Introduction
The Transforming Leader
New Needs for New Times

Everything changes. Everything is connected. Pay attention.
—Classic Buddhist teaching

Most of us want to make a difference, but doing so is not as simple as it sounds. Whether you hold a major leadership position or are just setting out to be a positive force for change, you likely know that good intentions are not enough. Many of us have had experiences where we meant well and tried hard, yet the changes we wished to see eluded us, were short-lived and unsustainable—or things actually got worse.

This book is written for people like you, who care about the quality of your life and your impact on the world around you. In it, we present leadership thinking and practices that can help you meet the challenges of today’s world. You may be a practicing leader; an educator, coach, workshop leader, or consultant who develops leaders; a scholar who writes about leadership; or just beginning your career, not yet even thinking of yourself as a leader. We are called to lead in many different ways and it is important that we take the responsibility to do what is ours to do for the good of those around us and the larger world.

The ideas and practices in this book are based on the notion that modern challenges require our total commitment. This means three things: First, we must respond to these challenges by developing our capacities to think and lead in transformational ways. Second, to accomplish the first, we must access all our faculties—mental sharpness, emotional depth, body sensations, imagination, and creativity, as well as a connection to our souls and spirits. And third, we need to harvest the full capacities of those around us, because we all have different experiences, gifts, and perceptions to offer, which collectively are greater than what any one of us has alone.

Transformational change also requires that we close the gap between what we want, what we are, and what we do. Thus, if we want to make significant and long-lasting changes, we must look within before we look without. By bringing our inner world (our thought processes, perspectives, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, capacity for staying centered in the midst of turmoil) into alignment with our outer world (our actions, how we lead, how we live the work, how we work with people), we are better able to transform our leadership and bring about the change we seek.

As leaders are transformed, so is their work and those with whom they work. For example, you may have witnessed settings where morale had plummeted, but then a new transforming leader (possibly you) comes in. Soon people start sharing responsibility for improving processes and outcomes, get things done without unnecessary drama, are curious and open to new ideas, learn from setbacks, and seem unusually fulfilled, having a sense that their labors are meaningful because their work supports values and a vision that they believe in. After a time, people working in such places may themselves become transforming leaders who create ripple effects as they practice what they have learned wherever they go.

Why Leadership Is So Difficult Today

Although making a difference is not easy, it is well worth the challenge. If you feel confused or frustrated by the trials of leading in a time of global uncertainty, interdependence, and unexpected difficulties, you are not alone. No matter how high up you go in leadership, and whether or not you aspire to be a transformational leader, today’s realities are daunting, as the future is unpredictable. For example, President Barack Obama ran for office with a vision of what he wanted to accomplish but got hit, even before he was inaugurated, with the global financial meltdown. Before Obama, President George W. Bush was blindsided by 9/11, an event orchestrated from far away that was so unthinkable that neither he nor the CIA anticipated it. Both presidents had to grapple with intractable problems that were not even in their areas of primary expertise or on their agenda for change.

Few enterprises, however big or small, are exempt from the impact of national and global interdependence. International businesses worry about competitors rendering one of their products or a whole product line obsolete. To add to the complexity, many now buy materials and manufacture products in a variety of regions around the world, so that natural disasters anywhere, not to mention warfare and political unrest, become business challenges. On a more local scale, small businesses are vulnerable to shifting prices of essential items or to a global conglomerate moving into their neighborhood and creating price competition they cannot meet. The health of the international economy affects us all. For instance, unrest in the Middle East drives up gas prices, the cost of travel, and other aspects of doing business. And so on.

This level of interdependence makes it difficult to figure out how to solve problems, leading many people to retreat into survival mode or strive to maximize their own advantage regardless of long-term costs. Some, sensing the urgency of the situation, react in knee-jerk fashion, blaming others for their troubles and ending up making things worse.

When I taught at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, my graduate students—mostly professionals in government, the military, businesses with government contracts, and nonprofit organizations—quickly identified a gap between the expectations of what leaders should be able to do and the immensity of the problems they face. They noted that most people imagine that a good leader will be informed, decisive, and able to steer the ship in every situation. People also believe leaders should be able to identify problems and energetically solve them, guided either by best practices or new scientific data. In addition, leaders should create strategic plans, sell them to their followers in a rational, scientific manner, and then implement them with excellent results in a timely fashion, in the process making the world better for us all. In short, they should be in control and achieve on a heroic scale.

The graduate students complained that such idealistic and, we began to believe, anachronistic models of leadership were unrealistic and unachievable in the situations they faced. Yet they felt pressured to at least pretend to fit this model. As we continued discussing the gap between the expectations to which they were subject and their actual ability to effect change, the students began to evince a “can we talk?” level of frankness concerning their reservations about how easy it is to describe leadership and how difficult it is to put it into practice. This was true at all levels of leadership and in all types of situations. For instance, soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan spoke earnestly about what it was like to live in constant fear—even of groups of women and children, who might be holding a grenade or a bomb, or hiding a sniper ready to shoot—while being expected to make friends with the local populace. Government managers complained about the obstacles to accomplishing anything in a massive bureaucracy; some recounted situations where politicians who did not understand the science related to their bureau’s mission passed laws requiring the agency to implement inadequate or even counterproductive polices. Executives of forprofit companies told of the tension produced by the constant pressure for quarterly profits, especially if meeting the goals conflicted with their values or undermined safety, quality control, or customer service. College and university administrators emphasized the impediments to getting things done in a context that requires collegial governance but with faculty who are resistant to needed change, while nonprofit leaders described being squeezed by mounting needs and expectations and shrinking donations and grants.

The students then began to tease out some common issues that made it difficult for them to succeed. They realized that although the examples they cited were very different, they all shared a Catch-22 quality, required unrealistic Superwoman or Superman powers, and/or led to results that themselves were counterproductive. Then there were challenges they all identified as problematic: employees, citizens, and customers today expect to have a voice, so leaders have to consult (and often please) them, but the leaders alone are held responsible for the results. Information overload and complexity means no single individual is likely to have the ultimate answer to any problem—yet they will be asked to supply one. As with any truly major issue, no one organization or even sector can address it alone, so leaders need to collaborate with others and incorporate diverse views, yet few have the skills or experience in this style of working. Finally, given the present pace of change and innovation in the world, even doing strategic planning is difficult because just about the time the plan is complete, it is no longer relevant.

These students’ wide range of experiences and backgrounds—yet common challenges and struggles—made it clear that we need to think about leadership in a manner that works within a variety of contexts and that addresses what is happening on the ground in real groups, communities, and organizations. The specifics of what leadership requires, my students concluded, keep changing with varying circumstances and in different milieus. Thus, it makes no sense to focus primarily on teaching leaders particular skills, approaches, or fad-of-the-month organizational interventions. Instead, we should build their core capacities, so that they are able to meet unanticipated challenges and tailor their responses to specific situations. But what are these capacities, and how are they developed?

Learning from Transformational Leaders

My University of Maryland colleague, Judy Brown, and I agreed with our students about the need to foster such capacities. As leadership scholars and educators, we, of course, had our own hypotheses about what ideas and practices might fulfill this need. However, we wanted to explore these ideas and expand our knowledge by engaging with other leaders who were making a truly transformational impact in the world. We knew they were out there. We were familiar with some, had heard of others, and wondered what they had in common. We wanted to know what it was they drew on—what images of the world, what communities of thought, what personal practices. Our goal was to learn from other successful contemporary leaders what leadership capabilities made the difference. We also wanted to provide a platform to bring transformational leaders together to pool their knowledge for the betterment of all concerned.

This desire gave rise to the Fetzer Institute Leadership for Transformation Project, cosponsored by the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership and the International Leadership Association (which was incubated by the academy). In this project, we were inspired by James MacGregor Burns’s work on transformational leadership, but used the term “leadership for transformation” to distinguish our inquiry from expectations that transformational leadership was a particular school of thought that would seem to be in competition with other approaches. We wanted to learn more broadly, from any and all ways of thinking about leadership that were working today. We invited leaders who had accomplished positive, transformational change, as well as educators, coaches, and consultants who assisted them, and scholars who studied them, to join us in a series of three relatively lengthy dialogues over a three-year period.

As described in the preface, something magical happened at these retreats. It was not just what the participants shared with us. It was how they shared, what they focused on, and the way they were with us and with one another—indeed, what they modeled in all these ways taught us as much as what they said.

We saw none of the usual posturing or competitiveness you often get in groups of high achievers. From the beginning, participants spoke from a collaborative and authentic place. Instead of claiming credit for their accomplishments, they typically attributed their success to an inspiration, a sudden sense of calling, divine help, or a synchronous event. Instead of speaking in abstractions, they told stories, used metaphors, shared images, or invited us to engage in an experience with them and with each other. The pace of conversation slowed; pauses were pregnant rather than uncomfortable; and voices became deeper. Our project stewardship team—consisting of Judy Brown and Carol Pearson; Fetzer Institute program officers Mark Nepo and Deborah Higgins; ILA president Cynthia Cherrey, director Shelly Wilsey, and board member Gil Hickman; consultant Michael Jones; and editor Megan Scribner—and participants in the dialogues soon recognized that something profound was happening in the space we were jointly creating. Our team became aware that we were starting to collaborate even more seamlessly in the service of the group. We observed a ripple effect, with energy emanating from individuals to encompass the entire group, which then was reflected back to the individual members, creating a wonderfully healthy feedback loop that deepened our mutual inquiry. This effect also intensified over the three-year period, so that it was more pronounced in the last dialogue than in the first. And while it was somewhat less present in the related short dialogues we conducted at ILA conferences, those sessions were always filled to capacity and seemed to satisfy an intense hunger for such open sharing.

Some consensus began to emerge from the Fetzer and ILA sessions. The participants emphasized the importance of individuals connecting with their deeper and wiser selves, so that they could embody the change needed around them. They held up as exemplary leaders people who are authentic, connected with an internal source of wisdom, and also feel deeply connected to other people and the natural world. Such exemplars, they noted, show nonjudgmental curiosity and openness to what is emerging in any situation, as well as a capacity for contemporary types of thinking and ways of making meaning, some of which come from emerging paradigms in the new sciences and social networking theory as well as depth and positive psychology. Indeed, these leaders combine deep self-awareness with real-world savvy and are consciously striving to grow and learn on both dimensions.

Listening to the participants and observing their behaviors gave rise to the major sections of this book. Part One focuses on transformational models of leadership and how to think in ways that support transformational ends. Part Two offers practices that help leaders to embody the qualities of consciousness needed in leaders today. And Part Three centers on how these inner changes result in enhanced abilities to lead groups so as to bring out their best and most transformational efforts. Or to be more concise, the three parts focus on modes of thinking, being, and relating that together constitute a new model for successful leadership practice.

This Book: Its Purpose, Design, and Content

In bringing these three elements—thinking, being, and relating—together, The Transforming Leader has the form of a Möbius strip, outlining the dynamic interrelationship between a leader’s inner life, which affects behaviors; the effect of those behaviors on the outer world of people, events, and structures; the impact of experiences in the outer world on the leader’s attitudes and emotions; and so on and on. This inner/outer dynamic is foundational to the flow of the book and provides its fundamental point of differentiation from books that focus on only one or two elements of this flow.

All this being said, The Transforming Leader complements various current leadership approaches or can stand alone as a source for learning and exploring the basic leadership capacities needed today. Because it is divided into sections with brief essays, each of which can be read in a short time, it can fit into very busy schedules. In fact, reading part of the book and taking time to integrate its lessons before moving on can support personal capacity building.

The essays, written by recognized leaders and experts in their own unique voices and styles, weave together insights from the Fetzer retreat participants and others to elucidate this dynamic interplay between the inner life of leaders and their outer actions, as informed by emerging knowledge in a variety of fields and from many different perspectives. They also provide powerful assistance in unlearning unhelpful and anachronistic approaches and replacing them with empowering ways of thinking, being, and relating that are congruent with the needs of this time in human history. Because today’s challenges require leaders who can bring not just their heads but their hearts, souls, and spirits to the table, and who can recognize unconscious as well as conscious motivations, the essays also draw heavily from psychology and other disciplines that take the whole person into consideration.

Each essay is powerful in its own right, but a synergy occurs when complementary ideas from different fields are integrated into a more holistic approach. For this reason, introductions to each section provide important background to contextualize the essays that follow. Between essays, you will find brief transitional bridges that show how each builds on the other and identify the leadership competencies explored in the one that follows. The conclusion offers a brief summation and then provides information about how to anchor your learnings through consciously reframing the stories you tell in both formal and informal communication.

At the close of the book, in Appendix A, you will find exercises that foster the development of the capacities outlined in the essays and provide accessible ways to translate the powerful concepts described in the introductions and essays into empowering practices. Appendix B offers additional resources, followed by references and a bibliography.

The book begins, in “Part One: Transformational Thinking for Twenty-First-Century Leaders,” with a context-setting introduction that focuses on the ideas of James MacGregor Burns, the founder of the transformational leadership school of leadership practice. It then briefly traces the development of his thinking, from emphasizing the transformational impact of individuals to that of whole groups or nations. The essays in Part One provide an overview of emerging modes of thinking that guide important elements of transformational leadership in action. They illustrate what transformational leadership is, how it works, and how it is evolving, and they offer guidance for updating conceptual paradigms to reflect the kind of transformational leadership thinking needed now. Part One includes:

• “Transactional and Transformational Leadership: Their Foundations in Power and Influence,” by Michael Lovaglia, Jeffrey Lucas, and Amy Baxter. This exploration of research findings demonstrates the efficacy of James MacGregor Burns’s ideal of transformational leadership and shows how you can be more effective in promoting change through inspiring others than by more transactional means.

• “Leadership in Action: Three Essential Energies,” by Betty Sue Flowers. This case study of how President Lyndon B. Johnson cooperated with Martin Luther King Jr. and worked skillfully with Congress to pass civil rights legislation presents an inspiring real-life example that makes theories about transforming leadership come alive.

• “Leadership and Organizational Networks: A Relational Perspective,” by Philip Willburn and Michael Campbell. This explanation of social networking theory shows how you can conduct a strategic analysis of groups and organizations through better understanding of natural social influence processes to communicate your transformational message more successfully.

• “Positive Power: Transforming Possibilities through Appreciative Leadership,” by Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom. This exploration of positive psychology, strength-based leadership, and appreciative inquiry insights helps you know what to do to build confidence and bring out the best in yourself, other people, and social systems.

• “Dancing on a Slippery Floor: Transforming Systems, Transforming Leadership,” by Kathleen Allen, describes new paradigms in science and systems analyses in organizational development theory to help you shift your thinking to be able to lead more effectively in complex adaptive systems.

• “On Mattering: Lessons from Ancient Wisdom, Literature, and the New Sciences,” by Barbara Mossberg, shares insights from ancient myths and modern science to help you fully realize how much you do matter and how important it is to explore your own complexity and the complexity in the world in order to use your influence wisely.

“Part Two: Being the Change: Inner Work for Transforming Leaders” delves into the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the inner work needed to be a transformational leader. It provides guidance about various modalities of inner work, each of which serves to enhance leadership presence and help the leader become a catalyst for transformational change. The introduction to this section, highlighting the work of educational psychologist Robert Kegan, provides context on the pressing need for individuals to develop their full cognitive capacities. It then shows how recognizing the wisdom of the unconscious as well as the conscious mind can enable you to have greater success in fulfilling your transformational goals. The essays that follow reflect insights from psychospiritual theory and practice for developing cognitive capacities. Part Two includes:

• “The New Basics: Inner Work for Adaptive Challenges,” by Katherine Tyler Scott, offers examples from organizational leadership to show how and why it is essential for you to do your inner work if you are to lead effectively in contemporary organizations.

• “Integral Leadership: Opening Space by Leading through the Heart,” by Jonathan Reams, shares findings in integral psychology and neuroscience as an aid in connecting with your full self and with a greater sense of options and possibilities.

• “Mindful Leadership: Discovering Wisdom beyond Certainty,” by Susan Szpakowski. Buddhism and neuroscience agree that the primary human impulse to fabricate certainty short-circuits the potential for creativity and intelligence. This essay shows how, when harnessed, this impulse becomes a doorway to leadership growth and transformation.

• “Leadership as a Spiritual Practice: Vocation and Journey,” by Matthew Fox, explores four archetypal spiritual paths as frames for viewing leadership as a vocation and leadership experiences as learning opportunities that foster wisdom, resilience, and flexibility.

• “Transmuting Suffering: A Leadership and Advising Perspective,” by Arthur Colman and Éliane Ubalijoro. It is very difficult to face suffering, loss, scapegoating, or a confrontation with one’s own or a cultural shadow. This essay explores how a trusted and able advisor can help you do so. Most important, it provides support for facing one’s shadow and the shadow of the world in order to become a healing presence.

• “Shapeshifter Leadership: Responding Creatively to the Challenges of a Complex World,” by Carol Burbank, provides a mythic model of an archetypal Shapeshifter and examples from exemplary innovators to awaken your capacity to innovate and flow with continual change.

“Part Three: The Art of Working with and Transforming Groups” recognizes that leadership is a complex, interactive process. No leader can succeed alone. Leadership is about the intricate relationship of leaders with the groups they inspire, listen to, and awaken into transformational possibilities. The context-setting introduction to this section explores how experiences of synchronicity help us move beyond seeing the external and internal worlds as separate. It then discusses the ways our unconscious minds—which process information faster than can our conscious minds—are always tracking new information from our environment, socializing us without our conscious knowledge. This background helps us recognize why connecting unconscious with conscious knowledge is so important. It also helps us begin to understand that leaders of teams or other groups are in dynamic interconnection—influencing and being influenced—with the people led. Moreover, in times of information overload and fast change, leaders need access to the unconscious simply to keep up. The essays that follow describe ways of leading in relationships that bring out the group’s most transformational efforts. Part Three includes

• “Depth Entrepreneurship: Creating an Organization Out of Dream Space,” by Stephen Aizenstat, shares depth psychological insights that can help you access imaginal guidance balanced with sound management practice to build and sustain a thriving organization.

• “Deep Dialogue: Harvesting Collective Wisdom,” by Alan Briskin, describes dialogue principles and practices, as well as stances or frames of mind, to inspire you to discover and harvest group intelligence and wisdom, and gives you tools for doing so.

• “New Approaches for Leadership: A Psychospiritual Model for Leadership Development,” by Karin Jironet and Murray Stein, discusses strategies for establishing empathic connection in dyads and groups that provide space for transformational insights to be received and nurtured.

• “It’s All a Dream: Depth Approaches to Understanding and Withdrawing Projection,” by Jeremy Taylor. This analysis shows us why we need to recognize and withdraw projection in the interest of decreasing conflict in and among groups and seeing reality more clearly. It also suggests strategies for doing so, with an emphasis on group dream interpretation and other active imagination approaches that foster an understanding of how ubiquitous projection is.

• “Hearing the Music: Leadership and the Inner Work of Art,” by John Cimino and Robert Denhardt, offers musical analogies and examples to provide a powerful metaphor for what it is like to lead in ways that attune to the rhythm of the group while also letting loose its capacity for improvisation.

• “Unleashing Possibilities: Leadership and the Third Space,” by Zachary Green, Omowale Elson, and Anjet van Linge, describes group relations concepts that show you how to move out of “us/them” dualities to live in a third space where attention moves from discrete parts to the relationship between them. Doing so can resolve inner and outer conflict, not with compromise, but with foundational, transformational change.

“Conclusion: Reinforcing Change through Transformational Communication” explores the power of narrative to help you ground new awareness about transformational thinking, being, and relating in a reframed conversation that encourages shifts in consciousness and habits in you and in those you influence.