Step 1: Build Awareness, Identify Your Shadows
The Leadership Shadow Theory helps leaders to better understand their unique leadership style, by exploring their unconscious biases and tendencies. By embracing their shadows, leaders can improve their leadership skills and become more emotionally intelligent and adaptable to change.
This approach also helps leaders use their strengths and weaknesses to build stronger relationships with their team, stakeholders, and customers. It’s not just about what you show to the world but also about what you keep hidden. By acknowledging and integrating our shadow selves, we can become more effective leaders and better equipped to handle complex and ambiguous situations.
Step 2: Claim your Leadership Gifts, Cultivate them
“To become our most integrated expression of leadership and power we will be called to embrace our shadows and welcome home our most messy parts of self.”
This approach helps us cultivate empathy and compassion, and work more authentically with diverse teams. These are the qualities of an integral leader, as defined by the Integral Leadership Model. In these turbulent times, it's more important than ever to lead with compassion and understanding.
Step 3: Serve a Bigger Mission, Identify your Leadership Purpose
Integral Leadership is not about being in control, but about being open to what the future holds. Integral leaders know that their purpose goes beyond themselves and their organizations.
They strive to make a positive impact on humanity and to reach their full potential in a way that is both gentle and firm, always putting humanity first.
They understand that the answers to life's most important questions cannot always be rationally deduced, but must be lived and experienced intuitively.
Step 4: Integrate & Elevate your team’s Shared Consciousness to the next level
Highly effective teams operate from a full spectrum of consciousness, tending to the group's physical and emotional needs, managing tensions, and being aware of interdependencies.
This state of shared consciousness leads to emergent intelligence and awareness. As integral leaders, we need to focus on empathy, purpose, and community to achieve shared consciousness.
Shared consciousness doesn't happen overnight, and it requires ongoing effort and commitment. Leaders must model the behaviors they want to see in their team, creating a culture of inclusivity and psychological safety.
By doing so, teams can tap into their collective intelligence, unlocking new ideas and innovative solutions.
Are you ready to be an Integral Leader?
Embark on this journey with Scaling People Asia. Visit us at www.scalingpeople.asia