Leaders, Values and Consciousness
At this time of extraordinary challenge to civilisation and planet alike, strong, visionary leaders are needed as never before, yet with very few exceptions leadership at every level of society is weak and visionary leadership is rare.
The institutional collapses we’ve seen in business, in finance and banking, in regulation and governance, in the church, are consequences of a leadership deficit that has facilitated a gradual erosion of the moral base on which those institutions were founded, making it possible for unprincipled leaders to opt out of responsibility for their own behaviour - so long as that behaviour is ‘within the law’.
Not enough people are conscious of the connection between the work they do and the global reality. Few link that external reality with the inner world of personal values. The result has been a concentrated focus on self-interest that has fuelled a widespread breakdown of trust and respect - the ‘glue’ human communities need to function well. And in all walks of life leaders are in denial about the reality of the world they’ve helped create. It’s ‘business as usual’ with no clarity about direction beyond growth, and no ethical foundation or principles at work to say what’s not for sale when it comes to decision-making.
Applying more regulation or stiffer penalties won’t produce moral leaders. What’s needed is a radical shift in the values and consciousness in the leadership of organisations that facilitates an easing of the fixation with self-interest and an awakening to a more truthful context for decisions and behaviour, so that more prudent, principled approaches to everything we do can evolve.
The more evolved we are, the more of the world is in our sights. With technology we’ve conquered the physical world. The next great human project is to make the connection between the physical world we experience and our inner world of values and consciousness, and to use all of the capacities unique to human beings: our power to think, to care, and to choose mature moral responses. And it’s up to leaders everywhere to set the example.
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"Instead of looking a the ‘broken bits’ of our organisation to find out how we might fix them we’re looking at them, finding patterns and themes, trying to listen to them, recognising that they are not objects to be fixed but hold a story worth listening to."