Tag: personalities

Leaders and full spectrum thinking

Once again in lockdown, I am coming back to still a new terrain with the benefit of a couple of lessons learned. While somewhat more familiar, the environment is still foggy to me. Living inside myself, I have come to recognize various voices: the angry one which hardly ever speaks but clearly has an opinion; the inner child who wants, needs, and desires until exhaustion; the confused one who analyzes and cannot make much sense of the outside world; the feeling voice who actually seems to be the most helpful one these days.

Some of us have the luxury of time and space to consciously face a regular “meeting of the minds” within ourselves. I have found this to be a very useful experience: a new staff meeting of sort! We can actually summon the many fragments that make up the whole of who we are and give them all a chance to speak, take space, and be recognized. Beyond the interest of self-exploration and self-care, this practice can help us discover a universe within that points to many untapped possibilities.

You may already have discovered various facets of your personalities, of course, but you may still be unaware of the multi-dimensional nature of our humanness – all your untapped possibilities. The environmental noise has made it difficult for you to hear the signs, see various signals, pick up on energies you never felt. You will no doubt marvel at how complete chaos has proven most useful to escape the outside noise and tune in to find clarity in this uncertain world – your own clarity: the only one that actually matters for you to identify your next steps. This is the beginning of full-spectrum thinking!

Today’s adversarial leadership

There are many styles of leadership. While I have been advocating positive leadership or service leadership, offering insights through my blog, it is clear that we are witnessing a surge of adversarial leadership on the international scene. High-conflict leaders have recently been leading from a place of drama, resorting to false heroic postures rather than working on solving current challenges. This has provided fertile ground for the rise of authoritarian political leaders. This phenomenon is not happening in vacuum. Our current social and political environment is attracting this type of leadership.

What are the main characteristics of today’s adversarial leadership and why is it happening now? Current adversarial leaders in politics and business around the world harbor high-conflict personalities, often bordering on a psychological or social disorder, either through impaired interpersonal relationships, lack of self-reflection, or an inability to change in the face of an obvious need to redirect. They are commonly referred to as narcissists, antisocial, or paranoid. 

The four key characteristics of this leadership style today are:

  • A tendency to blame others who become targets of personal attacks;
  • An all-or-nothing approach to solving problems;
  • A show of intense emotions, impairing problem solving and conflict resolution; and,
  • A tendency to resort to extreme behaviors from which most people would refrain.

As sociopaths of narcissists, they can also be seductive and highly attractive leaders, as many high-conflict leaders from the past were known to be.

What is it in our world today that attracts such leaders? Let us look at three key factors to start with. First, the media competition and highly emotional tendencies which have monopolized viewers’ attention these past decades, glorifying extreme behaviors, normalizing conflict behaviors through antagonistic debate shows, and fear-based coverage which happen to sell best. Second, a tendency to simplify highly complex challenges such as climate change through evil scaremongers and superheroes offering fantasy solutions, yet displaying no leadership skills and no results. Third, adversarial systems offering “either/or” solutions, which play well in debates, panels and combative politics, but rely on no community-based real life progress ensuring sustainability and thrivability.

This leadership style will continue to grow until we in society recognize our personality patterns and take responsibility through our voting power and decision-making communities, from boards of directors to school councils, as well as changing ourselves. It takes a community to raise a leader!