Accelerating Transformational Leadership: Part Two
In Part Two, Nick Jankel continues sharing his powerful premise that both cognitive development and availability for emotional growth is essential for leaders to systemically transform their organizations and teams to confront the reality of our VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous—world.
In basic terms: to truly transform our outer world, we must also transform our inner world.
If you were moved and impressed by part one and resonate with his thoughts below, I urge you to get a free digital copy of the book now. And look out for a special offer at the article’s close, provided here exclusively for leaders interested in Nick’s nine-month Mastering Transformational Leadership program.
Excerpt #2 from Now Lead the Change: Mastering Transformational Leadership by Nick Seneca Jankel
As transformational leaders we want to be developing both vertical Cognitive-Behavioral Complexity and horizontal Interoceptive-Affective Complexity. We want our wisdom to melt the seeming dualistic polarities of cognitive brilliance and emotional openness into a dialogical “Highest Common Factor” that affords us full transformational potency.
In my experience, the VUCA world is demanding that we do this. The VUCA reality and the 3D Future demand that we have both skillful hands, to simplify systemic complexity, solve really complex problems creatively, make sense of emergent realities rapidly, and make smart decisions that affect concrete change, as well as a sharp head. But we also need an open heart and relaxed hara to make sensitive and wise choices in increasingly challenging times. We need a whole, or at least healing, bodymind with which to connect, hold, and make safe those we want to transform.
Will, intention, ambition, and even vast amounts of funding are never enough to deliver organizational or system transformation. However, when we have developed high degrees of embodied wisdom as well as insightful action, we can more easily and reliably handle the fear, chaos, and confusion inherent in the VUCA world without becoming reactive or righteously locking onto old ideologies and becoming fixated. Then we can sense into emerging customer needs and generate bold ideas to serve them; and deliver transformation into our organization by engaging and supporting scared and resistant people to be the change we want to see.
Ideally, the stage of Cognitive-Behavioral Complexity we are at is softened and tempered by matching increases in Interoceptive-Affective Complexity. This allows us to transform the shadow, or dark side, of every developmental stage—and prevent our egos running amok, which they are wont to do without wisdom holding them back. We learn to ease the protective urges of C&P [Control & Protect] Mode to always be smarter and in control by amplifying the connective inspirations of C&C [Create & Connect] Mode. We soften smartness with wisdom. Ideally, we are always progressing and expanding vertically and horizontally at the same time. We want our emotional and interoceptive intelligence to be in step with our cognitive-behavioral intelligence. I see them as a double helix, spiraling ever more widely and expansively as we age with style and grace.
The key to expanding our leadership consciousness consciously is to be biodynamic: responsive to both large and small changes in the environment (customers’ needs, team vibes, market conditions, planetary warnings); and in our own “invironment” (changes in intuition, instinct, intelligence, and insight within). As we distinguish small or large changes within or without, we willingly metabolize them into ideas that realize our potential for truly transformational leadership.
The bigger and more gnarly the problems are of which we take ownership, the quicker we grow, stretch, and expand on our Leadership Edge. If we process everything as it occurs, the double helix of C-BC and I-AC unfolds without fixations or frustrations thwarting the emergence of order as we engage fully with the world around us (and the world within us). Although we must take time and space to connect and reflect, we can go right back to our Leadership Edge come Monday morning: pushing ourselves into challenging situations and experimenting with adaptive responses.
The danger of embracing C-BC without doing the inner work of self-healing (seemingly endless) trauma in I-AC is that we end up in philosophical cul-de-sacs and practical dead ends. Without developing an expanded and healing heart to match our expanding mind, we become systemic genii with stellar thoughts but never think to ask anyone about their experiences or feelings; cognitively brilliant gurus (in technology or spirituality) who sleep with their employees and/or abuse their power; famous philosophers with luminous thoughts who are also addicted and aggressive; financing wizards who are alienated from the human impacts of their deals; or disruptive innovators who think nothing of crushing every competitor in their path of world domination.
There can be no genuine transformational solutions without interoceptive-affective resolutions. But many prefer the false illusions of intellectual profundity rather than risk the embodied vulnerability that is needed to genuinely transform unruly human systems. There are no shortcuts; though there are accelerants and hacks to the unfolding of transformational leadership development.
Please dear reader, be clear: developing mastery of both our Cognitive-Behavioral and Interoceptive-Affective Complexity is a conscious choice—and a life’s work. It is unlikely we will ever reach the most transformative stages of leadership development by chance and a following wind. We have to choose to go deeper within to expand wider, and wiser, without. We may not make it where we think we want to get to; but we will have an enormously generative and exhilarating leadership journey—and so life!
If we retreat into arrogance, victimhood, or nihilism, we simply cannot progress far on this developmental journey. But if we do take inside us all the gnarly problems we see in our teams, in our organizations, and in the systems we rely on for life—and find ways to metabolize these problems into breakthroughs—we will develop more maturity and step into next-level leadership. Such self-transformation only occurs though with committed inner work: the heavy lifting we do as we reflect on our problems, spot the patterns that we have used to deal with them in the past, and transform them into new habits that serves us and our organization better. Doing this inner work—on our Leadership Edge—is the daily ‘yoga’ of transformational leadership.
Nick Seneca Jankel runs a 9 month virtual leadership program Master Transformational Leadership which supports leaders to develop both cognitive complexity and embodied wisdom. Visit www.switchonnow.com/leadership to download the brochure and explore joining him for the next cohort.
SPECIAL OFFER: For readers of the Tune In To Leadership blog, Nick Jankel has agreed to offer a 20% discount to the MTL program (worth $1200) for first person from our readership who applies. Use the Code: SWITCHONJAZZ.
Event Update and Next Week’s Free Sessions
Yesterday, Jewel and I, in concert with our colleague Amiel Handelsman, co-hosted a frank and candid dialogue with a group of people across the U.S. and the UK about our thoughts and feelings during and after the Jan. 6th insurrection at the Capitol. We created a safe and brave space for folks to share and open up to us and with each other. One of the attendees, Susanne Cook-Greuter, a grandmaster of mature ego development research and application, commented that based on the responses folks gave when we applied one of our JLP principles—Antagonistic Cooperation—to the riots, most everyone present was clearly “post-conventional.”
We’re happy to announce that we’re continuing the conversation on Feb. 3, from 7-9 pm ET, in collaboration with the Aligned Center. Register and join us for From Insurrection to Inauguration: Making Sense of It All and Reimagining America.
On Monday, Feb. 1, I’ll be co-hosting the first of a five-part series in collaboration with Dr. Gregg Henriques, Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture. The first session, from 5:30-7:00 pm, features us with theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander and evolutionary biologist Brandon Ogbunu, for a dialogue titled, “From Matter to Life to Mind to Culture.”
Click the flyer to secure a reservation.
Click the flyer to register or cut and paste the URLs into your browser