John Mackey started a movement when he founded Whole Foods, bringing natural, organic food to the masses and not only changing the market but breaking the mold. Now, for the first time, Conscious Leadership closely explores the vision, virtues, and mindset that have informed Mackey’s own leadership journey, providing a roadmap for innovative, value-based leadership—in business and in society.
If businesses want to become more conscious, leaders themselves must also become more conscious. Each chapter of Conscious Leadership will challenge you to rethink conventional business wisdom through anecdotes, case studies, profiles of conscious leaders, and innovative techniques for self-development.
Conscious Leadership culminates in an empowering call to action for entrepreneurs and trailblazers—to step up as leaders who see beyond the bottom line.
Introduction
Leadership has always presented challenges, but today, amid our rapidly changing global economy, those challenges are truly monumental.
Technology is proving increasingly disruptive, global competition is ever present, generational shifts in the workplace are complicating organizational culture, and changing attitudes about the responsibilities of business are putting more pressure on leaders.
The sheer diversity of issues that any CEO must respond to requires the wisdom of Buffett, the assertiveness of Churchill, the creativity of Jobs, the emotional intelligence of Oprah, and the patience of Mandela!
An organization’s potential is constrained by the abilities of its leader. So if our goal is for business to become more conscious, there is no escaping the imperative for leaders to step up to the challenge personally.
Lead with Love
In principle, few would argue with the statement that love is extremely important in every domain of human life. And yet, when it comes to business, this core human virtue is striking in its absence. Love rarely makes the list alongside traditional leadership virtues like integrity, hard work, and courage.
As a consequence of this omission, corporations are far less satisfying places to work than they should be, organization cultures are suboptimal, and their highest potentials are stunted. Love is very much in the corporate closet.
If we want to bring love out of the corporate closet, if we want to be conscious leaders who skillfully practice this powerful human virtue not just at home but at work, then we are going to need to think about business in entirely new ways. Instead of thinking of business as a battlefield or a jungle, what if we think of it as a community?
Find Win-Win-Win Solutions
The traditional approach to business is to aim for a win-lose situation, where one party comes out on top while the other is left with less. However, a conscious leader seeks to find a win-win-win situation that benefits all parties involved, including the larger community.
This approach recognizes that all stakeholders are interconnected and interdependent, and that managing the system with win-win-win thinking creates positive synergies that benefit everyone.
Practicing the power of intention by focusing on a desire for a win-win-win solution can yield unexpected and powerful results, often leading to a solution that benefits all parties involved.
Encouraging creativity
Innovation and breakthrough ideas require interacting networks of people. Some strategies to encourage creativity in organizational culture: create the right incentives, encourage healthy competition, and embrace the edges where established rules hold less sway.
By rewarding new thinking and ideas, allowing freedom to innovate, and exploring new cultural patterns, businesses can foster creativity and generate more innovative ideas over time.
The Nine Characteristics
Conversations and interactions with hundreds of men and women have uncovered nine distinguishing characteristics and behaviors that unite those leaders who are striving to be more conscious. These nine characteristics are categorized into three categories:
- Vision and virtue: put purpose first, lead with love, always act with integrity.
- Mindset and strategy: find win-win-win solutions, innovate and create value, think long term.
- People and culture: constantly evolve the team, regularly revitalize, continuously learn and grow.
When leaders become more conscious, the organizations they lead become more conscious, creating an ever-widening circle of purpose-driven cultures and communities. We elevate business through our humanity, and we elevate humanity through business.
What business are you in?
Business categories are changing rapidly in our fast-paced world, making it important for long-term thinkers to constantly ask themselves, “What business am I in?” Narrowly defining one’s business can cause missed opportunities and failure to see disruptive developments.
For example, if Netflix had defined itself as being in the mail-order DVD rental business a decade ago, it may not have successfully pivoted to online streaming and content creation as its previous business model became outdated.
Founder Reed Hastings recognized that Netflix was in the entertainment business, allowing for the company’s successful adaptation to change.
Put Purpose First
A leader’s job is to ensure that, amid all the complexity of daily activity, purpose shines brightly—that it remains vital and relevant, a guiding context, both ethically and practically. This entails more than just believing in our organization’s higher purpose. A conscious leader embodies it, and lives it out in a way that makes that purpose vivid and exciting.
Conscious leaders infuse their organization’s purpose with authenticity and meaning. They make it come alive, in little ways and big ways, every day. Their passion for purpose can become a touchstone for those around them. They demonstrate and embody the “why” of an organization. And they show a reasonable pathway to “how.”
Always Act with Integrity
Integrity is a virtue that every leader should aspire to, but we won’t pretend that it is easy or common. In some sense, we can more easily define integrity by what it’s obviously not. It’s not lying.
It’s not stealing. It’s not fudging your accounting, or mistreating your team members, or greenwashing your marketing. It’s not making unsubstantiated claims and false comparisons. It’s not misleading your customers or hiding facts from the public.
All of those are easily grouped into the “lacks integrity” bin of failed leadership.
Five qualities are core to understanding and practicing the virtue of integrity when it comes to leadership: truth-telling, honor, authenticity, trustworthiness, and courage.
Evolving the Team
As a leader, your team is crucial to your success, so attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining the best team is critical. The health of your team is a never-ending project that requires care and engagement.
To start building a great team, make good hiring decisions by evaluating emotional intelligence, character, and cultural fit, in addition to intellect. Cultural fit is especially important because a bad fit can cause problems within the team.
Remember, the team is a living, evolving puzzle that requires constant attention and care.
The Meaning of Conscious Leadership
Being a conscious leader means embarking upon an intentional journey of development. It means purposefully stepping up to a much higher level of integrity and responsibility.
It isn’t easy to become a more conscious leader. It’s not enough to simply follow rules or adopt the latest leadership fashions. The term “conscious” implies being more thoughtful, more awake, and more intentional in our embrace of our role and the responsibilities it confers.
It’s a word one might more readily associate with personal growth, spirituality, or philosophy than with professional development.
Conscious leadership is first and foremost an inner journey of character development and personal transformation, informed by a powerful understanding of human nature and human culture.
The Power of Intention
When you’re stuck in a difficult situation, one of the best things you can do is to repeatedly affirm your desire for a win-win-win solution to the specific challenge. Hold that intention in your heart and mind, with great conviction.
Focus on your desire for a win-win-win solution to emerge. This practice activates your subconscious creative mind to go on an inner “search process” that can yield powerful, unexpected results.
When your focus is this clear, your deeper, subconscious algorithms are tasked to work on the problem, and sooner or later a solution emerges.
Often, it will do so in unforeseen ways—a sudden insight, a wisdom-laden dream, a breakthrough in the shower, an early-morning intuition, a creative leap. A win-win-win solution presents itself. It may feel like magic, but it’s not—it’s the power of your own intention.
Innovate and Create Value
Ideas. Creativity. Resourcefulness. Imagination. Innovation. That is the real secret of our collective success.
Capitalism is at its best when we deeply appreciate that it’s more about the application of human creativity than about the allocation of financial capital. That’s why the successful innovator, entrepreneur, and even executive needs to focus on creating value rather than simply creating profits.
Here, “value” simply means the quality of product or service that encourages someone else to want to do business with you. Yes, value is tested in the marketplace, in the crucible of actual trade. But always remember that profits are downstream from created value, not the other way around.
