Reconsidering LEADERSHIP from Gandhi's Perspective

In recent years, with our 24-hour news cycle and the advances in social media, all of us have witnessed disappointing leadership behavior on many fronts. For some, lives have been deeply impacted by it. It does seem we are overdue for an overhaul of the standard of conduct for leaders at all levels of business, government, and society. The twenty-first century brought with it a reality that has changed the whole landscape of leadership --- regardless of our position or status, we all have opportunities to lead every day by our example. Technology has also made it possible for leadership to be as local as our cell phones and as far-reaching as technology will take us around the world. With all the issues needing our attention, opting out really isn't a responsible option, is it? To create a better world, it is clear we all own our part of it. 

So, how do we begin to renew, revitalize, and recommit ourselves to standards of conduct as leaders in our own right --- so we are ready to respond to the needs and challenges of this new time --- as well as to the people within our spans of influence in the marketplaces, workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities where we live and work?

In considering this question, I immediately thought about Gandhi as a great study and role model. He believed in self-examination and analysis of one's behavior and actions. He did it often. In a cherished book, A Higher Standard of Leadership: Lessons from the Life of Gandhi (Berrett-Koehler 1997), the author Keshavan Nair writes about Gandhi:

"Gandhi demonstrated that personal reflection was a practical endeavor... He analyzed his actions in the weeklies he edited...and in his correspondence with colleagues. None of these time-consuming activities diminished the amount of work he put in; indeed, they sustained him. It is not necessary for us to emulate Gandhi's level of reflection, but we can benefit from the direction he set for himself. ...Disciplined reflection does not take time away from work; it sustains the spirit and increases the intensity and quality of work."

Ongoing Self-REFLECTION IDEA:
We all have to find our own ways to renew ourselves. I share one of mine with you...

In several places in my home, I have small framed signs with one of Gandhi's messages strategically placed to catch my eye during the day, "My life is my message." It is interesting how those five words have shaped so many days --- so many actions --- so many decisions. They place the question of rightness to every action and decision. It is humbling on many days to realize that my humanness has kept me from living up to this proclamation in the way I wished I had.

The Story Behind GANDHI's Words
The story goes like this...
Gandhi remained silent one day a week. He was traveling on a train on the one day a week when he did not speak. When the train made a stop, a journalist rushed up to his window, screaming out to him, "Do you have a message for me to take back to my people." Gandhi scrawled a few words on a piece of paper and put them up in the window... "My life is my message."

Over the years I've thought about the commitment this self-imposed standard demands. I've imagined each of us measuring our behavior by it every day with a new kind of consciousness about all we do --- we could change the world in short order, don't you think? How many things would be different throughout the world? Think about it.

In my book, Putting Our Differences to Work, I recount Gandhi's warning to us about the traits that are the most perilous to humanity. We could reverse the realities he warned us about with a collective change in how we think, behave, and operate and by measuring our behavior and actions against the higher standard of leadership he established. Think of it...below I've restated Gandhi's warnings in the affirmative as QUALITIES. Imagine the impact of each of us living up to these QUALITIES:

• Wealth with Work
• Pleasure with Conscience
• Science with Humanity
• Knowledge with Character
• Politics with Principle
• Commerce with Morality
• Worship with Sacrifice

How does your life contribute to fulfilling these virtues?
I leave you as I reconsider this question myself.

Warm regards...

Debbe
 

Debbe Kennedy
founder, Global Dialogue Center
author, Putting Our Differences to Work

Putting Our Differences to Work
The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership and High Performance
** 2010 Axiom Business Book Award Winner  **
Bronze for HR/Employee Training

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Comments

[Chris Kenny]

Debbe,

As always, I find your reflections and observations to be thought-provoking and inspiring. Humbly, I submit to you that my life increasingly is about peeling away the various identities I have adopted for myself (almost all of them have been adopted over the years without any thought or realization that I had, in fact, adopted them and have been trying to live up to them).

By "dis-identifying" with the various labels (business person, father, son, brother, provider, protector, Republican, Democrat or whatever) that I have adopted throughout my life, I am finding that my true nature - who I really am as my essence - is more able to shine through.

I believe this is what Gandhi may have been doing when he entered his one day of silence or as he reflected daily. In the silence (meditation, for most of us), stripping away the various labels (and the subconscious judgments - such as "successful" or "better than" or "worse than" that accompany each of those labels) and reconnecting with the essence of who we truly are enables 2 essential things to occur: first, it allows the greatness of our essence (that we all share) to shine through our actions (i.e., the more our essence is expressed without the filter of the false, mind-created "roles" of who we feel we are "supposed" to be, the more the world experiences our true nature) and second, it enables us to see how, at our very core, we are each an expression of one, universal Life. In this fashion, we recognize that the beauty of who we are is, in fact, the beauty of the One Life that creates and sustains us and which, when experienced as such, unites all creation as One.

Gandhi was a great leader. A leader, by definition, is one who has followers (no followers, no leader). I think that the people who were most inspired to follow Gandhi were (and are) those who recognized, perhaps without even understanding it, that he manifested in his words and in his actions the Truth that cultural, political, and religious differences are in fact superficial and do not take away from the fact that we are all individualized expressions of the One Life, and thereby we are all inextricably bound together as One.

[Debbe Kennedy]

Dear Chris,
Thank you for your insightful post. It reflects much personal contemplation and reflection across the span of life itself. I am very pleased that you were inspired to share it me and with others. I think Gandhi is smiling on your expression.

What I've discovered is that the more I study Gandhi as a leader or learn from other leadership greats through the wisdom they leave for us, it becomes a mirror with which to renew oneself in a contant refining. It also seems with practice one can more easily spot others who manifest such qualities as they lead by example. Then we find each other in a kind of "Gandhi march." As he said, "When you are after a righteous cause, people pop out of the pavement to help you." Do you find this to be true?

Debbe

[Chris Kenny]

Yes - I absolutely find that to be true. I also find that stripping away our attachment to various identities and our version of how things are "supposed" to be enables us to be present for the unfolding of Life, without resistance to how that unfolding occurs. This lack of resistance (which I do not in ANY WAY claim to have mastered, even remotely!!!) to what "is" enables us to attract to our circumstances the precise resources and/or lessons that Life "wants" us to receive and/or experience in that moment. To your point, the lack of resistance enables the resources and help we need (or, perhaps, the lesson we are supposed to be learning at the moment) to "appear" just as we need it (and completely without regard for - and almost always very differently from - our mind-created expectation of what that resource or lesson "should" look like).