The well-being of employees is very important. So two is compliance with cultural rules within the organisation and by the laws of the country. And people need to look after themselves and keep their health and mindset in a good place. This is all management. One single task handed to an individual must be divided into smaller chunks so that others can participate and support that single individual in getting things done with their expertise. Again this is called management. People need to be paid on time and tax needs to be deducted from their salary and this again is called management. Bad management will disrupt the business. So far we have not talked about leadership.

An individual is walking down the street to the front door of the office. There are two separate factors as to whether they are walking fast or slow. If they are walking slow it’s probably because they are in no great hurry to get to work and one could assume fairly accurately that they do not have enthusiasm. They would rather be outside in the fresh air then sitting behind the desk or at a meeting with a bunch of people they didn’t choose to be at a meeting . So let’s say there is a group of people who come to work reluctantly, by necessity. These people are badly lead.

Then there are another group of people who are coming to work running. They are enthusiastic. We can split the screen into two as well. There are those who are afraid of the punishment they will get for being late and what people will think about them for not turning up on time and so they are being well managed. The other half of this group who are enthusiastic are in a hurry to get to work because they’re looking forward to it and this group are well-managed as well as well led.

So getting people to turn up at work and do the work they’ve been asked to do is the responsibility of management. There are two sides to manage somebody, support and challenge and these both mean that at one point people are rewarded for doing good things and at the other point they are punished for doing bad. Most of this management is about rules of the game which are determined by timeframes. But there is also rules of the game that are determined by quality control. This is all about management. As employees become educated more and more of this management is handed over to the individual. It is expensive in a business to employ people to manage other people who manage other people to manage other people. The best way to handle management is to educate people in the right ways to manage themselves and, employed people who are capable of self management. Once this is done the role of leadership becomes crystal clear.

What we know about human nature is that there are seven areas of their life. We know that corporate training is prohibited from entering into the zone of social, spiritual, relationship and family life and yet these areas of life can often drag a person down into the zone where they can no longer self manage. So although we can employ people who present themselves as ideal self manage low-cost individuals they can easily fluctuate down into the lower levels of human consciousness if there are melodramas at home or in their health and well-being. An individual who starts to drink at night more than their fair share can arrive at work in the morning reluctant to go to work only because they have a hangover. This is ultimately bad self-management and if this starts to happen somebody has to step into the role at work to bring them to disciplined time and quality management.

So the first function of Innerwealth in a corporate environment is to teach people how to self lead. We say self lead we mean self manage and self lead. When a person cannot self manage themselves they need to be managed because all people fluctuate between the low consciousness got to level of life and the high conscious love to level of life and those that are very bad at it, can bounce down into go to headspace and need to be managed frequently. These are the emotional leaders who cannot hold their space. Self leadership requires discipline. Self leadership requires routine. Self leadership requires the ability to sort through domestic and personal stuff so that it’s not only left behind when you come to work but resolved.

We are not allowed to ask a person whether their personal life outside of work is stable. That is against the rules of employment. But it is quite ironic that 99% of all workplace bad self management comes from this area alone. A person who does not have their domestic life together might come to work thinking they are going to do a great days work but they cannot because their matches have been burnt and the mind cannot turn to an eight hour working day while they are panic stricken about their future with their partner or the well-being of their children. And so helping people learn how to self manage, coaching them up through some of their domestic challenges becomes really important for productivity and cost management at work.

The challenge for a leader then is how do you intervene in a topic that is outside the scope of work at the current Paradine. People take on mortgages they can’t afford, they have domestic relationships that are at best bullying, and as a result of that their health is put into jeopardy, and then they come to work and you are required to lead them. How do you separate this out and how do you get the best out of people when the worst of them is coming to work?

When I worked in Canada there was a thing. It was called the letter. People were working their hardest to get the letter. The letter was a notification that this individual had performed so badly that their job had become redundant and they were going to be paid their full wage for the rest of their life including holiday pay and superannuatio. These people were sent to workshops where I was asked to teach them self-management. But when I attended these workshops it came clear to me that they were doing a very good job of getting what they wanted. These people wanted out with a big paycheck and they were doing everything right. Trying to convince somebody that it would be better for them to do a days work then to mess up and get a letter was really hard. The structure was wrong and there was nothing you could do within it because it generated a motivation.

That’s an extreme situation. But sometimes at work we put people under pressure thinking that that will make them perform well when in fact, putting people under pressure who don’t want to be put under pressure makes them deceptive. And now with about 50% of the worlds population working from home, this deception turns to bad management with a plethora of excuses. How do you cause productivity without putting people under pressure?

And the answer, good leadership.

To ask people to manage people when leadership is poor is impossible. A manager can only work within the confines of the boundaries of work practice in causing other people to do what is needed. A bad leader will simply push down through an organisation to get people to do more. As the pressure bills people become, as I noted earlier more deceptive, and therefore things do not get done faster just because there is more pressure down on them. So management is limited to the quality of the leadership that is governing the environment. We so often blame people for not getting their team or their group to be responsive but the team is at first responsive to leadership rather than management. So it goes you can only manage a person who is well lead. Now let’s talk about leadership.

Every human being has a set of values. There are intrinsic values which are feelings and there are extrinsic values which are things. We can motivate people by offering them the things that will cause the feeling. For example we might offer somebody more pay, but what we are really offering them is the feeling of security. And so there is the model of motivation. Motivation simply means to find out what people want and give it to them in return for enthusiasm. But motivation has been surpassed in all working environments globally because it has become transparently fraudulent and people are no longer willing to become enthusiastic as a result of motivation. Motivation has now become an expectation and it has fallen into the realm of good management. So now we can eliminate the motivating concept out of leadership in the era of 2023.

As we begin to narrow down the definition of good leadership and eliminate motivation and management from the list we are left with some real powerful insights. Firstly, every human being that a leader leads, has a different reason that they will be willing to be lead. One person might connect to a social aspect of the business and another person might by lead by the competitive aspect of the business.

So the first step becomes clear the leader must be whole. A leader must be holistic in their ambition to take the business to its highest state. That means that all seven areas are encompassed in the consequences of success. This begins with the leader being inspired. The leader must be whole.

The second step in leadership is therefore salesmanship. Or sales person ship. The ability to sell a vision of all seven areas of life into the future is the ability to communicate to people in a way that they can connect their value set to the value set of the business. You are not selling the values of the business you are selling the connection between the individual and the business. And how strong do you think this must be? It must be so strong that if there is domestic struggles in the individual life of the people that you lead they must be incentivised to deal with those domestic problems so that they can get back as quickly as possible and jump on the company dream. I would suggest that most leaders of businesses that we see are falling asleep at the steering wheel because they just don’t know how to sell the dream. The second reason is because they’re selling only a small part of the dream not all seven areas of it.

Finally, for today in our list of good leadership qualities, there is one variable that people completely leave out which is the spiritual aspect, the aspect called Joy. If I say these words to a manager they will think let’s go to the pub and get pissed. They will think let’s have a party and pull the roof down with alcohol. A manager can only use the sorts of clumsy environments to trigger temporary engagement which we would commonly call motivation. “Hey guys there’s a party at the pub and the company is paying the bill.” This is not joy. This is Neanderthal leadership which we now call bad management. So let’s now talk about joy.

To talk about this issue of joy I’m going to take you on a quick trip again up into the Himalayas where I have 14 people lost in a forest. Due to an experience we set out too late in the afternoon with 14 clients, eight porters, one manager and me. One hour after we began the clouds in the sky turned black, and the rain came down. Dayton tonight and we were left without our reindeer which was in the porters packs, without torches which we hadn’t thought we need walking along the edge of a vertical cliff on muddy sand in the dark. This is my most embarrassing and my personal darkest hour of leadership. I mismanaged the experience and my leadership was put to the test because we were in a life and death situation with 14 people I had taken responsibility to lead. One by one people got lost, there were turning point bridges and opportunities for people to take the wrong direction and we were separated. As night Phil and I arrived at our destination point. I had to make radical decisions that would affect the lives of the remaining eight people who had not yet arrived at the overnight accommodation. The six people who were there came up with a multitude of ideas to solve the problem including going out themselves in search. The one thing that got me through this was joy. Now you might think that this state of mind of joy is inappropriate when lives are at risk and the business is going down the shitter, or in this case as the lives of people were in jeopardy, but a leader who loses their Joy is no longer the leader. Firstly, the six people who had arrived were very aggressive and I had to keep them from running out the door and getting lost searching for those who are lost multiplying the problem. Secondly, I needed to come up with a strategy. How do I deal with this terrible trauma. And the answer was joy.

You see, in every situation that has a drama built into it there is the opportunity to do what is called a knee-jerk reaction. A leader who knee-jerk reacts is shown to be weak and has fallen into management. So instead of knee-jerk reaction joy is how you stay confident that if you just wait a little piece of time solutions will appear. Trusting that your intuition and your inspiration can help you in these situations is trusting being Hall. I sent the six people off to take a warm shower and start preparing food for those who would arrive. Reluctantly, they went away and change the desk soaking close and then came back and started to prepare food and tea. One by one people started to arrive until at the end of it, only two were missing. All the porters had arrived and my manager who was a local man. I’ve put two porters together and asked them to go back along the Trail and I got the manager and one Porton to go further up the Trail just in case the two had gone right through the village and kept walking. Which is exactly what happened. One hour later the manager returned with the two exhausted clients. This is a great example of hell if management is bad you can’t lead. But if leadership is bad you can’t manage. And just to be clear about this I was tempted to go out and be one of the search party but there is no way I can get my hands dirty searching for somebody and lead. The next morning we had a big debrief about it. I still held that state of joy that everything we could do was been done and there was no use being stressed or worried or anxious about it I just kept my confidence and my joy alive and this ultimately won the day.

Maybe with some of the current problems some of the larger telecommunication companies are facing at the present time this insight might help but I think it is equally important for all of us as parents.

That’s the end of this episode. With spirit, Chris.