Identify the Zone

You can kick-start your journey to wise leadership by first becoming aware of your tendency to operate most often in one of the two primary leadership zones: blue for functional smart and red for business smart.

While reading this chapter, you might have had some inkling of which zone—blue or red—you are comfortable operating in most of the time, although you might desire to act and lead from the other zone. Identify stories and actions that remind you of your own behavior. Highlight relevant sections in the book, and make notes so that you can quickly refer back to those sections when necessary. Once you read the first seven chapters, look back on your notes and highlight sections to identify patterns that belong to the blue zone or the red zone.

Assess Where You Are on the Path

Use the self-assessment here to identify how frequently you demonstrate wise leader capabilities through your behavior (you can also visit fromsmarttowise.com to take a more detailed self-assessment). When you look at the self-assessment results, you may discover—and be pleasantly surprised—that you are already acting as a wise leader in some capabilities. Celebrate your newly gained self-awareness, and if you like, you can ask your colleagues to use the assessment to evaluate you and share the results with you. Ask them to give concrete examples from the recent past that make them support their assessment if you want to identify the behaviors you want to change.

Gaining awareness of how you currently exercise wise leadership capabilities is the first step in the right direction. We recommend that everyone on your team get a copy of this book and spend one hour a week to discuss the insights and action steps from each chapter to help each other move along the path of wise leadership.

Keeping your own assessment results close by, continue to deepen that self-awareness by reading chapters 2 through 7, where you will learn about other wise leaders and the unique way in which they exercise the six leadership capabilities. In each of those chapters, we give details on how leaders tend to exercise a particular capability—say, perspective or motivation—when they operate in the blue or red zone and compare and contrast that with how wise leaders use that same capability. Each chapter gives examples of wise leaders and their best practices, as well as some tools and advice. Pick one tool or piece of advice from each chapter and practice what you have learned at least once a day. Also, discuss each chapter’s key findings with your team members, say once a week. Creating a book club or a dialogue group on wise leadership around you will give you more motivation to practice what you learn in this book.

We believe that wisdom—and wise leadership—is our birthright. We can all journey toward it if we become aware of where we currently are operating from and progressively take our colored filters off and see—and interact with—the world in its full spectrum.

Create a Road Map Toward Wise Leadership

Once you have read this book completely and identified your wise leader score and action steps to increase that score, create a road map to move yourself toward your North Star, which represents your noble purpose (in chapter 2 we offer a tool that can help you discover and connect with your North Star). This road map is your developmental path: it will help you prioritize your efforts in cultivating wise leadership while you are moving toward your North Star.

Once you have the road map in hand, you can initiate your journey by focusing on any of the six capabilities. Pick the capability that you are most interested in working on, and reread the chapter that addresses that capability. Then discuss with your team (it could be a work team or family team or a circle of friends) your action plan to exercise that capability in a wise manner. Be open to suggestions from others, and get to work on it. When you are ready, you can identify another capability that you are interested in—or just go to the next one in order—and continue this cycle. Sometimes you might find that while you are working on improving how you act and lead in one capability, you are simultaneously getting better in another—which is not surprising, since the six wise leadership capabilities are integrated and interdependent.

In our experience, leaders who operate primarily in the business smart mode can make the biggest progress to understand wise leadership if they begin to pay more attention to motivation first—in other words, if they can act out of enlightened self-interest more often. Then they may need to pay special attention to perspective, action orientation, and role clarity. You might have to downplay your enthusiasm for quick and intense action, especially if you tend to operate in the red zone. If you primarily operate in the blue zone, you might want to increase your activity level and pay special attention to decision logic, fortitude, and motivation. Again, use your team to support your transformation into a wise leader—while you are also supporting their journey.

Stay the Course

Once you have prioritized one or more developmental areas and started acting on them, you are on the road to wise leadership. Be aware, however, that this journey is not a straight line but more like the movement of a clock—steady and continuous movements to both sides, with the real movement taking place on the clock face. Indeed, we have identified wise leadership as the diligent effort of shifting away from a particular zone you generally operate from. Expect to have lapses and sometimes get stuck in your traditional zone (after all, it is your comfort zone): it is important to demonstrate resilience and be kind to yourself. Be conscious of trying to unstick yourself and resume your journey—or, more appropriately, of removing the filters you are accustomed to and taking a fresh look at what is in front of you.

All journeys can be difficult: nobody likes changing entrenched habits, and the unknown is often associated with anxiety, leading many people to conclude that it’s not worthwhile to leave safety behind and explore untraveled territory. So how can you determine whether you are breaking old habits and progressing on this journey?

Our book website, fromsmarttowise.com, provides more detailed assessment and feedback for you. We will continue to add more tools, graphs, and examples to help you on your wise leader journey. We hope our website will also serve as a social networking platform for aspiring wise leaders like yourself to share your discoveries and the best practices you learned along your journey to wise leadership.

Even after you have broadened your perspective to include the attributes of wise leadership, your primary strengths in the red or the blue zones won’t be gone. In fact, when you are stressed or feel very confident (even arrogant), you might easily revert to autopilot mode and operate more from your primary strengths. Wise leadership is a dynamic state of consciousness, and it takes significant discipline and practice for you to operate consistently in that state. It requires being aware of where you are at any moment and paying close attention to the context you are in. Once you take action that you intuitively feel confident about, take time to reflect on what you did, the results it produced, and how it was appropriate to the context outside and within you. Such attention, reflection, and introspection are the basic tools you will use to integrate wise leadership. Use these tools in partnership with your study team. The more consistently you use them, the more adept you are likely to be and the more confident you will feel in operating from a place of wise leadership.

This book does not offer any magic bullet for becoming a wise leader. There is no such thing. It will, however, provide a framework for you to learn about yourself and guide your personal transformation as well as that of your organization. It is an iterative, interconnected process. We hope you will experience a radical broadening in perspective, which is at the heart of sustainable change. Then, by applying the new insights and lessons from the book, you will grow into a wise leader. Above all, we hope this book will inspire your own spirit of inquiry, just as conceiving of it and writing it did for us, and encourage you to embark on this rewarding path.