Developing Your Courage as a Catalyst Leader
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) provide a blueprint for a more resilient, peaceful and inclusive future. However, the 2024 progress report – tabled at the UN last month - shows only fifteen per cent of SDGs targets are on track to be achieved by 2030, nearly half are showing minimal or moderate progress, and progress on over a third has stalled or even regressed.
António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations maintains “We are at a moment of truth and reckoning. But together, we can make this a moment of hope…when we jump-start progress on the SDGs, to create a more peaceful and prosperous future for all.”
The importance of hope to being an effective catalyst leader was discussed in our earlier blog, ‘Apply Activated Hope’ – a sense that taking purposeful action will change outcomes and make a positive impact by creating sustainable wealth and wellbeing. The insights in that blog from Chellie’s latest book ‘The Catalyst’s Way’ were handpicked by Chellie to provide further value and insight to leaders - to ignite powerful change in your organisations, communities and yourself.
Part of my (Rodger’s) ‘Activated Hope’ is that more ethical and sustainable investment and catalyst leadership development – my twin passions that I see as two sides of my coin of change – will make a positive impact in achieving the SDG’s. My focus on encouraging more investment is via Money Matters where our engagement with fund managers and companies includes calling for a greater focus on leadership development to support the SDGs. My focus in this blog is providing more insight to this type of leadership development.
This need for more leadership development in support of the SDGs lies at the heart of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) initiative that last month marked its three-year anniversary. The IDG’s aim to ‘bring the power of inner development to global challenges faced by humanity’. The IDG ‘movement’ is built on the understanding that: “there is a pressing need to increase our collective abilities to face and effectively work with complex challenges. And without a foundational shift in human values and leadership capacities, external solutions to our global challenges may be limited, too slow or short-lived”.
The IDG Framework consists of five dimensions with 23 skills of human inner growth and development that are intended to “assist us in navigating and developing our inner lives to catalyse outer change”. The IDG invites you to discover how the five dimensions - Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting – can “become a unified catalyst for global change”.
One of the essential qualities identified by the IDGs is ‘Courage’. This is presented and defined as follows:
Courage was a quality I explored in my PhD in the context of virtue ethics. Courage was the first virtue listed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle who believed that it is a marker of moral excellence. For Aristotle this meant courage in combat which can be equated to the courage required of and displayed by catalyst leaders who take a stand for responsibility. One of the quotes I included in my PhD was from author James O’Toole who describes courage as the essence of greatness. He maintains that this virtue not only serves business and society but is critical for ‘the continued survival of corporate capitalism’.
Another application of courage is being willing to ‘look within’. Staying with the Greek’s this is the courage and wisdom to ‘Know Thyself’. In the context of Inner Development my PhD thesis included an exploration of the role of self-reflection and self-awareness in leadership. I found the work of Parker. J. Palmer ‘exploring the inner landscape of a leader’s life’, particularly inspiring. This, in turn, prompted me to attend my first Courage to Lead® workshop and many workshops later to then become a facilitator with the Center for Courage & Renewal, co-founded by Parker Palmer. This ‘facilitator preparation’ process helped me bring to my roles, including as facilitator, qualities of empathy, deep listening and humour; offering people the safe and welcoming space to tune into their own wisdom for living and leading well.
The Courage to Lead® offers an approach to leadership rooted in integrity and trust. At Catalyst Leadership we see view this approach as a key part of mastering the Inner Development Goals. Through this you can:
Expand your inner capacity to lead a more authentic, meaningful and engaged life.
Develop your ability to listen openly and to be present to others.
Increase your skill in asking open, honest questions that help others uncover their inner wisdom.
Discover a process for discernment to reach clarity around key questions.
Learn principles and practices that can be applied to your daily life and work.
Past participants of Courage to Lead® report powerful benefits including:
A stronger sense of purpose and satisfaction with their work.
Feeling recharged and ready to return as an agent of positive change.
Heightened self-awareness and ability to be more fully present.
More trustworthy and compassionate relationships.
‘Leading from Within’
One of the many excellent books that have been inspired by and relate to the Courage & Renewal approach is ‘Leading from Within’. It begins as follows:
On September 11, 2001 on United Flight 93, a passenger, Tom Burnett, called his wife from the hijacked plane, knowing that two other planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. “I know we’re going to die,” he said. “But some of us are going to do something about it.” And because they did, many other lives were saved. Their example can inspire and instruct us.
In the Foreword to the book ‘Leading from Within’, Madeline Albright recounts this story and adds, “I know we’re going to die” is not a remarkable statement, as any of us could say the same any day. However, Albright highlights as “both matter of fact and electrifying” Burnett’s words “some of us are going to do something about it.” Those words, she maintains, “convey the fundamental challenge put to us by life. We are all mortal. What divides us is the use we make of the time and opportunities we have”.
Albright then considers the same question in the context of the relatively recent discovery that the genetic code of a human being and a mouse are 95 per cent the same. She suggests that: “Perhaps each night we should ask ourselves what we have done to prove there is a difference. After all, mice eat and drink, groom themselves, chase each other’s tails, and try to avoid danger. How does our idea of “have a nice day” depart from that?”
She maintains “true leadership comes not from the sound of a commanding voice but from the nudging of an inner voice”. She concludes by noting that: “Opportunities for leadership are all around us. The capacity for leadership is deep within us. Matching the two is this book’s purpose – and all the world’s hope”.
‘Leading from Within’ brings together leaders from virtually every sector of society – “tough and tested men and women whose daily work life is chock full of problem solving, relationship building, and make-or-break challenges”. These leaders were invited to tell the stories of how they strive to be authentic. Given the current vogue for authentic leadership writings this might not sound particularly noteworthy. However, what distinguishes the approach taken in this book is that the leaders were invited to provide a favourite poem and a 250-word commentary that describes what happens when they reflect on the poem.
The resulting book was described by Jim Kouzes, co-author of the bestselling ‘The Leadership Challenge and A Leader’s Legacy’ as “perhaps the most soulful treatment of leadership ever composed. Leadership is first an inner quest, and there is absolutely no better place to explore your inner territory than in the pages of this book. This is an evocative work of art; do yourself an immense favour and engage with these amazing and diverse leaders and their poems.”
‘The Blizzard of the World’
The Center for Courage & Renewal encourages leaders to explore and inquire into their inner and outer worlds. In the IDGs context this includes ‘cultivating our inner life’ that in turn includes strengthening an ‘Inner Compass’. In an approach that is rare in leadership development settings, the Courage to Lead® approach explores important topics metaphorically, using poems and stories that embody the topic. Palmer calls these embodiments “third things” because rather than representing the voice of the facilitator or participant, they have “voices of their own, voices that tell the truth about a topic” and evoke from us what our authentic or deeper self wants us to pay attention to. Here is an example:
There’s a Leonard Cohen song, ‘The Future’, which refers to “the blizzard of the world” crossing the threshold and overturning “the order of the soul”. Leaders experience this blizzard in many forms, including an ever-increasing volume and velocity of challenges and complexity. The blizzards faced by business leaders can cause them to lose sight of what matters most and to lose their sense of orientation.
Palmer describes how: “…farmers on the Great Plains, at the first sign of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home in a whiteout while still in their own backyards”.
In response to the subject of ‘The Blizzard’ and the Leonard Cohen lyric you might take 15 minutes to reflect and write in a journal your answers to the questions (NB: If you don’t think you have time to do this, that very response highlights the potential value for you of this reflection):
What is the nature of the blizzard(s) in your life and work?
What contributes to it?
What does it feel like to be in it?
What does the blizzard obscure?
What gets ‘lost’ when you’re in it?
‘The Way It Is’
Highlighting the courage required to look within even via poetry, Palmer cites T.S. Eliot and notes that what Eliot said about poetry is true of all third things: “(Poetry) may make us… a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves”.
A companion exercise, about tying the rope to the barn, is to work with the poem ‘The Way It Is’ by William Stafford:
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
Questions for reflection on this poem are:
What are some threads – personal beliefs and convictions that you try to hold onto in your life and work?
What helps you hold on to them?
What makes it difficult to hold on?
Have you ever had to explain about your thread? How have you talked about it?
What might it mean to ‘follow’ your thread, rather than pull or push it? How does that change things?
What does it feel like to be separated from your thread? Say, by losing something, or choosing a path that isn’t really yours?
Learning more about the Courage to Lead® and including it as integral part of your leadership development could be one of the best leadership investments you ever make. I can certainly vouch for the phenomenal impact it has provided to my personal and professional life. Please be in touch if you would like to explore this further.
Let’s hope that supported by in-depth leadership development catalyst leaders will help make the difference required to achieve the SDG’s.
