Excellence In Leadership & Personal Development
What does Excellence in Leadership have to do with Personal Development?
As a leadership & spiritual coach I get asked this every so often, and to my mind I don't see how it's possible to separate the two. If you want to be a great leader how can you set aside or ignore your values, overall purpose and connectedness to others from achieving the task at hand? Great leaders create and empower synergistic relationships between the leadership and the people they lead. It’s a mind-set that nourishes the whole of the company, clients and community.
Values, purpose, connectedness, synergy - these are all spiritual elements and each one of us leads, whether it’s our team and customers at work, our team at home, our friends, or people we influence.
Any venture or enterprise classically starts out with a Vision or Mission statement, but often the values are either not included at all or poorly ob-Served. A confident leader can pull off vision with poor values but only for so long. We’ve seen this repeatedly where a charismatic leader’s vision is intrinsically selfish and sooner or later the leader loses the respect of their followers, clients or electoral base. Setting values clearly and holding by them operationally is the backbone for the corporate culture.
Great leaders guide and inspire; they serve their team, their clients, and their community. Well-supported people are far more likely to achieve their potential and produce their best work. A customer base that feels listened to and appreciated is far more likely to be loyal. As a client, I’ve personally left companies I’d been loyal to for years because of their continued policy to reward new clients at the expense of the long-standing customers.
The concept of Service in Leadership is not new and the first mention of it I've managed to find is in the I Ching, a book believed to be over 5000 years old where it says “To Lead Truly Is To Serve”.
According to Larry Spears who served as president of the Robert Greenleaf Centre for Servant-Leadership from 1990 to 2007, the three most important traits of a leader are 1) to be a good listener, 2) to have empathy, and 3) to be a healer (3). Many of the companies named in Fortune Magazine’s annual listing of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For” adopt a servant leadership approach and have integrated it into their corporate cultures.
The benefits of even a simple practice like regular meditation to business leaders has been much covered, including by the likes of HBR and Forbes. The chart below shows how the main traits of great leadership can be enhanced by attention to our personal development.
These traits are innately in all of us but the more we are connected to our own light and true confidence, the better we are able to fulfil our purpose and to guide others with wisdom and kindness to fulfilling their potential.
