The Conscious Lifestyle: A Leader Must Look and Listen

In the first post of this series on leadership, I divided the topic into seven headings using the acronym L-E-A-D-E-R-S. In this post we'll discuss L = Look and Listen. In the past, when leaders were more authoritarian, the people who were expected to listen - and obey - were the followers. Leaders had a monopoly on giving orders, laying down plans, and making all the crucial decisions.

To some extent this imbalance is built into the system. But leadership has shifted dramatically, because leaders and followers create each other. Followers have needs that leaders fulfill. "Look and listen" comes first in the list of skills needed by a successful leader, since only by looking and listening can he keep with an ever-shifting situation.

The greatest leaders are visionaries, but no vision is created in a vacuum. It emerges from the situation at hand. The situation can be a crisis or a routine project, a management problem or a financial emergency – anything that requires a leader to offer guidance. The leader is someone who can assess the situation by looking and listening at the deepest level possible.

When you are a conscious leader, you look and listen to the situation around you, but you also look and listen inside. Four steps are involved:

Impartial observation – Look and listen with your senses

Analysis – Look and listen with your mind

Feeling – Look and listen with your heart

Incubation – Look and listen with your soul

As a potential leader, you must develop your awareness on all four levels long before you win your right to lead. Imagine three people, partners in a start-up company, seated on a couch in an outer office. The office belongs to a venture capitalist who has agreed to give them half an hour to present a proposal for a start-up company. Success or failure depends upon this meeting; their whole future might ride on it. Who among the three will emerge as the leader of the group, the one with the best chance of persuading the venture capitalist?

The first person feels so nervous his palms are sweaty. He tries to make casual conversation but realizes that he’s babbling, so he grows quiet. He closes his eyes, repeating one last time the speech he is going to make. He got very little sleep the night before, because he spent hours perfecting every word of his speech. He keeps thinking one thing: “Now or never. It’s do or die.”

The second person looks much calmer. He’s quite confident, in fact. He believes in their idea; he’s certain their new business will succeed once they find a backer. Tall and clear-eyed, he’s used to being looked up to. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he can talk the venture capitalist into going out for a round of golf or a pickup basketball game. One-on-one has always been his best mode of persuasion.

The third person is scanning the room with open curiosity. She notices the rich Oriental rug and fresh flowers on the reception desk, but she’s more interested in the employees going in and out of the venture capitalist’s inner office. They’re dressed in jeans and shirt, not suits. They come out looking more focused and intent than when they went in, but they don’t look stressed. Their talk is excited; they seem to be discussing things with real focus. Checking inside, the third person feels expectant but not stressed. Whatever happens, she’s open to the outcome. She can be one of those excited people she sees emerging from the office. Once she sets eyes on the venture capitalist, she’ll know what kind of personality she’s dealing with.

Of these three people, the first one isn’t perceiving anything outside his own mood, which is tense and closed off. He’s not responding to his environment. With his eyes he may notice the expensive room with its trappings of success, but even that registers very little. The second man is more comfortable and is beginning to see from the heart. He assesses people and situations by how they feel. The third person goes a step farther, however. She is entirely open to her surroundings and keeps picking up clues wherever she can find them. From these clues, which involve looking and listening, she begins to build a scenario. She can envision herself in the scenario, and as it unfolds, she will adapt. If it turns out that she doesn’t fit in, she won’t make the mistake of taking the venture capitalist’s money – the compatibility isn’t there.

An everyday situation, yet you can see that the potential leader is the one who can look and listen from the deepest level. Leadership requires a sound basis inside yourself. If you can arrive at the point where looking and listening comes from your entire being, you are likely to be the leader in any situation, because you have set the groundwork even before you had the first follower.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers. FINS - Wall Street Journal, stated that “The Soul of Leadership”, as one of five best business books to read for your career. Co-author with Rudolph E. Tanzi, their latest New York Times bestseller, Super Brain: Unleashing The Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being (Harmony, November 6, 2012) is a new PBS special.