In the last post I referred to different kinds of courage and I will give that topic a little more attention now.
Good enough community leadership has a substantial emotional dimension. This is not often thought to be important – but it is.
Emotion is yet another element that is a bonus in other forms of leadership but essential in us community leaders, who need to be emotionally present to our task on an ongoing basis.
I believe that emotional presence, should, through thorough training and good supervision, become second nature. We need to base much of our decision-making on how we and others feel as a result of our decisions.
This is not necessary, really, in the corporate world – except if it will have negative consequences on profits. Think of all the decisions taken by corporate leaders where people’s livelihoods are put at risk because of redundancies imposed not because the company is not viable, but just to make greater profits!
And in military leadership worrying about how others feel could be very dangerous – after all if I, a leader, worry too much about how a soldier’s children would feel about their Dad being killed it might make me reluctant to send him into battle.
(It is important for me to discriminate between different forms of leadership here because of the influence of the corporate world on leadership in organisations within the Pillars).
I believe that if we are emotionally present we will be far more alert to potential leadership which can be applied and encouraged at all levels of our organisation. This is because we have bodily awareness of what is going on around us as well as cognitive awareness. We use our intuition a lot more and this in turn encourages others to use their intuition also.
Attending to the essentials is easy to write down but when people have strong feelings (emotions) about what should be done, attended to, not attended to, etc. maintaining the focus of our mission and vision can be very challenging.
It requires clear thinking, confident articulation, fair dollops of moral courage and above all the ability and willingness to take responsibility for decisions we make.