Mark Divine - Staring Down the Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams

TAKE A DEEP BREATH, THEN THROW THE OLD MAP AND COMPASS OUT

Are you a CEO or key leader desperate to drive new revenue and profit because the shifting business and technology landscape has made the old maps of how to win in your industry obsolete? At the same time, your teams and culture are struggling under the crush of commitments and the constant chaos. Your HR department is missing the mark, off-kilter because its personnel are trained to deal with humans as resources, not as human beings demanding to be treated as such. They were fine when it was just about hiring, measuring, promoting, and firing maybe even conducting surveys and initiating sensitivity training. But they are challenged to develop leaders in ways that now count mostemotionally, morally, and spiritually.

Perhaps you are one of those young leaders who feels disengaged because you resent being treated as an assetor worse, being led by an asshole. The typical large organization is biased toward endless process and tasks, with little time for cultivating a powerful culture, which is critical to navigating this new terrain. The business world can be like a battlefield, and your organization could be on its way to getting seriously wounded, or killed, as a result.

In the new battleground, the internal terrain of emotional power and mindset is where the creative energy to win will come from. Those require new developmental models to effectively deal with the rapid change and uncertainty. After the cold war, the US Army War College coined an acronym for the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of the worldVUCAwhich has gained some familiarity in executive suites since. To win the mission in VUCA, leaders will need a next-generation compass, one that helps them to navigate the peaks and valleys with emotional, moral, and spiritual strength. They will need to set their egos aside and subordinate their needs to the team and mission, to become whole leaders who operate from a world-centric, integrated consciousness. Becoming whole and self-evolving allows leaders to develop a profoundly deep connection with their team. And it will lead to more meaningful success for their organizations in a future that is already upon us.

These are skills leaders desperately need right now.

But your fear wolf stands in the way.

The fear wolf is a metaphor for whats holding you back emotionallythose deeply engrained fears, negative reactionary patterns, and biases. What do these hold you back from? They hold you back from receiving 100 percent buy-in and alignment from your team. And they hold you back from your true self.

This book is about helping you stare down your own fear wolf to overcome lingering negative conditioning so you can evolve to your fullest capacity. Its the only way to unlock your truly massive potential.

This new battlefield will simply not let you chase profit at the expense of people any longer. Your people and your culture are your main thing now. Everything else is subject to the winds of change, easily made irrelevant as those winds blow.

As a leader, you are not the victim of VUCA. You cant blame the market, the volatility, the competitors, the investors, or the customers. Its up to you to change, or be killed, in this new business climate. Consider yourself lucky that you arent likely to actually get killed, which was not something that I counted on in the SEALs. You cannot let volatility, complexity, and numbing ambiguity freeze you in your tracks.

I have found in my work with leaders and teams that most have hit a wall in the last five years or so. All of a sudden they are starting to feel incompetent. At some point, what had worked for them was no longer relevant; the weapons they trained with now do no damage. Their professional skills, developed in business school, endless workshops and courses, and OJT (on-the-job training) simply arent delivering the desired results. Though they see and feel the elements of this new battleground acutely, they dont know how to proceed.

Fight, flight, and freeze has set in among the allied business troops.

Where are the Eisenhowers and Pattons when you need them?

Sorry, there is no savior this time around. There is no outside transformational leader or consultant who can fix this for you, or anyone else.

The only transformational leader available is you.

You must transform. And you must also transform your team.

You cant keep doing things that arent working and expect better results. This book wont give you a bunch of fancy strategies and shiny tactics to solve your issues. Instead, it will give you insights on how to develop your own, and your teams, character. That character will be exemplified by moral and spiritual courage, trust and trustworthiness, respect and respectability, excellence through self-leadership and adaptability, persistent growth, resiliency, and alignment around a shared purpose, vision, and mission. These are the seven commitments that will lead to total team engagement.

Developing these skills will require that you look deep within to overcome any negative qualities holding you back from your ability to tap your full intuition, creativity, and connection. Frankly, you cant pretend to be the perfect leader, with all the good qualities and none of the bad. Your peeps saw through that mask long ago. Equally important, you must stop casting your shadow onto your team. Your shadow is your negative conditioned behavior, most often linked to the emotionally traumatic experiences of your youth, which now harms relationships and your teams performance. It shows up as projection; transference; aggressive, passive-aggressive, or passive behavior; or just outright horrible communication skills. Your team will not trust or respect you fully until you do this work. Your shadow makes you the limiting factor in your own success.

The way through VUCA is to push yourself and your teams to embody the seven commitments in this book. When you do so, you will accelerate your growth to the highest stages of development and wholeness. This is accomplished through the self-awareness of your fear wolf shadow, and through a daily practice of self-mastery. That will allow you to clean up your emotional shadow issues, wake up to your essential nature as a spiritual being, and grow into a fully authentic leader. This is hard work, but it must be done. Your future and the future of your teamsperhaps even the future of humanity itself when you consider our collective global challengesdepend on it.

You must stare down the wolf of fear.

It is well known in developmental psychology that we operate with differing internal maps of reality. This makes leading complex because not only is the external terrain shifting due to VUCA, but the internal terrains of team members are different from ours as well, with inconsistent and differing reality maps! Most leaders ignore this truth because they havent learned to recognize the different terrains, or they are trapped in an incomplete map and cant see the forest for the trees. It takes awareness of the dominant reality perspectives in order to activate self-transformation.