INSPIRATIONAL PRESENCE
The Art of Transformational Leadership
JEFF EVANS, PH.D.
New York
Inspirational Presence The Art of Transformational Leadership
Copyright ©2009 Jeff Evans, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60037-570-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60037-571-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009921176
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PREFACE
Why this book, and why now? Our world is one of expanding economies and increasing global impact and awareness. This web of connectedness demands a new leadership style and a new type of leadership consciousness. Current research on emotional intelligence and intention affims the importance of emotionally literate and globally aware people. While we live in countries organized as nations, the preponderance of global companies is expanding past national boundaries, past economic systems, and past cultural norms. Leaders in these organizations are explorers in a world of connections yet to be discovered.
The pioneers in this emerging world will be forced to lead from a place of global and enterprise thinking. They will have to rely on people with whom they do not relate culturally, who live halfway around the world, who move in different time zones, observe different holidays, pray to different gods, follow different laws and customs, and who even have different economic values and principles. Yet in spite of those differences, they all must share a common sense of direction, purpose, and global identity. They must experience a connectedness that transcends these differences. In this world, the rule-based leadership in use for the last hundred years or so is becoming less and less relevant.
These leaders must be far more comfortable with ambiguity and with leading through influence. These leaders must be fluent in the language of humanity, in the universal connections of heart and spirit. They must connect through rapport rather than positional power. These leaders must understand the art of inspiration, which breaks the reliance on motivation used for so long in Western culture. These leaders must understand systems and organizations, rather than organization charts and policies. These leaders must start now.
The skills of inspiration and influence are innate to humans and have been known for millennia. Leaders have used these skills to create change in many settings throughout our recorded history. The issue now has to do with the relative importance of these skills. The magnitude of interpersonal connections being created globally is at a point never before experienced in human history. Our planet is on the verge of massive change that demands global thinking. Even though our focus is on the corporate setting, the main objective is to create leaders who can connect around the world. These leaders must be able to create new perspectives, new thinking, and inspire people to take action in different directions—because people want to, not because they have to.
For example, look at global warming. This issue must be solved by people who are working from a consistent level of global thinking and looking at this issue from a much larger context than ever before. Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Global warming is clearly a case where the limited thinking of past generations created a set of problems that can be solved only by a new way of thinking—and this is only one issue on which we could focus. There are many such issues, and we intuitively know that some of them have not yet come to our attention. We know that a new generation of global leaders must step into the space of creating transformation in our world.
This book is an outgrowth of ongoing action research done through our consulting firm, which specializes in developing unique and powerful leadership in global settings. As such, it is a reflection of grounded theory in action, where the user can take what we have learned and apply it in his or her work, community, and personal life. Our practice has, through the years, used a meta-model, bringing in the work of emotional intelligence (Goleman et al), leadership models (Posner & Kouzes, Hertzberger, others), and systems thinking (various Gestalt theorists and systems scientists). As we have done successfully with our work in the Ten Tasks of Change (Evans & Schaefer, 2001), we have allowed the theory to stay in the background and directed the focus on how it is used. After years of working through large-scale organizational change, it seemed that the focus was consistently on the leaders and how they transformed themselves in order to transform the organization. This work is a culmination of this practice and is published with the intent of sharing what gets results.
Inspirational Presence was written for people who want to embody these changes and be the forces for change in the world. Although there are thousands of research studies available that document many aspects of leadership and transformation, it is the work of other volumes to present that information. The work of this book is to teach leaders how they can accomplish transformation in the simplest form possible. My highest aspiration for this book is simply for it to be useful. I hope it will open a way of thinking for people who want to transform their environments and provide a guide that will fuel positive and creative change in the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have spent a lifetime in a mode of learning and experimentation, with teachers being as many and as varied as you can imagine. My background is a mosaic, earning degrees in literature and history before degrees in human development. Along the line, however, there have been many