Why Conscious Leadership Is Essential For The Road Ahead

Gabrielle Berstein states, "a conscious leader understands their role in creating a world that works for everyone and takes action to make it happen".

Organizations today are facing heightened levels of complexity, ambiguity of direction, uncertainty of outcomes, and volatility of predictions. Conscious leadership is the name of the game.   

When sustainable, inclusive and profitable growth becomes a conscious, resolute choice, it shapes decision-making across every business area. Conscious business leaders can outperform their peers because they think and act differently and align around a shared mindset, strategy, and capabilities.

What is conscious leadership?

Conscious leadership is a style of leadership that involves self-awareness, mindfulness, and a deep sense of purpose. It is about creating a world where people want to belong. Inclusion, diversity, equity, sustainability, peace, and prosperity cannot be achieved without conscious leadership. Conscious leadership is transformational at both the individual and collective levels. Indeed, leaders who are conscious and intentional about their actions, decisions, and interactions can create positive outcomes for themselves, their teams, organizations, and society. 

According to Forbes, these are the fundamentals that make conscious leadership essential.

Scale: The main challenge of consciousness today is the scale. You can't take significant actions today that do not impact the whole system. Today's complexity requires leaders to upgrade their level of consciousness to include the entire system and understand how the parts relate to the whole.

Investments: The emergence of responsible investment growth in multiple bottom lines is becoming a criterion of differentiation for responsible investors. Increased awareness of leadership legacy on climate, war, fraud and poverty raises the bar on corporate governance and press organizations to measure and report growth on multiple bottom lines.

Technology: No aspect of the technological explosion today is not concerned with moral choices, claiming leadership consciousness. While advancements in artificial intelligence and extended consciousness can be a "cognitive prosthesis" (as Robert Dilts refers to it) for the leader, they imply the pressing need for leaders with an acute sense of systemic and subtle awareness.

Social distrust: There is a growing increase in social distrust towards institutional leaders. Society has entered a cycle of distrust directed at social leaders, with approximately 82% of them employing leadership styles that lean more towards problem-solving rather than future-shaping, focusing more on probable futures and less on pursuing aspired futures. Studies indicate that only 33% of employees believe they can trust the leadership in their organizations. These signs suggest that while many leaders strive to do a good job, their efforts are not achieving the desired impact.

Consciousness is what makes us humans. It gives us the understanding of, as well as the freedom from, the more rigid aspects of linear thinking. It provides us with the intuition to navigate evolutionary possibilities.

Conscious leadership is undoubtedly the gateway to shaping the future of organizations. It is not about perfection because no leader is perfect, but it is inclusive and wise. Are you a conscious leader for the road ahead?