How to Coach Conscious Leaders

If you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground lately, you might have noticed the words – conscious leaders – popping up in all corners of organizations and the coaching practice. We are experiencing trends towards more meaning, more values, whole person work, engagement at work, purpose-led business and leading in a complex world. As a result, the word ‘conscious’ links to the word ‘business. Even though historically, these words were never spoken together.

This has brought on a plethora of new thoughts about what leadership needs to look like in our complex, connected world – and this teaches us how to coach for this kind of leadership. We know that the old styles of leadership are no longer fit for purpose. It follows that command-and-control leadership won’t boot up in a world that is so complex and ever-changing that the ‘leader’ no longer has all the answers. The organization is changing and morphing every day so that notions of anyone having the correct answer are quickly becoming outdated.

A Different Kind of Leadership

What is needed is a kind of leadership that turns the organization from an oil tanker into a highly tuned sense-and-respond organism; therefore, this type of leadership taps into the collective intelligence of everyone in the organization and beyond it. We live in a world where we see a lot better through everybody’s eyes than anybody’s eyes, where innovation comes from new kinds of partnerships and reframes notions of competition. As a result, we tap into our collective human spirit and create things that benefit all of us. Because of such advances, multiple perspectives, collective intelligence and collaboration are our new indicators of success. These kinds of leaders are needed to lead in this redrawn world are the conscious leaders.

Developing Leadership

The question is: how do we develop this kind of leadership in our organizations? This is a vast topic and one worthy of many blogs. To simplify this article, one way to approach it is to look at how coaches can impact the development of conscious leaders. To do so, coaches need a few tools. They need to be interested in this kind of leadership and what it can mean for businesses and organizations. Additionally, they need to be on some sort of conscious leadership journey themselves and ask themselves some helpful questions regarding their development. (We ask our questions as coaches from a certain level of consciousness, and it’s beneficial to be developing this level in ourselves if we are to be helpful to the development of it in others).

They need an easy-to-use model of conscious leadership as a map. To enhance the map, they need some powerful questions to ask the leaders they are coaching. This article attempts to provide some of these tools for coaches interested in coaching conscious leaders.

Coaching Conscious Leaders

In my experience, there are many coaches and consultants out there who are fans of conscious business and conscious leaders. This is in evidence whenever we host an event at The Global Centre for Conscious Leadership or Conscious Capitalism; the coaches usually outnumber the business leaders! I don’t see this as a problem; it is just a sign that many enthusiastic and inspired coaches are looking to make a difference to the leaders they coach in the business world and are interested in this kind of development.

I recently released a book about conscious leadership, and as part of my research, I interviewed more than twenty conscious business leaders globally. These leaders had amazing stories to tell, which became great quotes and perspectives on business and life. These stories naturally turned into provocative questions that can be used for other leaders who are looking to develop as conscious leaders. It also struck me that pulling these together all in one place might be very helpful for coaches the world over as we work to make a positive impact on business, which can positively impact society. Even if you’re not coaching a ‘conscious leader’ (who we could think of as someone expressly interested in developing consciousness in themselves in business), some of the questions might be helpful to shift the perspectives of your leadership clients in that general direction.

An Easy-To-Use Model (Map) of Conscious Leadership

Conscious leadership is not just mindfulness or authenticity, embodied leadership or systems thinking, or adding more leadership content to an existing leadership mindset. It seems like it’s taking a good look at our leadership mindset–our assumptions and worldview – and becoming more self-authoring about this. Therefore, it enables us to live and lead by choice than from our conditioning habits. On top of this is a whole range of qualities and characteristics of being and doing that conscious leaders demonstrate. See the conscious leadership blueprint link at the bottom of this article to view a more comprehensive and ever-changing map of what these qualities entail. However, to simplify this, we can think of conscious leadership in terms of a four-zone model, which we feature in the image at the top of this article.

These Four Zones Include:

• Conscious leaders develop self-awareness and self-mastery in the ‘I’ zone (choice over their egos; wholeness through their values and purpose; greater authenticity; and vertical development or the ability to lead successfully in conditions of great complexity).
• They aim to remain conscious and self-aware in their relationships and interactions – in the ‘We’ zone. This includes striving to be present with others, listening deeply with their heads, hearts and intuition or gut; being comfortable devolving power, control and responsibility to others; creating opportunities for collaboration and multiple perspectives to be brought into the mix. Think about how they might establish partnerships across boundaries with previous ‘competitors’ so that they can innovate and create shared benefits).
• Conscious leaders develop deep systems insight in the ‘It’ zone. They have a highly developed awareness of how life is one extensive interconnection; they have a broad stakeholder view. Also, think about how they can create balance, benefit the broader system, and take responsibility for the long-term effects of their actions on the system.
• They have a sense of collective responsibility (felt as an inner urge or calling to contribute positively to the areas they believe need attention and reformation, using a business or organizational life as a transformational vehicle).

Powerful Questions for Coaching Conscious Leaders

As a result, several powerful coaching questions naturally arose from conversations with the conscious leaders I interviewed, which fit neatly under the model’s four zones. These questions are not intended to be used in their entirety, of course – that would be overwhelming! – but to be cherry-picked according to your needs. In the spirit of abundance, wholeness, and a collective positive impact on the world. Feel free to use them, edit them, share them and add to them (there are already some brilliant additions added here from other coaches) as we work together to create a positive net benefit to the world through our work as coaches.

Self-Mastery:

As conscious leaders –

• What is your definition of success?
• Describe the game, is the game you want to play bigger than yourself?
• What difference would you like to make to the world and others?
• What legacy would you like to leave for the benefit of others?
• How can you catch your ego’s three strategies (being right; looking good; controlling, and defending) at play and convert them to more open, inclusive acts?
• What are you resisting right now, at this moment, that you could accept?
• How can you practise and role model curiosity?
• What are the other’ correct answers’?
• Name your top three values that form your roots?
• What does being authentic mean to you? How are you an authentic leader?
• What brings a genuine sense of joy to your leadership, organization and life?
• Describe the most courageous stands you need to take in your organization? How does this relate to your purpose or your organization’s purpose?
• What is your story of the future, and how is it provoking insight and invoking action in the present?
• How are you role modelling a more conscious way of being in your organization every day?
• Is the universe hostile or friendly? If hostile, how can you notice more friendly, supportive cues?
• What level of support are you currently experiencing?
• What do you feel grateful for right now?

Conscious Relating:

As conscious leaders –

• What’s your relationship to hierarchy?
• Where can you let go of control in your organization and stand in the space of not knowing?
• What significant rules can you put in place instead for others to experiment within?
• Describe how are you leveraging collaboration and collective intelligence? From which undiscovered corners of your organization can you seek input?
• How can you create psychological safety for others in your organization?
• How are you amplifying connections, strengths and diversity and dialling down unhelpful comparisons, judgements and criticisms?
• Are you listening from your head, your heart and your intuition? What does your intuition tell you about your most extensive conversation today?
• Describe the context (the bigger purpose) you are holding for your team or organization?
• What are the qualities of the stories you are telling? How are you encouraging the telling of stories in your organization?
• Are you speaking primarily from the past? The present? The future?
• What is still possible, even though the circumstances look like this today?
• What are the more significant conversations you need to have?
• How are you helping to bring the ‘maker instinct’ alive in your teams and your whole organization? How could you do this to accelerate experimentation and innovation?
• What opportunities for personal transformation are you offering in your organization for those who want to take them?

Systems Insight:

As conscious leaders –

• Who benefits from your purpose? What are the outer reaches of those whom you impact?
• Where would you choose to recast the boundary lines with your competition?
• What opportunities exist to create potential partnerships with your competitors around a common purpose? How does win (you), win (them) and win (society) look?
• Who do you need to trust?
• How can you create and measure value from innovating with your widest circle of stakeholders?
• Who all benefits when your organization benefits?
• What is the level of responsibility for behaviours in your organization? And what impact your organization has on your stakeholders, the world and the planet?
• What patterns do you see happening in societies of the world which have relevance to your organization? Second, what opportunities can you create? What difference can you make?
• How might you play in the dynamic space between giving shape to your organization and listening to the form it wants to take?
• What is your organization telling you about the direction it wants to head into in the future? How can you test this out?
• What experimental intention can you set to notice the meaningful coincidences and patterns relating to this?

Collective Responsibility:

As conscious leaders –

• How is what you’re creating through your organization adding to the net benefit of humanity? In a decade? Over half a century? In a hundred years? A thousand?
• What are your views on growth? How much is sufficient?
• How much responsibility are you taking for the effects of the end-to-end processes in your supply chain? What do you need to speak up about?
• So what do whole systems healthy look like for your organization?
• What are the core indicators of your business that will help to ensure it contributes a net positive effect on life for all?

What question has the most energy for you to begin with right now? And how will you start?

If you like these questions, please use and share liberally!

 

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