Holistic Leadership

For many leaders, running an organization has been distilled to a mundane pattern of meeting the numbers and the metrics every quarter, and this tends to be how the organization’s success and the skills of its management are defined. For many, it defines who we are. In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote:

Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: “What does his voice sound like?” “What games does he like best?” “Does he collect butterflies?” They ask: “How old is he?” “How many brothers does he have?” “How much does he weigh?” “How much money does his father make?” Only then do they think they know him.

If you tell gown-ups, “I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof,” they won’t be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, “I saw a house worth a hundred thousand dollars.” Then they exclaim, “What a pretty house!”

Of course, running an organization—or any community of people for that matter—and being a responsible leader, requires us to pay attention to the numbers and to act prudently on the information revealed by the metrics. But we can grow our successes by consciously leading organizations with greater awareness of the importance of myth, mystery, and magic. That is what inspires the people who work there, because inspired people have a way of making their numbers.

As conscious leaders, we become whole when we see that our focused, singular commitment to making the numbers and the metrics cannot be effective on its own, but only when it is part of the whole picture—only when we see that it takes more than metrics to make up the whole.

Adapted from One: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership by Lance Secretan