Evan Renaerts

The Inside leader

February 4, 2008

It is early morning, still dark; the roof tops and grounds are covered in frost. Yesterday was brilliant sunshine with the snow-topped mountains etched against the horizon. Last night’s red sunset promises sunshine for today.

One of my personal beliefs is that everyone is a leader and that everyone is always leading – in ways that add to the good or that take away from it. I notice, when I say this, how many acknowledged leaders and managers adamantly shake their heads no – they don’t believe or accept this statement. Perhaps it’s only semantics and what’s needed is a deeper conversation about the nature and forms of leadership.

Leaders make choices and then initiate action based on those choices. They don’t always know for certain that they have made the right choice or that their actions will lead to desired outcomes, they are acting on goodwill, faith, intuition and experience, all propped up with the best information available.

I say that we are all leaders because we are all making choices and acting on those choices throughout each moment of each day. What separates an acknowledged leader from all of the others might simply be that the acknowledged leader has a vision that includes the whole (tribe, clan, group, department, organization or nation).

Whether acknowledged or not, being a leader does not guarantee that good choices will be made, and in fact our world and our history are filled with examples of megalomaniacs and petty tyrants making decisions and precipitating actions that have hurt and killed millions. Even our well intentioned leaders suffer the law of unintended consequences.

One observation I have is that we put too much emphasis on the outer manifestations of leadership and give too little attention and consideration to the inner leader. Most leadership training focuses on behavioural attributes such as, responsibility, accountability and decisiveness. Business management training broadens out to include economic models and perhaps even the latest trends in sociological thinking – all aspects of how to behave.

Even as our cultures shift to insist that leadership thinking include a triple bottom line it is still a fact that leaders face huge pressure to produce ever increasing financial returns and sometimes that pressure is in direct opposition to a better choice of action.

What is dramatically missing from the leadership conversation is an inquiry into “who” the leader is. It is a truism that we can not guide anyone beyond where we ourselves have gone and that means that we can not call forth the best in others if we haven’t gone looking for the best in ourselves. We can’t ask others to consider the well being of the whole system if we don’t embody that ethos within ourselves.
Real leadership training needs to bring together groups of people who have a desire to lead in a setting where they are challenged to go beyond what they have believed to be possible; where they experience the intelligence of thinking in a committed team and where all of this is embedded in the real world.

Leadership must go beyond conceptual and theoretical to include real people, nature and the environment and the astounding complexity of life. This training should never be about reducing the complexity in order to make simple decisions – every decision needs to be made with the humility to acknowledge that we do not know all of the possible consequences of our actions.

The world needs leaders who experience the full range of human feelings and are okay with that experience. We need leaders who truly want to collaborate and share ideas, always looking for the missing piece of wisdom. We desperately need a kind of leadership that genuinely seeks to serve and to nurture people, places, life and all of existence in its endless forms.

As with all great undertakings this awakening of enlightened leadership, if it is to happen, will start with individuals who say, “It begins here with me.”

Evan Renaerts 604 314 0835 evan@evanrenaerts.com posted by Evan Renaerts at 08:33