Leading from Me to We to the World

Conscious Leadership is ‘leading for the greater good.’
Leading consciously is a practice that is focused not only on self-awareness and self-mastery. Nor is it only the practice of leading others.
It is also the practice of leading in the world, for the world.

We know that leaders set the culture and role model it. They influence everyone throughout their organisation since everyone watches what the leader does. You lead from your level of conscious awareness and shape your organisation accordingly. Leading a conscious and sustainable organisation requires a more highly evolved, integrated and conscious worldview. How have you developed your level of conscious awareness and mastered the way you lead?

Conscious Leadership Coaching is a specialized one-to-one and systemic executive coaching solution that expands your effectiveness as a conscious leader.

This way of coaching combines two powerful ingredients:
Working with you as an individual. Expand the way you see the world and shift your impact as a leader. Develop both your leadership being as well as your leadership doing. Discover where you are leading from security and playing it safe or small. Look to how you can build and create your vision with others, collectively, for the greater good. Raise your ‘vertical development’ – your ability to work from more complex, nuanced and interconnected perspectives and to tackle complex leadership challenges. Increase your authentic impact by developing your self-awareness and self-mastery, your relationships with others and your impact in leading for the wider world.
Involve your key stakeholders in your development as a leader. Include the perspectives of your internal stakeholders (colleagues and employees), as well as your external stakeholders (customers, investors, suppliers, partners, the community, society and the environment). This brings a whole systems perspective into your personal coaching which helps you in leading from Me to We to the World.

It can be tough to be this kind of leader. You need to remain courageous and steady in the stance that you decide to take for the greater good. There are stakeholders to manage, possibly shareholders to satisfy and finding allies who think and lead like you can be difficult.

A conscious leadership coach is an invaluable support to you as you develop yourself as a conscious leader.

Conscious Leadership Coaching addresses questions such as:

  • How do I practice self-mastery?
  • How do I relate to others more consciously?
  • How do I ensure our employees are engaged and bringing their full selves to work?
  • How do I ignite their passion and spark their energy to innovate?
  • How do I create collaboration beyond limiting competition?
  • How do I increase my positive impact, and that of my organisation, on the world around us?
  • How do I find my purpose beyond profit?
  • What do I need to do to continue developing my practice as a conscious leader?

Benefits of being a Conscious Leader

Increased Authenticity

Conscious leadership is leading authentically, and more. We engage in transforming ourselves and the way we think. We can know ourselves inside and out and be very authentic in the way we express ourselves, but being a conscious leader takes this one step further: towards developing a ‘self-transforming mind’ where we see how we are seeing and can choose to develop and change this.

Even so, greater authenticity enhances our leadership in the following ways, all of which can be developed through Conscious Leadership Coaching:

  • Awareness of your personal strengths and weaknesses
  • Knowing your values
  • Managing your emotions and self-mastery
  • Empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence towards others
  • Courage to act for what is right
  • Increased integrity and earning the trust of others
  • Being genuine, congruent and consistent
  • Knowing and sharing your life story to enhance your leadership impact
As a conscious leader, ask yourself:

What is my authenticity in service of?

Plugging into the Collective Intelligence of your Organisation

Your organisation is teeming with life. Yet, very often, we are constrained by the idea of ourselves as a leader with a position. Conscious Leadership Coaching helps you to shift from heroic to post-heroic leadership. This means moving beyond ego, beyond what keeps you playing small and safe, and towards building and creating the future, collectively with others. You become someone who builds bridges between the various corners of your organisation, redefines competition and encourages collaboration across boundaries in order for the collective intelligence of everyone to be drawn upon. Doing this gives a massive injection of innovation energy to your organisation. Conscious leaders practice reciprocity-based innovation by asking: ‘What is the value that can be created for the widest possible range of stakeholders – and how do we collaborate to get there?’

“Reciprocity-based innovation will be, I think, the biggest innovation opportunity in history.”
Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future and The Reciprocity Advantage

Finding your Purpose and Taking a Stand

Conscious leaders are motivated by their sense of being in service to something greater than themselves. They are the outliers who want to link their personal purpose to their organisation’s purpose and who hold the line for finding a different way, one that promotes long-term sustainability over short-term gain and benefit to the majority over benefit to the minority. This is not easy in the face of challenges from more traditionally-minded colleagues, clients and shareholders pushing for short-term results.

Conscious Leadership Coaching helps you to ask and answer the big questions, such as:

    • What are the stands I am most inspired to take?
    • How does this relate to my personal purpose?
    • What do I want to see becoming a reality in my organisation or in the world?

“My catalyst is the inability to ignore something that I can affect.”
Ibrahim Al Husseini, Full Cycle Energy Fund

Holding the Space

What does it mean to give up tight control of your organisation, to allow it more freedom to self-manage, to trust? As leaders we are caught in the expectation to deliver results by controlling outcomes, yet the complexity of our organisational lives means that we cannot figure out all the answers and we have to let go, at least to some degree. Conscious Leadership Coaching helps you grapple with this most thorny of leadership challenges and helps you find the ways in which you can be the hands that hold the space for your organisation, rather than the puppeteer who controls and orchestrates it.

“In my life I have two time frames: right now – plus or minus two weeks – and a thousand years.
In this way, I do the things that are practical right now, but I do them in the
context that if everybody were to do this for a thousand years,
the world would end up a much better place.”
Tom Chi, former Head of Project Experience, Google X

Leading Future Generations

As a leader you know the challenges of successfully engaging and leading the next generation. Subsequent generations are born with the human upgrade already in place and they have even higher expectations of their leaders. What does it take to lead these generations successfully? Conscious leaders of today’s companies have a responsibility to help nurture and develop this incredible talent, and usher in a more responsible and conscious form of leadership for the future. Old-fashioned leaders, who adopt a cardboard cut-out approach to leading with predefined borders, will have their upcoming generations feeling bored and seeking stimulation elsewhere, probably on social media, or outside the company.

“We have a responsibility to help pave the way and mentor the Millennials so that when they come into leadership they have an entirely different value system and vernacular. Millennials are inherently wired to want purpose, and not just have a job to make a pay cheque. As leaders, we are helping to take that energy and fold it into business and develop them as strong leaders and innovators in the world of commerce.”
Laura Roberts, CEO of Pantheon Enterprises

 Are you inspired by the possibilities of Conscious Leadership Coaching for yourself,
your teams or your organisation?
If so, get in touch with us to explore what Conscious Leadership Coaching can do for you.

“The only choice we have is between conscious evolution and unconscious evolution. Unconscious evolution is the default choice. It is going to happen whether you sign up for personal evolution or not. Signing up for conscious personal evolution makes the process so much easier and successful. If enough people sign up for their own personal evolution, we have the possibility of accelerating the evolution of the consciousness of humanity.”

Richard Barrett, The New Leadership Paradigm