ACTivity/ Alone or Together

Photo by Milan Popovic on Unsplash.

Manila, 21 April 2021 — Will you grow your leadership alone or together?

Story

It happened in 2021. Roger Walsh, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of California and author of eight books, wrote an article Calling All Integral Practitioners! Responding Effectively to the Crises and Craziness of Our Times. As I’m a student of the Integral Approach, I paid attention. The integral approach helps me to systematically take multiple perspectives in my training and coaching work with clients. Using ‘integral’ perspectives to help my clients select effective leadership behaviors in a variety of challenging situations is the staple of my leadership development work. 

In the article, Walsh tells us that humankind is “in a race between consciousness and catastrophe, and the potential catastrophes keep multiplying.” Think of the crises of sustainability, climate, poverty, conflict, and more. Underlining our responsibility to use our skills to make good choices, he asks a series of questions about the best contributions we can make and how we can discover those contributions in the first place. Going deeper, the two questions I like best are 1) what’s the most strategic thing I can do, and 2) how can I live my life to be an optimal instrument of service? These questions forced me to look up and rise above the daily details of my work. My habit is to make time for such reflection every week, usually during the weekend. 

So far so good, and I hope you are also inspired by Walsh’s questions, will make time this week(end) to reflect on your skills, contributions, and choices, and come up with answers about where you will invest your time and effort going forward as a leader. Many of these questions also surface regularly in my work with clients in leadership training and coaching, and I know that working on them with a coach will help to find more considered answers and to take the actions needed. Now, with all that said, I also felt that Walsh’s call to action only covered half of what should be asked. So what about the other half?

Challenge

What Walsh missed out on, in my view, is that we should not only ask and answer those questions as individuals, but also collectively, in pairs, teams, businesses, organizations, and communities. The collective point of view of leadership went missing, and this often happens when we let ourselves get inspired by leaders from countries where individualism and competition are favored over collaboration and collective solutions. 

When you add a collective dimension to Walsh’s questions, it certainly creates more stuff to reflect on, and you’ll need more time to work on it. And, yet, that is essential. It’s about how we should develop ourselves as leaders: both individually and collectively. We can’t leave one of those two out. Among my favorite quotes are those that describe leadership as both an Inside Job (individual) and as a Contact Sport (collective). The goal? It’s to lift your leadership in the face of the crises we’re facing in our world. I call that leveling up to Play a Bigger Game, which is my third metaphor of leadership. 

In particular, the pressing challenge of becoming an influencer of positive change in our world today is learning to appreciate and work with others who are different from us. To play a bigger game, you need to grow leaders around you and collab-orate. This might be easier for leaders in Asian countries who have a head start in appreciating collectivism. And it might be harder for leaders in Western countries who are focused (even fixated) on tapping the strengths of individualism. In the end, however, it’s a challenge for both, as leadership to play a bigger game requires both an inside job and contact sport.

Question

As I reviewed my personal answers to Walsh’s questions, taking both an individual and a collective perspective, I reaffirmed my commitment to growing leaders who can take on the world’s challenges, including making our world more sustainable, inclusive, and peaceful. My passion is to help leaders grow individually through private coaching and training, and collectively through group coaching and training. That’s the combination of services that I stand for. 

One-to-one programs bring out the individual leadership growth that helps leaders to successfully navigate transitions in their career, starting off with the three-month Leader in Transition program. To support collective leadership development, I have started a community of leaders around a Challenge to take on. This involves inviting three colleagues to join together with you and work as a small team — we call it a Collab — to influence a positive change in your workplace in 6 to 8 weeks’ time. Resources on effective leadership behaviors are available to the community members, and regular discussion, sharing of experiences, and practice are encouraged. We found that joining the Grow3Leaders community is not for everyone, because it requires a commitment to collaborate with others instead of the more familiar individualistic consuming of content.

So what’s the question for this week? It’s how you will invest in yourself to become an optimal instrument of service (as mentioned by Walsh) dedicated to solving the world’s big problems. It’s about deciding how to Play a Bigger Game. And it’s about choosing your next steps to grow your leadership, individually as an inside job, and collectively as a contact sport with others. Let me know if you’d like to discuss taking this forward. If your immediate step is in a one-to-one program to step up your leadership, book a Free Strategy Session here. And if your first step is to take on the Grow3Leaders Challenge, book a Free Setup Call here. Or, you can decide to fly solo or work with another coach. Just remember, your Bigger Game is waiting to be played.