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Leaders need
feelings
Leaders who are disconnected from
their sense of humanity are likely to behave unethically
by Margot Cairnes
It never ceases to amaze me that people fight
feelings. I remember running a workshop and on the first
day I asked people once how they felt and got them to
visualise one outcome. On the second day I asked them
again how they felt. "You have already made us feel
twice" barked one manager "You're not going to get me to
feel again."
Life brings with it feelings. One of the things that we
humans pride ourselves on is that we have emotions. We
feel at a higher order than other animals or so we like
to think. So why are people so keen to hide, ignore,
repress or deny how they feel?
There are many reasons. Some arise from our families.
When we were growing up we learned sometimes to deny our
true emotional response to comply with what we thought
was expected of us. Possibly we were living in
environments that punished us for being sensitive and
aware of our emotions. Environments dominated by an
addict for example are characterised by the fact that
only one reality is allowable and that is the reality of
the addict.
So alcoholic parents beat and emotionally freeze out
their children with no remorse because the only thing
that really matters to the addict is their next fix.
That the children are scared, broken, or in danger is
ignored.
In organisations too, where bosses are obsessed with
results, certain priorities, or their own importance,
the emotional and physical needs and reality of
non-power players are ignored. Comply with the dominant
culture or get out!
Women have suffered greatly as a result of this
thinking. Increasingly research tells us that women and
men see the world differently. Organisations can be
perceived as addictive environments since they
frequently disallow female reality, resulting in the
mass refusal by women to pursue corporate careers to
positions of senior authority. Sanity dictates that
women hang on to their own reality rather than discard
this to comply with organisation cultures that
legitimise only one way of operating.
If people do try to maintain their own reality while
operating in environments where individuals and their
psychological well-being aren't nurtured they find that
the pain of feeling becomes excruciating. It seems sane
in these situations to shut down.
However, we do this at our own cost. Our emotions bring
with them a huge amount of information about the world
in which we live. They tell us when we are safe, and
when we are in danger. If we unconsciously shut down our
emotions we may be placing ourselves at risk.
It has been a practice in organisations over the last
few decades to discard anyone over 50 years of age.
There is good reason for this. By 50 most people are so
emotionally shut down they are almost emotionally dead.
Emotionally dead people don't respond quickly to changes
in their environment. They have difficult processing new
information, difficulty relating to others and
difficulty adapting their behaviour.
Bringing people back to emotional life is difficult, so
organisations replace the old lot with young people who
are then progressively shut down.
Of course some individuals chose not to play this game -
at a cost. They then feel what it's like to spend 8 - 12
hours a day in an environment where only one reality is
acceptable. Here denial of the personal and commitment
to often unrealistic and inhuman objectives is the norm.
They feel the human cost of organisational politics or
of existing in rigid and stifling systems.
If they have enough external support they do however
stay emotionally alive. This allows them to see outside
the box (for which they are sometimes rewarded and
sometimes punished), it allows them to intuit their way
through organisational politics and stay emotionally
present in key relationships. If they are tough enough
they can stay alive in a world that demands the energy
of emotions but is almost crippling for anyone who is
sensitised to human feeling.
The great cost of all this is not only to the individual
but to society. That most leaders have had to deaden
their emotions to get through the battle field of
organisational politics is hardly something about which
we should all rejoice. That organisations pollute, cheat
on their tax and engage in otherwise less than ethical
practices is largely due to the fact that many leaders
have deadened that part of themselves that links them
emotionally to other members of the human family.
Movies like "Wall Street" show us an extreme example,
but most corporate leaders are emotionally inhuman to
some extent. If they weren't they wouldn't have made it
that far.
The solution to all this is far from easy. If real
change is to come from within the system it needs to
come from the top, from the people who have come through
the current system and paid the price that the system
extracts as a right of passage. If change comes from
outside the system from smaller more human organisations
(small business being the fastest growing sector of the
world economy) then we can expect corporate leaders to
fight to retain their current positions of privilege.
Some leaders, however, are choosing for personal and
ethical reasons, to learn new ways of being. This is
rarely comfortable and is usually questioned by those
around them. Such leaders are choosing to look at the
psychological patterns and cultural realities that have
led them to be the way they are and to operate the way
they do. This process is difficult to do without the
support of a skilled guide; and such guides aren't easy
to find.
Forget in-house mentors. Supporting someone to be a
full, alive human being who has the strength necessary
to survive corporate politics and forge a leadership
path forward through the malaise of denial and
group-think that exist in most organisations is a job
for skilled independant experts.
They are however worth finding. Rapid technological
change and the information revolution are demanding that
we all change at a speed that necessitates emotional
presence and consciousness as to our psychological
drivers. If large organisations are to survive global
pressures for rapid response under conditions of ongoing
chaotic change we will have to find new ways forward.
This isn't just about learning new skills, it is about
letting go of ways of operating that actually undermine
our humanity.
So yes we do have to feel again and again. And in that
feeling might be pain and discomfort, fear and grief,
but there will also be joy and love and connection to
the human and physical environment in which live. From
such a connection we might just make the kinds of
decisions that will enrich our lives and save our planet
from grievous harm.
Copyright
ã Margot
Cairnes
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