Being a Leader & the Effective Exercise of Leadership An Ontological Model

Text is Copyright 2011 Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Landmark LLC. All rights reserved.

An Artistic Expression

The first of the three fundamental structural elements of the course are in mastering the factors that form the foundation for being a leader and the effective exercise of leader……..

integrity,

authenticity, and

being committed to something bigger than yourself

The second of the three fundamental structural elements of the course is a contextual framework for leader and leadership that when mastered becomes a context that in any leadership situation has the power to leave you being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as your natural self expression.

Look into your own life and find a context that shapes the way you see a certain situation or a certain person or a certain group of people, or that shapes the way you act with that certain situation or certain person or certain group of people.

• The third and the last of the three fundamental structural elements of the course are removing from the way you wound up being what limits or distorts your natural self-expression.

Most of us think that the way we are being and acting is our natural self-expression.

However, our natural self- expression is limited and distorted by certain ontological constraints that have become a part of the way we wound up being.

Ontology is the investigation of the nature and function of being.

At the core of most approaches to ontology is the question of what it means to exist.

An exploration of Ontology is concerned with the nature and function of being when being a Leader, and what way one’s beingwhen being a Leader affects one’s actions in the exercise of leadership

Some of the ontological perceptual and functional constraints that limit our opportunity set for being and acting are inherent in and shared by all people…

……..a consequence (without an effective intervention) of the way our brains work.

The point is until you remove those constraints, you have no access to ways of being and acting that lie

outside the way you wound up being – your personal opportunity set for being and acting.

As a result of these constraints, each of us gets left with idiosyncratic personal ways of being and acting that allow us to succeed in some situations, but which leave us at best getting by in others, and unfortunately failing in yet others.

In our formative years virtually all of us begin to develop a certain strategy for

avoiding failure that we continue to rely on as life unfolds.

The first half of the strategy is to attempt to avoid failing by simply staying away from situations that don’t fit with the way we wound up being (don’t fit our set repertoire for being and acting).

The other half of the strategy is to attempt to succeed by polishing that set repertoire for being and acting, and seeking out opportunities in which we can succeed by utilizing our set repertoire.

Given that leaders cannot choose the situations that require leadership, if you are to be a leader, this strategy won’t work….

You need a focus on discovering where you might be being Authentic, and then when asked about my in-authenticities, telling the truth about your being inauthentic in that way.

To become a Leader and to exercise Leadership effectively you have to be open and ruthlessly straight about your way of being and acting.

To become a Leader and to exercise Leadership effectively you have to be open to having your Worldview examined and questioned.

And, be open to having your Frames of Reference relative to Leader and Leadership,

And, relative to who you are for yourself, examined and questioned. And be open to transforming your Worldviewand those Frames of Reference

In order to be a Leader, you must master being an Effective follower

Integrity for a person is a matter of the person’s word, nothing more and nothing

less.

For a person to have integrity, the word of that person must be (as integrity is defined in the dictionary) whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, perfect condition.

Integrity Is Honoring Your Word, and Honoring Your Word Is…..Keeping your word, and on time OR

Whenever you will not be keeping your word, just as soon as you become aware that you will not be keeping your word (including not keeping your word on time) saying to everyone impacted:

a. that you will not be keeping your word, and

b. that you will keep that word in the future, and by when, or, that you won’t be keeping that word at all, and

c. what you will do to deal with the impact on others of the failure to keep your word (or to keep it on time).

Before giving your word it is wise to weigh the benefits of giving your word against the cost of keeping that word. When you give your word, you are in effect saying, “I will make that happen.”

As this new model of integrity points out, integrity is the state or condition of being whole, complete, unbroken, unimpaired, sound, perfect condition.

Such a state is the necessary and sufficient condition for workability. And, workability is a necessary condition for performance. As a result, it becomes clear that integrity determines the opportunity set for performance.

Leadership Is Not Title, Position, Or Authority!

Leadership is not Management!

While it is true that leaders sometimes have titles, or are in a leadership position, or have authority (decision rights), none of these in and of themselves, nor any combination of these,makes anyone a leader nor are they necessarily a part of the exercise of leadership.

To be a leader, you must be able to lead and exercise leadership effectively with no title, no position, and no authority.

To be a leader, you must be able to lead and exercise leadership effectively with no title, no position, and no authority.

The context through which you perceive a situation, other person, or group of people, can be constituted by your worldview (model of reality).

The way a situation occurs for me (shows up for me) is colored and shaped by my context for that situation, and my way of being and my actions are correlatedwith the way that situation occurs for me.

The Contextual Framework

Context for Leader and Leadership – that is, a context that has the power in any leadership situation to shape the way in which the circumstances you are dealing with occur for you such that your naturally correlated way of being and acting is one of being a leader and exercising leadership effectively.

The Contextual Framework

Linguistic Abstractions (leader and leadership as “realms of possibility”)Phenomena (leader and leadership as experienced; that is, as what one observes or isimpacted by, or as exercised)Concepts (the temporal domain in which leader and leadership function)Terms (leader and leadership as definitions) and exercising leadership effectively.

Linguistic Abstractions (leader and leadership as “realms of possibility”)

As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership asrealms of possibilityin which when you are being a leader allpossible ways of being are available to you,and when you are exercising leadership allpossible actions are available to you.

Linguistic Abstractions (leader and leadership as “realms of possibility”)

In order to be a leader, what must be present?

In order to be a leader, what must not be present?

In order to exercise leadership effectively, what must be present?

In order to exercise leadership effectively, what must not be present?

Phenomena (leader and leadership as experienced; that is, as what one observes or is impacted by, or as exercised)

As phenomena,leader and leadership exist in the sphere of language,whether that be literally speaking, or speaking in the form of writing, orspeaking and listening to yourself, that is, thinking, or the speaking of your actions, as in “actions speak louder than words”, or inproviding a certain kind of listening.

Concepts (the temporal domain in which leader and leadership function)

As concepts,leader and leadership exist in the domain ofa created future,a future that fulfills the concerns of the relevant parties,that the leader and those being led come to liveinto, which future gives them being and action in thepresent consistent with realizing that future.

Being a leader and the exercise of leadership is all about realizing a future that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Terms (leader and leadership as definitions) and exercising leadership effectively. A combination of the previous 3 Aspects

As a term, being a leader is defined as,committed to realizing a future that wasn’t going to happenanywaythat fulfills the concerns of the relevant parties, andwith the availability of an unlimited opportunity set forbeing and action,being the kind of clearing for leader and leadership thatshapes the way the circumstances you are dealingwith occur for yousuch that your naturally correlated way of being andacting is one of being a leader and exercisingleadership effectively.

Terms (leader and leadership as definitions) and exercising leadership effectively. A combination of the previous 3 Aspects

As a term,leadership is defined asan exercise in language that results in a created futurethat the leader and those being led come to live into,which future gives them being and action in the presentthat results inthe realization of a future (that wasn’t going to happenanyway)which future fulfills (or contributes to fulfilling)the concerns of the relevant parties,including critically those who granted theleadership (those who lead you and those youlead).

One’s Perceptual Constraints distort one’s perceptions of what one is dealing with and oneself in dealing with it.

By contrast, even if one’s perceptions were not distorted (limited and shaped by a Perceptual Constraint), one’s Functional Constraints when triggered fixate one’s way of being and acting

One’s being and action are fixated by a Functional Constraint in the following sense: When anger, for example, is the triggered fixated way of being and acting, while the way one expresses and acts on the anger may depend on the circumstances that triggered it, one’s way of being is fixed as (restricted to) anger. We may even try to hide our anger by suppressing our expression of it; but our being angry is still the fixed way of being.

All human beings are endowed with a powerful mechanism that protects us from danger. The source of this “flight or fight”mechanism is the amygdala, a small organ in the reptilian brain.

Feedback from the outside world such as sight, sound, etc, enters the brain and takes two paths, one path leads to the amygdala (several

synapses away) and the other much longer path leads to the cerebral cortex, the thinking, reasoning, conscious part of the brain (hundreds

of synapses away).

The difficulty here is that the amygdala can be triggered not only by the threat of physical pain, but also by the threat of psychological or emotional pain. When this system was put in place thousands of years ago the environment was a much simpler place than it is now and in such an environment psychological threats played a much smaller role.

We now have to contend with environments involving huge numbers of people and highly interdependent interactions.

Thus in this new environment the amygdala regularly hijacks the conscious brain in the face of the mere threat of psychological, not physical pain.

And the result can be highly counter-productive. We have all seen people “lose it” in reaction to some perceived insult or lack of respect. In the presence of an amygdala hijack there is almost no chance to have a productive set of interactions in such situations.

One of the flawed mechanisms that constrains the being and action of any human being is what we call rackets.

Gangsters run rackets by setting up a front (like a money losing business) that makes the actual enterprise appear to be legitimate and justifiable, but which front is kept in place only to conceal a payoff happening behind that front.

The Functional Constraint we call a racket run by human beings functions somewhat like the rackets run by gangsters.

In order to be effective in dealing with this central issue in being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership, you will have to deconstruct your existing frame of reference for “future”.

And then, create a new frame of reference for “future”, one that provides you with the kind of access to“future” that leaves you with power in dealing with the future.

People have various kinds of possible futures they thinkabout, or worry about, or hope for, or strive for.

However, given the way the brain functions, the “future into which people are living” is a future that is given by the past.

And, the brain generates being and action in the present to be consistent with realizing the future it predicts, that is, a past-derived future.

As should now be somewhat obvious, the future is the context for the present.

Or said more precisely, the future a person is living into is for that person the context for life in the present.

That is, both what is so in the present, and the possibilities for dealing with what is so, occur for that person in the context of the future that person is living into.

What makes this all so dismal is the fact that the prevailing context is the future people are living into, and the future that people are living into is by default derived from and shaped by the past.

Remember, the context is decisive. That means that, in the default context, people’s being and action in the present will result in more of the same. It may be more, better, different, or a change, but it will still be some variation of the past.

And this is why leadership matters.

This was just a Glimpse of the Transformational journey a few of us took!!

L-R : Neeta Asnani, Course Administrator, R Katyayani, Werner Erhard, Sandeep Kapur, Micheal C Jensen, Teena Singh, Rajdeep Lalvani & Suchitra Sengupta

L-R : Sanjoy Sen, Rajdeep Lalvani, Werner Erhard & Dhanush Vir Singh

L-R : Front Row : Shalini Sarup, R Katyayani, Neeta Asnani, Teena Singh & Nafisa Thingna L-R : Second Row : Rasesh Gandhi, Surender Unzan, Gautam Sen, Sandeep Kapur, Werner Erhard, Rajdeep Lalvani, Micheal Jensen, Ashok Sen, Kari Granger, Ramesh Menon, Sanjoy Sen, THomaS George, Nandan Srinath, Ninan Thariyan, Dhanush Vir Singh

The Times of India Senior Team at the Course

These PowerPoint slides contain selected quotations from the PowerPoint Textbook for the course “Being A Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological

Approach authored by Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, Steve Zaffron and Kari Granger and taught at Asia Plateau, Panchgani, India (Nov. 22 - 27, 2010). I was a participant in

this course.

I have created this slide deck to to share with you the simple yet extremely powerful perspective of Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership

FAIR USE: You may redistribute this document freely, but please do not post the electronic file on the web. Web links to this

document are at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1941387