Soul-Inspired-Leadership

Alignment is key. Some companies do it very well. Some look at alignment at the start of a change and then assume that's done and in place. Yet from experience we know the latter doesn't work in practice.

Many organizations approach alignment as telling their people about what they should be thinking. The common practice is getting the people to think the same way with regards to the mission and task at hand. The real challenge is about the alignment of action. If you can agree on where you're going, what does success look like and understand that, you can then agree on the actions you need to take as a team.

This is key as everyone is coming and going in different directions. It's important to understand the individual difficulties in getting to a common point. That assistance helps in ensuring the actions line up towards the common goal. It's very important to appreciate where people are coming from in order to understand their state of mind and provide the assistance required.

For leaders today it's critical to understand what their people are feeling. At different levels of a company the challenges are different and that creates a totally different state of mind. Understanding this, knowing how their team is looking at the challenges and the thoughts they have on it, helps leaders in creating the necessary alignment for the team to pull together as one.

The other critical point about alignment to keep in mind is that:

A) it's not binary

B) it's not fixed

There are degrees of alignment and it's momentary. 

Alignment is foundational for any company, or clusters of groups of people, can achieve anything. The more one works on alignment the more one is bound to succeed. Not to mention it drastically reduces the benefit leakages and stress & frustration. 

Leaders need to have patience, ask open ended questions and listen to the feedback. It helps bring out the challenges or obstacles and how those can be managed. Addressing those with positive suggestions creates the grounds for good alignment to occur.

Today with the way technology is evolving there is a real opportunity to look at how do you implement and utilise technology to help leaders collect and organize opinions so that one can work on the areas where there's non-alignment. 

Lesz can be contacted at https://www.lifelurn.com/

The motivation for the book was the learning that senior business leaders felt quite lonely in the way they had to make decisions.

The background research leading upto the book, showed that upto 30% of senior business leaders felt they were depressed. Following this up with the in-person interviews brought out specific stories that's captured in the book. A key finding was that senior leaders are often working across cultures and laws over various countries which impacts decision making and makes it complex. Whilst some leaders might be comfortable in discussing and arriving at a collaborative decision, the culture demands a more authoritarian approach of being provided the solutions sans the discussion.

Another interesting finding was that the vast majority of senior leaders do not want to talk about this loneliness to their superior or company. This stems from the fear that it would not be favourably looked upon and could be detrimental to their career. 

Sharing the personal story is to provide strength to others on how to be able to lead oneself. To be able to accept there is a problem and then seek out help is actually displaying strong self-leadership. Nick's personal story illustrates how the loneliness affects senior leaders and guides the reader to having the steps of taking action.

The key message, for all good leaders is, be transparent and observant. Be willing to be vulnerable in order to create transparency and connectivity. Through that an important conversation might just happen which would be of help to an associate, a colleague or someone connected to you.

To purchase the book go to: https://executivelonelinessbook.com/index

For more information about Nick go to: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-jonsson/

Lessons from the spiritual warrior-- The new book by Gary Hansel

Everybody is a leader. Today leadership has come about to be more about mindset and attitude. Way back the classic older leadership style was about 'we don't trust you'!

Leadership creates the environment that brings about learning. The more the people learn they grow. This is an aspect that shows trust. Trust that's reciprocal. It creates an energy that drives everything. 

This energy is actually the thoughts of the people. How optimistic are they, how positive are they, how do they feel they are involved in the mission.

Fear works in singular cases. Not always and we're not best under fear. We're not creative, open-minded or making the best decisions. We are just reacting. So leadership by fear brings a leader a very limited amount of the potential people have. 

It's important for people to feel respected and to be made to feel involved. When this is in play psychological reciprocity takes place and in turn a leader gets respect.

The new book highlights the awakening we humans are having. We're learning more and more what we humans are capable of. 

We're learning about our inter-connectivity with our earth and people. That's creating a spiritual awakening. 

Now leadership is no longer about control. It about allowing the flow to occur and to trust. It's what's resulting in hybrid work situation as well as in academia. It's bringing about more focus on the individual leader and on self-leadership.

Self-leadership is believing in yourself and having the discipline to be true to yourself.

Gary can be reached for book purchases at https://www.garyhensel.com/

Good leadership is about self-leadership. One of the elements of self-leadership is maintaining a proper lifestyle and maintain one's health. 

How did you get started into lifestyle medicine?

Back in the day when I was mentally preparing to be the 3rd generation in the family business, I learnt that my father was harbouring a few diseases inside him! These are the silent diseases like high blood pressure. You don't realise they are there. This affected me and resulted in me making a complete change where my career was concerned. It brought home the purpose of wanting to lead people to thrive and have healthy lifestyles.

In leadership having good health comes from understanding and living a healthy lifestyle. Doing that involves taking care of the body, mind and heart. Its what brings about effectiveness in leadership.

It starts with understanding the value of taking time-out. It allows one to check in with self and actually do checks that help rejuvenate oneself. 

A key check is about moving our bodies. Research has shown us this. For a leader you need creativity. One of the concepts is called divergent thinking. Researchers at Stanford studied this coupled with 20 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of sitting. The data shows that after walking divergent thinking goes up 60%. Other research show that we can get into the alpha or theta level brain activity after exercising. To get strategic and creative thinking going, as a leader, it's key to be exercising.

The other key lifestyle input is to give yourself enough sleep. Sleep deprivation impact’s reaction time. So, appreciating sleep and giving oneself enough sleep impacts the body and mind positively. Sleep is foundational in one's health, happiness, creativity, and productivity.

Leaders are passion and purpose driven. In order to keep those going it’s important for them to take steps to honour their own body, mind, and soul. Doing this everyday it becomes a question of what’s priority and how much time is is will I spend on that priority. So, it drives you to make time for it. Instead of reacting to everything that comes and takes up one's time. The last bit is creating social connections such that, as a leader, you mentor and grow people who carry your ideas forward. This takes energy and how one maintains that energy is what matters.

Beth can be contacted at http://wellness-synergy.com

The Lifestyle Medicine Handbook: An Introduction to the Power of Healthy Habits can be purchased at

https://www.bethfratesmd.com/books

The first thing in being a good communicator is to be able to listen. Truly listen, and not just listen physically, but with your whole body.

In leadership listening with empathy is how you develop trust. When one notices a drop in the listening, or the leader's attention being occupied with something else, seeds of mistrust start creeping in subconsciously. 

The fear of being judged the barrier that blocks active communication. When one is afraid of being judged, one doesn't want to share anything, and it leads to no communication. Research has shown that when leaders become adept at empathetic listening, they increase their performance by 40%. 

What is empathetic listening?

Empathetic listening goes a bit further than active listening as it includes the entire person. For e.g., observing the body language is part of empathetic listening by using one’s eyes. Then using one's heart to listen. Neuro linguistics shows that we listen through our hearts, ears, and eyes. 

The importance of listening with your heart needs to be highlighted. It actually means feeling what the speaker is feeling during the communication.

To do this it's necessary for us to become aware how we listen. For e.g., in a conversation, if one has an agenda and wants to make a point, then chances are one is not either actively listening nor being empathetic as the focus is on trying to speak one's point. 

This is a key point of difference between great leaders and good leaders. Great leaders are able to use empathy to see the point of view of the speaker and use that to engage meaningfully. Thus, enhancing the communication. 

A benefit of empathetic listening is that it often helps the speaker, who might be seeking answers, to find what they are searching for in that conversation. Having the skill to listen always helps. Especially in the circumstances we have all experienced. As a leader, cultivating this leads to better engagement and performance.

Unfortunately though, it feels as if empathy is on the decline. It's coming about due to technology now being the primary means of communication, instead of physical person to-person communication. 

When a leader practices empathetic listening, by physically giving time to team members, it helps create an environment of safety for those team members. That strengthens the relationship, impacting trust and performance as well as it making the person speaking, feel appreciated. 

When something bad happens we're always asking why it happened! Yet when something good occurs we spend truly little time exploring how and why it happened.

When the Titanic sank there was the usual why and how. It came down to three key findings:

1. Everyone was convinced this was the best ship ever built that there weren’t enough contingencies. It was one of the reasons as to why there weren't enough lifeboats.

2. The command structure-- Neither the captain nor the next in command was out there looking out for potential risks.

3. Taking too much time to respond to the situation-- when finally, action was taken much of the catastrophe had occurred and all one could do was salvage the situation.

This resonates a lot with how leadership in business is often playing out today. We are always overconfident of ourselves and we don't expect things to go wrong until they do.

This is part of having a fixed mindset.

Connecting this back to our talk on the eco-system, it's important to note that these three impacts the eco-system significantly.

Whilst we know that having plans, processes and structure in place and running efficiently, we don't ensure the whole is ticking smoothing. It occurs due to the silo approach in each area stemming from leaders working independently and not connecting. To have a healthy eco-system, it's important to have that connect, because in a healthy eco-system everything is interconnected.

In an organisational context, we end up seeing that we have too much of a fixation one thing. Taking the analogy of the Titanic, let's build the best ship. Yet nothing was mentioned about the capability of the crew! There was no focus on the capabilities of the crew as the ship was a state-of-the-art ship and the crew didn't have to do anything.

However, since it’s the best ship, in an organisational setting, the people it attracted where the best people you could hire. The question of have them trained gets swept under the carpet since they are, individually, the best performers.

Such linear thought process leads to failure as there are always limitations.

Instead, if one were to look at it as a series of interconnected activities that create the whole, sort of like looking at a cobweb, where even if one or two strands break nothing happens to the entire web.

Linear thinking makes us think or believe that it's only that one thing that can affect. However, reality is that it isn't so. It's a gradual build-up of various stressors and risks that culminates at a point in time in creating the catastrophe. So being attuned to the signs that come up and taking course correction and remedial measures is the sign of forward thinking or being open minded.

Whilst it is not possible to factor in everything it is possible to be agile, in terms of mindset, i.e. being able to respond to a situation without getting flustered. This is a skill. In leadership this is often taken as a given. Creating simulations of potential crisis helps create a habit that helps leadership at a point in time when crisis occurs. 

The analogy here is from my son's aquarium. Whenever you have a fish tank at home, you'll notice that in the first month it looks beautiful and it starts looking really horrible after that. Every single month the tank has to be cleaned. As my son outgrew the tank in the house, he started using small aluminium basins to put the fish in and put them outside. The learning was that these little basins did not need that extensive cleaning that the tank required. When we extend this to the wilderness and the rivers, we see that there is no need for any cleaning unless us humans have messed the river up.

Each of these have their own eco-systems. Starting with the fish tank which is more akin to us people putting in our efforts to maintain it on regular basis. Then you have the aluminium basins which is slightly easier maintenance and finally the natural environment where the eco-system runs itself. 

In each of these you'll find that fish thrive. However, when you look at it from the perspective of effort that needs to be put in, just as in organizations managers and leaders have to do, to make sure the organization thrives and the employees are able to be productive, this becomes an excellent analogy to show what an effective eco-system really is. All three of them have their own eco-systems. It's just that they have different levels of intervention.

This provides a learning. The tank inside the home is a controlled one where growth is only possible when externally provided. Whereas in the natural eco-system growth occurs with a purpose for that eco-system.

From an organizational perspective the learning here is that one has to accept the fact that one can't control everything. By allowing people to do what they need to do and digressing here to add that as human beings we instinctively know what to do, there will be mistakes yet there will be progress and growth. It comes about from that same instinct whereas people we want to succeed.

When we accept that things will occur and it might not be exactly in the way, as a leader, one had foreseen it and yet it's on objective then we begin to understand and create a natural ecosystem.

Whenever people speak of eco-systems there's a misperception of that vis-a-vis culture. An organizational eco-system is a bit more than culture. Culture is the people piece and around it comes all the other components of skill, structure. If one is fiddling with anyone of these, one has to look at the effect on all components and take those into account. Our habit is to look at one thing and see if we can fix that. However, as an organizational eco-system its all interconnect and inter-related and it's not about fixing one thing but the sum of it all.

An eco-system is not just the people. It's also the processes, systems, structure. All of these things together make up the eco-system. In an organization when we speak of an eco-system, lots of people put a humongous amount of effort into creating a right culture. And there is nothing such like a right culture. That becomes the problem. If a culture suits the organization based on its context, there will be systems, processes and people that suit the organization. Usually, we make this mistake of seeing someone else's eco-system and think that's working great there and will work equally well too.

Gerdi Verwoert is a self-leadership coach of busy managers and executives. She has a deeply felt connection with Nature, especially mountains.

She helps people step into their self-leadership by helping them re-connect with themselves. Convinced that to be truly connected to oneself, you also have to be connected with Nature, Nature and mountains are an integral part of the work Gerdi does - both online and in the Great Outdoors.

On this episode of Soul-Inspired-Leadership we dive into the importance of being connected with Nature. How we can benefit from this connection and why it is important when we want to be authentic people, authentic leaders in life and at work.

Gerdi can be contacted at

https://daregreatlycoaching.com

The one thing that stands out between a high performing team and a non high performing team is relationships the team members have with each other and the trust they have. This dictates the performance and success of the team. There has to be strategy, tactics and tools used by the leader to ensure team performance. It's necessary to do this intentionally so as to ensure performance. Teamwork has to be a strategic priority.

When a leader senses that a team member or two isn't really connected with the others what are some of the things they could do?

One of Jason’s games is a set of cards that gets people to play simple question and answers. Asking each other 36 questions over 45 minutes and it leads to creating better understanding of each other. The key thing about trust is how you ask more vulnerable questions that allows people to share their personal experiences in a group because then other people see themselves in that person. What happens is that people focus on answering the questions or listening and they stop noticing the differences. That brings a stop to the made-up stories one has told oneself about the other person as they now have actual fact that they have heard from the person concerned. What this also does is help an individual to create a how-to-work-with-me manual by putting together questions the answers to which would help the person choose to work with the other.

Given that we're all working remotely at the moment how do we connect better?

Strategy is key. Recognizing how we are feeling, in the group sessions and in the one-on-one discussions, is key. In the pandemic disconnection creates loneliness. So reaching out an supporting the individual in a way that helps that individual is essential for a leader to do. A simple way to do this is to ask the group who helped whom in the past week for example and how. Hearing one say how the other helped creates a huge amount of emotional engagement. Being connected and feeling like one belongs are the key in having better connection between team members. 

Understanding basic human needs and working on that helps in creating the conversations that get team members to build trust and connectivity.

Having these conversations bring about clarity and transparency of goals and processes and fosters accountability and responsibility willingly. It helps the leader keep the team engaged, connected and motivated specially through such times and ends up creating the required performance.

Contact Jason on

https://jasontreu.com/services/

Moral leadership is an emerging conversation in leadership. It ties up with conscious leadership. Which is around how self-aware are leaders? In other words, to what extent do leaders consider their motivations, their interests, their serving, their own biases, their own strengths and weaknesses and act in a more conscious way. The morality part comes from knowing that organizations prioritize the commercial aspect and yet leaders are expected to be guardians of good, ethical and sustainable decisions. Is it possible to balance these two forces?

On one hand, as a leader, there's a responsibility to others by grooming them and developing them and most leaders get on board with this quite quickly. On the other hand there is the financial performance delivery that is expected from the leader. The consequences of these are quite significantly different. The former is within certain parameters of being seen to be a better or worse leader and it impacts only the leader individually. Whereas the latter impacts the individual's capability and career. It's much more visceral and it results in behaviour, from leaders, that ranges from being productive to extremely harmful.

The people side of leadership has softer consequences whereas the performance consequences are much more intense.

This is what makes moral leadership a bit tough.

If we take a look at some of the corporate shenanigan's that are being highlighted, we can trace it back to the simple fact of people being under pressure, trying to deliver what is expected and not being the one left holding the can. That's where the morality part, as a leader, kicks in to actually lead and say unethical behaviour is not encouraged or supported. 

The question then becomes where does moral leadership fit in?

In some way’s organizations have to take responsibility for including a moral imperative in the way they act, they incentivize, and they discuss. What that does is that as a leader if I face this pressure the moral responsibility by the organization tells me that it has me covered and empowers the leader to do what is right.

Business is more than money. Yet on the flip side it's the money that shows how strong the commitment from a corporation is to morality. 

How does one help leaders to prioritize morality?

It starts with having an extremely high level of trust and openness in a group for truth to be on the table. To get to morality there needs to prevail security and confidence in order to talk about it. To do that it's necessary to balance the personal development conversation with the commercial conversations and create a unified conversation that includes the commercial pressures. 

A fair amount of balance and facilitation skill in creating and guiding these conversations is required. Simply because the discussion has significant impact on the future of any organization.

Chris can be reached at:

 [email protected]

 www.chris-atkinson.co.uk/