Navigating the Shift to Aware Conscious Leadership
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Shine a light on how your level of leadership awareness affects your success and employee morale. Identify whether you're 'unaware', 'sort of aware' or 'consciously aware', and discover strategies to enhance your leadership.
Conscious Leadership and Awareness
Being far more aware of what’s going on around and within us provides a wealth of information that can uplevel our decision-making. This awareness opens doors to fresh insights, greater clarity, and wisdom, all while dramatically reducing our stress levels.
But to be a truly conscious leader, how aware do we need to be?
Defining Leadership: Three Vantage Points
Let’s look at this from three vantage points of different types of business owners:
- The Standard: Full-certified unconscious leaders
- Leaders who are pretty aware but not yet actualized as conscious leaders
- Conscious leaders
Case Study: Addressing Employee Dissatisfaction
Let’s say that we own a company that has been turning a steady profit for the last five years. Profits haven’t grown over those years, so in a sense, we’ve been stagnating. This past year, we expanded our offerings without onboarding new team members and realized a 15% rise in net profit.
The strain of achieving this has resulted in widespread employee dissatisfaction regarding teams being stressed and under-resourced.
Leadership Without Awareness: Risks and Consequences
With the increase in company profits, we give ourselves a very healthy year-end bonus. We took the risk, kicked butt, and get to enjoy our just rewards.
We dole out team bonuses because some of them worked hard too and this will make them happy. The problem with this is that being deaf to our teams needs and our own motivations is a recipe for failure.
This is where we need a good bullshit detector on our team!
How many stress claims will we endure and pay for, as well as rising workers’ comp premiums? How much money will be lost to training new team members as every disaffected employee leaves?
What about the impact on present and future productivity as morale sinks? And how about our team members’ quality of life? The impact we have not only on them, but their families?
Partially Aware Leadership: The Struggle of Ignoring Reality
In this scenario, our need for short-term gratification carries too much weight and drives us to blind ourselves to what’s going on.
ln the back of our minds we know that their bonuses are really a veiled attempt to pacify and silence the employee pushback about being overworked and under-resourced.
We realize that we’re not actually addressing the problems we’ve created but we don’t really want to because that will mean we can’t have everything that we want.
We bury this awareness so it doesn’t interfere with our vacation to Machu Picchu and enjoying the fruits of their labor. But within us, this awareness surfaces from time to time, and haunts us.
That haunting is our conscience sending us a message that we’ve acted out of alignment with our values and what we know to be wise or right or good or kind in a situation.
The Cost of Ignorance and Partial Awareness
This middle ground between not aware and conscious leadership is actually more difficult and painful than simply being ignorant — because in this mode, we, and our teams, will not only have all the negative impacts of a leader who is not truly aware, but we’ll be haunted by it as well.
Sorry about that. But now you’ve read this so there’s no turning back. Onward to conscious leadership.
Conscious Leadership: Maximizing Awareness for Wise Decision-Making
As conscious leaders, we don’t pretend our team is fine and that throwing some money their way will pacify them. We recognize that they are stressed and we care about that for their well-being and the long-term well-being of the company.
We know that it’s important for them to feel heard, and that they do need more resources. We’re also mindful that we have needs too, and that one of the reasons we created the company and have worked our butts off was to receive some bounty.
Taking all of this into account, we assess solutions that reasonably meet all of these needs, best we can.
Living and Leading Consciously
Awareness helps us be in touch with our feelings, our values, our genius — providing important information that results in a greater capacity for wise decision-making.
With awareness, we’re able to see a much clearer, less distorted, and bigger picture of what’s going on. This is essential in that it guides us as to how to best invest our resources in care for our company, its employees, and ourselves — for the present and the future.
Unleash your Brilliance as a Conscious Leader
It's my mission to support people in leading with unyielding integrity, clarity, and authenticity. If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to lead more powerfully and effectively, feel free to reach out at connect@evolvingceo.com to set up a time to connect.
To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.
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