Enlightening The World
CFEL Home
Founding Partners
Faculty & Associates
Speakers
Workshops & Institutes
Executive Coaching
Mentoring
Articles
Newsletter
Consulting
Products
Books
Client Comments
Web Links
Wellness
The Event Horizon: Essays On Our Spiritual Journey
Empowerment Stories
Networking Groups
Paul Houston's Blog: Political pH
Contact Us
Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS – A QUARTERLY E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

20/20 Foresight
By STEPHEN L. SOKOLOW

  Dr. Stephen L. Sokolow
  Dr. Stephen L. Sokolow
Executive Director and Founding Partner

We’ve all heard the adage that hindsight is always 20/20. This adage implies that as time passes we can look back and see if what we thought was right in a given situation at a given point in time turned out to be right after all. After all, it’s always easier to know the right decision to be made when the issue is behind us. As leaders and as human beings, we strive for 20/20 foresight. What would it be like to be right all the time, or even most of the time? Would it be a burden or a blessing or both?

Most leaders strive to do what’s right. But what does that mean? Right for whom? Right for them, right for their organization, right for the people who hired them, right for their constituents, right for the country, right in the eyes of the majority, right in the eyes of God? Discussions about what’s right usually boil down to a matter of context and values.

Hardly a day goes by that the news media fail to quote leaders talking about doing what’s right or fighting for something they believe to be the right course of action. In a February 3 front-page story in the New York Times, the headline read “A Call to Topple Policy for Gays in Armed Forces.” The subtitle was “The Right Thing To Do.” In the article, Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as believing that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.” The following day, the Times Nation and World section reported on an event billed as a Conversation with the President. The title read, “Obama to Dems: Want re-election? Show Leadership.” The article went on to say that Obama is “still confident the American people will re-elect leaders who do the right thing and explain it well.” Earlier that same day I received an e-mail from the Democratic National Committee advertising the same event. It mentioned “fight” or “fighting” three times in about seven sentences: “President Obama will talk about fighting for change in 2010; President Obama will…address the tough fights ahead of us; …including fighting to strengthen the middle class.”

As leaders, we try to foresee what’s right. Some leaders say they get a “gut feeling” about what’s right. They want to feel that they are doing the right thing. We judge ourselves, and others judge us, about the degree to which we do right and are right. As if this weren’t challenging enough, we are continually tested to determine how deeply we feel about doing what we deem to be right. As countervailing perspectives and forces arise, we must decide if what we believe is right is worth fighting for. How hard should we fight? What are we willing to risk? Peace in the valley? Good will with adversaries? Political support? Political capital? Our health? Our livelihood?

So how do we see through the mire and the muck to chart the right course for ourselves and our organizations? We really need to know ourselves and be true to ourselves. We need to be in touch with our core values and be guided by them. In his book Moral Courage, Rushworth Kidder identified five universal core values: honesty, fairness, respect, responsibility, and compassion. In The Spiritual Principles of Leadership, Paul Houston and I identified these and many other related spiritual principles of leadership. We believe that each of us has an inner moral compass that points us in the direction of “true north,” i.e., what’s right. There are many ways of tapping into this inner guidance system. Living by and practicing the spiritual principles of leadership is one of them. In other words, we can increase the likelihood of being right and doing right by acting in accord with our core spiritual values. That said, it is always possible to misread or misinterpret our inner guidance because human beings are capable of self-deception and fallibility. Therefore, it is imperative that we give our judgments a reality test; either through modeling or benchmarking we must assess the degree to which our decisions and actions are playing out as we planned and envisioned.

Meditation is one means of tapping into your inner guidance system. It can help you gain access to your best thinking and highest state of consciousness. Pose a question to yourself either before meditating or before going to sleep. Allow your unconscious mind to ponder the right thing to do or the right course of action while you sleep. Then be open to the intuition and clarity that comes to you from your inner guidance system. I did just that with this article. I did a brief meditation and posed a question about the right way to approach this article. At first I did not have clarity, so I posed the question again before going to sleep that night. As I awoke the next morning my head was abuzz with ideas I felt guided to include.

Let’s do a reality test. I wanted this article to be interesting and helpful to you. If it is, send me an e-mail (slsokolow@aol.com) with a thumbs-up. (I’m a newcomer to Facebook. I just learned how to share an idea through Facebook where people can give you a quick thumbs-up if they like your posting. This is one new way of reality testing our ideas with others through the use of social networking sites.)

Here are some other insights that came to me when I posed the question (to myself) of what I should include in an article about seeing what’s right, feeling what’s right, being right, doing right, standing for what’s right, and fighting for what’s right. To borrow an often-quoted line paraphrased from Robert Frost’s famous poem: “Take the road less traveled.” More often than not, the right choice is the more difficult one. Try not to focus on yourself or your own self-interest. Instead, focus outside of yourself, on the interest of others. This does not mean you can’t benefit from doing what’s right. It just means that your primary attention needs to be focused outward. There’s an irony here. You focus inward for guidance but outward for the effect of that guidance. As a superintendent of schools, I asked myself a question that many educational leaders use to chart their direction, “Is this good for children?” Ironically, what was good for children was not always good for me and my career. I frequently paid a political price for fighting to do what was right for children.

Leadership is not for the faint of heart. When you find yourself encountering strong oppositional forces, you need to figure out if you are being opposed because you are wrong, or going about something in the wrong way, or because you are right and your position simply threatens the established order.

In the long run, leaders with 20/20 foresight are deemed by others to be wise. Again, you can improve your vision by being true to your best and highest self, operating on the basis of core beliefs, and focusing on the greatest good for others.


Center for Empowered Leadership ®
Email: info@cfel.org
Phone: 1.609.259.7911