Conscious Leadership: What Is It & Why Should You Care?

This is the first of a series of articles exploring the importance of Conscious Leadership in today’s business world.

Much these days has been talked about in business circles about the need to take a more conscious approach in how leaders conduct business.  This includes how they are in relationship with customers, employees, suppliers, their community and the environment.  There is much more widespread recognition that focusing on profit alone is too narrow a view.

For instance, a recent article in the Huffington Post featured “11 reasons to love Costco that have nothing to do with shopping”.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/reasons-love-costco_n_4275774.html

Yet profit matters. Without financial resources, a company cannot afford to pay its employees who cannot afford to support their families. Without financial resources, a company cannot invest in R&D, cannot continue to invest in its growth and development – not even the growth and development of its people. Staying focused on profitability is a good thing.

But what else is there? Could something beyond profits be even more important? How about the view that profit is an outcome of a much bigger pursuit? What is your bigger pursuit?

What is it that deeply matters to you above and beyond the organization/team you are in charge of? How will you pursue what deeply matters to you? Does this include more than satisfying the Board/investors by making more money than the previous Quarter? How do you satisfy them as well as satisfy your need to be in service in a much bigger/broader/deeper way? What if you and the Board shared this broader view of ‘business’?

These are the kinds of questions/considerations that a Conscious Leader will be focused on and be engaged in satisfying.

Conscious Leaders engage in Conscious Leadership by way of who they are, how they see things, how they make meaning of things, what they stand for, their ability to be both strong and compassionate, both long-term focused and present moment attentive, both innovative and rigorous as needed, etc. Yet they are not super-human or super-machine. They are who they are and they know it and they are not afraid to show it. If they don’t know something or have made a mistake, they’ll be the first to admit it. That kind of leader.

In fact, these kinds of Conscious Leaders who led their respective Conscious Businesses such as Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Costco, Caterpillar and others outperformed the S&P500 by more than 1500% over a 15-year period (1996-2011) Source: Updated data originally published in Sisioda, R, Wolfe, DB & Sheth JN: Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007

In this series we will describe characteristics of a Conscious Leader’s Way of Leading by looking at how a leader views the world and how he/she is enacting their view in service of making their organization, community and the world a better place.

We will look at how a Conscious Leader is keenly aware and awake to:

• Themselves — who they are, what they stand for; how much of that is similar and different than others in their circle of influence;
• What they wish to accomplish beyond ego needs;
• How they can extend themselves just a little every day beyond their comfort zone in pursuit of a purpose bigger than themselves and/or their company’s profit-making;
• How to be in service of who/what they consider to be important.
• Who else are they able to include in serving the ‘cause’ because those other people are aligned, inspired and want to be in service in their own unique way.