2. WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
The fact that the majority of today’s leaders are “high-performing spiritual babies” is a problem for four reasons:
In short, the current leadership paradigm does not encourage rising above our shortcomings well known in the history of mankind: difficulties in genuinely respecting and understanding other human beings, lack of courage, lack of integrity, and above all – laziness to use our brains to solve the real problems of chronic deficiency of love and acceptance.
Why is this so, then? Why are our current leaders not particularly advanced on the X axis? This is largely due to the fact that in the system as we have it today, achievement in society and spiritual growth are seen largely as two alternative ends of the same dimension (which they are not). This illusion holds that advancement on one axis actually discourages advancement on the other.
- Fear and egos become the real leaders: If we continue to let the "Performance and drive" dimension dominate our leadership culture, then we accept that our organisations are mainly led out of fear. It is the fear of not being good enough (ultimately the chronic deficiency of love and acceptance which unfortunately cannot be fixed by any amount of achievement or status...), which is compensated by an overly inflated ego. Both elements fundamentally suck as leaders: fear does whatever is easiest and least scary, and ego does whatever makes it look big right now right here.
- We cannot grow in crises: If our leaders only master the "how" and don't really have a clue about the "what", a sudden or gradual change in the operational environment of an organisation can mean pretty ugly things. For example, if the world does not need any more VCRs, it doesn't really matter how efficiently you are able to produce them. Or, maybe a less simplistic example: If you have been assigned to solve a nation's budget deficit but are unable to let go of your own ego (and the fear of not being re-elected), you are likely to make some suboptimal decisions.
- We waste the best leadership potential: If we continue to incentivize and define leadership as we do today, we lose a substantial amount of the real leadership potential as the talented young leaders who have managed to challenge themselves on both axes scatter away from, and/or lose interest in, leadership positions. This happens when they realise they don't sincerely "buy into the system anymore", e.g., they cannot look up to anyone in the organization, as their superiors are spiritual babies and driven mostly out of desire to be liked and/or get promoted. This does not drive out everyone, as some are powerful/lucky/persistent enough to find a path through the jungle they want to change, but a great amount of the potential nonetheless – which is admittedly a societal, economical and humane loss.
- We also lose money (or the material wellbeing that it is supposed to reflect): This is not just “soft stuff". Anyone who ignores it as such will have a hard time ahead of them, as the capitalistic system as we know it today is going through some major changes. ... My bold claim is, that in 5-15 years, there will simply be no way to make “real” (substantial, sustainable) money in a first-world economy by continuing to recruit spiritual babies as leaders. (LT this is true, but we can’t see it because we optimize ST money making.)
In short, the current leadership paradigm does not encourage rising above our shortcomings well known in the history of mankind: difficulties in genuinely respecting and understanding other human beings, lack of courage, lack of integrity, and above all – laziness to use our brains to solve the real problems of chronic deficiency of love and acceptance.
Why is this so, then? Why are our current leaders not particularly advanced on the X axis? This is largely due to the fact that in the system as we have it today, achievement in society and spiritual growth are seen largely as two alternative ends of the same dimension (which they are not). This illusion holds that advancement on one axis actually discourages advancement on the other.
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Since we do not see the link between these seemingly opposite objects of human development, we tend to incentivise the emerging of one dominating axis per person. In plain English, that means that if a person is leaning towards taking the X-axis as their guiding light in the society (e.g. showing great strengths in empathy, caring and listening, and studying to be a nurse to work in an orphanage for severely disabled children), it is rarely expected of them to develop in the Y-axis attributes (e.g. skills in mathematical and logical thinking, assertiveness, taking on more responsibility and positions of power). And vice versa, once someone has shown great business smarts by building up the fastest growing IT company in Sweden, we rarely encourage them to take a breather and think whether they should actually be doing something completely different (requiring them to step out of their comfort zone and develop their X-axis skills) - say, be a nurse.
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Naturally, our position in the skill and will matrix is not stable. We evolve all the time. The project aims at better understanding how and why we actually change our position in the matrix, but the working hypothesis is that in our society, it is not possible to go directly from B to D - i.e., all leaders who reach the "box of really good leadership" visit either "high-performing spiritual baby" or "enlightened hedonist".
Current hypotheses of some of the basic evolution patterns:
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