leadership

The leadership dysfunctions I observed when I started my career 40 years ago still exist today despite a leadership industry totaling billions of dollars annually, an army of consultants and coaches, countless leadership articles, and books. Many ask, Why do we still have a leadership problem?

My leadership journey began early in my professional career when I worked for a high-technology manufacturing company.

The company had high expectations for a new business planning system (MRP II) they were implementing when the people running the project were suddenly no longer with the company.

I was tapped on the shoulder to get the project back on track and enthusiastically accepted the challenge.

The company first sent me off to be educated by Oliver Wight, widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on implementing enterprise software systems at that time.

The critical thing I learned from Ollie was that companies were failing at implementing systems like this because they had a leadership problem. You couldn’t just invest in a system, turn it over to the employees, and expect it to happen. The leaders had to be more intimately involved.

Well, that turned out to be the case. We made a few minor adjustments, and six months later, we successfully implemented the new system.

This company had some of the best executive leaders I have ever worked with. The fact that they were so open to making changes was a testament and credit to their leadership.

Over the next 30 years, I was involved in dozens of more implementations as both an employee and a consultant. And the story was always the same. There was a leadership problem.

Even when I advised companies they had a leadership problem, they didn’t believe me. They had to fail tragically before I could get their attention. “Our employees are highly motivated and will get the job done. There are no problems here,” they said to me.

Then in 2009, I successfully turned around another project when suddenly we had a different kind of leadership problem. Corporate headquarters replaced the current leadership team and no longer wanted anything to do with what the previous group had changed.

That’s when I quit and started on my quest to find better ways to improve our organizations.

I can’t help but notice all the attention and money invested in leadership over my career. Yet, we still see the same leadership problem — over and over.

We still have a leadership problem because more leadership training and coaching aren’t the answer. We need to become less of a human-robot running on autopilot because we were all born leaders!

Updating the structures of our mind

We need to be less of a human robot running on autopilot by updating the structures of our minds for the 21st century!

I don’t have all the answers on how we update our minds’ structures, but I do have living proof of what works — my own leadership journey.

The following six areas of growth are key and the focus of my work here at LeaderONE:

1. Forward thinking. Forward thinking involves thinking, planning, and actions that consider the future and the present. In today’s fast-changing world, the future is already here. That means we need to look beyond traditional ways of living and working based on Industrial Age thinking and practices.

2. Conscious/self leadership. Traditional forms of leadership are grounded in command and control and in doing the things that good leaders do. Traditional leadership is often thought of as the domain of a select few individuals with the “right stuff” at the top of the pyramid. We are now discovering that insight for leadership resides not only in the “other” but is accessible to everyone through newly honed sensibilities of looking and listening within.

3. Inner awareness and intuition. By enhancing our ability to look and listen within, we access greater awareness and creative power to shape our world and be a force for good. If you don’t know what awareness truly is and how to use it, then your awareness is random. When we learn how to direct our awareness, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

4. Inner-leader journey. The inner-leader journey is a personal journey where there is no path. However, there are guides to help us better understand the nature and challenges of the journey.

5. Questions, listening, and dialogue. We can learn to ask new questions that harness our more powerful intuition, helping us discover surprising new answers. A new understanding of how the mind works quiets the mind and opens us up to deeper and more effective levels of listening. In dialogue, we move beyond discussion and championing our point of view to learning how to suspend our opinions, listen more deeply, and then see what that all means for breakthrough vision and action.

6. Understanding how the mind works. A new understanding of how the mind works from the inside out is based on mind, consciousness, and thought principles. With this new understanding, we realize our experiences and feelings are created by our own thoughts, not our circumstances. This new understanding lifts us up beyond where we find ourselves and gets us closer to our wisdom and deeper intelligence.

Insightful comments from others on the leadership problem

In a recent related post I wrote for SpaceB, colleague Liz Guthridge made the following insightful comment on the leadership problem:

“Terrific post, Bill Fox! And we’re going to continue to have a leadership problem until we realize we’ve got to stop cramming people’s heads with more stuff to learn and instead start helping them build more mental, physical, and spiritual capacity to deal with all the increased complexity in our businesses, communities, and world.”

“Outer complexity demands leaders to do inner work, as you’ve discovered for yourself. And so many leaders and those who provide leadership development aren’t fully aware of this, are committed to the current types of training, and are in denial or something else.”

My work at SpaceB has been an ongoing revelation and accounting of how I have changed from the inside out and updated the structures of my mind and continue to do so.

In the coming year, I will focus more on my mission to educate, inspire and empower humans for the 21st century at LeaderONE.

I’ll be making some announcements soon on what I have planned for the coming year. If you’d like to be the first to know, you can join the waitlist at LeaderONE.

— Bill

When I left my corporate job in 2009 with the intention of discovering better ways of introducing change to improve organizations, I didn’t realize what it would set in motion. In hindsight, I realize I had started on a path many call an “inner-leader journey.”

Perhaps one of the most well-known and recognized authorities on that journey is Joseph Jaworski, author of Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership and two other books and chairman of Generon International. In Synchronicity, Jaworski shares the story of his escape from an inauthentic life and his journey to a deeper understanding of leadership. Leadership, he discovered, has more to do with our being — our total orientation of character and consciousness — than with what we do.

From Jaworski, we learn that people and organizations can pass through a journey of inner transformation that enables them to shape the future instead of simply responding to events and circumstances. In Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Carl Jung defined synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” In effect, leaders can learn how to create the conditions for “predictable miracles,” or synchronicity.

One of the most intriguing things we learn from Jaworski is that anyone can choose to be a leader through new capacities that are brought forward when we begin the inner journey. This shifts the conversation on leadership beyond formal power hierarchies. And increasingly in today’s world, hierarchies are weakening throughout most businesses and organizations. Much of the work today now occurs through informal networks and self-managed teams that form, do the work remotely, then dissolve, making the need for leadership at every level and in every person even more critical.

Think and Act in New Ways

We also learn that most of us aren’t very good at perceiving reality as it is. Rather, we relate to internal remembrances of our own history evoked by whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. When we open ourselves up to begin an inner transformation, we begin to see things as they truly are. When we see what is true, we allow something new to show up. We begin to think and act in new ways and interact differently with others. Change happens naturally as a consequence and flows through us to our outer experience.

In 2014, when I read Jaworski’s Synchronicity, I recognized immediately that it was my journey as well. I sought him out and began to learn from him. Since then, I have met many others who are traveling this path, and I have helped others get on the same path.

The inner-leader journey begins within yourself and your state of being. In a recent survey I conducted, one hundred percent of the respondents strongly agree or agree with this statement:

By enhancing our ability to look and listen within, we access greater awareness and creative power to shape our world and be a force for good.

Frankly, I was a bit surprised at the level of support for this statement, although my experience is that most people publicly support traditional business values (more growth, profits, and performance) but privately yearn for a softer, more humanistic, more sustainable approach to work and business.

The survey also revealed that 72% of respondents are in agreement with Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus of Visa International, who said: “Synchronicity [the inner path of leadership] is the path we all must follow in the 21st century.”

Having traveled this path myself, I agree. Again, I found the level of support among respondents to be surprising, especially since these statements expand the scope to include everyone. While the inner path of leadership is not a mainstream business topic, it is a form of leadership that I have observed is gaining more awareness as people become disenchanted with existing forms of leadership and a younger generation moves into leadership positions.

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt that was taken and adapted from our article, The 21st Team Member Is a Leader of One: Themselves, published in the Cutter Amplify Journal. A copy of the article is available from Cutter or contact Bill Fox to request a copy.

Can anyone and everyone be a leader? Has the need ever been more urgent for more people to step into their own leadership?

In my most recent article for Cutter, I make the case for why and how more people start or deepen their “inner-leader journey.”

Cutter editor, Tim Lister, had this to say when he introduced the article:

“Bill Fox wrote our fifth article, which says we must enter into a quest to transform ourselves and learn new ways of living and working together that elevate everyone. He says Industrial Age rules and thinking are limiting us and that today’s times call for team members to have the ability to lead themselves and others, regardless of location or circumstances. Fox advocates for leaders to transform internally in a way that enables them to shape the future rather than just respond to events. “When we open ourselves up to begin an inner transformation, we begin to see things as they truly are. When we see what is true, we allow something new to show up. We begin to think and act in new ways and interact differently with others,” he writes.”

“Fox describes six areas of growth that are key to transformation: forward-thinking, self-leadership, inner awareness and intuition, inner-leader journey, listening and dialogue, and understanding how the mind works. He stresses that insight for new leadership resides not in the “other”; rather, it is accessible to everyone. By enhancing our ability to look and listen within, we shape our world from the inside out, he says.”

View the article online at Cutter or get a downloadable PDF copy:

I hope you will take a few minutes to read the article and let me know what you find most intriguing.

— Bill

P. S. We are launching the Be a Forward Thinking Leader of the Future — Today workshops and online learning in May 2023. Join our mailing list below today for the latest updates.

There’s no shortage of advice on being an effective leader today. Social media and the business press are filled with a constant stream of articles and new books on how to be a better leader.

In his article, The leadership illusion, Dan Howden, VP at Workable, asks, “What would you say about a global industry worth $45 billion annually that was delivering no apparent value?”

Today’s prevailing wisdom is that leadership is all about focusing on others — inspiring, serving, and making better people of others. However, given the apparent lack of leadership in the world today, maybe it’s time for new questions and new thinking.

Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa, clearly believes it’s time for new thinking on leadership and offers a contrarian view.

We were all born leaders; that is until we were sent to school and taught to be managed and to manage.

— Dee Hock, Founder and CEO Emeritus, Visa

Hock believes that in today’s complex world, the first and most important responsibility of a leader is to lead oneself by focusing on our “own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts.”

According to Hock, traditional Industrial-Age thinking and practices on leadership are no longer adequate in an increasingly complex and chaotic world. He believes such a world requires a much different consciousness.

It was Dee Hock who first introduced the world to chaordic leadership. He invented the word when he founded Visa. Chaordic leadership blends chaos and order into a more effective response in a world that’s moving faster and faster every day.

In 1968, Hock convinced BankAmericard to give up ownership and control of their credit card business to form what eventually became known as Visa in 1996.

We take for granted what it might have taken to bring together hundreds of competing bank cards to work together as one. Today, Visa is an almost invisible trillion-dollar entity with thousands of competitors that seamlessly work together to provide a valuable service to businesses and consumers worldwide.

We are all leaders

Earlier this year, I submitted final edits to Cutter for my article, The 21st-Century Team Member Is a Leader of One: Themselves. It will be published in Cutter’s Amplify journal.

After finishing the article, I discovered an essay by Dee Hock on Leadership in Today’s World. In his article, Hock shares what he learned about leadership in a middle-of-the-night encounter with a one-horned mother cow.

You might say it’s an example of the challenges we are all facing today. It’s a fascinating story, so I hope you will take a few minutes to read it.

In my writing and experience, and likewise in Hock’s article, we both believe everyone is a leader. “We were all born leaders; that is until we were sent to school and taught to be managed and to manage.”

The Cutter article makes a case for why it’s time for everyone to rise to the times and express their inherent leadership and why it’s becoming a necessity in today’s chaotic and fast-changing world. I also share how we can awaken this capacity in everyone.

The article is now available online at Cutter or view the PDF.

— Bill