It’s time to revise the meaning of Leadership. The times of the ego driven leader, who is not able to lead from his heart, is not able to use his powers in a connective way and is not able to make wise decisions for the company and the society, are over. True leaders need to find a balance between power, wisdom and love. Love, meaning being totally open and respectful towards others. Power, meaning being able to serve your organization & society, stay connected to your own purpose and take clear actions. Wisdom, meaning being able to go beyond your ego and finding a balance between analytical and intuitive thinking.
What is then actually the crucial part of Leadership in 2020 and beyond? The key task of a Leader in 2020 is to create wholeness and connection. Wholeness in the sense that there is a flow of energy between all parts of the organization. Connection in the sense that the people in the organization have open connections with each other and are connected with society and the planet. The key skill of a leader will then to master his energy: being able to manage his own energy, set the energy in the room, being able to tune into the energy of the people in the room, hold this energy and being able to bring these energies into matter.
So leaders in 2020 and beyond need to create wholeness, flow, and connection and they need to master their own energy and the energy of the people around them. In that sense leaders are healers, because heal literally means “to make healthy, whole, or sound” and heal practically means you create flow and connection between the different parts of a system.
To be able to create wholeness and flow, leaders need to make a paradigm shift in their worldview from a Newtonian - to a quantum view. The Newtonian view is our dominant thinking paradigm since people like Newton and Descartes formed our way of thinking. The core of their thinking was to separate the conscious self, the mind from the matter. This created a mechanistic and dualistic view of the world, which has formed the basis of our current dominant world view about economics, psychology, philosophy, business, nature and lots of other things. This brought us a lot growth in several ways, but also diminished our capacity to use the different layers of intelligences and created the illusion of separation.
By focusing on rational & analytical & scientifical & materialistic & dualistic thinking we have slowly diminished our capacity to sense more than we can see, our capacity to connect with nature and our ability to develop our consciousness. The result is that we are trying to solve challenges in the world, with just a small part of our intelligence, only seeing a part of the reality around us and not being able to create space for our consciousness to grow and flow.
Quantum science has forced us to see the Universe in a different way, not as a realm of separate objects, but as woven web of relations that forms a unified whole (Kingsley L. Dennis). Quantum scientist like Max Planck and Albert Einstein showed us that all living- and not living objects, are a form of vibrating energy and that all these energies are connected and form a flowing field of energy. Within the quantum paradigm mind and matter are part of the same continuum of the same energy field, meaning that we as human beings, are part of the world around us, of the material and non-material world. We are the world, we are the universe!
The practical, day to day implications of this conclusion is that if we want to influence the world around us and want to get things done, we only have to be aware of our connection with everything and everybody around us, tap into the collective wisdom of this energy field, make meaning of what we experience and materialize it. In this respect leaders need to be masters of energy, being able to sense and connect with the energy in their team, their organization, the society and the planet. At the same time they need to be able to materialize and bring what they sense in the energy into action. In this way of leadership, there is no place for vague or ego driven actions, but only for concrete, in the moment decisions, which serve the whole value chain, from the individual in the organization to the impact on the planet.