THE POWER OF A LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY IN ACHIEVING PERSONAL EXCELLENCE AND MAXIMIZING positive IMPACT

A GREAT LEADER'S PHILOSOPHY

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." - Mother Teresa

THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF LEADERSHIP

“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (Northouse, 2013).  Leadership expert Northouse argued that leadership is about process, influence, group, and common goal.  Leadership is a team sport.  It is about relationships and interdependence.  At the very heart of interdependence is love.  The primary purpose of leadership is love.  Loving is about meeting another person’s needs.  Love is about making other people feel secure, special, included, respected, and powerful (Lipman-Blumen, 2005).  

LEADERSHIP AND LOVE

Mature love builds on understanding.  “Seek first to understand, and then to be understood” is a guiding principle of highly effective leaders (Covey, 2004).  Love, or leadership, is about putting the interests of others before the self.  It is about cultivating a spirit of giving.  Effective leaders ask: “What can we do for you to be at your best?”  Leadership is about checking our ego at the door in order to foster the we once we have entered the room (Siers, 2014).  Leadership is important because we live together in a larger system.  Leadership ought to create faith, hope, and love among members of this system.  With faith, hope, and love, there will be more cooperation and less detestation.  In turn, there will be more worldcentrism and less egocentrism, more connection and harmony, and more progress and peace in the systems of the world (Wilber, 2000).

THE MEANING AND IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP

Leadership matters because it is a means to achieve the end of love.  Love adds meaning to one’s life.  Leadership gives our lives meaning and empowers people to care for and about others (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002).  Leadership is about both the "we" and the "I".  This leadership paradox states that the we can be improved by working on the I.  Leadership starts from within, continues without, and shines the brightest when both are in harmonic balance.  Being leaders impacts us personally because it allows us to live out our inner voice.  Finding our inner voice adds meaning and authenticity to our lives.  A meaningful life fills a servant leader with drive and passion because of the key idea that it is not solely about "me", but about "us" instead.

OUR DEFINITION OF SUCCESS AS LEADERS

Leadership gurus Wooden and Jamison (2005) argued that success is peace of mind that comes from knowing that you did the very best that you were capable of doing at a particular moment in time.  On an intrapersonal level, we will assess our effectiveness as leaders by asking: “Did we activate all our energies when working on this task towards that vision?”  On an interpersonal level, we will assess our effectiveness as leaders by asking others: “What else could we have done, but did not do, for you to be at your best?”  Leadership effectiveness is about the tandem of intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic results.  Both leaders and followers will always be held accountable based on the achieved results.  In the end, if the quality of the outcome aligns with the quality of the input, then effective leadership has occurred.  As leaders, we will measure such alignment by asking: “Did we activate all energies possible to achieve the goal that we had set out to achieve? If not, what behaviors do we need to change?”

LEADERS RELY ON TRUST TO INFULENCE FOLLOWERS

Kouzes and Posner (2014) argued that trust is everything for leaders.  Trust is the backbone of leadership.  Without trust, there are no healthy relationships.  Without healthy relationships, there is no love.  And without love, there is ineffective leadership.  For leadership to be effective, then, trust has to be well and alive.  To gain trust, leaders practice specific traits, skills, and behaviors on a daily basis.  Leaders become trustworthy by doing what they said they would do (Kouzes & Posner, 2012).  Trust is a two way street.  The leadership key is for servant leaders to authentically trust others first.  Doing so is crucial if the intent is to receive trust back from others.  At times, trust will not come back, and this is a natural byproduct that makes leadership so dangerous.  But instead of fearing that no trust will come back, leaders trust others anyway and build effective anchors that encourage them to deal with the consequences of disappointing some while empowering others.

EFFECTIVE LEADERS COMMUNICATE WITH CLARITY, STANDARDS, AND GRACE

Effective communication creates strong communities of thousands of people, whereas ineffective communication creates weak teams of a few dozens of people.  Stephen Covey (2004) believed that effective leaders practice the skills of listening, empathy, and kindness whenever and wherever they interact or influence other individuals.  An effective leader knows that respectful communication struggles to generate empathy and breeds compromise, whereas empathic and kind listening builds win-win synergies.  We know that effective communication occurs when our core group of leaders and followers unite their solid viewpoints with ours to form a team favoring win-win agreement.  As leaders who stimulate and encourage win-win agreements, we intend to keep information flowing effectively by listening with empathy and kindness.  Doing so empowers us to create a warm and open organizational culture.  

LEADERSHIP AND A CULTURE OF CARE

In an honest and caring culture, there are neither bad nor good news.  Primarily, organizational members will receive training in practicing the notion of mindful compassion (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005).  Mindfulness is a choice that everyone can learn and apply if aware.  Robbins (1986) argued that awareness of one’s current action allows for the choice of a new behavioral response.  This choice can lead to mindful living and compassionate working, which will allow us, as a strong culture, to perceive news as mere news.  To learn what is really going on in our team, we will make sure to ask this same exact question on a daily basis: “What is really going on?”  In this curious and non-judgmental culture, we do expect leaders and followers to always speak the Truth.  Speaking the Truth will generate awareness of what matters most to members of our organization.  In turn, sharing about what matters most generates trust, and trust is what gives leadership a heartbeat.

EVERYONE CAN CHOOSE TO BE A LEADER

Everyone has the potential to be a leader, but not everyone answers this call in the same manner (Brady & Woodward, 2007).  This means that everyone’s voice will be shared and heard when making decisions in our organization. Freeman (1972) argued that effective collaboration is the result of individuals coming together to clarify priorities, verbalize objectives, distribute task among the people, hold one another accountable, share equal amounts of responsibilities, and transparently communicate information.  At times, though, our leadership abilities will be challenged to go beyond Freeman’s wisdom.  Some challenges will ask for more decisiveness in our leadership style.  Depending on the nature or urgency of the challenge, our leadership style varies from authoritative to democratic.  Collaboration will always be a crucial part of our agenda prior to making decisions.  The degree or volume of collaboration might vary depending on situational demands.  We choose to rely on the Situational Leadership II framework to solve adaptive challenges that bring about different situational factors (Blanchard et al. as cited in Northouse, 2013).  When our core group of leaders and followers show low competence but high commitment, we will engage in high directive and low supportive leadership behavior.  Also, when our core group of leaders and followers exhibit high competence and great commitment, we will adapt our leadership to delegate with low support and low directive behavior. 

LEADERSHIP AND POWER

Leadership and power are two concepts that are directly intertwined.  Northouse distinguished between personal and positional power.  The power that effective leaders rely on most is personal power.  Personal power deals with interpersonal liking and sympathies.  Individuals will follow our lead if they think that we are competent in what we are doing and if they perceive us as sociable or kind.  This means that effective leadership is about influencing others by sharing one’s power with them (Robbins).  In addition to personal power, leaders who work in authority positions may use positional power, too.  This power is about rewards, status and punishment.  Leaders who are not authorities do not have access to this power, which is why we will focus our energies on personal power when describing our leadership philosophy. To grow effective leadership habits, we will generate high levels of personal power in order to influence others to work towards a shared goal.  Since we declared leadership to be about relationships, and, therefore, love, it is self-evident that the symbol we choose to represent personal power is a heart.  The requirement to be an effective leader, then, is to have our hearts involved in all of our mental decisions.  This alignment of heart and mind will ensure an ethical use of power and an effective leadership practice.

EFFECTIVE LEADERS BALANCE AND PRIORITIZE ROLES 

Effective leaders maintain balance in their lives.  To balance one’s priorities and roles, effective leaders renew their selves.  Renewal is a heartfelt mindset that empowers the leader in us to focus our energies on doing the things that we are most passionate about.  The one thing that we feel most passionate about is servant leadership.  As servant leaders, we might indeed shift the order of our prioritized roles throughout life, but our core values and clarity of purpose as leaders will remain the same (Christensen & Allworth, 2012).  Our core value is leadership based on faith, hope, and love in all facets of my life. Through faith, hope, and love-based leadership, we find renewal.  Our clarity of purpose states that “Every day, we intentionally lead through faith, hope, and love” (Weber, 2024).  We aspire to model leadership by following Jesus Christ's example as the Ultimate Leader and example of greatness.  We strive to set the pace in terms of intentional living and relationship building.  

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP ADDS MEANING TO LIFE

According to our mental faculties, we are here to be here (Kupperman, 2006).  Our inner voice adds meaning to our being: ethical leadership.  First, leadership makes our life meaningful because it empowers us to improve our own behaviors.  Second, leadership enables us to think past our selves in order to reach out to others with faith, hope, and love.  This means that we are here to lead our selves and others back into a loving relationship with God.  Together, we practice intentionality and relationship building.  We lead by using intentionality in order to build strong relationships.  Since leadership is an affair of the heart (Heifetz, 1994), our hearts tell us that our common goal ought to be to build win-win relationships (Covey) that are characterized by peace, respect, and freedom of choices (Cahn, 2009).  Our clarity of purpose reminds us about our desire to become resonant leaders who model compassion, mindfulness, and hope (Boyatzis & McKee).

LEADERS CREATE ENVIRONMENTS OF GROWTH BY FILLING IT WITH FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE 

Leaders create environments where people can grow in faityh, hope, and love.  For people to grow, we will behave in a faith-filled, hopeful, loving, nurturing, and caring way.  We will be kind, compassionate, and hopeful.  We will behave in a positive, optimistic, and mindful way when influencing others.  The use of deep empathic listening will allow us to create a loving culture in which people want to grow and thrive.  In such an organizational or team setting, members will learn from failure and mistakes.  They will recover faster from lapses, experience less stress when making mistakes, and will be faster in focusing their attentions back on the task (Achor, 2010).  By so doing, high results will show up and high performance standards will be achieved.  Failure, in plain language, goes hand in hand with high performance levels.  Failure leads to success and high standards.  To make sure that this leadership principle is being understood by our core group of leaders and compassionate followers, we will particularly praise those individuals who learned from their mistakes by achieving a small win or improved outcome when working towards a goal.

LEADERS CONTINUOUSLY PLAN THEIR GROWTH 

As quintessential parts of our lives, we read extensively, listen to motivational tapes, work out, and foster social interactions (Achor, 2010; Patterson, 2008) on a daily basis.  We are in the performer stage on the leadership continuum ready to be unleashed into the spheres of a leader (Brady & Woodward, 2007).  To continue growing as positive leaders, leave the performer stage, and enter into a leadership phase, we will make sure to schedule daily recitals of our clarity of purpose.  We will translate our clarity of purpose into questions in order to assess our current and future learning.  At midday and at the end of the day, we will ask our team and ourselves: “Did we act in a loving way?” Moreover, we will ask: “Did we show a passion for learning?” 

LEADERSHIP AND SELF-DEVELOPMENT

Leadership, ultimately, is effective development of the self (Kouzes & Posner).  With this in mind, we believe that the feedback of others is most valuable in finding out whether or not we behave in ways that serve them and the progress of our group or team.  To learn from our followers, we strongly consider the optional distribution of several leadership inventories from leadership authority Northouse.  When we have gathered both verbal and written feedback from others, we will have a better chance at growing as a leader who minimize the gap between ideal self and real self (Boyatzis & McKee).

THE SHADOWS OF THE ULTIMATE BARRIER TO OUR LEADERSHIP

There are shadows that we all benefit from confronting sooner rather than later in order to grow in greater faith, hope, and love as positive leaders.  Our major shadows that are defense mechanisms include philosophical arrogance and self-deprecation.  To grow into more effective leaders, we will create a new story that allows intellect and feelings to marry under the vow of faith, hope, and love.  We deliberately practice leadership by finding ways to use our intellectual skills with creativity, compassion, and humility.  For example, we will first choose to listen and feel where others are to meet their needs.  We will discontinue ineffective patterns of philosophizing predesigned phrases into other people’s lives.  To further mature our leadership behaviors, we will practice this premise: “To truly find our authentic selves, we need to loose ourselves in the service to others" (Peale, 1980).  For instance, we intend to lead through faith, hope, and love by setting aside quality minutes each day to talk to people about who they are, what their dreams are, and how they feel about their lives and destinies.  Doing so will help us to find out where they are currently at in life.  It helps us to feel with them and engage in friendly relationship building.  By syncing our faithful, hopeful, and loving story with with the exciting stories of other people, we will find, speak to, and call up the godly leadership capacities in ourselves and others.  At the same time, we will always play our own drumbeat in alignment with that of our beloved Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Only thereafter can we truly feel confident to share this elite tune of faith, hope, and love with others to create a beautifully orchestrated melody that heals and inspires the very soul of the world.  We will be compassionate, yet we will strive to never compromise our purpose and God-given voices with love and humility.

EMBRACING THE LEADERSHIP PARADOX

Becoming an authentic leader also requires us to embrace another paradox, which is life itself.  Life is a paradox.  On the one hand, we know where we are heading with our ultimate home being heaven.  On the other hand, we have not the slightest clue about the many invigorating steps along the way and are constantly looking out for emerging opportunities (Christensen & Allworth).  This paradox represents the unpredictable beauty of life.  With our clarity of purpose orbiting around the practice of godly leadership through the values of faith, hope, and love, we are striving to lead a life full of intentionality and relationships.  We move forward with character and principles.  As professionals in the leadership arenas of business and education, we intend to behave in a flexible, ready, proactive, fair, assertive, theatrical, vital, and cooperative manner.  We see ourselves as relators who foster the PDCA cycle of learning: Plan, do, check, and adjust (Woodward, 2012).  Through our leadership initiatives, we envision an approximation to an ideal world that is characterized by social inclusion, emotional belonging, psychological safety, professional success, and physical wellbeing.  Ultimately, our mission is about empowering our key leaders, followers, and their families to locate their interests, find their purposes in life, and live their lives as true leaders.  Through our work, we desire to help others experience a similar metamorphosis (Siers) of faith, hope, and love as we are able to experience in our lives.

REFERENCES

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ABOUT

Pascal and Lindsey Weber are the Owners of Kingdom Enterprises specializing in leadership and business development. Pascal completed his M.A. in Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego and Lindsey obtained her M.A. in Education and ESOL from Salisbury University. Both credentialed educators and practicing entrepreneurs are passionate about loving God, inspiring personal breakthroughs, and leading positive impact. Lindsey is an esteemed Education Specialist and decorated former NCAA DIII athlete. Pascal’s professional contributions to Education and Entrepreneurship are inspired by #1 leadership expert Dr. John C. Maxwell. Today, Pascal and Lindsey live with their two sons in San Diego, California.