Best Leadership Practices .... Part 2

In part 1 of this blog, I talked about keeping it simple. In part 2, we'll talk about another mission-critical task for leaders:

changing your consciousness.

Just as children learn to crawl, then walk, then run, so too do adults have developmental tasks they must achieve. These days, many psychological researchers including Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber are pointing out that the largest developmental task is broadening your consciousness.

Clam bake, anyone?

In a recent report in Nature magazine, scientist have discovered physical evidence that early humans held the technology to have a clambake ... over 164,000 years ago, which is far earlier than scientists had thought.

While is appears to be child's play today, the ability to have a clambake required a certain level of consciousness development. According to the article, it actually took thousands of years for that clambake technology to become widespread.

Unfortunately, we don't have 1,000's of years for new levels of consciousness to emerge. The well-established threat of global warming, and our continued use of violence to solve problems has put us on a race with the clock. There's no guarantee that humanity will survive.

Emerging levels of consciousness, referred to as post-rational (which I wrote about in my book The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching) are what will get us out of this mess.
To be effective, leaders need to be on the forefront of consciousness development.

We'll talk more about consciousness development in the near future.


BOTTOM LINE: Best leadership practices for the 21st century include leaders developing their consciousness