Leadership Sclerosis

Identifying the Leadership Misnomer Code

People will do anything no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls - Carl Gustav Jung

Trite entangled? or determinism aligned? - with purposefulness, Leadership Development interventions, in truth do not allow an individual to face their own ‘Soul’! Why??Here, we would identify the reality of it from an explorative perspective.?Hence identify the core of the failed leadership development attempts on individuals’ ‘Self’.

Leadership as a concept has an aspirational ascendency, if not it would not have belonged to the human development aspect or into the many facets of enablers in the corporate work world or community or nation-building aspect. History provides stories of Leadership ingrained elements with phenomenal impact on human society; thus, enabling an aspirational tendency by stakeholders to clone it under the guise, so that Leadership initiatives thus turn productive.

Here in this article, it is by no means an attempt to take a minimalistic approach to nullify Leadership but to provide an evolutionary trajectory for Leadership as a concept or it will be the death dream of Leadership Truth. ?A detailed observation of the Leadership Development efforts and the end products [as the emancipated ’Self’ enabled to contribute] in the individuals is the focus. Managers in the leadership role who have gone through some interventions may leave footprints or traces of their ‘Self’ all around them revealing a lot more in terms of what these leaders are in their ‘Self’ which they may as well hesitate to state as a Leader, because of developmental ascendency being veneered in the business world; be in of any genre.

Still, it is evasive amongst leadership interventionists or facilitators – I Wish Carl Jung should have been grossly wrong!

Leadership, like the inner workings of a computer, is a complex set of relationships, systems, and processes that few fully master- Dave Ulrich,?Global Consulting Alliance.

Overt abuse of the term Leadership (something as ‘intellectual pursuit’) is also because the construct of success is being misconstrued and never driven in its true sense, hence left to get to vanity with misfortunes of growth perceptions. Why is this to be understood? It is because – misfortunes of growth perceptions of the unwise personas lead to truncation of the ‘Self’ leading to damage of the ‘Self’ and others ‘self’.?That is an aspect many professional wonders about, in dismay when leadership fails in essence.

The possibly truncated representation of post leadership intervention impact, by projected ‘Self’ and ‘Self-Will’, leads certain personas into a cliché of rationalization efforts, thereby making their claims of outlook and success which may be ‘socially desirable’ aspects of that particular society. This intervention impacted personas ‘Self’ when projected in truncated form or leaves traces of their real ’Self’ when -delivering business! [like shaping purpose and direction! leading people etc] may depress the proletarian's aspirations to look upon leaders or at least may end up identifying leadership itself as a misnomer code. ?If not a misnomer code, it may have been an allowed construct for being a mere myth to continue to hide the true aspect of ‘servant leadership.

In line with the above, lacking the truth, it would do good if the term ‘Leadership’ is replaced with another label, else it can turn out to be a concern? Not for the sake of the label – but to clean the shame the label has been carrying for some time. So, to give a direction away from the truncated aspects of Leadership let it be a start to be allowed calling it Servant Headship as against Leadership.

?So, what is at Stake?

Leadership development interventions do attempt to engage for sure the human ‘Self’, else it might all look like some tactical human behavioral manipulation or some pseudo efforts.

Leadership Development's focus on the human ‘self’ has seemingly taken its generous and precarious form because of flavor: like the artificial flavors splashed for the pudding because the natural ingredient may seem not so potently aromatizing the pudding /product! That’s how and why artificial flavors are on the market. So seeing through this metaphorical lens of flavoring the ‘Self’, is identified here as a dysfunctional aspect being driven among the aspiring leaders, and that is a key driver to this exploration in this article for better understanding.

Why flavor the ‘Self’ when the self has its natural flavor? – Answers could be that there is a need for a stronger or a better flavor! If this was a hidden answer or obvious answer the next question opens the mystery.

Why try to bind the ‘Self’ when the ‘Self’ itself is ‘divisive’ in nature?

Why do certain Leadership development attempts fail at building on the blocks of ‘Self’?

Why is the divisive nature super powerful? The answer to that lies in - it eludes all aspects from being divided around under the guise of soulish subjects?

Why do certain interventions succeed when the ‘Self’ is allowed to be identified in its true divisive state?

To answer the above could also be attributed to the attempts to work on Leadership competencies at the cost of ‘Self’s’ focus pushed to the periphery.?While somewhere in hindsight one could also realize the potency of ‘Self’, but having taken it as a peripheral aspect which could be flavored out. This factor, when being overlooked or misconstrued in this context of the aspirational need of the competency-building focus, the divisive ‘self’ stays in the background probably as an uncompleted person. On the contrary, the unseen aspect of ‘Self’ and its natural condition of divisiveness makes its forceful way into the expressed form of competency behavioral indicators in a divisive manner, hardly identified or acknowledged by practitioners.

In certain instances, some unfortunate individuals may be shepherded by socio-cultural dysfunctional influencers and dogmatism. That may result in underestimating the prescience of the loud voice of awareness regarding ‘Self’s divisive’ nature leading to the infidelity of competency development for business and stakeholder management.

Leadership Facilitators New lens!

In local parlance many just agree the given – individuals are terrible beings because they have conflicting ‘Self Intact’ or ‘Ego’ in the negative context or positively individuals are great creations because of their ‘Ego’!

Now to the reality as against myth, the ‘Self’ which is the ‘I’, the ‘Ego’, which is an invisible attribute and a very isolating processor causing disorders, is the origin of all disorders. Some contend that leadership efforts have failed because of the Ego of people not allowing for appropriate impact. That’s an easy escape mechanism from ignorance, identifying the ‘Ego’ as something and ‘Self’ as something else. This escape mechanism is the grandest of leadership interventionist failure in inculcating servant leadership/headship. This very aspect is the divisive nature of the interventionists’ ‘Self’.

It's trite to even think as professed by some evil thought provokers, that all around the ‘Self’ is a web of cosmos, and that the ‘Self is everywhere’ – such kind of expression is a quite parochial exhibition of meaninglessness, which is as well as the expression of the divisive ‘Self’.?These expressions are themselves an example of a divisive mind not being able to conform to the truth. The very divisiveness of ‘Self’ in the area of Leadership development tries to help manifest in a pretense of non-divisive nature whereby it could find its sustenance to make physical or material understanding and gain as Leadership interventions impacts.

The ‘personality’ or ‘Self’ as an expression of the truncated true combination of ‘Volition’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Emotion’ – is the very reason it is divisive. As there is no true complete ‘self’ or personality among humans, they need something other than that to complement to complete it into the ‘true personality or ‘true self’. That completed ‘Self’ will be the enabler to the highest extent possible. Hence Leadership Development should embrace ‘Servant Headship’ exclusively as the priory for all leadership development that could be aligned to competency development with noetic touch. This Servant Leadership initiative will support the divisive ‘Self’ to seek the complementing ‘Self’ to take to the needed direction of ‘True Personality or True Self’.

Hence, in a sense personality development or working with self in Leadership development is not advisable in the present misunderstood realm, but should be taken up in the next realm of Truth. The psychologist who has been venerated for his works and thoughts on humans has simple words stated so-

Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects – Carl Jung

While getting to the understanding of ‘Self’, it may also be contended by intriguing minds that ‘Self’ need not be the source of disorder, but represents disorder. Though it is not the source, it would need to be identified further, as every human experiences it and presents it; thus, an attempt to put that in order has also been an emphasis of many interventions.?

Reading in the depth:

Why would it be a ‘divisive’ element and ‘not trustworthy’ for human development? It will be good enough to take an exploratory approach, though the truth and empirics do exist for reference.

The truth remains that the complete ‘Real Self’ is not yet manifested in any human being, while there is an air of apparent understanding from dogmatic schools and cult thinking. What is professed among the dogmatically inclined is based on that which is apprehensible only to the extent which has been based on the level of imaginary (superior or inferior) process and for philosophizing. So, from this perspective ‘Leadership Development’ or ‘Leadership’ itself is a real problem – which mediocre mess or miss it!

A certain school of thought, emphasizing the building of the “self” contends that it is not adequately complete in itself – a very true observation indeed! Yet other schools of thought practice that without realizing that the misnomer code of secular approach along with the so-called postmodernists spiritualism is not an answer for itself rather a mega deception. Building the ‘Self’ of a person in the guise of leadership requirement which is considered adept by some leads to building the ‘Self’ to be more divisive – leading to despair, the hopelessness of life, and faltered leadership being legitimized. ?The ‘Real Self’ in the current state of all humans is unevolved stuff based on the interplay of heredity, education, knowledge, and/or extra-terrestrial aspects intermingled.

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again – Thomas Sowell

The worst aspect of Personality development / Self in Leadership competence enhancement is that its forceful and forcing that has a tenor to ‘Self-effort’ towards ‘Self Realization’ – Resulting in Man lost to gain nothing.

Hence Leadership ought to fail? The Leadership Misnomer Code needs to be realized, for better Servant Headship efforts to be focused.