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LEADING WITH SHAKTI

Only three things happen naturally in organizations:
friction, confusion, and underperformance.
Everything else requires leadership.

—Peter Drucker

For life to generate and flourish, you need both the seed and the soil. Put the best possible seed into toxic or depleted soil and it will not grow. On the other hand, even with the most fertile, nurturing soil, a damaged or flawed seed will not develop into anything of lasting value or impact. Both seed and soil need to be addressed to bring about positive transformation in the world. This book is about helping you develop yourself, as the seed, and also as a leader who has the capacity to improve the quality of the soil—the context in which you lead—over time.

Shakti Leadership is a powerful and practical leadership model that consciously leverages masculine and feminine energies to heal, restore balance, and evolve the planet. It represents a synthesis of some of the world’s best personal mastery practices and paths. It focuses on developing long-ignored innate feminine capacities and balancing and integrating them with traditionally masculine resources.

Before we introduce the framework, let’s look at how leadership has evolved over the course of human history.

THE ROOTS OF MODERN LEADERSHIP

The roots of modern leadership lie in conflict, territorialism, and the brutal exercise of power. The innate masculine appetite for hunting, conquering, owning, and subjugating appears as a bloody thread running through most expressions of leadership throughout history. Think of Alexander the Great and his dream to conquer the world; Julius Caesar and the empire of Rome; Henry VIII and his impact on English history. They were considered the great leaders of their time, and naturally they were all men. They are invariably depicted in portraits as very severe, aggressive, unhappy, and serious.

Even in most indigenous cultures and tribes, the mantle of leadership was awarded based on a person’s (usually a male’s) ability to win wars and protect their people from aggressors. India’s grand mythological teaching epic, the Mahabharata, is the story of a great war between two sets of male cousins. The cousins look for leadership lessons on how to rule over their subjects from Bhishma, the venerated patriarch who lies (and dies) on his bed of arrows on a colossal battlefield—a battlefield that wrought such destruction that it brought to an end an entire yuga (epoch).

The discourse he gave is still venerated as a “how-to” manual for kingship in peacetime, as is The Art of War by Sun Tzu, an ancient military treatise used even today by many leaders. The war has moved from the killing fields to business boardrooms and political chambers.

Of course, there have been leaders in history who did not operate from a dominantly masculine orientation. The leaders who have truly transformed and brought lasting positive change to the world embodied a blend of masculine and feminine virtues and capacities. Think of beloved leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Each had a transformative effect on the world that existed in his time, and each blended tremendous strength with a great capacity for love and care. Lincoln blended masculine traits such as strength of purpose and tenacity with feminine ones such as empathy, openness, and the willingness to nurture others; this capacity was seen as “central to his practice of great leadership.”¹ As Leigh Buchanan wrote, “Lincoln’s humility and inclusiveness made possible the ‘team of rivals’ described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in the popular book of that title. Generous and empathic, he made time for people of all stations who approached him with their troubles.”²

Contrast the legacies of these leaders with those of despotic twentieth-century leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, and others. They represented the worst instances of unbridled masculine energy run amok, and nearly destroying human civilization in the process.

Traditional Leadership Models

The traditional leadership model was designed for combat and competition, with a focus on survival, conquest, and defeating the enemy. Traditional leadership is hierarchical; rank determines power and authority. Decisions are made top-down and follow standard procedures, and drill, discipline, and unquestioned compliance are seen as key to achieving goals. A willingness to sacrifice is seen as key to winning, while ends are believed to justify the means. By some measures, this very masculine leadership model has been successful; it has certainly endured for a long time. The positives associated with masculine leadership include discipline, focus, and extraordinary achievements under duress—but, far too often, it comes at a painfully steep human cost.

Today, the context has changed dramatically and with it our expectations of leadership. Leadership was about maintaining order; today, it’s about knowing how to navigate ambiguity. In the past, many things were centrally controlled; today, we operate with peer-to-peer networks. We used to have very limited access to information; now, we have universal and instant access to massive amounts of information, to the point of information overload. Power was closely held and is now distributed; we’re moving from ranked hierarchies to unranked “heterarchies.” The leader was the unquestioned boss, powerful and controlling; now, the leader needs to be a catalyst, empowering and inspiring.

Most current leadership models are essentially behavioral (telling us how to behave as leaders), and thus operate from the outside in. They require us to develop certain competencies as a leader. Some of them also emphasize values and beliefs, which goes one level deeper—but still not deep enough.

GETTING AT THE SOURCE

To manifest leadership based on true power, you need to start with the source. You need to understand what that source is, how to get in touch with it, how to harness it, and how to uniquely manifest it in the world. This is a three-step process: step in, step up, and step out. In the process, you source Shakti, embody Shakti, and, finally, manifest Shakti.

Step in is about stepping into your Shakti, awakening to your deeper being: the source within. It is about connecting to your deeper self, and, through that, to the infinite power of the universe.

Step up is about doing: polishing your life and leadership skills, and embodying a natural balance of masculine and feminine qualities to become a flexible, comfortable leader anchored in personal power.

Step out is about being sensitive to the needs of the context and choosing where and how to best serve in the world. It is about fully manifesting and deploying the Shakti that you’ve found by asking: What is my unique purpose? What am I here to give life to?

Shakti Leaders Speak: Staying Connected to a Source

For Lynne Twist, effective leadership has to do with staying connected to a source, which we call Shakti:

My relationship with leadership is to stay connected to a source. There is an energy or taproot that is always waiting for our attention. It’s always there. It doesn’t come and go; we come and go. That taproot is like an expression of God or love. It’s not you or me; it has no “either/or” in it; it’s you and me. People ask me, “How do you do so much?” or “Don’t you get burned out?” and I say to them that burnout to me is being disconnected from source. It doesn’t have anything to do with working all night or having too much on your plate. When you’re in the zone, your energy is almost limitless. I know that when I’m really, really effective, I’m tapped into something other than my own ego or my own talent or my own intelligence. I’m tapped into being a useful instrument of something that wants to happen. It shows up when you’re completely present, when there’s a committed listening in the room and committed listening from the leader.³

SHAKTI LEADERSHIP

Shakti Leadership is an adaptation of the conscious leadership model developed by a group of facilitators and coaches in India called ChittaSangha (Consciousness Collaborative).⁴ The conscious leadership model is about leading with depth, starting from the inside out. It is an approach to leadership that originates from consciousness, the ultimate source of everything. By tapping into that source, we can cultivate a state of being from which comes what we call presence—a state in which you’re not preoccupied with the past or future but are completely at home in the moment.

When you are not present, you operate with conditioned knee-jerk responses, making unconscious, default choices. When you are fully present, you’re able to see and sense things about the situation clearly, act accordingly, and be fully attuned to all its possibilities.

From a state of presence anchored in consciousness, you can readily access and develop the three essential capacities of leadership: wholeness, flexibility, and congruence. These are the critical capacities from which flow all the qualities and behaviors you need to be an effective leader.

Once you develop these three capacities as a leader, all the behaviors and competencies you need to cultivate will be anchored on solid ground. Without such anchoring, no amount of training in “what good leaders do” can have lasting impact.

It matters whether people manifest behaviors from the conditioned ego self or the deeper, true “ground of being.” Only leadership that originates from the fertile ground of your consciousness can sustainably generate the outcomes that your organization and people need. Without that, it is like planting cut flowers and expecting them to grow.

Capacity for Wholeness

Wholeness is the ability to balance, integrate, and unite all the divided and fragmented parts of oneself. Wholeness is emphasized in all major wisdom traditions. It is about healing the many splits that are within all of us.

We think of ourselves as just one person, but we each carry multiple selves within us. Women have a mother-self, a daughter-self, and also an inner man within. Likewise, men have a father-self, a son-self, and an inner woman within them. We are all human beings and we are also divine beings; this split, too, has not been reconciled for most of us. To become whole, we need to bring about a kind of “holy family reunion” within our beings. In a sense, it’s about becoming your own mother or father as well as your own beloved. We need to learn how to access and express all these selves within us as appropriate.

The Western view of wholeness is psychological, reflected in Carl Jung’s insight that we have an ego-self and a shadow-self. To become psychologically whole, we need to integrate the two. Jung famously said that this was the apprentice piece in the journey to individuation; the “masterpiece” is to integrate the anima and animus—your masculine and feminine dimensions. When you can hold all those pieces together in a coherent way, you have achieved psychological wholeness.

The masculine tendency is to be more self-oriented, while the feminine tendency is to be more other-oriented. When unconscious, the masculine nature can be selfish; when made conscious, this drive leads to individuation. When unconscious, the feminine nature can be submissive; when made conscious, this drive leads to self-transcendence. Individuation and self-transcendence are two sides of the same coin: the mark of a full-blown presence.

From the yogic tradition comes the idea of spiritual wholeness—you have to unite the human or ego self and the divine or higher self. It recognizes that you are not only the ego, but also the soul, the atma. Ultimately, even the soul has to unite with the supreme soul, paramatma.

Chinese or Taoist wisdom focuses on ecological wholeness: balancing complementary energies, the yin and the yang. Chinese medicine is about understanding that your energies need to be balanced with the energies of your ecosystem, which creates a state of health. Likewise, every organ in your body is in a yin-yang energy balance with another.

Becoming a whole person requires us to reclaim our lost parts. The three traditions have worked out pieces of the puzzle; now we can reach for a grand integration.

When you become whole, it creates a great sense of joy and releases extraordinary energy—the positive energy of Shakti. The positive and negative poles of a battery are of no use without each other; they need to be connected for energy to flow. Likewise, we are disempowered when we are internally fragmented. Shakti is the energy locked in those poles which can now be released.

Shakti flows and grows from wholeness. Far from being a static, resting state, wholeness is a state of powerful dynamism. When we become whole, Shakti is awakened and active and available in its full power.

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Leadership and Balanced Respect

Author and educator Judy Sorum Brown provides insight into why we need to invite more feminine qualities into leadership:

Men and women who struggle to lead in healthy ways recognize in themselves and others the hunger for a balance of the two orientations in their own lives, relationships, and organizations. . . . Some organizations seem to inadvertently dampen and discourage the feminine dimension in men and women. As a result, those organizations end up dismissing the feminine energies.

It is not easy to have a balanced respect for the dance between masculine and feminine in organizational life, at least in Western culture. Work cultures schooled in one (the masculine, for instance) but unconsciously yearning for the other (the feminine) may swing between them rather than center to hold both. . . . In work cultures that are historically feminine, it may be necessary to explicitly invite the masculine dimension into the leadership.

How do we create conditions in which both the feminine and the masculine perspectives are invited, valued, celebrated, and heard? Leadership is holding both sides and valuing both. It is the precise, disciplined and curious scientist and the aware and gifted storyteller. . . . The feminine is needed not because it trumps the masculine, but because it has been missing from the necessary partnership of the two leadership dimensions.

Leaders create conditions that are either enlivening or deadening. In a sense, leaders—like architects or designers—create emotional space, thinking space, and working space. Our ability to serve as leaders has much to do with how we work with the materials before us. Among the resources are the energies of the feminine and masculine dimensions within us and around us. In a sense, we’re trying to create a fire—the release of human energies.⁵

Capacity for Flexibility

The second essential leadership capacity is flexibility. Shakti Leaders need to know how to flex between masculine and feminine energy as the situation or context requires. Most of us tend to get stuck in one mode and don’t how to cycle to the other. That’s the habitual nature of the mind. Yoga and Chinese martial arts and techniques such as Tai Chi and Qi-gong can be quite beneficial to help overcome this; when you make the body flexible, the mind becomes flexible as well.

The bamboo tree is a great symbol of flexibility. It is able to bend and sway as conditions demand, but does not break, no matter how harsh the wind. The bamboo has become central to many sacred traditions for good reason, as it embodies uprightness and tenacity, elegance and simplicity.

Being flexible when you are not operating from presence can be disempowering and come across as being weak, indecisive, or lacking personal conviction as a leader. But if you are in presence and holding your center, you can exercise needed flexibility without any loss of power.

Capacity for Congruence

The third leadership capacity is congruence. When we are congruent, everything is lined up: we are centered, authentic, and aligned. Everything comes together and is moving in harmony with one’s swadharma (a Sanskrit word for the concept of a personal higher purpose, what one is here to live and be and do). Leaders who are congruent are not pulled in multiple directions. They are aligned with their purpose internally (how they feel) as well as externally (how they act). If you cultivate inner congruence, you will exemplify it on the outside as a highly effective and engaging leader and human being. When a person is congruent, they manifest great integrity; you see them living the truth of who they are, not pretending to be anything else. Congruent people are inspiring to be around; they are powerful beings whose energy comes together into a concentrated force of nature.

MANIFESTING LOVE AT WORK

Love is a word that is finally emerging from the corporate closet. For too long, business has been run purely on self-interest, leaving aside the equally powerful human need to care. Bringing caring or love into the workplace is an inevitable by-product of embracing Shakti Leadership. In fact, it is already happening at conscious companies—and not just because it seems like a nice thing to do. Ron Shaich, founder and CEO of Panera Bread, believes that “Love is a competitive advantage. When you can give voice to and capture love, you can activate all kinds of things in people which is way different than the model which says they should show up and we will pay you $X per hour. You don’t have to make a business case for love.”⁶

Shakti Leaders Speak: Leading from a Place of Love

Leaders often face situations where they are challenged to stay true to leadership rooted in love. Casey Sheahan, former CEO of Patagonia, recalls:

About two years after I became CEO of Patagonia, we were hit with the global economic crisis. All business leaders at that time were looking with great fear to the future: that business might dramatically slow down; that we might go into a depression; that sales and orders and all business would be negatively affected. I was having meetings with my executive team and with the owners of Patagonia trying to figure out what to do next. The first inclination in traditional businesses is to cut costs. The biggest area of cost for most companies is payroll and overhead. I thought, “Business is going to be tough. We may have to lay some people off.” I didn’t want do that, because Patagonia is my family and I think of every individual there having children in school and mortgages and car payments. I was really anguished about it. I came home that night after having these discussions at work and talked to my wife at the time, Tara. She said, “Are you making these decisions out of love or fear?” I said, “Fear, of course. Business could get bad and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we need to batten down the hatches and tighten the belt and get ready for a really rough ride.” She said, “What would happen if you looked at this from a place of love?” I said, “I would not let anybody go. I would find other ways to save money. I would have the workers and sales associates in the stores do the window washing and the cleaning instead of laying off a bunch of people.” Well, that’s the course I took. Simultaneously, we were introducing our beautiful new product line for a snowy winter, and sales went through the roof. They continued to escalate and the company started growing exponentially from that moment forward for the next five years—and is still growing like that.

In that moment, I could have taken the traditional fear-based path of saving money, trying to do the best thing for the income statement and the balance sheet, or I could think of creative ways to save the jobs of people who are part of this family. They were very appreciative, knowing that they might have lost their jobs. They worked even harder, and pulled together very collaboratively in a creative way to get through the economic crisis. Patagonia came out of the downturn gaining market share and becoming a much more powerful company than it was before. That’s the biggest expression of the two energy paradigms that are at work in organizations; which one you follow could determine whether things work out for you in a positive or negative way.

When I took the love decision and made the love choice, I sensed a shift in my consciousness, a shift in my energy. I felt in myself a sense of calm and relief after making that decision. But I was also quite excited to be able to use my mind and work with my team to develop solutions that were creative and we knew hadn’t been done before, so it became actually a very exciting time.⁷

For many leaders, “love” seems like something soft—somehow at odds with the steely chill we associate with hardened businessmen. Stakeholder theory pioneer and Darden School professor Ed Freeman is blunt on the subject: “In the academic literature, business is about macho crap. Business theorists are embarrassed to hear people talk about love and care and that kind of stuff.”⁸

What many leaders fail to recognize is that there is great strength in love. Love is not the sentimental, pink-hearted cartoon that many envision; it brings people together in a real way. For John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, “Love is the most powerful energy in the world. When you have that, you’re not weaker; you’re actually a lot stronger. That’s the narrative that’s missing out there and needs to be told.”⁹

There is nothing incompatible between love and capitalism. Fred Kofman, author of Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values and now vice president at LinkedIn, has said, “Because love is a competitive advantage in a free market, the companies that best embody love and that best support the well-being and development of all stakeholders will win. They will accumulate wealth and power and size. Freedom privileges those who are willing to offer the most while drawing the least resources from society. It allows loving people to win over those who are less conscious.”¹⁰

LEADING FROM SHAKTI

Shakti Leadership is not about using people for your objectives, but about serving them and being a good steward of their lives. It’s a very different way of looking at leadership. Shakti Leaders don’t try to “manage” people; they attract followers because people know that the leader is aligned with a force for good and truly cares about them as human beings.

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Caring

Ping Fu survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution and went on to write the harrowing memoir Bend, Not Break. She is now vice president and chief entrepreneur officer of 3D Systems. Here is how she describes her approach to leadership:

I think the reason people follow me is partly ethical; we share the same values and vision of why working on a particular project is worthwhile. But it is also because people know that I care about them—their well-being, their career, their happiness beyond their job, the totality of the person. This is something that came to me naturally; I have a strong mother instinct. When I came to 3D Systems, my boss said, “I am the father and you are the mother.” I think a big part of the reason is because I became a surrogate mother to my sister when I was eight years old (during the Cultural Revolution). So I developed the skill of being a mother in my formative years. A mother always wants her children to do well and always cares for her children. Being proud of your children is your biggest reward as a mother. My leadership style is kind of like that. People who work for me sincerely feel that I really care about them, and, when they do well, I’m really proud of them.

I don’t believe in cracking the whip. I think what works is setting clear expectations and holding people accountable. I get people to set their own objectives; they own their goals and they own the measurement. That’s the tough-love part of leadership. I do that routinely because I don’t like to micromanage. People can make mistakes, of course. But if they purposely engage in behavior that negatively affects the entire team, we talk about it. Nobody likes to be shamed or feel like they are the bad apple in the basket. I don’t need to crack a whip—if they let other people down, they whip themselves.¹¹

Why lead with Shakti if you are a conscious person and leader already? Being conscious would imply that the Shiva consciousness is awakened to a fair degree in you. You are more self-aware and have the ability to deeply reflect on your choices and the impact they have in the world. However, if you wish to bring about real and lasting positive change, you’re going to need the agency of Shakti, the power that fuels such change. In yoga, this power is deeply respected, sought, and brought to bear upon situations, for it alone fashions the transformations necessary. We can be highly conscious leaders, but without Shakti we will not be able to achieve the change and transformations needed at these critical times. This transpersonal and higher power alone can bring about the paradigm shifts needed.

As the expression goes, with great power indeed comes great responsibility. Conscious leaders exercise power with great care. Their integrity and intention are tested often; Shakti is theirs only as long as they have self-mastery over their ego and are in selfless service to the greater good.

Shakti Leadership requires that you cultivate deep and consistent presence as a leader. From that place of presence you connect to the Shakti within and are empowered by it. From this Shakti you’re able to develop the three essential capacities: wholeness, flexibility, and congruence.

In this chapter, we introduced the broad framework for Shakti Leadership. In the next chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the master key: presence.