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 Servant
Leadership
Man's search
for meaning is the primary motivation in
his
life and
not a 'secondary rationalization' of
instinctual
drives.
This meaning is unique and specific in that it must
and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does
it achieve
a
significance, which will satisfy his own will to
meaning.
Viktor
Frankl,
Man's Search for
Meaning
As Viktor
Frankl says, our search for meaning is the primary
motivation in our lives. It is this search that
makes us the spiritual creatures that we are. And
it is when this deep need for meaning goes unmet
that our lives come to feel shallow or empty. For a
great many of us today this need is not met, and
the fundamental crisis of our times is a spiritual
one.
The search
for meaning is evident in so many aspects of our
lives. What
is my life
about?
What does
my
job
mean?
What
is leadership?
Where is this company that I
have founded
headed?
What
does it mean to be
me?
What does it mean that I am going to die some day?
Why commit myself to one thing or another,
to
one person or
another---or
to anything?
People living
in earlier societies would not even have asked such
questions. Their
lives were culturally embedded in a set
framework.
They had living traditions, living gods, living
communities, functioning moral
codes,
problems that had known boundaries and fixed
goals.
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Spirituality@Work
First,
some definitions: To be spiritual is about
relating to, consisting of, or having the nature of
spirit which is not tangible nor material. Spirit
is defined as the vital principle or animating
force or energy traditionally believed to be within
living beings. The soul is the spirit in man and is
often conceived in religions as an immaterial
entity that is immortal, separable from the body at
death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a
future state.
Leaders
of organizations, who are concerned with positively
affecting the soul and providing employees with the
freedom to practice their diverse religious
beliefs, may decide to manage the workplace
environment with spiritual
sensitivity.
Experts
say U.S. workplaces have become more religiously
diverse, forcing companies to rethink everything
from vacation policies to the cafeteria menu.
Click
here for the state of spirituality@work today in
the U.S.
Becoming
Servant Leaders
In business and
in most other fields of life, the concept of the
servant leader
brings
together service and meaning. American thinkers
have taken it to mean a leader who has a sense of
deep values and who consciously serves these values
in his or her leadership style. But in American
business, particularly, deep values refer to
matters such as excellence, fulfilling one's
potential and allowing others to do so,
achievement, quality of products and services, and
a commitment to never-ending growth. By contrast,
in keeping with the spirit of Eastern humanism,
traditional Eastern values center on areas like
compassion, humility, gratitude, service to one's
family and service to the ground of being
itself.
As leaders, each
of us must 'sing our song'. We must all, through
our own deepest resources and through the use of
our spiritual intelligence, access the deepest
layer of our true selves and bring up from that
source the unique 'music' that each human being has
the potential to contribute.
This task of
self-discovery
will not come
easily. Our culture is even spiritually dumb in the
literal sense-we have no adequate language to
express the richness of the human soul. Words like
'joy', 'love', 'compassion' and 'grace' allude to
so much more than we can articulate. Still
discovering deeper layers of ourselves that we are
used to living matters. It requires us to find some
grounding in the self for meaning that transcends
the self. This will not be a simple task for a
people who have grown used to
five-easy-steps-to-self-improvement.
Find a
guide,
a
coach,
a mentor
to help you along this path to become the
effective
leader
you know you can be.
The
Wall Street Journal's Science Journal, March 26,
2004
Our modern age is
defined by such things as the breakdown of family
and community and traditional religion, and the
loss or absence of heroes, and peopled by young
humans trying to make sense of them. We live at a
time when there are no clear goal posts, no clear
rules, no clear values, no clear way to grow up, no
clear vision of responsibility.
We lack an
overall context for our lives, a natural flow of
meaning of which we can simply be a part. In many
ways this spiritual desert has come about as a
product of our high human IQ. We have reasoned
ourselves away from nature and our fellow
creatures, and we have reasoned ourselves beyond
religion. In our great technological leap forward,
we have left traditional culture with its embedded
values behind. Our IQ has diminished labor,
increased wealth and longevity and invented
countless trinkets, some of which threaten to
destroy both our environment and us. But we haven't
found a way to make it all worthwhile.
Modern
culture is spiritually
dumb,
not only in the West but also, increasingly, in
those Asian countries influenced by the West. By
'spiritually dumb,' we have lost our sense of
fundamental values---those attached to the earth
and its seasons, to the day and its passing hours,
to the implements and daily rituals of our lives,
to the body and its changes, to sex, to labor and
its fruits, to the stages of life, and to death as
a natural ending. We see and use and experience
only the immediate, the visible and the pragmatic.
We are blind to the deeper levels of symbol and
meaning that place our objects, our activities and
ourselves in a larger existential framework. We are
not colorblind, but meaning-blind. How did we get
this way?
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Room
for thought
Chimpanzees are
our closest living relative. Their genomes are
about 97% identical to ours. How, then, can so few
genetic differences account for our language-using,
cathedral-building, opera-writing and
computer-inventing?
Scientists have
taken a big step toward solving that mystery. In
the journal, Nature, they report the discovery of
the first genetic difference between humans and
chimps that produces a clear functional difference.
And it seems that this mutation occurred at roughly
the same time that human like traits first appeared
in the fossil record. Yet, the gene has nothing to
do with intelligence or other traits, at least not
directly.
Within a handful
of genetic differences between humans and chimps,
they found that a non mutated version of MYH16 (a
gene that affects muscle proteins) gives non-human
primates huge jaw muscles. Whereas, the mutated
MYH16 gene keeps humans from making this jaw-muscle
protein, and so we have smaller jaws.
The larger the
muscle, the more bone is required to anchor it. As
a result, gorillas with big jaw muscles also have
extra bone on top of their skulls that prevents the
cranium to grow. But in humans, who don't need
extra skull bone, the skull keeps growing. And so
does the brain inside it.
'Something going
on outside the brain turns out to have a very
important impact on what's going on inside it,'
says Dr. Hansell Stedman of the University of
Pennsylvania. 'This was a surprise to all of us.'
Our
Brain
The self has an
ego (rational) periphery, an associative
(emotional) middle and a unitive (spiritual)
center. A well-balanced, spiritually intelligent
self needs something of each layer. But in
traditional societies, the center, the inspiring,
energy-giving, meaning-giving, unifying spiritual
level of existence, is held in the middle layer.
The traditions of the community encapsulate deeper
spiritual insights and values, so that the
individual relates to the spiritual center through
his culture and its traditions. He does not have to
relate directly to the center on his own, as an
individual.
Few of the
craftsmen who built the great European cathedrals
of the Middle Ages, for instance, consciously knew
the principles of sacred architecture, but absorbed
them as they learned their craft. Few medieval
peasants had to consider the meaning of life or the
meaning of their work because these were embedded
in the necessities and traditions of daily
life.
That shared
community simply does not exist for most urban
people in today's world. We are deeply
undernourished in that whole associative, middle
layer of the self. We have few collective
traditions that point beyond the prosaic, everyday
level of life that ground us in the deeper origin
and meaning of our communities and of our life
within them. We have few 'gods' and 'goddesses',
collective heroes whose lives exemplify some deeper
layer of human possibility or aspiration and touch
our own with a sense of grace. We have to take
personal responsibility for meaning, to create new
access to it and use it intelligently.
"Once the fear
of death is transcended, life becomes a transformed
experience because that particular fear underlies
all others. Few people know what it is to live
without fear--but beyond fear lies joy, as the
meaning and purpose of existence become
transparent." Power
and Force,
The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David
R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.
Only
you know what's important in achieving your
vision of success. However, we all seek
shared outcomes to provide a foundation for
where we want to be. Here is one client's
definition of the foundation for his
success:
"Have
you ever watched, listened, and felt someone
tuning a guitar or other string instrument?
That is what it is like to have the good
fortune of connecting with John Agno. He is a
living tuning fork and you're that string
instrument. Today, I have greater self
awareness, am more in step with my calling,
and better able to appreciate the journey,
including the valleys, than ever before.
Thanks, John for helping me get attuned with
my LifeSignature."
You, too,
can drastically increase your chances of
succeeding in business and life when you
learn
from a coach or
mentor
– someone who once stood in your place
and overcame all obstacles to earn success
and happiness.
The common
thread throughout history has been that you
learn mastery performance from the master.
Whatever quality or skill you want to
develop, you "get it" by hanging out with
people who have it.
 
Albert
Einstein once said, "We should take care not
to make the intellect our god; it has, of
course, powerful muscles but no personality.
It cannot lead; it can only
serve."
Leaders
know and science has discovered
emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn
mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings
to receive the contents of each other's
minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it
is the vehicle that carries every signal from
one brimming heart to another.
Leadership
happens in a series of interactive
conversations
that
pull people toward becoming comfortable with
the language of personal responsibility and
commitment.
That
is why leadership development is not an
event.
It is a process of participating in
respectful conversations where the leader
recognizes his or her own feelings and those
of others in building safe and trusting
relationships.
For human
beings, feeling
deeply
is
synonymous with being
alive.
Signature,
Inc., PO Box 2086, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
734.426.2000 www.CoachThee.com
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