As humans and leaders, we all strive to lead from the best place we can to help our teams be successful. We strive to lead from a place of openness, curiosity, and to learn and grow as humans. There’s a growing term for this called “Conscious leadership.” I read a book called “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership,” that spends more time on this subject and is packed with some really great insights. More than anything, conscious leadership focuses on self awareness and understanding how you handle yourself in stressful situations so you can remain in control and make the best decision possible.
The opposite of this is unconscious leadership. Unconscious leadership generally takes the form of defensiveness or not being open to the ideas and thoughts of others. It might even sound like a “my way or the highway” type of conversation. Unconscious leadership also misses the mark in a big way when it comes to personal responsibility and taking ownership of your actions and behaviors. It often shows up as you being the victim or the bully.
I’d like to share a story with you about Nate. Nate was in the C-Suite of an organization of approximately 300 people. I was brought in to work with Nate because of a number of complaints that were happening internally and had unfortunately spilled beyond the office into a pending discrimination case.
I started Nate on our psychometric evaluations and came to understand that Nate, while incredibly empathetic, was not very self-aware when it came to understanding his own emotions and also really struggled with resiliency. He loved the job. He loved the work. He truly enjoyed coaching others to help them succeed, but that’s not the version of Nate that his team often saw.
To explain this a little further and really pinpoint the problem, Nate seemed to have very little control over his emotions, and one minute could be the most understanding guy, and the next you could be getting yelled at for something that happened a few days ago. Nate was just unpredictable.
This unpredictability left Nate’s team very unsure of which person they were going to get on which day. To add even more to this story, Nate had recently turned over approximately ½ of his department. When those who left were given an exit interview, many of them sighted Nate as the main reason they were leaving.
Nate is a great example of unconscious leadership. When Nate was stressed, he reacted emotionally and couldn’t see past the moment of how it was affecting him. He couldn’t move from being the victim in the moment. Because of this inability to do what conscious leadership calls “being above the line,” Nate was the victim and the bully, and therefore Nate’s team was also the victim of his inability to elevate into a more conscious state of mind.
Nate and I began working on seeing this pattern and learning to move from a “below the line” or unconscious state, into a state of conscious leadership to help him see how his actions and behaviors were affecting his team. We started with understanding that Nate’s viewpoint was not the only one that mattered. In stressful situations, Nate’s team was looking to him for guidance and ways to solve issues, and an environment of curiosity and learning, not to watch him melt down and lash out. Nate and I also worked on behaviors and skills to help him be more resilient during challenging times.
Conscious leaders have learned to look first at their own reactions and behaviors to make decisions and solve problems. As leaders, we cannot remain victims. By the nature of our position in the workforce and what we’re paid to do, we must move from a victim mentality below the line to become conscious and aware leaders who understand their actions.
As a conscious leader, there are 3 levels of perspective that need to be developed in order to remain “above the line” of a victim mindset. Below is a brief overview of these mental frameworks as well as the “below the line” starting point:
Below the line: Victim mentality. These things happened to me. I must protect myself. Decisions made at this level rarely have good outcomes for the team, often resulting in win/lose or lose/lose scenarios.
By Me: This is the first step above the “victim” line to look at consciously understanding your actions and behaviors. A great place to start here is by using the sentence “The cause of my reaction is ______.” For Nate, he could have listed a number of things here. Whether it was lower self-awareness or a lack of resiliency through challenges. Regardless of what he chose, he’s able to take a step back and understand that he is emotionally reacting to something and can control that behavior.
Through me: This is the next step in the process. Now that we’ve identified the cause, let’s take a look at the effect. In this stage, you recognize and notice something beyond yourself. In the “by me” section above, we focused on “The cause of my reaction is ______.” Now we’re going to add to that sentence “and this reaction is creating _______ effect.” In Nate’s case, his emotional reaction caused him to lash out at his employees to create these negative experiences that were driving people away. As Nate began to understand this, he began giving himself mental space to process these emotions in the moment and learn new skills to help him keep his emotions in check. This allowed Nate to show up better for his team in those stressful moments. It gave him the ability to see beyond himself to see how he, and the stressful situation, were affecting his team.
As Me: This is taking all the pieces and putting them together, in the moment, and staying conscious of your inner personal state.The goal of this level is that you are aware of events as they unfold, can still remain aware of how they are affecting you, and how you adjust your behavior in the moment to stay open and curious to seek the best solution. It’s taking the two parts of the sentences we just reviewed and putting them together. For Nate, it was understanding that “The cause of his reaction was his low emotional threshold. Because of his low emotional threshold, Nate was taking his emotional instability in the moment out on his team, which was causing them to lose trust in Nate as a leader.
As Nate and I worked together to uncover all of this, it was like a light bulb went on for him and how he needed to behave as a leader. He learned to look past himself as the victim in the moment and begin thinking at a higher level about what he needed to do to help his team be successful. He was able to see past being the victim in the moment and begin to take actions that helped empower his team to not only make it through challenges, but to also trust that Nate would lead them through it.
As leaders, we’re all a little like Nate. We’re humans who are doing the best they can. While we all strive to be at the “As Me” level where we’re able to consciously control our thoughts and behaviors, we’re not always going to be there. What we can do though, is focus on staying above the victim line so we can remain conscious of our actions and behaviors to help create solutions where everyone wins.
That is conscious leadership.
If this discussion helped you see growth opportunities in your leadership, I invite you to reach out and schedule an appointment with us. At Mission Squared, our goal is to help leaders be better equipped to manage themselves and their teams through adversity to create stronger teams and better businesses.