Choosing the Right Entity for Your Impact-Driven Business
Essential, not optional.
Every leader who is aware of the global political, social, and economic landscape knows need to transform their organization if they want to thrive in the future. Unfortunately, only 30% of change initiatives meet their goal. There’s a deeper reason why the majority of transformation initiatives fail. A reason that keeps preventing us from building thriving organizations and creating a more sustainable world.
Here are 10 reasons why Conscious Business practices are mission-critical — why they might provide the key for building truly inspiring, impactful organizations.
1. Your Success Stops Growing at the Point where your Consciousness has Stopped Growing
We can become financially successful, even the leader of a nation, with a low level of consciousness. However, when a leader who believes “people are lazy, I need to push them to perform” engages with the same consciousness in his personal life – with his wife or children – it’s easy to see that he will experience breakdowns that limit his overall success and well-being.
Consequently, an organization is only able to build a culture to a point that reflects the leaders’ level of consciousness. Beyond that point, the business will continue to experience breakdowns in trust, effectiveness, and sustainability.
What’s one area in life in which an expansion of consciousness could help leapfrog your overall success?
2. Transformation isn’t Change
Often, transformation initiatives fail because leaders think that ‘transformation’ is the same as ‘change’. They set goals, put a strategic change plan in place and expect people to execute accordingly. Consider that change means ‘to do something different, more, or less within an existing system or frame of mind’ – such as finding a different shipping route to East India with a flat-world mindset.
We can become financially successful, even the leader of a nation, with a low level of consciousness.
Transformation on the other hand is ‘to operate from a completely different level of consciousness and possibility’: to shift to the notion that the world is round and consider sailing westward to reach East India. Without the need to work harder or do more, one shift in consciousness opens a completely different world of possibilities.
Where in your work-world do you observe change, where transformation?
3. There’s no Undo Button for Conscious Evolution
Change initiatives get stuck when we expect people to change their behaviors; when a leader expects you to do something different without considering that your millennial-old patterns want to pull you back to your accustomed, ingrained behaviors. Growth in our personal lives, teams, and businesses remains limited if we expect different behaviors without addressing people’s level of consciousness.
An expansion of consciousness, however, can’t be reversed. Once we see an airplane for the first time, we cannot un-see what we’ve seen. We set the stage for sustained transformation.
What’s an experience that shifted your consciousness irreversibly?
4. Outside vs. Inside
We live vicariously through our five senses and have mastered dealing with situations using ‘outside’ measures. We buy a Prada handbag to feel posh, get a sailboat to feel respected, push employees to drive revenues, or climb the corporate ladder to gain power or self-value.
It’s time we realize that focusing our energy on external matters cannot fix our inner dilemmas and struggles, nor will it solve our global issues. To shift the playing field, we must direct our focus from the external to our internal world. When we do so, our impact, leadership, power, and peace of mind doesn’t only improve, it leaps to a higher level that was previously inaccessible.
Where in your leadership do you focus on external measures vs. focusing inside, first?
5. Every Conflict can be Transformed by one Change of Consciousness
Our world is ridden with conflicts. When a conflict remains unresolved, it’s just a matter of time until there’s a breakdown – in leadership, team relationships, and business performance.
There’s one change of consciousness, one insight, that could bring balance back to every conflict. In a conflict with your colleague, for example, an understanding what happened to him at a young age provides you with the compassion to listen rather than resist.
What’s one shift of consciousness that would resolve a conflict in your life?
6. From Scarcity (Survival) to Abundance (Thriving)
At the root of every struggle lies the mindset of scarcity – that there’s not enough of what we deem necessary for our well-being. When a leader pushes their employees to meet company goals, the driving mindset may be that there’s ‘not enough revenue’, that employees ‘aren’t working hard enough’, or that the leader ‘doesn’t feel good enough’ unless his business meets the revenue targets.
All our personal struggles, business issues, political conflicts, and global sustainability issues grow from our millennia-old scarcity mindset. To create thriving businesses, we must shift to a mindset of abundance: that there’s enough – that we’re enough. (If you find yourself thinking: that would be nice, but… read Reason 2).
Where do you lead your life with a mindset of ‘not enough’’?
7. Transformation happens when we “Don’t know that we don’t know”
Picture a circle that represents the entire knowledge of the universe. How much of this circle ‘do you know that you know’? For example, you know that you know how to ride a bike. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say 1%. Next, how much of this circle ‘do you know that you don’t know’. I know that I don’t know how to fly a plane, for example. What would you say? 5%?
This leaves most of the circle to the category ‘I don’t know that I don’t know’. If I asked you to give me an example of that, you couldn’t, because you don’t know that you don’t know. This is where true possibility lies: for yourself and your business. How can we access this vast repository of possibility? Through expanding our consciousness; through outside influences or groundbreaking experiences that shift our world view.
How much time do you spend exploring experiences that change your view of the world?
8. Exhaustion without a Chance of Improvement
82% of our workforce is at risk for burnout. Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes that our workplaces are literally killing people. Our existing level of consciousness got us here – and it cannot get us out of this situation.
Our only option to address our global challenges could indeed be to uplevel our consciousness. One of the necessary shifts in consciousness is to build organizations that focus first-and-foremost on people’s thriving rather than financial performance; asking us to know – without a doubt in our bones – that financial results would follow. One shift in consciousness, a completely different organization.
Where do you see your organization focus on finances, where on people?
9. New Leadership Tools are Meaningless
New tips, tricks, and leadership tools alone may eke out an improvement in performance, but they can’t solve the bigger organizational challenges at hand. A new leadership tool is like a hammer; it is only as useful as the consciousness of the person using the hammer: to fix, or to destroy.
Unless new leadership ideas are accompanied with expanding leaders’ consciousness, situations might improve, but the transformation we seek will remain beyond our reach.
How do you observe other leaders using new approaches they learned?
10. Create from the Future
We cannot create thriving organizations from our existing reality. We must first “live” in the future we want to create. Once we do, the requirements and steps for creating that reality reveal themselves to us.
Most feudal systems could not become democracies without a war. The military has not been able to shed its hierarchical structure. The new ways in which we govern our organizations or countries will be created by individuals who are able to live and create from an expanded consciousness and view of the world.
What is your genuine interest in creating truly thriving organizations?
Arguably, each one of these 10 reasons makes the point that Conscious Business is mission-critical for building thriving workplaces. Together, they provide businesses with an incredible opportunity to take advantage of the global challenges we’re facing – to take the lead in a world where trust in our existing political institutions is eroding.
Business is the only institution that is experienced in responding to a constantly changing market environment, far more adaptable and innovative than educational, political, or religious institutions. It may be in the hand of business leaders to create places where people can thrive, belong, and build the scaffolding for a more sustainable world.
Related Content
Comments
Deep Dives
RECENT
Editor's Picks
Webinars
Featuring
Alix Lebec & Julia Wilkinson
Lebec Consulting
February 20 - 12:00 PM EST
Featuring
Betty Francisco
CEO of Boston Impact Initiative
March 20 - 12:00 PM EST
An exploration of the transformative role of AI in scaling nature-based solutions.
News & Events
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about new Magazine content and upcoming webinars, deep dives, and events.
Become a Premium Member to access the full library of webinars and deep dives, exclusive membership portal, member directory, message board, and curated live chats.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about new Magazine content and upcoming webinars, deep dives, and events.
0 Comments