Quantified Results for What Was Once Considered a “Soft Skill”
What’s preventing your company from reaching the next level? Diagnosing that organizational challenge surely requires equal measures of tenacity and patience. But getting to the underlying reasons that might explain why your organization isn’t consistently reaching its full potential demands a fresh look at individual leadership at the top of the organization.
The critical nature and organizational multiplier effect of executive-level leadership often drives or drains investments meant to lift business performance, and behavioral science has pointed to the role so-called emotional intelligence plays in leaders’ decision-making. But a richer body of knowledge—one that recognizes Conscious Leadership as a critical indicator of business performance and organizational capability—is now emerging and revealing how negative behaviors and deeply ingrained individual belief systems inhibit productivity on a scale not previously explored. Even more far-reaching are the strategies and insight that Conscious Leadership presents to significantly improve engagement, retention and performance.
“While other approaches involve managing your emotions and being aware of your impact on people, says Steven M. Swavely, Ph.D., senior consultant and psychologist with Farr Associates, Conscious Leadership takes it a step further in assessing leadership effectiveness beyond just emotions that may be driving automatic or reflex behaviors but also examines an individuals’ belief systems and how those beliefs drive behaviors.”
Many people, including many successful business leaders, Swavely contends, aren’t fully aware of how those parts of their overall belief systems, such as their thoughts, intuition, and skill in recognizing the emotional states of other people, regularly defines their outcomes with their followers and the situational outcomes. Each of these personal inventories impacts the decisions leaders make and the behaviors they display. These subconscious or “unaware” behavioral drivers, Farr Associates’ research shows, can frequently sabotage individuals’ own best efforts.
Conscious Leadership requires an individual to acknowledge their beliefs and biases and how they influence his or her situational awareness, to understand other people’s points of view, and to discern, for example, when to be assertive and when to allow others to take the lead.
According to Swavely, “The key to becoming a Conscious Leader lies in bringing into awareness those belief systems that reside in the unawareness and then recognizing how they can sabotage even our best efforts to achieve success and high performance. This is especially true during times of organizational and individual stress. Since this unawareness results from a combination of how the mind works and the brain is wired, advances in neuropsychology have improved our understanding of how to achieve this objective.”
The bottom line is that Conscious Leadership keeps a leader focused on critical business objectives. With these specific goals in mind leaders don’t get derailed based on some previously unaware bias or emotional reaction that takes away the clarity of their decision-making. This leads to more effectively meeting their goals and achieving their company’s strategic objectives more efficiently.
