Fractured agreements, an uncertain social ethic, divided communities, and compromised trust permeate our social field and take social leadership to the brink of impossibility. At the same time, individual inner freedom and personal relationships are so fundamental to our well-being that exploring our tacit, spoken, and written agreements is necessary for re-grounding approaches to leadership. John Bloom takes a look at the deeper challenges of leading in a changing social field.
When we realize just how interdependent we are—with each other, with the spiritual world, and within ourselves—humility overrides hubris. Admittedly, personal concerns and needs occupy a significant amount of our time and “head space,” but without the world around us, we would basically be lost souls, surviving bodily but without purpose. The world shapes us and realizes us. The world is also our mirror, an instrument of accountability, and the field within and through which we find our destiny paths. Agreements and leadership are complementary pathways toward social, community, and organizational destinies.
Each of us has a physical bodily boundary. Our warmth, feelings, and thoughts are energetically radiant and know no such limits. By extending the reciprocity between self and world mediated by our senses, we inevitably wrestle with their interaction. Through this process, we may come to recognize the unity of the two and develop a greater capacity to move freely in and between them.
This freedom—or perhaps “freehood” is a better word—is a space of freed activity at the heart of social life. Can we breathe between the freedom to know for ourselves while recognizing that this is true for every individual? Directing our own freedom in order to perceive what arises in another human being creates an ever-changing “heart space” which thrives across time. The complementarity of head space and heart space contributes to the wholeness of our social being.
If this social being is fundamental to how we operate in inherited or chosen community, then the very nature of how a community finds its governance and what has historically been called “leadership,” needs reconsideration. What are the characteristics that will enable leadership to serve into the future?
Trust and Agreements
It is hard to begin addressing this question without first highlighting the importance of self-knowledge. Finding and following a path of self-knowledge enables us to move freely, creatively, and in service to whatever comes toward us from the world. If we cannot lead ourselves, how can we lead others? How do we exercise our inner freedom in a way that enables us to lead consciously and effectively? It is essential that we see that leadership arises out of the needs of real circumstances, the shared discernment of those needs, and the recognition of individual or group capacities that meet those circumstances. Can we meet these circumstances effectively out of trust and agreements that include broad values?
Agreements are essential to social being—they inform and govern the spaces between us. They also shape and sustain whatever we create together. Making them conscious and practicing them consciously is a path, however complicated, to healing our social life. Agreements emerge in the moment when human beings recognize each other. Even the permission to recognize and be recognized is an exercise of agreement. Coming into agreement is not a “sacrifice” of freedom, but rather a realization of freedom expressed as trust in and love of others. Leadership for a more social human future presupposes the capacity to co-create and administer agreements—a process of mutual recognition rather than an exercise of power.
Taking responsibility for the exercise of our individual freedom as we live and work together requires attention to the interests of others and the overall well-being of the social context. Such attention is supported by a disciplined spiritual consciousness that includes real-time self-knowledge, real-time empathy for others, and real-time coming together of head, heart, and time.
Authority and Power
To lead out of this imagination will require renegotiating the relationship to and between authority and power. Historically, there has been an underlying assumption that if I have one, then I also, rightfully, have the other. However, the logic of this relationship between authority and power is generated and sustained by self-interest and fails to recognize the origins of authority, which arise from human creativity as a living process that moves from imagination into action in the world. If I write a novel, then I am assuming that the right to act includes the power to affect others. I move from private to public, from personal ethic to public ethic. It is also possible that others recognize my authority based on my capacity and then grant me the authority to exercise it for power. At the same time, I could exercise power over others without having been granted authority. Arrogating such authority and power, say by brute force, violates the freedom of the other and thereby is disempowering and dehumanizing.
As an alternative to claiming as inevitable the nexus between power and authority, I can claim authority but relinquish any power attached to it and, thus, put that authority in service to the needs of a group or community. This argumentation is simply to establish that “leadership” in the future will require an inner knowing of one’s own relationship to authority and power, and an ability to discern when they should be in tandem and when they should be separated. This is neither a sacrifice of authority nor of power but rather allows them to be two separate functions, each with its gifts and necessities in right thought and right action.
Well-Being and Connectedness
In the greater social context, agreements serve as the foundation of the legal system. As laws arise from the practices of community, they also reveal a chosen ethic. From this perspective, the laws have been brought forth and maintain their authority through the authority granted by community agreements. The power to manage the body of law (and community agreements) is also invested by the authoring community; that is, the community can choose who is best suited to manage its laws. Since law speaks to our day-to-day activities, it also governs us. Thus, one essential role for leadership is the work of sustaining agreements and cultivating the underlying trust that makes those agreements legitimate. The driving motivation is community interest and community coherence—a kind of social contract aimed toward the connectedness and well-being of all.
By contrast, power driven by self-interest will inevitably attempt to manipulate the agreements, the social contract, or the law of the land, rather than engage in a transparent social process of rebalancing the natural dynamic between self and community interest. In this self-interested motivation, actions tend to be justified in light of consolidating power. Power gravitates more to the individuals working the system, regardless of their true authority, and less to those individuals who carry the whole of the community. For example, the current political landscape, particularly in the US, is moving within a narrative of power and authority that disregards inner freedom and shows little regard for a common foundation of truth. Self-interest used in this way is antithetical to a free-associative process, a process that constitutes an ethical foundation for leadership and the community for which it is responsible and to which it is accountable.
New Social Contracts
As an antidote to the consolidation of power, it is not too much to say that our capacity for social relationships beyond our chosen circles has to be reformed one step at a time, rather like the way uprightness emerges from a young child’s first tentative steps into the ability to run. Every new social encounter is a process of finding inner balance and stability. It is almost impossible to engage fully with one another without this fundamental understanding. Once grounded, the relational process is actually co-inspired, motivated by a simultaneous interest in the inner direction and the outer world. Leadership requires a recognition of this need for relational renewal as well as an awareness of how to cultivate trust and living agreements that support engagement as discovery rather than competition.
This proposition for leadership is hugely demanding, and there is little in our culture to prepare people to step into leadership in this way. There is precious little support for investing in the social capital and informed citizenry needed to bring such leadership and agreements into action. Building a social future, one that thrives with a healthy dynamic between the freedom of the individual and the body of agreements that recognizes community equity is both idealistic and achievable. Time must be committed to trusting relationships that free up individuals who can stand with, for, and by the whole. No wonder it is hard to find willing leaders who understand that wisdom arises from the whole community, and that leading is the capacity to recognize that wisdom while contributing to it. Might this be a new social contract that authors the process of leadership and shares in its power?
Picture Jose Martin Ramirez Carrasco
Thank you John. It is certainly a perspective that you bring.