Praise for Inspirational Presence
INTRODUCTION
When you pray, move your feet.
—Native American saying
There is a little known reality associated with the skills of leadership. As a leader’s sphere of influence increases, the requirement for skills related to emotional intelligence goes up as well. In fact, as much as 90 percent of leader success can be attributed to these skills (Goleman, 2003). Along with that reality comes an associated challenge. That is, it can be difficult for leaders to see or accept this shift. There is a simple reason for this challenge, and it has nothing to do with leaders being slow, dumb, or incompetent. On the contrary, it has to do with people being quick, smart, and competent. The entry point for most organizations requires a high competency in technical ability. Success, as it relates to job mobility and promotions, comes early from using this, which becomes a self-validating reality. This is also true in educational settings. Success comes from what you did last, not where you are going next. However, predicting future success from the use of these technical abilities is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. It doesn’t tell what will create success where you are going.
To further compound this, these transition points for leaders are rarely taught from the perspective of requiring new levels of relationship skills. A natural progression of leadership, without a conscious change in path, would have a leader continually attempting to lead from technically based strategies that served in the past but no longer serve the current situation without a support network or guide to show a new path. Growing into leadership requires courage, as the new challenges of expanded influence require new and often untested approaches for the leader. This overall generalization led to Laurence Peter’s book The Peter Principle, in which his premise was that in a hierarchy each employee rises to his or her personal level of incompetency. While this has been used by various people as either a joke or a fact, there is an element of truth within the premise. It can be true of how hierarchies function, but it does not represent an absolute truth about human ability. It is simply a perspective of human development that recognizes the need to use different skills as the situation changes, and these skills are often not obvious to the leaders who need them.
LEADERSHIP FROM THE INSIDE OUT
The skills and approaches that will guide leaders through a journey of expanded influence are known and learnable. These aspects can be found in the research on high-performing organizations and the research on neuroscience. This research is now becoming clear with regard to how a leader’s engagement style can be quantified through performance measures. While there are many correlates to success in emotional intelligence for leaders, we start with two fundamental differences in approach.
The first perspective is one of self-preservation. This makes a leader conservative and cautious. The primary aspects you will see from this perspective are related to control and predictability. These leaders want to be able to repeatedly and reliably replicate the past and thereby produce stability. The strategies at play with this perspective tend to be slow to change and quite risk-averse.
Second, we can operate from a perspective of self-realization. Leaders in this mode are far more experimental and innovative. These leaders tend to become skeptical of previously used strategies and tend to want to leverage them into new ways of operating or achieving new goals. These leaders are change-ready and willing to take risks. They tend to not feel a strong linkage to or need for authority, and they tend to question the value of stability.
In The Heart of the Soul, Gary Zuckav brings this down to much simpler terms. He states (and I firmly believe) that we are, at all times, either acting from “love and trust” (self-realization) or “fear and doubt” (selfpreservation). This is probably the most basic component of our work. Through this, we work with inspiration, helping leaders connect to the deeper parts of themselves. From there, we take action on that inspiration, in an intentional and connected way. This work will help leaders understand those callings and teach them how to move those ideas into action in ways that support large-scale organization change.
This book will deal with the leader on an individual level as well as larger levels of the system, such as a team or an organization. I started in this field, working with large groups of people as an organizationchange consultant, hence my first work on large scale change, Ten Tasks of Change. During the years of consulting work, I spent most of my time teaching leaders how to change an organization by first changing themselves. This is the biggest differentiator of Inspirational Presence in that it teaches leaders how to effect change across many layers of organization through transformational change.
Consequently, there are many references in this book to change, which might seem odd when you think of it as a book on leadership. In truth, leadership and change are tied tightly together, as you rarely lead people to where they already are. New undertakings and directions are achieved when people see the world in new ways and spend their days doing different things. Therefore, it is critical to understand the aspects of how people engage new concepts and how a leader can influence this.
OVERVIEW
Inspirational Presence presents a framework of what makes a leader and what makes that leader powerful and able to support transformation. The book focuses on transformational change or when the rules of engagement change. This is the sort of change that brings about reform movements and restructures businesses. Transformational change creates new paradigms about what is possible in the world of business as well as humanity.
In this book you will encounter the use of the word spirit—it is not meant to be religious but to denote the connection of human spirit and our perpetual desire to be more, to be connected to a higher source or a greater cause, and a yearning to make a deep and lasting impact on the planet in the years we spend here. In the early years of my work in organization development, a colleague told me that most people who spent any amount of time in this field wound up on some sort of spiritual journey through self-exploration. My experience has shown that statement to be true and, if anything, a bit limited. In my studies of literature and history, I tend to see a much more expanded view of that and believe that every human on this planet goes through some sort of spiritual quest in his or her life. Some are deeper than others, some are longer, and some are more life-encompassing than others. At any rate, it is part of being human. We all hold in our core this spiritual being that is connected at much higher levels of consciousness than we realize most of the time.
Inspirational Presence is about connecting with that spirit, but it is not necessarily about the quest itself. This book is about what to do with that energy and how to create a world in which those aspirations can manifest. The passion of that direction becomes the energy of creativity and a connection that drives us and fuels us. It is what sustains us when we might otherwise feel all alone in the world, particularly when we are off the beaten path, forging new directions, leading the wave of innovation, or just standing up for something simply because it matters.
Throughout