity is defined as the quality or condition of wholeness. This is an internal state. Your intent may be to serve the mission of your organization. And yet you may not have the internal integrity to carry this out. As a result, trust is undermined.

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Mission Over Profit: Slaying the Hungry Ghost Within

Recently, one of my clients left her position as head of human resources because she could not reconcile her company’s stated commitment to the wellbeing of its employees with the reality that its highest priority was wealth creation. The employees were stretched to a breaking point; chronic exhaustion and burnout were ubiquitous. The CEO clearly recognized that the health of employees impacted the bottom line and, as a result, he deemed this a core value. He directed my client to lead a key initiative to support “employee well being.” But in so doing, she became the face of hypocrisy since employees knew that the quality of their lives would continue to be sacrificed for the sake of aggressive corporate growth. Ultimately, it is not possible to serve two masters. We can collaborate, cooperate, and reconcile, but eventually we will be asked to choose. I have been thinking about this in relationship to two essential ‘master’ principles: organizational mission and the bottom line.

In the 1990’s John Elkington coined the phrase “triple bottom line,” arguing that business success should be defined by measuring profit, environmental responsibility, and social responsibility. This attempt to create a more responsible business ethic has been both revered and critiqued. In order to be effective, this kind of framework must be a living one - fluid, contextually responsive, and adaptive. In the end, any company attempting to live by this model will find itself, in certain moments, having to choose.

By contrast, a social enterprise serves one master: its purpose is to respond to societal needs in a creative and entrepreneurial way. There is a purity of intent in this, and, as a result, a clarity that arises in the decision making process when we are confronted with those moments of choice. With this clarity, the mission of an organization is, without a doubt, the guiding principle, and this increases the possibility that the values of the organization can also prevail.

How did we get to the point where, in mainstream business, the financial bottom line was placed above the very mission of our businesses?

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Grandma's Groceries: A Lesson in Becoming a Changemaker

My grandmother’s name was Flora, and she was all heart. Born and raised in Bristol, Tennessee, she had a deep connection to Appalachia. On occasion, I would ride with her into the Appalachian Mountains with a station wagon full of groceries to be delivered to several dirt-poor families that she watched out for. There wasn’t an arrogant bone in my grandmother’s body, a sense that she understood poverty from the inside out and took it in stride – both the fact of being poor and her service to those that needed help. As a result, there wasn’t shame in these exchanges, and I so loved accompanying her. There were other times, however, when I was embarrassed by my grandmother’s service. She had a compulsion to give, and this meant that she wasn’t always able to discern when to step in and when to step back. On occasion, I stood as witness as my grandma insisted on paying for someone else’s groceries – a random person that she thought might be struggling. There were times when this gesture was a lovely act of generosity. Other times, standing next to her, I wanted to sink into the earth, my body full of dread - a dead giveaway that my grandmother had overstepped an invisible boundary.

How do we figure out what is ours to pick up and what is not, particularly when we are exposed to problems around the globe 24/7?

“Dharma” is a Sanskrit word with multiple layers of meaning, referencing, in part, individual conduct that conforms to the principles or laws that order the universe. We discern our dharma not by measuring up to expectations from the external world but rather by searching for the truth within. When we respond to the demands of the world by aligning those demands with our inner truth, we are responding dharmically. When a child is born as a musical protégée, the relationship between dharma and service is relatively easy to discern. In my own life, it is quite clear that it is not my dharma to become a pilot or an electrical engineer.

The work of Ashoka, an organization that supports the social enterprise movement, calls on “everyone to be a changemaker.” There is a sense of urgency in this mission, a recognition that the problems in the world have grown so complex and intertwined that we need all minds, hearts, and hands on board to respond. This is best done through honoring the notion of dharma. As we call on every individual to become a changemaker, we are really calling on each person to discern and respond to his or her dharma.

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Leadership: What's Love Got to Do With It?

I have been pondering how love became conceptually separated from leadership. For the better part of 20 years I have given multiple lectures and seminars exploring emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, and empathy within the context of leadership, but I have never spoken about the heart, and I have certainly never spoken about love. Perhaps there is no place for a conversation about love if leadership is understood as a charismatic gesture that either hypnotizes or controls. However, at this point in history, the conversation in leadership seems beyond the framework of command and control. Most of us recognize that with the level of specialization that now exists, the speed of change, the transformation of culture through social media, the overall complexity of a global business environment, and the enormous social challenges that we face, collaboration is central to leadership. At the heart of collaboration is love. Most of us think of love as an emotion. There is a love that is emotive, often referred to as affection. In his book, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis describes affection as the most natural, emotive, and diffuse of loves. Affectionate love, however, is not necessary for collaboration. It is love without emotion, that is, compassion, which lies at the heart of a true collaborative process. Compassion arises when we recognize something universal about the other, dissolving judgment and separation and promoting understanding and oneness. It is an essential part of agape, defined by the Greeks as the highest form of love. In this case, love is an act, not an emotion. It is a selfless, spontaneous and consuming commitment to the well-being of others. There is, within this kind of love, recognition of the truth of the interconnection of all of existence. Agape is not based on preferences, on our likes or dislikes. It is the rare human being who develops this kind of love to its fullest potential. Nonetheless, we are born with an innate desire to develop and promote selfless love. Barbara Frederickson, in a wonderful piece called, "The Science of Love" shares research that demonstrates that the body is designed to love, noting that love energizes our entire system, broadens our mindset, deepens our attunement to others, and enhances creativity.

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Empathy: A Gateway to Objectivity in Leadership

Most leaders have learned along the way that empathy is a critical leadership skill but few have an understanding of why. Empathy is a form of attention that goes beyond the intellect and involves directly sensing what it is like to be in someone else's shoes. How do we do this?We sense what other people are experiencing or feeling by sensations that arise in our own bodies. All of us are like walking antennas, receiving and registering the felt experience of those around us. Some of us are better at this than others. To accurately register this kind of information requires being in touch with our own emotional responses. To be in touch with our own emotion, we have to be in touch with the physical sensations in our body. For example, I know that I am fearful because my heart rate begins to speed up, my stomach clenches, and my hair stands on end.

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Paying Attention to How We Attend

The way that we pay attention is integrally related to the reality that we perceive as "true." By the time we have grown into adulthood most of us live within a certain repetitive and narrow band of attention; boredom and a certain degree of numbness is the result. Often, we can sense a kind of spaciousness outside of our habits of attention but rarely do we feel capable of accessing this. Our attention is habituated on many levels: We have a repetitive range of emotion that we continually return to, a narrow and habituated way of using our vision, a narrow range with which we attend to auditory input, a belief system that narrows our perceptual field and a way of processing intellectually that reinforces our view of the world. Often a "midlife crisis" or other kinds of struggles in adulthood are, in part, crises related to this narrow way of attending. We become bored with ourselves, longing to access a more spontaneous way of being in the world. We assume that our boredom has to do with the exterior world, so we buy a new car or get a new haircut. We are often unaware that our boredom arises from a self-created prison of habituated attention. We lose touch with the fact that the way we are attending affects the degree to which we feel connected to the world around us and to life itself.

Les Fehmi is a forerunner in the field of biofeedback and he has studied how we pay attention for over forty years. He contrasts two ways of attending when he describes a pride of lions relaxing together on the African savannah. They are breathing slowly, their muscles are relaxed, and their attention is diffuse and wide open. An injured animal comes into their sight, and suddenly the lions move from this relaxed state to an intense, single-pointed focus. Their muscles tense and their heart and respiratory rates increase. The lions have shifted to an emergency mode of paying attention. Once the injured animal has become dinner the lions quickly return to a state that is wide open, alert, and relaxed.

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Innovation and the Quiet Mind

Buzzwords rise and fall in the world of business, and at their highest, serve as flags marking a place where we need to drill down. For some time, the need to “innovate” has been creeping into the lexicon of my clients, reflecting the fact that old paradigms on so many fronts are breaking down.When my daughter was in third grade, I had the pleasure of watching a creative little boy shift the paradigm of his art assignment. He, along with his classmates, was given scraps of paper to paint and paste onto a large sheet of paper. His classmates dutifully painted and pasted within the confines of their pages. However, this child asked for a pair of scissors. He began by reshaping his rectangular paper. As he glued his fragments of paper onto his redesigned template none stayed within the margins; curly cues, concentric circles, and folded accordions spilled over the edges redefining the boundaries. What began as one-dimensional became two. It was a paradigm shift in motion. Too often, when there is a call for innovation, we tackle whatever problem we face through the same mind that was shaped by the previous paradigm. We look at the problem from the confines of the past or the confines of expectation. How do we escape this paradox of the mind and its repetitive subversion of creative thought? Most of us make the assumption that consciousness itself emanates from, and is bounded by, the mind. However, when we quiet the mind through contemplative practices such as meditation, we eventually discover that awareness or consciousness exists beyond it. True innovation, along with any act of creativity, draws from this infinite field of intelligent awareness that exists beyond the mind. This is sometimes called pure awareness. And this state is directly accessible to all. How?

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