Present Leadership: Showing Up And Doing The Hard Work Of Cultivating Presence

Working apart does not mean being separate

Today, perhaps more than ever, leaders are being called upon to work more closely with their teams, as they collectively address the current unprecedented challenges. The reality of working remotely, the uncertainty of wellness for yourself, your friends, and family, and the worry of tenuous employment opportunities can, at times, be daunting. Isolation and distance from colleagues force you, as a leader, and those in your organization to function together while staying apart. What a mixed set of challenges!

There is a way through. By fostering a capacity to trust and depend on each other – both in the best of times and in the winds of sweeping change, you, your teams, and organization can continue to grow, develop, and scale. As a leader, your fundamental responsibility is to curate relevance out of the current situation. On the surface, this seems pretty simple. However, the work involved requires understanding the internal and external influences that shape the growth and development of your organization, employees included. Successful leaders do not function well in isolation. In fact, the primary source of fresh insights and problem-solving acumen is dependent on how well relationships are managed.

As a leader, the challenge to achieve success is met by building effective management teams and sustainable processes in support of successful behaviors that are able to thrive in this environment of persistent change. When challenges are too great, team members need to look to leadership to move them across any deep divide and into a sustainable culture that supports collaboration. Leadership, more than ever, is reliant on each team member. And teams, more than ever, are reliant on leadership.

Leaders cannot depend on the preexisting social systems, or technology, to unite and keep their teams together. Using online messaging platforms to critique another team’s progress has the potential to cause more problems than it solves. Texting colleagues how you feel about a team meeting tends to split the culture into an us-versus-them mentality.

Long emails about your point of view on the success or failure of the project create unnecessary work for everyone on the email thread and strengthen the divide. Often, leaders realize that despite their best intentions, team members may, for whatever reason, begin to lose their connections with one another. When leadership and social support are needed most, teams can increasingly become more distant and isolated. In these times, leadership is needed to make sense of these challenges.

Individual leaders cannot establish and maintain a culture through self-determined action alone. If not managed with intention, a brilliant insight, a new vision, or any innovation carries with it the possibility of disruption. This is not necessarily a problem, unless the disruption works against homeostasis – the balance of the variables that facilitates connection and cohesive equilibrium.

Isolated trees have a shorter life expectancy than those connected to a forest or larger ecosystem. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for the growth of an individual tree. Similarly, it takes a collective to create the culture and microclimate suitable for the growth and sustenance of an individual leader, the team, and the organization. Like a forest, an organization will thrive due to an embedded system, which recognizes the significance of the interconnections of its people. This is what creates and sustains culture. A leader cannot establish a consistent and cohesive team climate or ecosystem on his or her own.

Individual, team, and organizational growth and development depend upon collective effort – working together as a whole, as a culture. This must become the responsibility of every team member. Every individual must work to cultivate this culture by sticking to the task of building and maintaining cohesive connections, while refusing to allow themselves or their teammates to become isolated, displaced, or ineffective. No matter the context, people need one another to develop and sustain success. As a leader, you are interdependent. The cultivation of a sustainable culture is forged through your ability and willingness to show up, engage and be present.

Without presence, an authentic social network may never form. You may find yourself participating in a false world of your own making, an incidental culture, one that seems to exist due to an accidental give and take, rather than consistent moment-to-moment determination. With presence, you have the option to choose.

How to know when your team is separating and developing conditions that, when allowed to persist, drive failure:
 

• As territorialism builds, a tribal mentality emerges. This creates silos across business units and functions. One’s perception of one’s teammates can slowly degrade into the fear that they are competitors. Competition develops when, in fact, collaboration is a better and necessary choice.
• Fear of expressing one’s voice is often a legitimate choice given an unsafe environment that can, at times, develop when people become isolated. However, that fear, left unexamined, supports a corrosive team culture.
• Regression into past wounds, problematic patterns, and unhelpful storylines lead to failure when decisions are left on the table, agreements broken, and trust forgotten.
• Avoiding and masking the opportunity for productive conflict prevents development, due to the rationale that the status quo or norm is better than taking this risk.

Present Leadership is the antidote that stops these levers and triggers in their tracks. By showing up and doing the hard work of cultivating presence, leaders can expand their tolerance for listening deeply to the concerns and contributions of their team. Present Company installs active dialogue with the developing organizational culture. When a culture of presence is cultivated the gap between what is being said and what is being heard diminishes.

A Culture of Presence serves the whole of the community by:
 

• Unifying and aligning people, teams, and groups, while cultivating respect for collaborative leadership.
• Improving cross-sector communication and establishing constructive candor as a norm.
• Reducing insecurity and fears by developing a culture of mutual understanding.
• Clarifying the organizational values and norms that bring about success.
• Identifying problematic patterns and habits to establish thoughtful solutions.

Take a moment, right now, to reflect on your organization and the leadership responsibilities that you carry. Can you move into this moment and make a conscious determination to be present, pay attention, and learn from those you lead?

A Present Company culture with intention and presence creates connection. A cultivated culture, one with intentional and conscious involvement among its people, evolves out of the lived experience that is repeated in the present time. In this present social construct, there is an opportunity to consciously participate in a joint network, a world beyond anything one person can generate. Through active dialogue – both spoken and unspoken – a robust and intelligent foundation can be established and developed.

Together with others, leaders can participate in consciously shifting the systems from something to be maintained to something that serves everyone involved.