The Essence of Leadership

The essence of leadership lies in the space between stimulus and response. How presence and heart coherence make leaders more effective.

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Today, I’d like to reflect once again on the essence of leadership. I’ve done this before, but I deliberately haven’t reread what I wrote back then – instead, I want to share my current thoughts with you, completely fresh.

What the essence of leadership is can of course be looked at from many different angles, and there are surely many such essences. So what I’m writing here is a very individual approach – my own current world of experience and observation drawn from my coachings, meetings, and sessions. It’s an attempt to work things out anew and to become more aware of what’s happening in the social sphere. My fundamental principle always applies: leadership begins with myself. In that spirit, in last week’s newsletter and podcast I spoke about observing the inner world – about observing thinking, in which one can discover feeling and will, if one really engages with this inner contemplation in detail.

The “I” likes to hide, I find. But of course it’s everywhere, because I’m the one doing it. So that’s me – and not “one”. And you do it for yourself, also with your “I”. We just have to discover it as such and not let ourselves be too influenced by so-called scientific contributions that are looking for consciousness. Behind those, there’s often a very materialistic worldview, namely that consciousness is to be found in the brain, in the physical, or that out of the complexity of the brain something non-visible, non-material develops, which is then called consciousness. The other view I tried to explain in the previous podcast based on Michael Pollan’s book “A World Appears”. This other group of scientists is beginning to doubt that consciousness is found in the brain, and increasingly recognizes that one must include the non-material phenomena as well – near-death experiences, telepathy, intuitions, all those things that have been documented many times in the world.

With near-death experiences, there’s also the newer term “after-death experiences”. So not only that someone is medically dead, then has very clear, light-filled experiences of consciousness and comes back and can tell about it – can report exactly what happened in the room, say in the ICU, who said what. So there’s a perceptual capacity for the physical world, while at the same time the person is medically dead and shouldn’t have any consciousness, but does. This has been demonstrated many times. And then there are the after-death experiences as well – an ongoing communication with deceased relatives, parents, or lost children. Not including these phenomena is, in my view, too reductionist. You can do it, but then you unnecessarily reduce your horizon. I think one should include everything that’s there and try to make sense of it. That’s how I read – I read gladly, everything I can find, listen to many podcasts, learn an incredible amount on YouTube, and take the best out of everything. That’s my methodology.

So much for the introduction. And now to the actual question: what for me is the essence of leadership? Here I keep coming back to a long-known concept that Stephen Covey already brought up in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” – an ancient concept really: the space between stimulus and response, I have the possibility to consider what I do. So if I’m triggered in a leadership context – let’s say someone walks into my office and says, “I hereby submit my resignation” – then that’s the leadership challenge. And now it depends on how I react. I can react immediately, without thinking, perhaps feeling disappointed. That’s not always wrong either, to express it right away. But this space between stimulus and response is, in my view, perhaps the most important element when it comes to the essence of leadership.

Why do I say this with a certain confidence? Because, among other places, it’s brought up as the central concept for the CEOs of this world in the excellent book “Real Time Leadership” by David Noble and Carol Kauffman – both very experienced coaches. The first chapter is called “Create Space in Real Time” – meaning, create space in the here and now, in the present moment. The subtitle is “to overcome your reflexes when you need to” – so when the situation requires it, don’t react reflexively, but thoughtfully. And this conscious shaping of the space between stimulus and response can, with practice, happen in fractions of seconds. It doesn’t have to take long, but it can also consciously take longer. That’s what it comes down to: shaping this in-between space – presence and being-in-the-moment, the capacity for full wakefulness. By the way, I would describe this as a capacity, not so much as a state. People always say: “Yes, you just have to be awake.” But that’s a capacity, and capacities I can practice.

The overarching title of the first five chapters in the book, by the way, is “Be mindfully alert” – be awake, but empathic, feeling, thoughtful, reflective. Bring your whole humanity into this awake moment before you respond. The authors then describe what one can do in that moment – they mention things like: calm yourself, even in moments of high stress. Become clear, so that the fog clears. Be curious, take an interest in what it’s about. Be compassionate, that is, warmly interested. And be courageous – courageous enough to slow down, perhaps to say: “What’s happening right now is very emotional. Let’s pause for a moment. I don’t have time right now because I need to be in the next meeting in three minutes, but we’ll come back to this.” Simple things, nothing new. But what’s instructive here is that this is part of that wakefulness, that presence between stimulus and response.

In the book, these qualities are called “the 5 Cs”, because they all start with C – well, that’s how books get written. But never mind: what matters are the qualities: Calm, Clarity, Curiosity, Compassion (warm interest), and Courage. Also see the needs of the other person first, not so much your own. It’s always about the other person being well – the leader ensures that others can work, strengthens them in their performance, and supports them. Courage sometimes also means accelerating and saying: “It’s a crisis, we have to act now, we cancel everything and come together to solve the problem.” And ideally all of this with humor and a certain lightness.

I’d like to add another aspect: leadership can of course also be learned – there are leadership trainings, tools, checklists, survey instruments, statistical evaluations, quality measurements and so on. That’s all correct and necessary, but I would see it as a necessary preliminary stage for that essential moment of leadership, namely the moment of presence, the moment of being in the now. In that moment I can’t really sit down and think which tool to apply – well, I can, of course, but it’s actually much more about: what is the right thing to do now? How can I get better and better at doing the right thing in the right moment? Sometimes that means: applying a particular tool, or another, or a combination – or none at all, but simply human interest and holding space. That too is something you find in the space between stimulus and response: at first I don’t know what to do, but I can say, “I’ll just hold the space, I’ll allow people to express themselves now.” That’s slowing down, holding space – similar things.

And always remember: with every person it’s different again. With one I have to speak this way, with another differently, otherwise they don’t understand me. This possibility of understanding has to always be in awareness – when two people talk to each other, the speaker often thinks they’ve been understood, and the other person nods, but may have understood something completely different or nothing at all. This non-communication often isn’t even noticed. One person says A, the other understands B, and they live and act side by side. We all know this.

That leaves the question: how can you practice this presenc and being-in-the-moment? I think it works very well by regularly going into heart coherence. This well-known exercise I’ve mentioned many times. Step one: I bring my awareness into the area of the heart. Step two: I breathe there a little more slowly, as is comfortable, in and out – in a horizontal image, so breathing into the heart, breathing out of the heart. Step three: I call up a pleasant feeling, remember a beautiful moment in nature or with a person, that “ah-feeling” you have when you finally put your feet up on the couch in the evening or lie in the bathtub, and place this feeling into my heart. With that, the heart opens further – it already opens through the slowed breathing, but through this empathic, beautiful feeling it opens even more. And then, as a fourth step, I send this out to myself and to my surroundings.

If you practice this on your own regularly and can call it up quickly when the situation requires, that’s already incredibly helpful. If you practice this as a team, as a community, and do it together before every important meeting, then I can assure you – and this is also backed by studies – that meetings become shorter, more efficient, that everyone is better able to express the essential without long-winded words. Out of presence, out of the space between stimulus and response, everyone can say the right thing in the right moment ¹.

I keep observing that people speak too long because, while speaking, they’re first finding themselves and their statement. With heightened presence and a good heart exercise beforehand, it works better to quickly get clear about what it’s actually about. And sometimes you also notice how someone absolutely has to say something, raises their hand while another is still speaking – that brings nothing, because that person is no longer listening, the speaker gets confused, the whole group loses concentration. As a leader, it’s very helpful to quickly recognize when someone is talking themselves into a frenzy, and then to interrupt: “What do you actually want to say? Concentrate for a moment and say it in a few sentences.” Or: “Think it over again and say it 10 minutes later.” Many leaders and moderators aren’t able to distinguish: is this essential, is the person getting to the point? Is it intellectual chatter? Is it very emotional? And there you are again in this space between stimulus and response: how do I lead this space, and how am I able to recognize the essential and respond accordingly?

So far my thoughts today on the question of what the essence of leadership is. There’s nothing really new about it – but I believe there’s still much to practice, apply, learn, and improve. Many thanks for reading and until next time

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