Individually, we tend to assess the authenticity of another's message as some preferred combination of validity,
logicality, reasonability, or rationality that holds our personal attention. When, however, we are articulating
messages as mandated leaders, we tend to forget that we already have the attention of our team. By virtue of the
fact that we have considerable power in the perceptions of others in our organization to end the employment or
career of those we are charged with leading, our team members automatically pay close attention to our words. I
became especially aware of this reality when I began, for the first time, to write a speech for a Toastmasters' club I
had just joined.
Toastmasters is great place to become aware of one's emotional flow and its influence on, and affect from, language
and meaning. I joined imagining that the extensive experience I had had creating and making presentations in front
of the employees of the large organizations which were the clients of my mentors at McKinsey & Company would
make my success at Toastmasters "a cinch". How false that confidence turned out to be! In the event I found
preparing speeches for the much more varied and much less captive audiences of Toastmasters to be at first quite
anxiety provoking. Caught between desire to express my insights without reservation and growing concern as to
whether my audience would find my hard won (and therefore precious?) wisdoms either uninteresting or offensive, I
felt extremely nervous. As the hours ticked away toward my first speech, I grew clearer why: I simply did not know,
as I had always known as a McKinsey consultant, what range of perspectives my audience would bring to their
experience of my speech. My authenticity was in question, but in ways I never experienced when introduced as a
McKinsey consultant.
The word "empathy", by contrast with the word "authenticity", is more familiar to people conceiving themselves as
leaders (which, hopefully, includes us all on occasion) but, even so, its meaning seems to me to be fully understood
only in the fields of healing and medicine -- fields most of us try to avoid as much as our health permits. Therefore, I
hope you will not find me too pedantic if I offer a few words of definition here to save us some possible
misunderstanding. Empathy received may be defined as the capacity sensed in another to be trustworthy in
respecting the feelings one needs, wants, or desires either to express or to have held confidential. Because
empathy is an idea akin to the ideas of "sympathy", "compassion", and "concern", perhaps a good way to clarify
further what empathy is might be to draw the following distinctions.
Empathy is different from both sympathy and compassion in that in empathizing one does not presume a superior
status as we implicitly do when expressing sympathy (always!) and compassion (too often!). In empathy one takes
care not to presume that one’s understanding of another’s situation or thinking is accurate. Instead we give
sensitive attention to the small details of what is happening and of what we are told of another's evolving
circumstances. We also engage in considerate curiosity aimed at facilitating expression of a more complete
description of the feelings of a team member concerning what is at stake in a corporate productivity matter.
Extending empathy is more vitalizing than extending compassion or sympathy because, in empathizing, we do not
create dependence or encourage the settling in of either a victim or an entitlement mentality. Rather, in empathizing
we encourage the reciprocal flow of goodwill and fellow feeling. This is a critical point to grasp because only in a
culture of genuinely reciprocal flows can the curiosity so essential to learning flourish enough for our organizations to
learn in good time what they actually need to learn. Empathy is also different from concern in that acts of
empathizing may or may not, depending on what we learn from our empathizing, lead to our having concern.
The capacity to empathize is essential to productive teamwork because, if a team member does not perceive enough
empathy in other team members' behaviours, including especially that of the team leader, s/he will feel inhibited from
contributing her or his most authentic contributions to team conversations. High degrees of empathy invite high
degrees of authenticity, and low degrees of empathy inhibit the release of what authenticity might be forthcoming.
In other words, the productivity of a team significantly depends upon the qualities of both empathy and authenticity
that each member both contributes to, and senses in, his or her fellows.
This being so, do people naturally find expressing authenticity and empathy at more or less the same time easy?
Unfortunately, not very often! This appears to me to be so in part because we do not easily notice, let alone give
recognition to, the particular styles of either authenticity or empathy offered by others from a different culture (or
sub-culture such as a profession, tribe, clique, cabal, establishment, ethnicity, dissident group, or family) from our
own. I also sense it is partly because few people in organizations have had much education in what constitutes
empathy, let alone how to express it, and partly because most of us reserve our most authentic expressions for
domestic situations (where we can usually hope that miscues arising from indulgence in the freedom of jocular
spontaneity will be either enjoyed or forgiven, or, at the worst, tolerated).
How then can a person increase his or her capacity both to express a combination of, and to recognize a
combination in, his or her fellows of both authenticity and empathy? The question is not even an easy one to
comprehend on first reading, let alone to answer! Nonetheless, by being aware of what empathy and authenticity
are and how the informational content of authenticity will not flow without trust that the relational quality of empathy
is reliably present in the team cultural climate, a leader can develop more of what he or she already has of the key
personal qualities central to the raising of team productivity.
A prerequisite of empathic authenticity is, of course, the practice of thorough consultation of both self and affected
others more or less coincidentally. In other words, if one wants to be effective in vitalizing leadership of a group for
whose productivity as a team one has a formal accountability, one will need to have proficiency in the practice of
simultaneous self-and-other consultation. Also, to be a good team member in a new team, one must deliberately
practice this faculty in the new milieu even if one has already learned that one was good at it in other teams.
One can state this quite clearly in theory. But, after reflecting on many, if not most, of one’s experiences in the work
and market places, many of us recognize that experiencing and realizing deeply empathic authenticity in work
relationships is quite rare. That seems to me to be both why insights arising from team co-operation do not occur as
often as we would like, and also why significant insights occur so rarely outside team co-operation! Does this mean
that, if we believe we have mastered the idea of empathic authenticity, we may only have appreciated one side of a
particular story? Certainly in my case that happens from time to time. It may also be why we so often feel the need
to complain of “a silo of group thought” as an irritating obstacle to raising the level of corporate productivity. We all
have had, however, memorable moments of relationship with a good friend in which empathic authenticity happens
naturally. Indeed that’s how we know that, by being empathic and authentic ourselves, we can hope to learn how
to create a state of relationship in which all the parties with whom we may be in communication will feel the well-
being of mutual confidence and reciprocated co-operation.
“So,” some may now be thinking, “I know more or less what empathic authenticity is, but as for expecting to
experience it reciprocally at work, forget it!” Although most people do hold that view, Authentix Coaches has found
practical ways to increase a person's ability to participate with empathic authenticity in team conversations. But,
because such ways are currently very rarely practiced, deliberate efforts to increase their occurrence in one's own
organization will often encounter askance, if not alarm, from others to whom our efforts seem disconcerting or
upsetting. That is why we often fear revealing ourselves in work settings. Yet it is also why we continue to want, if
at all safely possible, to do so even after years of hearing and experiencing that doing so is "impossible" because it
would be "inappropriate" or "immature" or "a waste of time".
The consequence of this natural obstacle to widespread practice of high levels of empathic authenticity is that one
has to be willing, in the conversations of one’s work or marketplace, to risk being occasionally considered, and even
severely judged, as strange, awkward, weird, and even insincere or malevolent at times. Virtually all of us feel at
least a little uncomfortable when judged in such ways; and some of the more sensitive of us even worry that we
might be being considered "out of line" by others too polite or disinterested or inhibited to tell us. In some ways this
very common reality is a fortunate one for otherwise life would simply be too upsettingly unpredictable for most of
us. When, however, some adjustment to the culture of an organization is needed, someone will have to be willing
frequently to set an example of behaviour that many other people will initially find weird and some may judge
disdainfully, or even, if they dare, contemptuously (and resentfully if they dare not!).
That, therefore, is the investment required of a leader if he or she is wants to raise the cultural climate of an
organization to where high levels of empathic authenticity are "normal". First, the values leading to empathic
authenticity must be discovered and accepted as a worthwhile aspiration for all. Then, in small but increasing
degrees, these values must become "standard" expectations for everyone's conduct in due career season. Not
surprisingly, few people are willing to make such an investment, and those who do have usually felt the need to
paint, not always truthfully, as in the Saddam WMD pretension, a picture of what leadership coach and author Daryl
Conner calls a "burning platform".
Is such a cost worth paying in your particular circumstances? That's not an easy question to answer. Of relevance
to a rational answer, however, is the following chart. It compares, in hard numbers, the average performances over
a decade of organizations differentiated by arguably the most salient features of organizational culture:
logicality, reasonability, or rationality that holds our personal attention. When, however, we are articulating
messages as mandated leaders, we tend to forget that we already have the attention of our team. By virtue of the
fact that we have considerable power in the perceptions of others in our organization to end the employment or
career of those we are charged with leading, our team members automatically pay close attention to our words. I
became especially aware of this reality when I began, for the first time, to write a speech for a Toastmasters' club I
had just joined.
Toastmasters is great place to become aware of one's emotional flow and its influence on, and affect from, language
and meaning. I joined imagining that the extensive experience I had had creating and making presentations in front
of the employees of the large organizations which were the clients of my mentors at McKinsey & Company would
make my success at Toastmasters "a cinch". How false that confidence turned out to be! In the event I found
preparing speeches for the much more varied and much less captive audiences of Toastmasters to be at first quite
anxiety provoking. Caught between desire to express my insights without reservation and growing concern as to
whether my audience would find my hard won (and therefore precious?) wisdoms either uninteresting or offensive, I
felt extremely nervous. As the hours ticked away toward my first speech, I grew clearer why: I simply did not know,
as I had always known as a McKinsey consultant, what range of perspectives my audience would bring to their
experience of my speech. My authenticity was in question, but in ways I never experienced when introduced as a
McKinsey consultant.
The word "empathy", by contrast with the word "authenticity", is more familiar to people conceiving themselves as
leaders (which, hopefully, includes us all on occasion) but, even so, its meaning seems to me to be fully understood
only in the fields of healing and medicine -- fields most of us try to avoid as much as our health permits. Therefore, I
hope you will not find me too pedantic if I offer a few words of definition here to save us some possible
misunderstanding. Empathy received may be defined as the capacity sensed in another to be trustworthy in
respecting the feelings one needs, wants, or desires either to express or to have held confidential. Because
empathy is an idea akin to the ideas of "sympathy", "compassion", and "concern", perhaps a good way to clarify
further what empathy is might be to draw the following distinctions.
Empathy is different from both sympathy and compassion in that in empathizing one does not presume a superior
status as we implicitly do when expressing sympathy (always!) and compassion (too often!). In empathy one takes
care not to presume that one’s understanding of another’s situation or thinking is accurate. Instead we give
sensitive attention to the small details of what is happening and of what we are told of another's evolving
circumstances. We also engage in considerate curiosity aimed at facilitating expression of a more complete
description of the feelings of a team member concerning what is at stake in a corporate productivity matter.
Extending empathy is more vitalizing than extending compassion or sympathy because, in empathizing, we do not
create dependence or encourage the settling in of either a victim or an entitlement mentality. Rather, in empathizing
we encourage the reciprocal flow of goodwill and fellow feeling. This is a critical point to grasp because only in a
culture of genuinely reciprocal flows can the curiosity so essential to learning flourish enough for our organizations to
learn in good time what they actually need to learn. Empathy is also different from concern in that acts of
empathizing may or may not, depending on what we learn from our empathizing, lead to our having concern.
The capacity to empathize is essential to productive teamwork because, if a team member does not perceive enough
empathy in other team members' behaviours, including especially that of the team leader, s/he will feel inhibited from
contributing her or his most authentic contributions to team conversations. High degrees of empathy invite high
degrees of authenticity, and low degrees of empathy inhibit the release of what authenticity might be forthcoming.
In other words, the productivity of a team significantly depends upon the qualities of both empathy and authenticity
that each member both contributes to, and senses in, his or her fellows.
This being so, do people naturally find expressing authenticity and empathy at more or less the same time easy?
Unfortunately, not very often! This appears to me to be so in part because we do not easily notice, let alone give
recognition to, the particular styles of either authenticity or empathy offered by others from a different culture (or
sub-culture such as a profession, tribe, clique, cabal, establishment, ethnicity, dissident group, or family) from our
own. I also sense it is partly because few people in organizations have had much education in what constitutes
empathy, let alone how to express it, and partly because most of us reserve our most authentic expressions for
domestic situations (where we can usually hope that miscues arising from indulgence in the freedom of jocular
spontaneity will be either enjoyed or forgiven, or, at the worst, tolerated).
How then can a person increase his or her capacity both to express a combination of, and to recognize a
combination in, his or her fellows of both authenticity and empathy? The question is not even an easy one to
comprehend on first reading, let alone to answer! Nonetheless, by being aware of what empathy and authenticity
are and how the informational content of authenticity will not flow without trust that the relational quality of empathy
is reliably present in the team cultural climate, a leader can develop more of what he or she already has of the key
personal qualities central to the raising of team productivity.
A prerequisite of empathic authenticity is, of course, the practice of thorough consultation of both self and affected
others more or less coincidentally. In other words, if one wants to be effective in vitalizing leadership of a group for
whose productivity as a team one has a formal accountability, one will need to have proficiency in the practice of
simultaneous self-and-other consultation. Also, to be a good team member in a new team, one must deliberately
practice this faculty in the new milieu even if one has already learned that one was good at it in other teams.
One can state this quite clearly in theory. But, after reflecting on many, if not most, of one’s experiences in the work
and market places, many of us recognize that experiencing and realizing deeply empathic authenticity in work
relationships is quite rare. That seems to me to be both why insights arising from team co-operation do not occur as
often as we would like, and also why significant insights occur so rarely outside team co-operation! Does this mean
that, if we believe we have mastered the idea of empathic authenticity, we may only have appreciated one side of a
particular story? Certainly in my case that happens from time to time. It may also be why we so often feel the need
to complain of “a silo of group thought” as an irritating obstacle to raising the level of corporate productivity. We all
have had, however, memorable moments of relationship with a good friend in which empathic authenticity happens
naturally. Indeed that’s how we know that, by being empathic and authentic ourselves, we can hope to learn how
to create a state of relationship in which all the parties with whom we may be in communication will feel the well-
being of mutual confidence and reciprocated co-operation.
“So,” some may now be thinking, “I know more or less what empathic authenticity is, but as for expecting to
experience it reciprocally at work, forget it!” Although most people do hold that view, Authentix Coaches has found
practical ways to increase a person's ability to participate with empathic authenticity in team conversations. But,
because such ways are currently very rarely practiced, deliberate efforts to increase their occurrence in one's own
organization will often encounter askance, if not alarm, from others to whom our efforts seem disconcerting or
upsetting. That is why we often fear revealing ourselves in work settings. Yet it is also why we continue to want, if
at all safely possible, to do so even after years of hearing and experiencing that doing so is "impossible" because it
would be "inappropriate" or "immature" or "a waste of time".
The consequence of this natural obstacle to widespread practice of high levels of empathic authenticity is that one
has to be willing, in the conversations of one’s work or marketplace, to risk being occasionally considered, and even
severely judged, as strange, awkward, weird, and even insincere or malevolent at times. Virtually all of us feel at
least a little uncomfortable when judged in such ways; and some of the more sensitive of us even worry that we
might be being considered "out of line" by others too polite or disinterested or inhibited to tell us. In some ways this
very common reality is a fortunate one for otherwise life would simply be too upsettingly unpredictable for most of
us. When, however, some adjustment to the culture of an organization is needed, someone will have to be willing
frequently to set an example of behaviour that many other people will initially find weird and some may judge
disdainfully, or even, if they dare, contemptuously (and resentfully if they dare not!).
That, therefore, is the investment required of a leader if he or she is wants to raise the cultural climate of an
organization to where high levels of empathic authenticity are "normal". First, the values leading to empathic
authenticity must be discovered and accepted as a worthwhile aspiration for all. Then, in small but increasing
degrees, these values must become "standard" expectations for everyone's conduct in due career season. Not
surprisingly, few people are willing to make such an investment, and those who do have usually felt the need to
paint, not always truthfully, as in the Saddam WMD pretension, a picture of what leadership coach and author Daryl
Conner calls a "burning platform".
Is such a cost worth paying in your particular circumstances? That's not an easy question to answer. Of relevance
to a rational answer, however, is the following chart. It compares, in hard numbers, the average performances over
a decade of organizations differentiated by arguably the most salient features of organizational culture:
Reading Material Sample
Services to Leaders
Coaching Essay: Conscious Leadership
Coaching Essay: Conscious Leadership
| Equanimously Conscious Leadership: Productive Teamwork through Empathic Authenticity (A Conscious Approach to Finding and Distributing Well-Being) (c) 2008, all rights reserved, by Angus Cunningham President, Authentix Coaches angusc@authentixcoaches.com |
A team develops macro-insight by synthesizing the micro-insights its members each bring to
team conversations. The quality of macro-insight produced by a team depends, therefore,
on the quality of micro-insight contributed to the team's deliberations by its members. What
then determines whether a team member will bring his or her very best quality of
micro-insight to the "team table"? Whether or not a team leader has insight into this
question will clearly be a major determinant in whether he or she can evoke the best in
productivity of which his or her team is capable. In this paper I hope to shed light on the
concept of empathic authenticity as an ingredient in productive teamwork of which leaders
are wise to become especially conscious.
The term "authenticity" is a relatively new one in the lexicon of many leaders so, to make
sure you and I are using this word in the same way, please review "Authenticity: A Learning
Approach", a paper in which the concept of authenticity is explored in depth. If, however,
you are truly pressed for time, the following is a useful summation: Authenticity may be
defined as the degree of expression of what one has experienced and learned that others with
whom one is in communication find relevant to the issue then in discussion.
team conversations. The quality of macro-insight produced by a team depends, therefore,
on the quality of micro-insight contributed to the team's deliberations by its members. What
then determines whether a team member will bring his or her very best quality of
micro-insight to the "team table"? Whether or not a team leader has insight into this
question will clearly be a major determinant in whether he or she can evoke the best in
productivity of which his or her team is capable. In this paper I hope to shed light on the
concept of empathic authenticity as an ingredient in productive teamwork of which leaders
are wise to become especially conscious.
The term "authenticity" is a relatively new one in the lexicon of many leaders so, to make
sure you and I are using this word in the same way, please review "Authenticity: A Learning
Approach", a paper in which the concept of authenticity is explored in depth. If, however,
you are truly pressed for time, the following is a useful summation: Authenticity may be
defined as the degree of expression of what one has experienced and learned that others with
whom one is in communication find relevant to the issue then in discussion.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
In the schematic above, the top row describes an evolving and cyclical process by which one extracts data from one's
emotional flow as one seeks to maintain equanimity in the face of challenges to one's sense of clarity, poise, and
balance. Unlike technical decision-making processes, this process does not ignore data in order to be relieved of
one's emotions. Rather it empowers a leader to eliminate the bias in his/or emotions without losing the useful
information concerning legitimate personal needs that is a part, but too often an unconscious part, of them. When
the information inside an emotion is not discriminated between its components of personal need and automatic
evaluative judgment, people affected by that person's decisions are vulnerable to whatever may be the quality of
equanimity already known to the decision-maker, and since few actually know the difference between equanimity
and emotional ignorance, society is suffering grievously from heavily biased decisions taken from emotional states far
from equanimity.
To factor emotional data rationally in to conscious choices, one must first become consciously aware of the emotion
one has. One can think of there being a spectrum of states of being in which one will be called to lead. In the
diagram the states recognized by a senior project manager are listed to illustrate such an "emo-spectrum". But
anyone can categorize his or her emotions as either emotions clearly experienced as positive, or as emotions clearly
experienced as negative, or as ones that we cannot easily label as either +ve or -ve. Such ambivalent states of
being are usually being experienced when, for example, one says "I'm fine!". Such a statement typically means that
the speaker either has the emotion of ignorance or the state of being known as equanimity. This ambivalent
category, shown in between the distinctly +ve and distinctly -ve categories, of emotions is made up of habits of
assumption that a person has either honed by self-discipline or inherited by good fortune. Whichever they may be,
such states of being have become habitual and what is necessary to know here is that they "hide" from our
conscious attention much data concerning characteristic ignorances of either our own needs or those of others.
The schematic outlines how we can consciously shift the focus of our attention in response to whichever of the three
categories of feeling and thought we become aware of during our decision-making deliberations. We can learn to do
this by deliberate "self-monitoring". Authentix Coaches have techniques for this purpose in which we help our clients
become skillful. These techniques are rooted in the "I have X emotion now" self-monitoring verbalization, to which
we have given the acronymic name IHXENs (pronounced "Eye-Zens"). Once we have verbalized an accurate
IHXEN, we can advance in our decision-making through the following three steps:
If we are certain our state of being, here and now, is equanimity, will we feel perfectly poised to act wisely on behalf
of both self and others? Few of us can distinguish equanimity from its common feel-alikes -- possession by
presumptive moods of, for example, stoicism on the one hand, or of brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other.
We can recognize the state of insensitive ignorance, for example, when we are vaguely aware of some nagging
unanswered questions, to which our consciences will require answers before we can decide on action without fear of
later experiencing regret, or even grief. In the state of stoicism, as another example, we are aware of some
tendency to believe that one "should" be the hero figure in the drama one is experiencing -- the presumed, but silent
and martyr-like, saviour of everybody else. In this state we are aware that we tend, by comparison with the
tendencies of others, to neglect our own needs for well-being -- sometimes even when our own needs are quite
urgent.
We want to be able to distinguish genuine, "honest-to-goodness" equanimity from its feel-alikes, which will always
include a segment of emotional ignorance and almost always some "ismic" bias of thought, such as the biases of
workaholism or narcissism. We want to make these distinctions because in genuine equanimity we acquire a fund of
well-being that is automatically transmitted to the people we lead – whose rate of more or less conscious learning of
how to combine the principles of authenticity with empathy will then increase. Unfortunately, and this is crucial to
know, we cannot be sure we have done so until we have become very consciously aware of the differences
between the genuine feeling of equanimity and its "counterfeits of thunk thought" (for example: brave stoicism
on the one side of equanimity and brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other). This we cannot do until we
have taken full responsibility for our feelings. Unfortunately, taking full responsibility for our feelings is no easy task,
although many are unaware of this reality.
If, however, we introspect enough to discover that the emotions specified in our IHXEN statements (such as "I have
frustration now") derive rationally from "because I want Y desires/wants/needs/requirements", we can take full
responsibility for our feelings by expressing them as specific requests in relation to how we conceive "Z" situation.
In this way, we both avoid making others responsible for our feelings and uncover our actual needs in the situation
we are confronting. Learning to do this takes time, of course. But we can speed the process by acknowledging to at
least one other person – possibly a leadership coach – that we do indeed have needs and shortcomings that we
have been reluctant to admit and thus unable to request help for.
Acknowledging our needs and shortcomings as desirable aspirations over time for personal growth, we can engage
our energies in growing our skills of empathic authenticity. This is the path along which engagements with Authentix
Coaches are designed to support our clients. Along it, our clients acquire, economically, the personal and
organizational insights both to perform prosperously and to distribute well-being. When we acquire proficiency in
the path of empathic authenticity, we experience increasing periods of genuine equanimity and find we are then
launched along a learning path in which our personal and corporate values align. Our skills -- to express ourselves in
relation to the real-life work issue in hand both fully authentically and with appreciated empathy -- then grow
rapidly. In summary, when we have distinguished the centered balance of genuine equanimity from its counterfeits,
which typically were "fashioned" by emulation of the common idiosynchrasies of our formative cultures, we are ready
to move forward both intuitively and rationally.
Thus the schematic above presents, in simplified form, a set of emoto-linguistic techniques (and inner experiential
processes guided and sparked by such techniques) by which we learn to deepen the wisdom or our leadership
decisions. Applying its principles we find ourselves integrating more and more of our current knowledge and history
with the products of the curiosity and narrative of those we lead. These decisions will be ones from which not only
we, but others affected also, will enjoy reasonable satisfaction of whatever needs the degree of empathic
authenticity of both ourselves and of our leadership team members has allowed to be expressed.
In summary, our key existential task as leaders is to be able, surely, to distinguish genuine equanimity from its
counterfeits (which, depending on the cultures and sub-cultures from which we have come, is likely to be a
philosophy, such as stoicism, or its opposite -- in that case brusquely ideological, and therefore, insensitive
ignorance). After fully experiencing both these pseudo-equanimities, we will be able truly to say we know when we
have genuine equanimity. From genuine equanimity one can gather the poise to make a decision both equitable for
all in the present and vital for the future of the organization one leads.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 080615-081103, excerpted from "Empathic Authenticity", to be published in 2009
emotional flow as one seeks to maintain equanimity in the face of challenges to one's sense of clarity, poise, and
balance. Unlike technical decision-making processes, this process does not ignore data in order to be relieved of
one's emotions. Rather it empowers a leader to eliminate the bias in his/or emotions without losing the useful
information concerning legitimate personal needs that is a part, but too often an unconscious part, of them. When
the information inside an emotion is not discriminated between its components of personal need and automatic
evaluative judgment, people affected by that person's decisions are vulnerable to whatever may be the quality of
equanimity already known to the decision-maker, and since few actually know the difference between equanimity
and emotional ignorance, society is suffering grievously from heavily biased decisions taken from emotional states far
from equanimity.
To factor emotional data rationally in to conscious choices, one must first become consciously aware of the emotion
one has. One can think of there being a spectrum of states of being in which one will be called to lead. In the
diagram the states recognized by a senior project manager are listed to illustrate such an "emo-spectrum". But
anyone can categorize his or her emotions as either emotions clearly experienced as positive, or as emotions clearly
experienced as negative, or as ones that we cannot easily label as either +ve or -ve. Such ambivalent states of
being are usually being experienced when, for example, one says "I'm fine!". Such a statement typically means that
the speaker either has the emotion of ignorance or the state of being known as equanimity. This ambivalent
category, shown in between the distinctly +ve and distinctly -ve categories, of emotions is made up of habits of
assumption that a person has either honed by self-discipline or inherited by good fortune. Whichever they may be,
such states of being have become habitual and what is necessary to know here is that they "hide" from our
conscious attention much data concerning characteristic ignorances of either our own needs or those of others.
The schematic outlines how we can consciously shift the focus of our attention in response to whichever of the three
categories of feeling and thought we become aware of during our decision-making deliberations. We can learn to do
this by deliberate "self-monitoring". Authentix Coaches have techniques for this purpose in which we help our clients
become skillful. These techniques are rooted in the "I have X emotion now" self-monitoring verbalization, to which
we have given the acronymic name IHXENs (pronounced "Eye-Zens"). Once we have verbalized an accurate
IHXEN, we can advance in our decision-making through the following three steps:
- Taking proper responsibility for whatever emotion is moving us -- by discovering the wants/needs that our
evolving emotion is indicating to us that either we or another has, - making requests for action or information required to satisfy these wants/needs, and
- either emerging with a decision giving us equanimity and well-being, or getting feedback to cycle around
again through this self-and-other consulting/coaching process.
If we are certain our state of being, here and now, is equanimity, will we feel perfectly poised to act wisely on behalf
of both self and others? Few of us can distinguish equanimity from its common feel-alikes -- possession by
presumptive moods of, for example, stoicism on the one hand, or of brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other.
We can recognize the state of insensitive ignorance, for example, when we are vaguely aware of some nagging
unanswered questions, to which our consciences will require answers before we can decide on action without fear of
later experiencing regret, or even grief. In the state of stoicism, as another example, we are aware of some
tendency to believe that one "should" be the hero figure in the drama one is experiencing -- the presumed, but silent
and martyr-like, saviour of everybody else. In this state we are aware that we tend, by comparison with the
tendencies of others, to neglect our own needs for well-being -- sometimes even when our own needs are quite
urgent.
We want to be able to distinguish genuine, "honest-to-goodness" equanimity from its feel-alikes, which will always
include a segment of emotional ignorance and almost always some "ismic" bias of thought, such as the biases of
workaholism or narcissism. We want to make these distinctions because in genuine equanimity we acquire a fund of
well-being that is automatically transmitted to the people we lead – whose rate of more or less conscious learning of
how to combine the principles of authenticity with empathy will then increase. Unfortunately, and this is crucial to
know, we cannot be sure we have done so until we have become very consciously aware of the differences
between the genuine feeling of equanimity and its "counterfeits of thunk thought" (for example: brave stoicism
on the one side of equanimity and brusquely insensitive ignorance on the other). This we cannot do until we
have taken full responsibility for our feelings. Unfortunately, taking full responsibility for our feelings is no easy task,
although many are unaware of this reality.
If, however, we introspect enough to discover that the emotions specified in our IHXEN statements (such as "I have
frustration now") derive rationally from "because I want Y desires/wants/needs/requirements", we can take full
responsibility for our feelings by expressing them as specific requests in relation to how we conceive "Z" situation.
In this way, we both avoid making others responsible for our feelings and uncover our actual needs in the situation
we are confronting. Learning to do this takes time, of course. But we can speed the process by acknowledging to at
least one other person – possibly a leadership coach – that we do indeed have needs and shortcomings that we
have been reluctant to admit and thus unable to request help for.
Acknowledging our needs and shortcomings as desirable aspirations over time for personal growth, we can engage
our energies in growing our skills of empathic authenticity. This is the path along which engagements with Authentix
Coaches are designed to support our clients. Along it, our clients acquire, economically, the personal and
organizational insights both to perform prosperously and to distribute well-being. When we acquire proficiency in
the path of empathic authenticity, we experience increasing periods of genuine equanimity and find we are then
launched along a learning path in which our personal and corporate values align. Our skills -- to express ourselves in
relation to the real-life work issue in hand both fully authentically and with appreciated empathy -- then grow
rapidly. In summary, when we have distinguished the centered balance of genuine equanimity from its counterfeits,
which typically were "fashioned" by emulation of the common idiosynchrasies of our formative cultures, we are ready
to move forward both intuitively and rationally.
Thus the schematic above presents, in simplified form, a set of emoto-linguistic techniques (and inner experiential
processes guided and sparked by such techniques) by which we learn to deepen the wisdom or our leadership
decisions. Applying its principles we find ourselves integrating more and more of our current knowledge and history
with the products of the curiosity and narrative of those we lead. These decisions will be ones from which not only
we, but others affected also, will enjoy reasonable satisfaction of whatever needs the degree of empathic
authenticity of both ourselves and of our leadership team members has allowed to be expressed.
In summary, our key existential task as leaders is to be able, surely, to distinguish genuine equanimity from its
counterfeits (which, depending on the cultures and sub-cultures from which we have come, is likely to be a
philosophy, such as stoicism, or its opposite -- in that case brusquely ideological, and therefore, insensitive
ignorance). After fully experiencing both these pseudo-equanimities, we will be able truly to say we know when we
have genuine equanimity. From genuine equanimity one can gather the poise to make a decision both equitable for
all in the present and vital for the future of the organization one leads.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 080615-081103, excerpted from "Empathic Authenticity", to be published in 2009
The chart clearly shows the enormous positive impact a constructive culture has on long-run performance. The
figures confirm that attention to constructive values such as empathic authenticity has real and lasting effect upon
the bottom line. The performance of your organization may not be problematic today. If so, this is significantly due
to something about its culture and sooner or later the culture will fall out of kilter with its customer and resource
markets unless you, as leader, consciously take steps to prevent that. In other words, someone is either making the
investment necessary to bring its culture up to the level needed to maintain its independent prosperity or alternative
arrangements will have to be made by you or your successor. As always, the choice of the most senior leader is his
or hers alone. Yet true as this is, it does not change the reality that attending to the subtle but high-leverage issues
of organizational culture is always easier when one is not under pressure from poor performance. Therefore leaders
are wise to make the aim of every interaction involving others in their organization a positive one for the values
prized by their team members -- even when others regard such issues as unimportant. This means that delegation
of urgent, but less important, problems by the leader is critical to long-run success. And the good news here is that
delegation, itself, provides opportunities for growth in leadership by others.
OK, so how can we make practical preparation to make investment in culture work pay off? Authentix Coaches has
found that leaders who first spend the time to distinguish moments when we know we have genuine equanimity
from very similar moments when our equanimity is more an aspiration than a deeply felt knowing, acquire deeper
insights -- insights that not only bring us clarity and poise but that also productively vitalize all involved. The process
sketched in the diagram below is the one Authentix Coaches use to improve the trade-offs that every decision-maker
in an organization is intrinsically making between immediate productivity and longer-run productivity gains through
the communications efficiency to be found in a more vital culture:
figures confirm that attention to constructive values such as empathic authenticity has real and lasting effect upon
the bottom line. The performance of your organization may not be problematic today. If so, this is significantly due
to something about its culture and sooner or later the culture will fall out of kilter with its customer and resource
markets unless you, as leader, consciously take steps to prevent that. In other words, someone is either making the
investment necessary to bring its culture up to the level needed to maintain its independent prosperity or alternative
arrangements will have to be made by you or your successor. As always, the choice of the most senior leader is his
or hers alone. Yet true as this is, it does not change the reality that attending to the subtle but high-leverage issues
of organizational culture is always easier when one is not under pressure from poor performance. Therefore leaders
are wise to make the aim of every interaction involving others in their organization a positive one for the values
prized by their team members -- even when others regard such issues as unimportant. This means that delegation
of urgent, but less important, problems by the leader is critical to long-run success. And the good news here is that
delegation, itself, provides opportunities for growth in leadership by others.
OK, so how can we make practical preparation to make investment in culture work pay off? Authentix Coaches has
found that leaders who first spend the time to distinguish moments when we know we have genuine equanimity
from very similar moments when our equanimity is more an aspiration than a deeply felt knowing, acquire deeper
insights -- insights that not only bring us clarity and poise but that also productively vitalize all involved. The process
sketched in the diagram below is the one Authentix Coaches use to improve the trade-offs that every decision-maker
in an organization is intrinsically making between immediate productivity and longer-run productivity gains through
the communications efficiency to be found in a more vital culture:
Source Data - "Corporate Culture & Performance" © 1992 by Kotter & Heskett
Analysis - Authentix Coaches
Analysis - Authentix Coaches
