Leadership

I spent last week at the Outer Banks with a group of friends. We went to celebrate the wedding of the son of one of them. I enjoyed the experience of letting go of everything and just be in the moment. Especially seeing the bride and groom so intensely aware of each other in the moment of their ceremony by the beach made me think anew of the importance of living the moment and be present in our interactions with others.

Continuing the series on how to elicit the thoughts and ideas of others and share yours in a way that real understanding and collaboration can happen we are going to explore today how to Be Present.

When talking to others, speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have in your life. It could be! When we are totally present and highly aware, our brains record and compute all kinds of subtle messages that can help us “read” the other and which many times result in the proverbial good or bad “gut feeling” we get about something. You might not be able to explain it fully, but you better “listen” to it.

July 4th, 2009 Fireworks. Photo by Ada Gonzalez

Independence, Dependence, and Interdependence are three important words for leaders to consider. As I was watching the spectacular fireworks over Legislative Mall in Dover, Delaware on the 4th of July, I was thinking about the interplay of these three words and what do they mean in leadership.

Probably because English is not my native tongue, whenever I think about words, I tend to go first to the dictionary to get the “official” meaning of the words. Pulling together what different dictionaries and Wikipedia say, this is my take on the meaning of the words and what they mean for leadership. As with everything else each of these words has an upside and a downside, which we need to consider in leadership.

It would be impossible to ignore all the press about the possibility of Judge Sonia Sotomayor becoming a Supreme Court judge. I don’t want to go into the politics of this, or talk about the pros and cons of her nomination. Nevertheless, reading different viewpoints reminded me once more of why diversity enriches decision making.

Fears are proliferating in people’s lives and in workplaces around the world today, with very detrimental results. As a psychologist I know the impact of positive and negative "affect," or mood on people and organizations.

Studies show that positive affect pumps up creativity and productivity, while negative affect (like fear) stifles it and leads to mistrust, cynicism, isolation, and competition. Not exactly the stuff we want in our high-performance organizations! No wonder Edmund Burke said: "No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as does fear."