Leadership presence is the ability to stay grounded, attentive and responsive when the situation is complex and your usual methods aren’t enough. It isn’t charisma; it’s a trainable capacity built on attention, self-regulation and a felt sense of what is happening in the room. This piece sets out why it matters now and how it develops.
In both everyday life and in situations of leadership, complicated no longer describes the environment or the goal. Complex defines the day. What you’ve always counted on before—yourself, your skills, your proven methods—no longer works sufficiently. You need something new, you realize. But what?
—Doug SilsbeeAt all levels of organizations, ever greater demands are being placed upon us to manage ever greater levels of complexity, depleting critical resources such as attention, focus, energy, health, and relational and cognitive capacities.
Equally, all too often the old methods prove to be no longer fit for purpose. The negative downstream effects of it all on creativity, communication, innovation, motivation, productivity, well-being and ultimately the bottom line become inevitably apparent throughout the organizational ecosystem.
Clearly, an evolution of skillsets is required to optimally meet these new circumstances — as leaders, as teams and as individuals. Yet what are these upgraded skillsets?
Change is so often attempted as a top-down process: perhaps by mandating it from above (an executive decision), by acquiring some shiny new techniques, or by acting like the thing one wants to become in the hope of magically transforming into some new kind of evolved person, or manifesting a whole new situation. While these strategies may even offer some temporary impression of shift, real transformation never happens at the program level.
The well-worn grooves of habit, the ingrained ruts of our conditioned neurobiology, and the systemic conditioning will still be deeply committed to the old ways of operating — and inevitably that programming wins out over any new resolutions, no matter how ardent.
Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, describes this built-in effect as an “immunity to change.” System program ultimately overrides top-down decision.
Leadership in its essence is the capacity to shift the inner place from which we operate. Once they understand how, leaders can build the capacity of their systems to operate differently…
True lasting change has to be effected from inner to out. It must become embodied in the system. To do so we begin by addressing the inner environment — at the level of individual, team and organization — as a way to effect the upgrade needed. That change must begin with the key individuals, with leaders, in order for the system to begin to reorganize around the new way of being.
Curious how this lands in your organization? The assistant can point you to the right program, or you can tell us what’s going on.
