[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" Meta Reflectoin #4

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014  #4

January 27, 2014

 

MODELING GREAT LEADERS

 

 

Years ago when I first began traveling to South Africa, the idea was shared
among many of us about getting an interview with Nelson Mandela for the
purpose of modeling, not his actions, but his spirit.  Many of us in the
Neuro-Semantic community brainstormed about that and Anne Renew spent lots
of time actually making inquiries to see what could be done.  As it turned
out, there was so many requests for audience with him that Mandela's family
began protecting his time and energy and so all of our requests for even two
hours were turned down.

 

Having read the biography, The Long Road to Freedom by Richard Stengel and
some other books on the history of South Africa and the background of the
fight against apartheid, I felt that while many of the leadership actions
and activities -what Mandela did-were well established but not the spirit
behind those performances.  And after he left his term of being President,
it became especially clear that those who followed were not following in his
footsteps at all.  They had a different spirit and their leadership was
quite inferior to his.

 

Now the special genius of NLP Modeling and even more so of Neuro-Semantic
Modeling is that while we start with behaviors and what is done, and how it
is performed, and being able to transfer that expertise, we do not stop
there.  We go inside and we get the state of mind, the representations, the
beliefs, the meta-states as the texturing and qualifying frames for one's
beliefs, the meta-programs as the perceptual filters, etc.  With the Matrix
Model we are especially able to model the system of a person's experience as
Bob Bodenhamer and I demonstrated in model the experience of stuttering and
of fluency.

 

That was my thought about Nelson Mandela.  What's needed is a description of
his mind and heart and spirit.  I had guesses about it, but it would have
been so powerful if we could have talked with him and interviewed him and if
he would have allowed us to enter into that sacred space of his inner
consciousness that made him the transformative leader that he was.

 

Recently when one of our Meta-Coaches and Trainers and her husband (Sandra
Aveleia Viljoen and Andre N. Viljoen) was at the Group & Team Coaching in
Hong Kong and we got word of Mandala's death.  So I spoke about him and then
wrote about him in the Meta Reflections 2013 #52 (Dec. 9, 2013) "Mandela: A
Leader Like None Other."  Afterwards Andre and Sandra asked if I had read
the follow-up book, Mandela's Way by Richard Stengel.  "No, I had not."  So
they gave that book to me as a gift. [I also discovered that Andre had been
a friend of Mandela and has numerous stories and pictures of them being
together.]  And Wow! What a book.  This is very much like the book I would
have wanted to write.  It reveals so much of the inner mind and heart and
spirit of the man.

 

A Transformative Leader Because he was a Collaborative Leader

Here is a quotation from the chapter "Leading from the Back" that speaks
about his understanding that the best leadership is collaborative
leadership:

"Mandela genuinely believed in the virtues of the team, and he knew that to
get the best out of his people, he had to make sure that they partook of the
glory and, even more important, that they felt they were influencing his
decisions." (p. 75)

 

If leadership is at its most fundamental about moving people in a certain
direction through changing the direction of their thinking and acting, then
it is about empowering people.  "It is through empowering others that we
impart our own leadership or ideas." (p. 77).  And how do you do that?
Richard Stengel describes the African model of leadership of the tribe that
Mandela came from:

"Chieftaincy was treated as a privilege, not just a right.  The chiefly
style of leadership was not about vaulting oneself to the front but about
listening and achieving consensus.  The meeting of the royal court, which
were like democratic town hall meetings, were the locus of leadership.  All
of the men from the village came, and anyone who wanted to speak could do
so.  It was the custom for the chief to listen to the views of his
counselors and the community before uttering his own opinion."

 

At the end, "he would summarize the views ... but he did not let his own
will supersede that of the community.  This is what Mandela means by leading
from behind.  A good chief does not grandly state his opinion and command
others to follow him.  He listens, he summarizes, and then he seeks to mold
opinion and steer people toward an action ..." (pp. 80-81)

 

The heart of leadership for him- listening, welcoming, summarizing (all
excellent coaching skills!) and then molding the views and mind of the
community to steer to action.  Okay, so we know the external actions.  What
about the inner mind, heart, and spirit?

"The African model of leadership is expressed as ubuntu, the idea that
people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through
unselfish interaction with others." (p. 81)

 

That's an excellent description of what we call Self-Actualizing Leadership
in Neuro-Semantics: "We become our best selves through unselfish interaction
with others."  And ubuntu is that special understanding- "the profound sense
that we are human only through the humanity of others" (ix).  So no wonder
leadership for Mandela was essentially collaborative.  It could be none
other.  The word means "A person is a person through other people" that who
we are is less as individuals than as part of an infinitely complex web of
other humans because "we are all bound up with one another" (p. 231).  

 

And if we believe that, then along with Mandela we would believe in the
greater wisdom of the group.  We are more intelligent together than alone or
apart - as we say in Neuro-Semantics.

"Collective leadership ... about two things: the greater wisdom of the group
compared to the individual and the greater investment of the group in any
result achieved by consensus." (p. 84)

 

Great leadership.  What is it?  It is collaborative leadership.  And Mandela
lived that kind of leadership.  But there's more ... and that will be the
subject next week.

 

 




 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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