Leadership growth and the outragiously deep fear of wholeness

New work and modern leadership concepts

For the case of leadership growth, the target picture is quite clear. It's common sense that improving leadership skills is about increasing mindfulness, empathy, leading by example, empowerment, enabling people, improving the system and coaching rather than commanding. All of this acknowledges the human factor as a key for enterprise performance. Historical sources are Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y and Lean Management which originates in the Toyota Production System.

Now when we look into the reality of today’s enterprises, the responsibility for decision making is still closely tied to positions and titles in a hierarchical or matrix structure. Overall there hasn’t been much change in recent decades. Growing leadership culture to become more human-centric and to improve enterprise performance at the same time seems like two irreconcilable targets. Why is that the case? Why is it so difficult to adopt a more humanistic approach to leadership even though the evidence exists that proves how it contributes to enterprise agility and happiness for both customers and working people?

Wholeness as the key aspect of leadership values

Noticeably, all of those concepts corresponding to a human-centric leadership style relate to an increased sense of wholeness of the leader himself. Philip Shepherd tells us in his brilliant book Radical Wholeness about the dimensions and the depth of resistance when it comes to adopting an increased sense of wholeness. When we acknowledge the nature of this resistance, we have the opportunity to reflect on it and eventually find our personal unique way to navigate through that resistance.

Flipping over the principle of separation into wholeness

The nature of wholeness is that it excludes nothing, it is all inclusive. On the contrary, over millennia the political success of human collectives was a result of applying the principle of divide and conquer. The same applies to the logics of technological progress. Structuring the wholeness of reality into elements separated by categories exactly has brought us to the unprecedented technological achievements which we see today. However, the principle of division is no longer serving us to move forward effectively. If we continue to apply the principle of separation to organize our reality, it will turn into nothing but the graveyard of humanity. There is no way of moving forward whatsoever by creating more of the same.

Leading yourself with intent involves remembering your wholeness.

The thing is, your wholeness as a human being is always there and it has been there ever since. What we are talking about is the level of awareness of that wholeness. Increasing our sense of wholeness consistently comes with a paradigm shift and a sense of disruption. We lose something in order to gain something else.

As the overthinking mind has put a lot of clutter on top of our sense of wholeness, we lost our awareness of it. Under this clutter is our deepest nature yearning for our wholeness to be acknowledged once again. Exactly this yearning to rediscover our deeper human nature corresponds with a deep fear.? Collectively, this fear is like an identity crisis. We as a collective have a premonition that reconnecting to our sense of wholeness would leave us feeling infinitely meaningless with our current identity. There is anxiety for an outrageous and disastrous sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. It is our startling suspicion that the sum of all the parts which we have created do now make up the whole by any means. The individual and the collective culture is mutually reinforcing the fear to satisfy that yearning for wholeness.

A call for doing the work

Noticeably, that journey of remembrance of our wholeness is counter cultural. The challenge of focussing on wholeness is like swimming against the tide. The tide consists of the belief system which has been established. There is a collective belief that it’s a matter of survival to keep on going. The collective is waiting for someone else to start. Swimming against that tide requires continuous effort. You can however strengthen the muscles that support you.

Now if you are courageous enough to be that “someone else” and to accept the challenge of exploring your sense of wholeness, the central aspect which makes you succeed is attunement with the present moment. Everyone needs to find his or her own approach to create that attunement. For some it’s sport activities, for others it’s meditation or something else that involves embodiment. In any case, wholeness is about sensing the unity of mind, body and spirit.

Coaching

Coaching can also be very useful. In particular the Co-Active coaching model is designed to view the client as a whole person. In fact it is crucial for the coaching process to bring the client to the present moment. I invite you to book a complimentary trial coaching session with me: https://marclustig.as.me/360coaching