By Connell Fanning and Assumpta O’Kane
In a recent conversation with us about ‘leadership’, the CEO of an Irish company listed the areas he felt needed attention in his team. He explained that ‘as a team we lack the flexibility to adapt fast in changing situations’ and that ‘we are too steeped in day-to-day matters and don’t look at situations strategically’. He elaborated by saying that there were individuals on the team who struggled to take on responsibility for their behaviour and others who were slow to form their own judgements and make decisions. At the same time, he questioned how he was building relationships with his team, and if his approach was helping or hindering them.
This is not an uncommon type of conversation for CEOs who are wrestling with how to guide their teams.
When people are struggling in their roles, they are often offered ‘training courses’ of one kind or another. Unfortunately, nothing usually changes. This is because the approach is barking up the wrong tree. It does not consider that any change in human observable behaviour that is lasting and does more than move the furniture around can only come from personal change – in other words, broadening the underlying capability through personal development.
Personal Development is the most important idea to emerge for humankind in the past 50 years and yet is very poorly known and understood. It empowers and liberates us to know that in adulthood we can continue to develop ourselves – the way we make sense of others and of ourselves and our experiences. Personal Development gives us the chance in life not to limit ourselves with restricted vision. Why would we construct the world at 60 years the same way we did at 40 years or the same way we did at 20? Why would we not take new awareness and learning about ourselves from our lived experience? Unless, of course, we are unaware that development is a possibility or that we choose not to develop ourselves.
A big reason to choose Personal Development is to unleash the power of our imagination. Einstein, following Kant, famously said, that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”.
But still so many of us focus on information downloading and training throughout our lives and shy away from developing our own human capability for relating with others. Why is this?
Are we entrenched in a pattern of thinking that we have been ‘trained’ and ‘conditioned’ into by our education and society generally?
The familiar ‘cause and effect’ way of thinking trains us to look for symptoms and results and, as ‘designed order thinking’, provides the bedrock for the successes of the technological and scientific age we live in. However, when relating with other people, we are dealing with matters that don’t have a logical beginning or end. Most relationships are inherently ambiguous, with shades of grey and require that we make judgements.
When feeling uncomfortable or uneasy in relating with others, what we need is not to double down on what we know through ‘cause and effect’ thinking but rather to embrace ‘emergent order thinking’, a less familiar way of thinking that allows new ideas to emerge from a process that cannot be predicted or controlled.
It follows from Hannah Arendt’s idea that ‘Men’ and not ‘Man’ inhabit the Earth, that uncertainty is inevitable in life. Uncertainty is what we have to live at. To do so, we need our ‘whole person’, with all our faculties (the powers we are born with) to be developed. We need all our faculties of feeling, emotion, reasoning, and intellect to be developed and integrated in us. Such whole person development expands our ‘bandwidth’ so that we bring our ‘expanded self’ into relating with others.
As we have written in The Leadership Mind, ‘leadership is about ourselves’ – ‘we only have ourselves’. If we see the full potential of ourselves, then it is a natural step to want to develop all of ourselves, including all our faculties of judgement, of reason, of emotion, and intellect.
Yet many of us only ever develop our cognition and never fully expand our inner capability to navigate the world by undertaking intentional and deliberate personal development for ourselves. We confine ourselves to ‘cause and effect’ thinking, reinforced in a world dominated by technological and conforming socialising forces.
Going back briefly to our CEO, he and his team can stop and think about leadership as a capability and choose to develop and broaden their capability for relating with others. They can decide whether to attempt to train their way out of their problems or seek to transform themselves and how they are relating to the issues that are problematic in their working together. Kant invites us to ‘have the courage to use our own understanding’. The call to action is loud: we must develop ourselves as ‘whole persons’ and align to the complexity of the world in which we live today. Otherwise, we fail ourselves and each other.
Assurance: The Keynes Centre does not use any large language pattern modelling (so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’) software or similar Information Technologies in the research and writing of our articles because we wish our readers to know that we are relating to them directly through our thinking and writing.
