How to Lead Your Organization to Success?

An article I was reading recently in Harvard Business Review indicated that many employees and half of CEOs report feeling lonely in their roles. The experience of loneliness is not only a health hazard shortening lifespans in a way similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day; it also negatively impacts productivity, performance, effectiveness, creativity and innovation. 

In today's over-connected world, we have almost forgotten what being connected originally meant. Building authentic relationships at work and at home gets lost in the adrenalin-filled chase of targets and goals, both professional and personal. Interestingly, it is easier to achieve much bigger targets and goals if the focus is deep human connection between fellow human beings. Our default evolutionary fear based human design comes in the way of naturally being authentic and vulnerable, the 2 pre-requisites for forging deeper bonds.

Organizations looking for greater profitability need to wake up to this new reality where communities have been replaced by organizations, as people spend majority of their day at work. The sense of belongingness to a particular community that anchored us before has now to be provided by organizations that we work for. A job only as a vehicle for earning money for sustenance does not create a space for authentic connections at workplace nor inspire maximum contribution by individuals forming the organization.

In the current model of leadership development, where the focus is on beating the success out of the system without understanding the linkage of that to inner growth of people responsible for creating the success, there is a limit beyond which the businesses will not be able to grow and prosper.

There is ample research out there pointing to the need to transform how we work though it is like blind-folded people touching different parts of the elephant and shouting Eureka. Each bit of research is definitive and emphatic about its discovery and its set of recommendations on what the organization needs to do. What is needed is an integrated approach which combines all the learnings across different domains for growth; with the recognition that organisational growth is a function of personal growth of people who form that organization.

As long as we are still operating from the ‘Survival’ mode of the default human design, a space of authenticity and vulnerability cannot be created. We may implement a few tactics, which may have worked in some other situation, the outcome will largely be uncertain and unsustainable. Loneliness, disengagement, loss of productivity and performance, lack of creativity and innovation, struggle to remain profitable are all symptoms. Solving the problem only at the level of symptoms will not address the underlying malaise which, if not healed, will continue to fester and the struggle with the symptoms will be an endless game.

It all boils down to leadership development in the new model of leadership where the focus is to support people on their inner leadership journey - from fear-based Survival of the Fittest to the love-sourced Transformation to Our Highest Self - by working at the level of habits across all the 4 bodies of the Being (physical, emotional, mental / intellectual, spiritual). Leadership development cannot happen in isolation. It needs a playground for the leadership muscles to practise and strengthen. Therefore, to successfully journey forward from good to great, organizations have to play 3 games that CEOs need to lead:

1. Leadership Depth - The inner journey of personal transformation from Evolutionary Fear to Transcendent Love for an integrated wheel of life to have it all and for greater impact in the world through living our Purpose of Life.

2. Business Excellence - The outer journey of professional success by contributing to the communities that we serve through the work we do and leading our organisations / business functions from good to great.

3. Craft Mastery - Becoming a key person of influence in our industry through continual learning, unlearning, re-learning to become the master of our craft.

​Ready to play?

Love, Jyoti.