Do we still / again need Leaders?

Current economic and political situation in the world with all perturbations is a big puzzle for me whether we are having or not the leaders.

Manuel Lima in his TED talk A visual history of human knowledge explains that “for a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or "Scala naturae" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories.”

Consequentially we accepted some kind of leadership whether of a real person or imaginative / invented super being. Normal people were part of a branching scheme of the tree depending on their power or wealth or importance. This concept is in fact such a powerful metaphor for organizing big communities, organizations, countries or super national entities or conveying information to map a variety of systems of knowledge that still persists in our understanding of organizational order.

At the end of the Cold war things somehow started to fall apart. World became globally connected via air transport and mostly due to evolution of Internet. To be precise I think the Internet is actually changing the tree paradigm we lived thousands of years, quite a lot and pretty fast.

Information is not any more spread via top down approach which gave top people the power of it. Organizational schemes are flattening. Even such organizations as armies follow the new principle when teaching combats units how to behave in the battle. It is dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no top leader leading the whole combat process. Rather, any soldier should or could take command if necessity of circumstances requires so.

What we experiences today is the shift from trees structures into networks. Networks really embody notions of decentralization. Bring in interconnectedness. And the most important people, knowledge, information, organizations, countries and more become interdependent. A fact so well embodied in Nature that we keep forgetting all the times. For a moment think of your body. How many cells you have, organs, extremities. Do you feel each finger all the times? No, all these work in unity. But your body is not alone in the Universe …. Therefore, interconnectivity or better entanglement is a natural order.

Even more, this new way of networked thinking is critical to solve many of nowadays’ complex problems we face. From decoding the human genome or brain up to understanding the vast Universe we live in.

Back to the topic in question – is there a space for a leader in such network notions?

The Difference between Helping and Fixing

Leaders are there to help, managers to fix.

Agree?

Probably hard to claim this could be the final truth.

When helping someone then (obviously) you have to know better or more than the person you are helping. So, helping in ‘the wrong way’ demonstrates non-equality of the people involved thus becoming a relationship between non-equals.

There are times when we help a friend or co-worker during tough times. Does this kind of help require (owe) a favor in return? Or, is this help a sincere one with no expectation of returned favor?

Trying hard to help someone has it happened to you that you have inadvertently ‘helped’ in a way that it actually took away from people more than you could ever “give” them?

I remember my first weeks arranging my life in Seville. I was so many times lost and had to ask for help. And most of the times I got it only to discover that people, in their desire to help, sent me in the wrong direction.

There’s another way to help: we could help in a way that the receiver will eventually develop new abilities or knowledge and not just receive your help and your past knowledge.

And what would a help with a sincere and open approach be like?

Picture a small kid playing with toys: trying all over again to build a tower with bricks and it keeps collapsing all the times. After a while you step in and demonstrate how to do it. What exactly have you thought the child by your action? That depends on the way you have helped: you may have as well diminished kid’s self-esteem, sense of worth, integrity and/or wholeness. But, the help could be given with the right stimuli, motivation and by asking what goes where … it is a proactive way of helping that ultimately builds trust and knowledge.

With a sincere help you simply share your knowledge or you figure out what’s your help’s value to other person or when you give a transparent feedback. You do not expect anything in return. You just help the other to grow and learn. Help is also when (good) leaders take the time out of their busy day to help a follower or co-worker in need but unable to solve a problem. They’ll sure remember your help.

What about ‘fixing’?

What do People Want from Leaders?

We mostly talk about leaders and what constitutes to be a leader. What about followers – do they have any role?

Hearing Lao Tzu one can figure out what was found important long ago: "I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men."

How about today?

The Gallup informs us that the ‘vision thing’ pales in comparison to instilling trust, compassion, stability, and hope when debating what followers expect from their leaders.

Is it any different from the past?

I do not think so, just the wording is kind of more puzzled when reading ancient texts. What I understand is that followers expect a lot from their leaders. When they don’t get what they expect the first thing they begin to lose is trust and respect for their leader.

What I would expect from the followers is their hope for leaders to have greater emotional intelligence – what Daniel Goleman has already introduced in the previous century. With it a leader connects more intuitively with his followers. But this connection is never one way. Followers anticipate to be heard, understood and given enough attention to feel that their contributions and opinions matter. They envisage a leader to become opportunity enabler and an exceptional coach for them to help improve their performance.

Best Practices That Drive Adaptability

“Better to spend three years looking for a good master than ten years training with a bad one.” Wushu wisdom.

We live in a fast changing world where “being stable” means being adjustable. Only people who lost their adaptability naturally resist change (see: How to Guide Your Change). They become rigid which is the opposite of stable.

In Martial Arts adaptability is the principle of the Bruce Lee’s idea of giving with adversity, to bend slightly and spring back stronger than before and finally to adapt oneself harmoniously to the opponent’s movements without striving or resisting. During a competition or fight you have to adjust to the environment, your opponent, and to the mistakes you and your opponent make. This you can only do by being stable, flexible and adaptive.

Nature is a prime example of adaptability. Even big trees should be flexible and adaptive to grow stable. They adjust to the surrounding environment, to the winds and become even more stable. If not, they are uprooted. They don’t consume extra energy to rise straight up. For them it is natural to adapt to the soil declination when growing.

Water is the next good example mostly used in martial arts as a material to ‘replicate’. In China they used to say: water purifies and refreshes all living creatures, water without restraint and fear trickles through the surface of most things, water is fluid and adaptive, water which is in harmony with the laws of Nature. Water is soft but can cut through the hills and hard rock. Water “makes” it by adapting.

In everyday life there is an abundance of events and issues that require our adaptation.

Are we able to adapt or not quickly enough?

How to Guide Your Change

“Change is the only constant in life” Heraclitus.

Then why are we so afraid of it?

In the post Organizational change I have written that employees, others as well, perceive stability as security and therefore normally oppose changes. Such perceptions present difficulties or even block a change.

Where, then, is the exit door to ‘changing’ that?

Let’s start with a simple question: what do I want to be?

The answer does not lay within New Year’s resolutions where we write down our wishes and intentions on a piece of paper, store it in a bottle and launch it to sea, hoping it will manifest by itself! No. The Universe isn’t going to make this happen. You are the only one to do it!

So, how then?

Fajin Power that radically changes your Leadership

Fajin or fa chin is a term used in some Chinese Martial Arts …

When I first heard the term I didn’t know what to think of it. If your background is natural science you know that MOMENTUM is the product of the mass and velocity of an object and that the net FORCE acting upon an object is equal to the rate at which its momentum changes with time. You’ve also learned that POWER is equivalent to an amount of energy consumed per time unit.

If everything is already explained by physics, what now with this Fajin?

Let’s see what Fajin is and then how a person could practice and achieve this skill in Tai Chi practice.

 

In Chinese, the character ‘Fa’ literally means ‘to issue’, ‘to discharge’, ‘to send out’, whereas ‘Jin’ is a little more difficult to translate. Dictionary term is ‘strength / force’ but does not fully express the correct difference between ‘strength’ in Chinese ‘Li’ and ‘Jin’ in Tai Chi. The best description between ‘Li’ and ‘Jin’ is that the latter is generated by the whole body and is able to permeate the four limbs while the first is bogged down in the shoulder and the back.

Difficult to understand?

For me it was. So let me give you some hints.

In Tai Chi classic The song of Thirteen Postures it is said: “To store the Jin is like pulling open a bow, to issue the Jin (with Fajin) is like letting the arrow fly”. “The root of Fajin lies in the feet and is issued from the feet, controlled by the waist and transmitted to finger tips.”

Still having trouble understanding?

Ideas to Spark Positive Motivation

We recently got a puppy Xia. She entered our hearts immediately although Biba left us not long time ago (see: Lesson of Leadership by Biba).

We rescued Biba from the shelter when she was about one year old. Xia came to us eight weeks old from a breeder. This time we did not hesitate to start educating Xia right away. In the first weeks we tried “old” school techniques according to our previous experiences but they were not working well. So we decided to get an instructor to teach much more us than her. The instructor was very confident in telling us that his principle is a positive motivation that is easy for dogs and hard for owners. And it proved so all over again!

We were awarding Xia (with briquettes) whenever she was doing something that we actually wanted her to do in the way the instructor taught us. Xia was not receiving her food at home but was fed out throughout a day and practically for every single briquette had to do something. In two weeks’ time she was completely clean. As dogs are more inclined to “understand” gesticulation and not words we had to learn right gestures. When she understood them we gradually added words to them. All this time whenever she behaved “properly” she was rewarded with food from our hand. Wrong doings were overlooked but not punished. Until something was done rights, she did not get food. Xia almost immediately learned what brings her food.

The instructor told us that normally the repetition of 10.000 times makes the command stored to dog’s musculature “memory”. How equal to us! (See: How To unify Body, Mind and Spirit). Practically the same goes in practicing martial arts: “If you want to really learn something you have to repeat it 10.000 times!”