Not long ago my friend, Ed Batista tweet­ed that he felt inspired by how I had con­nect­ed lead­er­ship to psy­cho­log­i­cal whole­ness in a recent post. That was very kind, and it also plant­ed a seed.

I’ve writ­ten before about what I think whole­ness is for lead­ers, but look­ing back to that 2011 post, I was dis­ap­point­ed — which is a sign, hope­ful­ly, of my own growth and devel­op­ment. Whole­ness is a far big­ger, rich­er top­ic than I was able to con­vey, so in this post let me try to add a lit­tle more of what I think whole­ness is, espe­cial­ly for those in lead­er­ship roles. If you know Fred­er­ic Laloux’s 2014 book, Rein­vent­ing Orga­ni­za­tions: A Guide to Cre­at­ing Orga­ni­za­tions Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Con­scious­ness, you may already be famil­iar with the term, as Laloux uses it exten­sive­ly to help describe cer­tain human­is­tic and spir­i­tu­al prac­tices of cut­ting edge work­places. I high­ly rec­om­mend it.

The way I think of whole­ness is as a kind of ener­gy, already in our­selves, that draws us toward psy­cho­log­i­cal health and well-being. Smart peo­ple in lead­er­ship roles, feel­ing the effects of ‘expo­sure,’ of liv­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion­al fish­bowl may begin to sense that their effec­tive­ness has less to do with what they know tech­ni­cal­ly than who they are as human beings and how this is expressed through what they do. Although at one lev­el they may know their jobs very well, at anoth­er they rec­og­nize that they’ll need more than man­age­ment process­es and author­i­ties to be tru­ly effec­tive. They must use their ener­gy to grow as human beings if they want to address the com­plex human/systemic dilem­mas thrown at them by mod­ern orga­ni­za­tions. Of course, whole­ness isn’t just about orga­ni­za­tion­al effec­tive­ness. It quick­ly bleeds over into a ques­tion of a lead­er’s per­son­al iden­ti­ty. It is the ongo­ing sto­ry of the per­son — a sto­ry that nev­er stops unfold­ing dur­ing her or his life.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, whole­ness is linked to integri­ty, but our eth­i­cal foun­da­tions are only part of what whole­ness means. It is more about bring­ing togeth­er con­scious and uncon­scious parts of our­selves, our quest to “inte­grate” in a larg­er sense. This means that it also has some­thing to do with the res­o­lu­tion of inner con­flicts, and the accep­tance of them: our abil­i­ty to tru­ly and ful­ly live with our­selves instead of caus­ing our­selves (and oth­ers) suf­fer­ing by fight­ing inner voic­es and demons. It means wak­ing up parts of our­selves that we’ve neglect­ed, pos­i­tive­ly or neg­a­tive­ly. It means see­ing our own radi­ance and the shad­ows caused by that radiance.

The fads of the day can pro­duc­tive­ly high­light some of the qual­i­ties of whole­ness, but these are often cul­tur­al­ly shaped. These days, qual­i­ties like resilience, cre­ativ­i­ty, pos­i­tiv­i­ty, mind­ful­ness, open­ness and appre­ci­a­tion for dif­fer­ences show up as key qual­i­ties of whole peo­ple, whole lead­ers. As a con­se­quence there’s a horde of train­ing pro­grams that pur­port to give us ways to ful­fill these qual­i­ties. There’s noth­ing wrong with any of this, of course, but whole­ness implies more, espe­cial­ly a will­ing­ness to ‘do one’s per­son­al work’ on the par­tic­u­lar pat­terns of our thoughts and behav­iors that inter­fere with a mean­ing­ful life. Many of us strug­gle with receiv­ing feed­back about those pat­terns of per­son­al­i­ty and tem­pera­ment. We become defen­sive. We push back on the need to grow. We defend our sta­tus quo. Yet if we devel­op a more con­scious inter­est in our own whole­ness, we’ll begin to be open to more infor­ma­tion about those pat­terns, where they came from, why they are there, and what impact they tru­ly have on our­selves and oth­ers — and we’ll be able to address them. Sure­ly, this is not all com­fort­able work, as a per­son inter­est­ed in per­son­al whole­ness nat­u­ral­ly feels his or her ego and learns to own the chal­lenges that ego cre­ates — whether it’s the need to be seen as ‘right’ or ‘smart’ or ‘authen­tic’ or a mil­lion oth­er vari­a­tions of self-image to which we all too eas­i­ly become enslaved.

In fact, I would say that when we real­ly start focus­ing our atten­tion on whole­ness, we can see how a great deal of the prob­lems of indi­vid­u­als, teams, orga­ni­za­tions and soci­ety at large are caused by the false means and med­i­cines that peo­ple use to try to achieve whole­ness uncon­scious­ly. We all know what those meth­ods and means are — from focus­ing on per­son­al stature, com­pe­ti­tion, exces­sive wealth and pow­er, moral supe­ri­or­i­ty to self-med­icat­ing with drugs and alco­hol and oth­er self-defeat­ing behav­iors. And we are darned clever in the vari­a­tions on these themes.

True whole­ness pen­e­trates — and reveals — the heart and soul of a per­son. It’s one thing to say, well, let’s all study ’emo­tion­al intel­li­gence’ — or more like­ly say, “my man­agers need train­ing in emo­tion­al intel­li­gence.” It’s quite anoth­er to own my unex­pressed per­son­al anger or address hav­ing been con­di­tioned by my fam­i­ly to think of myself as ‘self­ish’ or ‘inad­e­quate,’ or to strug­gle with the ‘reac­tiv­i­ty’ I express that leaves oth­ers feel­ing dis­cour­aged and dis­tant and makes me feel ashamed. My inner work as a per­son is unique. It defines who I am to me. It defines how I want to lead and who I real­ly am as a leader.

Whole­ness is not just about every­body going to ther­a­py (although more of us lead­ers could). Ulti­mate­ly, I believe, it’s about under­stand­ing how in teams and orga­ni­za­tions and soci­ety at large we can help each oth­er grow — if only we have the col­lec­tive courage to acknowl­edge our per­son­al paths and chal­lenges. Tak­ing the risk to dis­close opens us to dis­cov­ery and help and reas­sur­ance that we are not alone. If we do take that risk, whole­ness also begins to expand to mean being part of a sto­ry much big­ger than us — one that has been wait­ing all along.

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