Balanced Leadership Development

Balanced Leadership Development

By Mike W Bell

Are you finding that your leadership challenges are changing? The traditional styles of leadership do not work too well for creating the adaptive, innovative and sustaining organisations needed to successfully compete today.

Business leaders and writers are giving some indication of what's important for leaders and leadership in this new time:

"you must also master listening to your heart"

"to include stakeholders, to evoke followership, to empower others"

"what a person is (character) and what a person does (competence)"

"the virtuoso in interpersonal skills is the corporate future"

"the world will belong to passionate, driven leaders who can energize those whom they lead"

"senior executives know they cannot command commitment"

"their convictions, their clarity, their personal commitment to their own cultivation"

Much of what is being asked of leaders today cannot be found through the intellect alone - the focus of much of our leadership development over the last 40 years. It requires leaders to bring more of who they are as human beings to their work. To be more balanced.

Gandhi said you have to be the change you want to see in the world. While many leaders speak of creativity, innovation, commitment, empowerment and self-management, many organizations are still waiting for the exemplary role models.

Our models of leadership have come from researching 'what is'. But when things change, this is no longer adequate. The traditional maps do not work when the territory shifts.

Drawing on old wisdom from indigenous cultures I offer a map of 8 inner qualities of Leadership:

• Creativity- fostering generative growth, creativity and innovation,
• Perception - sensing the emergent needs in your organization,
• Emotional - a resilience and responsiveness, informed by emotions, meet challenges in a powerful way,
• Pathfinding - bringing individual and organizational action into alignment with a larger sense of purpose,
• Sustaining - supporting, maintaining and balancing organisational health, structures and new initiatives,
• Prediction - discerning patterns and trends of coming cycles,
• Decisiveness - awakening the simple clarity of right action,
• Energy - perceiving what is needed to arouse vitality and integrity within the organisation.

Our Western culture has tended to focus on the development of Decisive Intelligence - that ability to identify and gather resources, develop strategy and take decisive action. Increasingly we see, however, that a leader's capability in this area is interconnected with his/her capability in the other seven domains. It is these that we now need to pay attention to and develop.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest ebook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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