PART TWO
BEING THE CHANGE: INNER WORK FOR TRANSFORMING LEADERS
Setting the Context for Part Two
Our success as leaders begins with how we think, as described in the introduction to Part One; but by itself, changing the content and structure of our thinking is not enough. Leadership success today depends equally on developing our inner capacities in ways that fundamentally change who we are. As Mahatma Gandhi (1913/1958) said:
We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do. (p. 241)
Inherent in Gandhi’s words, and reinforcing Mossberg’s injunctions in Part One, is the belief that what we embody has weight beyond what we say, do, or even think. And certainly, most of us today look beyond mere leadership strategies and even inspiring words to assess the quality of the person leading.
As the organization of this book attests, transforming leaders need to align transformational thinking and inner psychological development, and act in ways that reflect these perspectives. It is sad when people try out the latest leadership strategy without having done their inner work, and then fall on their faces because they lack the presence to inspire cooperation. It is a great shame when those who have responded to a call, clarified their values, and are passionate about an informing vision become frustrated, even demoralized, when they cannot convince others to change. It is a horrible loss when leaders become excited about a promising organizational strategy but get poor results because their personal development is inadequate for them to fully implement the kinds of ideas they are so fervent about. The transforming leader must bring thinking and being together—which is a tall order.
Listening to leaders who have made a real difference, it is clear to me that most understand how to be connected to their hearts, souls, and spirits, not just their minds, and to reflect their inner richness in their outer leadership practice. This capacity is explored in a very influential book titled Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society (Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers, 2004). In it, a number of distinguished scholars and experts associated with the Society for Organizational Learning—Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers—describe “presencing” as the active quality that a leader who embodies a needed change of consciousness is able to bring to any situation.
My depth psychology background gives me some useful psychological language concerning presencing, specifically what it means to connect with the deeper parts of myself and in so doing better connect with other people and the world. Depth psychology tells me that as long as I am living from the perspective of the ego alone, I inevitably will remain stuck in us/them thinking, essentially alienated and self-involved. Also, I will, unconsciously, protect my ego’s positive view of myself by either projecting negativity onto others or collapsing into self-doubt every time I make a mistake. To be transformational, we must connect with a deeper part of ourselves that feels an underlying commonality with other people and the natural world. Jung called this deeper part “the Self” and saw it as connected to the “collective unconscious” to which we all have access.
Many psychological and spiritual traditions help us deepen and bond in this way, though they articulate it differently. Most religions emphasize the desirability of connecting with a better part of ourselves and offer a process for becoming peaceful, loving, and wise, linked to the divine within and without. Those with a secular orientation, as well as those supported by a religious or spiritual faith, often also know how it feels to tap into a peaceful part of ourselves, to sense a profound connection with nature and/or those we love, to experience the joy of moments of flow when all seems easy—and how, when we are in this place, we are kinder, more compassionate, and more authentic. And contemporary neuroscience provides us with information on how our brains and bodies work when we are seized with panic, when we are calm and centered, when we think in a shallow way, or when we tap into some deeper wisdom and way of living. Indeed, neuroscience and new thinking about intelligence break down the separation between mind, body, and emotions, recognizing that cognition involves all of these—and more.
Being the change requires a different and higher-order mode of thinking than intelligence as measured by an IQ test or logic alone. Indeed, it involves self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, intuition, and many other integrative ways of knowing.
Harvard Professor Robert Kegan has written extensively about cognitive complexity. His ideas provide a conceptual bridge that links the emerging thinking included in Part One with the essays on inner work in Part Two, as both are aspects of cognition. They also prefigure how the inner work in this section prepares us to lead groups, which is the subject of Part Three. Before we can become more effective leaders, we must both find our deeper selves and get out of our own way enough to truly empathize with and understand the gifts and perceptions of others that differ from our own.
Kegan (1994) demonstrates that the cognitive intelligence required today demands an ever-increasing awareness of our inner lives, our limitations, and our reliance on others who hold important pieces of the puzzle related to understanding the issues and potential before us. In his groundbreaking book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Challenges of Modern Life, he warns that most people lack the cognitive complexity needed today to thrive as individuals, much less to lead others. He identifies five orders of complexity related to the quality of our relationship to our inner and outer worlds, and concludes that the majority of us are stuck at what he calls an Order Three level of cognitive development: we recognize the validity of others’ views but feel stressed by difference and want to know who is right, or have difficulty making decisions when various parties want different things.
This, however, at least beats Order Two consciousness, which Kegan says is characteristic of the self-involvement of adolescents. Even people who are smart according to the prevailing standards in their fields can lack the complexity to see (or care about) their part in the big picture or to factor into their decisions concern for others outside their immediate circles. We might think, for example, of those Wall Street executives who, following their bailout by U.S. taxpayers during the global financial crisis of 2008, were so oblivious or uncaring about their part in precipitating the collapse that they celebrated with lavish events and huge bonuses. Such real-life examples reinforce Kegan’s argument that Order Two consciousness is dysfunctional when it persists beyond adolescence into adulthood.
Success as a person, much less a leader in the twenty-first century, Kegan argues, requires at least an Order Four level of cognitive development. As he describes the attributes that characterize this level, we can see connections with capacities fostered in this volume:
• A facility for self-authorship, self-regulation, and individuation
• An aptitude to see relations between abstractions and to understand the perspectives of various people and social systems
• An ability to feel in relationship to others, as a separate self to separate selves, which allows us to deal with difference respectfully, understand multiple perspectives, and still be able to make decisions about what we should do.
The essays in Part Two help us to develop these capacities, which together give rise to the relational stance in transformational group practices outlined in Part Three and the ability to act on the ideas described in Part One of this book.
Many of the essays in The Transforming Leader reflect not only Order Four but also Order Five cognitive capacities, which flesh out the quality of consciousness Kegan considers the emerging level needed today. What do Order Five capacities look like? At this level, you have the ability to transform your own self, achieve an awareness of inner multiplicity, and be involved in an individuation process that is experienced in connection with others. You are at ease with paradox and complexity and can appreciate people who hold truths different from yours because you are aware that their truths provide essential complements in productive tension with your own.
You also realize that some people act out anachronistic and even harmful habits of thinking that are part of the cultural consciousness. You understand that you need to deal with people who reflect these low levels of cognition, without denial, by setting appropriate boundaries to stop their negative behaviors and ameliorate their impact on the world. With Order Five consciousness, however, you know you are in an interdependent reality with the perpetrators and that people can and do change, and that not enabling counterproductive behaviors may motivate that change.
A Jungian idea also is helpful here. Such people’s actions make visible some part of the cultural shadow that we can find in ourselves even if we do not act on it. Thus, a constructive task is to identify the underlying needs or desires that energize that shadowy motivation. Doing so can allow you to discover more positive ways to meet such needs, further your goals, and support the greater good. (For example, some people will cheat or lie to get what they want. But, even short of this, any of us may sometimes inadvertently do less obvious but still harmful things. We can value our underlying desires while still seeking more mature and responsible ways of fulfilling them.)
Respecting others and their perspectives is aided by the Order Five understanding that your own truth is a product of your socialization, culture, and unique experiences, and hence not absolute—and so it is with others as well. Thus, you can recognize how larger cultural systems give rise to the individual experiences within them. At the same time, individuals within those systems are affecting the whole, creating a continuous dialectical reshaping of experience for everyone involved.
By now it should be clear that the higher orders of complexity Kegan describes require a linking of big-picture intuition, rational analysis, emotional clarity, and the sense of connection with others that occurs when consciousness shifts from being defined only by the ego and the conscious rational mind to a more complete way of being. Indeed, in a more recent book, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, coauthored with Lisa Lahey, the research director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard, Kegan emphasizes how the connection between the conscious and the unconscious minds can increase our ability to adjust quickly in the face of rapidly changing conditions or to meet our desired goals (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).
In analyzing the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds, Kegan and Lahey shed light on the mystery of why so many of us, as individuals, groups, and organizations, commit to goals we think we want to achieve and then make little or no progress toward them. Their explanation is that the unconscious mind has made an equally reasonable commitment that is in direct conflict with what we think we want. Using an example with which almost anyone can identify, Kegan contrasts the conscious mind’s commitment to healthy eating and getting exercise with the unconscious commitment to living a full and pleasurable life. Similarly, leaders might make a conscious commitment to lead more collaboratively, while they unconsciously commit to guard against limiting their ability to get the right thing done if others don’t agree.
Kegan and Lahey (2009) argue that if your conscious mind believes you should push harder to achieve its goals by will alone, you will repress the wisdom of the unconscious, and the results will be counterproductive. The unconscious will continue to sabotage the conscious goal. Surfacing the tension between our conscious and unconscious minds can generate a respectful inner dialogue, leading to a sense of how both commitments can be integrated in action. Belief in that vision can be reinforced by small experiments that test out what happens when you act on the new vision in ways that reassure both the conscious and unconscious minds that this new mode is viable.
The essays in Part Two provide various languages and strategies, from different traditions and fields, to show you how to grow your cognitive complexity as you link up your conscious and unconscious minds, and how to enhance your ability to utilize a wider range of inner resources that can help you embody the change you wish to promote in yourself and the world. After reading this section, you may find it valuable to apply these ideas to particular situations you face. Should you wish to do so, you can go to Appendix A and complete the exercises there before going on to Part Three.