The Leadership Paradigm

Dr. Stephen Covey, in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he describes a scene where he encountered a man with two children on a subway. While the children ran about and were beginning to physically annoy the other commuters their father simply sat there, his head in his hands. After some time of this, Dr. Covey engages the man and inquires as to his situation. The man, with a sigh, shakes his head and replies that the children’s mother, his wife, had just passed away not more than a few hours previous. He was reacting the only way that he knew how, and the children were reacting the only way that they knew how. This situation illustrates the classic characteristics of a paradigm shift: The paradigm of the passengers in the subway was typical: Father who did not know how to control his children. The paradigm of the father was considerably different.

Paradigm: A set of rules or worldview that each individual or group comprises that does two things: 1) it establishes or defines boundaries; and 2) it dictates behavior inside the boundaries in order to fulfill needs and desires.

Paradigm differs from attitude in that attitude is essentially defined as a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways. In a sense, your attitude extends from your paradigm; that is, your mental state that manifests from the mix of your feelings, values, and dispositions extends from how you view the world. In computing people will often ask more about how an operating system works, such as Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. The best analogy that I have been able to come up with is that the operating system acts like the floor of the house: Defining the “lay of the land” throughout it; if there are two floors or more, the floor will need to have stairs in it; if the ceiling for one room is too low, the floor will need to descend. The floor of the house offers a construct in which all the people that live there operate within the constraints therein. In the same fashion, our worldview creates the construct and constraints within which we operate.

If you ask ten different people what they feel leadership is, you are likely to get at least ten different answers. From a position of a figure of authority to a special competence in a technical skill to the broader meanings of an influential individual who guides, directs, and mentors or the capacity to do such things. In this sense leadership is not something to be achieved; rather it is a paradigm for which to live your life. Leaders are not necessarily managers or people that hold supervisory or authoritative positions: Leaders are, instead, people who see the world around them and live their lives in such a way as to transform it into a better place. Leadership is a worldview, a construct in which to live our lives.

The study, science, and art of leadership are things that are as broad as the Grand Canyon and much, much deeper. The entirety of leadership, however, rests in vision.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 2

Everyone (well, most everyone) interacts with other people on a daily basis. When we interact with people the new information allows us the opportunity to deal with the many differences that might exist between how we perceive the world and how the world really is. As individuals that belong to social groups, communities, and other such groups of individuals, we tend to develop shared worldviews based on individuals in the group placing and communicating value on similar objects. These shared views of the world create the environmental construct in which our individual constructs evolve. Things such as the laws we observe, virtues we share with others, and the morals of our communities are the manifestations of groups of worldviews. Because we share, respect, and value the worldviews of the social groups which we reference, we live our lives, in a manner of speaking, in accordance to the social reference group whose collective worldview is most aligned with our own.

Conflicts arise, however, when we add personal meanings to the collective worldview. Because 10 different people will interpret the world through their personality filters in 10 different ways people will be apt to create different construct meanings as part of the greater morality construct. In this sense, worldview meanings will not always translate—and often do not always perfectly translate—into the worldview meaning of the social reference group. In this environment where the fusion of individual and group beliefs is non-existent conflict becomes highly probable: We’ll start seeing conflicts not only between individuals in specific groups, but also between different groups. These groups of interactions are, in the more common vernacular, as relationships.

Relationships allow us to seek awareness in our patterns of thinking: The comparison of our closely held beliefs through emotions and concepts with the events that are transpiring in our interactions, our relationships. Which beliefs, concepts, and values are reflected in our behaviors? Each of these behaviors that reflect our beliefs, concepts, and values are partly caused by our interactions with our environment and partly the manifestation of our genetics.

Throughout our past we learn and evolve an understanding of how to be from the framework which we are working in at that time: This is why awareness is a key leadership trait at all levels—from self-awareness to awareness of one’s environment—if one’s perceptions are broad and understanding of circumstances deep, an individual can seize this epiphany of conditioning and make the most of one’s evolution. We go through this constant process, being most apt and searching for it in our youth, to fulfill the need to search for meaning in oneself and the world around them. If the past has had a dominant “punishment model,” the search for meaning created mechanisms for defense within the construct; in a nurturing atmosphere, self-expression becomes dominant. At any rate, the experiences of your past manifest themselves as the patterns of your today. The earlier that these experiences shape your construct, the stronger the tendencies and patterns become…the more inertia they have…and the more energy is require to overcome them.

The patterns that we use throughout our daily lives embody the truths in our world: We interpret, process, and mold the world to meet our specifications, our worldview. Conflicts in relationships are simply two worldviews that lack congruence with one another. In his book “Ways of Worldmaking” Nelson Goodman says: “Not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.” In other words, the truths of each individual differ, but the reconciliation of our truth from someone else’s is infamously indistinct.

The logical conclusion for all of this is that we should strive for three things: Heightened self-awareness, a deeper understanding of our relationships, and a thoughtful understanding the individuals in our relationships.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 1

Each person is but the sum of their experiences, or so we are told. Every experience which you have, every interaction which you make leaves you changed (unless we’ve been desensitized of it). Deep inside we have conscious awareness, unconscious unawareness, and everything in between that forms the construct of the person we are, the fabric of our being.

An individual construct, however complex, can be deduced to series of areas that combine in special ways:

Ontological component: The study of being and what constitutes objective and subjective existence, and what it means to exist.

Theological component: A particular system or school of religious or spiritual beliefs and teachings.

Cosmological component: The study of the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe.

Axiological component: The study of values and value judgments.

Epistemological component: The study of what is meant by "knowledge". What does it mean to "know" something as opposed to merely having an opinion?

Ethical component: The principles of right and wrong that are accepted by an individual or a social group.

Take 10 different people and ask them, for instance, “What constitutes your objective and subjective existence and what does it mean to exist,” or…if you didn’t want to be so long-winded, one could simply ask “what is the meaning of life for you?” You would likely get 10 different answers. Because things like the theological, cosmological, and ethical components have a tendency to be more discrete in nature (“What are your theological beliefs?” “I’m Lutheran” or “what is your belief about the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe?” “The standard model of cosmology, thank you very much!”). Ethics tend to vary between social groups, societies, and civilizations: What is an accepted belief in Western Philosophy, for example, isn’t necessarily something that one would find in Eastern Philosophy: The paradigms between cultures vary in context and, therefore, meaning.

How these various components interact comprise the objective versus subjective within the individual. Objective things are those that can be proven by fact, whereas subjective matters are often interpreted by the individual to fit into their individual world. The sum of accumulated learning goes through the “filters” of the individual—the ontology, theology, cosmology, axiology, epistemology, and ethics filters. Each person’s perception of the world is unique in that how they pass new information through these filters to change something.

Worldviews, supported by personal values, are a framework for interacting with others: More on that in the next post.