Why a new kind of training in organisational and group leadership is needed
"There are no parts - only participants" Hans Peter Duerr
What is the most important asset of an organisation? People (everybody knows that, these days everybody even says that - see for example http://www.tompeters.com/slides/content.php - Part 3: Talent). But what does that actually mean in practice ?
Are people working to their full potential, as individuals or as teams ? How would we gauge a potential that is as yet not manifest ? Until we access that greater potential and are actually eating the proof of the pudding, we won't really know. We are currently liable to extrapolate only on the basis of what we know and what we take to be normal. In an age of unprecedented speed of change, that is not a useful or realistic guideline (have a look what futurologist Ray Kurzweil has to say about this).
What will make the biggest difference to how people work and how they work together ? WHAT they think or HOW they think ? Their conscious thoughts and intentions or their underlying beliefs, feelings and attitudes ? Their mental inventory or their psychology ? You can just about control what people say and what they do outwardly. Using current models of psychology, you can try and influence what they think. But to affect how they think (as well as how they feel, and how they behave spontaneously), you will need a new kind of psychology.
What will make the biggest difference to people's psychology ? Your leadership and your psychology and communication.
Do you want to invest in people - how about investing in yourself ? The Communitas Project is an ideal environment to support the holistic, multi-dimensional development of your unique reservoir of multiple intelligences: emotional as well as rational, social as well as psychological, left-brain as well as right-brain, intuitive as well as reflective, embodied as well as abstract, inner as well as outer.
Most traditional and currently established leadership training is predominantly left-brain and didactic, both in its aims and how it is delivered. It imparts relevant knowledge and models. It works well in predictable situations where the principles and conclusions of the past can be expected to still be applicable to the present. It is built on vision, strategy, planning, with a simple linear timeline stretching from a precisely analysed present into a desirable future. It suits the kind of leadership that is required in a fairly closed, circumscribed system that can be overseen, where the inputs and outputs can be monitored, with all the executive functions located at the centre, the kind of organisation that has a father-figure at the helm.
In short, the principles of currently established leadership training are best suited to leaders in the kind of organisation that was predominant 100 or maybe still 70 years ago - in essence a Victorian organisation: the typical family business of early capitalism. That kind of training does not prepare or support leaders in a globally connected 21st-century organisation in the post-information age. That kind of training is also rooted in a psychology that is Victorian in origin.
What is a Victorian psychology ?
to be continued ....