By Connell Fanning and Assumpta O’Kane
The Leadership Mind is an invitation to rethink the important phenomenon of leadership. It is a serious invitation to stop and think about your current ideas about leadership, and open up to new ways of relating with leadership that can expand your capability for leadership.
When writing The Leadership Mind a key moment dawned for us when we realised that we had made a big mistake trying to understand leadership in places that were familiar for us. Our old habits of thought had control over us and without our awareness we were going into the usual rabbit holes of job titles, hierarchical positions, personality traits/characteristics, processes, skill-sets and behaviours to understand leadership. However, when we could not find any real evidence of leadership in these areas – and instead found disappointing generalised descriptions – we became very uncomfortable.
Subsequently this discomfort meant that we had a choice to make – to stay with the conventional and accept the status quo about leadership or to challenge ourselves to go beyond what was already there. We realised how trapped we were in our old ways of thinking about leadership, and that these were the enemy of fresh thinking. As soon as we saw ‘how we were thinking’ about leadership we were able to step back, and able to think anew with fresh questions.
And so began a lengthy process which took us to the realisation that leadership is not what we observe on the ‘outside’ e.g. job titles or behaviour. Leadership we realised is an ‘inside job’ – it is what is going on inside a person ‘how we think’ which by its nature is unobservable.
In our book, The Leadership Mind, 2022, p84 we say “Leadership as something ephemeral belongs to the realm of unobservable phenomena like thinking, creativity, and judgement”. Yet it is this hidden aspect of ourselves ‘how we think’ and not ‘what we think’ that fundamentally determines how well or how poorly we all deal with the complexity of the world. Content alone will not solve our problems – what is needed is the capability to think about and make good judgements – something which is a developmental matter for everybody.
Against this backdrop, we went to a deeper level to better understand what is going on inside a person that differentiates those who are capable of showing leadership and those who are not. What we found in situations that demanded a different approach, a new beginning (such as Nelson Mandala in South Africa) was that the person at the helm was operating with a unique insight, a fresh idea, a new way of seeing things, which in itself was internal and unobservable, but emerged strongly and undeniably from the person, and, crucially was aligned to the complexity of the situation.
We also realised that once an insight begins to take form in the world, it is at this point that management steps in to ensure that the insight is made manifest and real.
The manifestation of an unobservable insight into what is observable, be that a behaviour or a physical object has to be understood as a creative process, not dissimilar to what a writer, artist, engages in when they are working out their inspirations. Like insights, the artist does not know how the creative piece will turn out in the end – the expression and working out of their ideas has to be managed through dedication, skill, knowledge and application.
So too in ‘leadership’ insights are unique to the individual, arising in people who are working on themselves as ‘expanding mentalities’. Insights are not a matter of formal education or training as they cannot be taught or learned, they do not arise from IQ or accumulated knowledge. Rather insights which are aligned with the degree of complexity in the world today arise in us when we are developing ourselves and broadening ‘how we think’ which includes taking into account the uncertainty of the world and the plurality of the human condition. This is by no means an easy matter even for those living a life committed to continuing our development.
On the other hand what of those of us who knowingly or unknowingly are sleepwalking through life, living as an accumulation of past experiences from childhood, schooling, community, without awareness of how we are thinking, and thus not giving ourselves a chance to come even close to having the kind of insights necessary for how we live in and respond to the world today.
Continuing our development for leadership as a life-long process is open to us all and is to be encouraged as an empowering and fulfilled way of living and one that is really essential for the challenging times we are faced with.
