No matter where you work, you will have experienced leadership that falls short and fails, for a host of reasons. Politically, in so many countries, leadership is often divisive and about leading a specific group towards an objective that serves the interests of that group alone. In organizations, even the most progressive, it falls short whenever leaders strut their egos, put their own interests first, demand obedience, protect territory or lead through fear or force.

The Missing Piece – Wise Leadership

The great missing in leadership today is the capacity for wisdom. It’s not a topic that we hear much about, possibly being too grand or mysterious a concept. Perhaps in our technology-driven era we don’t have the time or mental space for it. But that does not make the need for it go away.

Wisdom is more than having great knowledge or expertise. There are many highly intelligence, experienced yet deeply unwise people in the world. Wisdom takes knowledge and applies it with discernment based on experience, evaluation, and lessons learned.

Wisdom also contains the capacity to take in the whole, and to understand the connections that exist between the various parts. In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things. It is the capacity to comprehend the systemic nature of life.

Are you a wise leader in the spaces you inhabit? Are you capable of perceiving and serving the greater whole that lies beyond your own specific interests, beliefs, needs and aspirations?

Losing Your Wisdom Stance

Wisdom vacates the premises anytime a leader decides to create division of any kind. It’s as simple as that. There may be “just cause” for such action, but it cannot be assumed that wisdom was or is present. Wisdom is the capacity to both see the whole and to comprehend how it strengthening its interconnections sustains the whole.

Anytime you find yourself defending, arguing, demanding, forcing, wrestling for control, or self-righteously defending a position, your wisdom stance has gone out the window.

Whenever you find yourself negatively judging or invalidating others, wisdom vacates the premise. Judgment energizes perceptions and attitudes that divide people, which in turn imperils the whole organization. Yet leaders do that all the time – they see and judge the people in their team or organization as ‘less than’ or deficient in some way.

The Wise Leadership Challenge

The wisdom development challenge I lay before you is to notice how the positions you take and the judgments you make put your capacity for wisdom and wise leadership in jeopardy.

People desire to work in organizations in which leadership is more accepting, tolerant, open-minded, open-hearted, just and fair. Yet anytime you choose to be the opposite of one of those, you jeopardized the whole organization and diminish its collective potential. When you lead by fostering division of any kind, even if that division resides unspoken in your mind, you are no longer leading from wisdom. 

The challenge for the next month is to give leadership by wisdom the space to grow in you by learning to take in a far greater picture of the interconnectedness of human and organizational life. Is it time to stop leading by division in any way and step into a much larger capacity of self-hood?

Here’s where you can begin:

Notice your own self-interests, and where you perceive them threatened. Notice who you have animosity towards. Notice who you are not tolerating. Notice who you judge to be ‘less than’ or deficient.

Then step back and ask yourself, ‘What does it take for me to lead from wisdom?’ Can I see beyond the immediate perception and sense into the whole that is there, both in that person and in the organization to which we are all contributing?

Then allow your inner wisdom to lead you to a new perception, attitude and action.