It’s Just Good Business #5: Conscious Leadership

Question: What is a Conscious Leader?

The short answer: A Conscious Leader is someone who leads with Conscious Awareness.

As I outlined in the third installment in this It’s Just Good Business series, Conscious Awareness is “a process of recognizing what is going on inside and out, the effects of decisions and actions, and the interaction between a complex array of factors and forces.” It is a powerful tool for transcending unconscious patterns, fostering an expanded perspective and openness to new possibilities.

Definitions

Leadership is a process of inspiring and engaging others to move in a direction together and to accomplish something together. Leaders are people who activate and sustain this process.

Conscious Businesses are organizations with Conscious Cultures catalyzed by Conscious Leaders.

The Role of Conscious Leaders

In the second post in this series, I outline the four core principles of Conscious Capitalism as applied at the level of the enterprise: Higher Purpose, Stakeholder Orientation, Conscious Leadership, and Conscious Culture.

Conscious Leaders – people who recognize the higher purpose of their business and the interdependence of the stakeholders in their business, and who lead from this awareness – are essential to the ongoing learning, growth and development of their organization, and of the people who comprise its corpus (the word corporation comes from Latin root corpus or body. To incorporate is to embody).

I’ll pass the talking stick to two Conscious Leaders to bring this idea to life, John Mackey, co-Founder and co-CEO, Whole Foods Marketing and Tony Hseih, CEO, Zappos.

The Bottom Line

Businesses are comprised of people. Human social organizations, including businesses, require leadership for direction and coherence. Leadership can be exercised by many people within a business and by different people at different times for different reasons. Business leaders, such as CEOs, provide ongoing leadership for their companies. If you aspire to build a Conscious Business, you need to be a Conscious Leader and cultivate a Conscious Culture. Your awareness is either expanding, or it is not. Conscious Awareness, by definition, calls for learning, growth, development and expansion.

In the next post in this series I will explore the idea of Conscious Culture in more depth.