QOL Citizens
How Can I Demonstrate Leadership?
I demonstrate leadership in the city by managing myself appropriately in relation to my life conditions.
I demonstrate leadership by:
- initiating new patterns, processes and structures; eg. "Imagine the City of the Future" initiatives.
- developing and/or extending existing patterns, processes and structures; eg. integral approaches to solving homelessness
- making connections with ideas, people and things; eg. matching up seniors with Gen Y's to raise funds for a sports stadium.
In demonstrating leadership, I actually depend on three major bio-physical systems. Systems scientist and author, James Grier Miller documented these three systems along with nineteen subsystems (or threads) (which parallel the same nineteen subsystems in all other living systems) as shown[i] in Table 1.
Table 3.1: Human Bio-Physical Systems
| Key Bio-Physical Systems | Detailed Sub-Systems (Threads) |
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How Can I Be An Effective Leader?
Effective leadership is always dependent on my life conditions. Leadership co-emerges with the situations where I demonstrate it. Just as my inner capacities (of emotion, cognition and spirit) evolve with my motivation to change (see What Motivates Intention), my external leadership capacities are also activated by change (See Figure 1). Thus my nineteen sub-systems are always responding and adapting. The greater my self-management, the greater my capacity for managing and leading others.
Figure 1 Evolving Leadership Capacities [ii]
Effective leadership produces increasing resilience. This means my capacity to flexibly relate to change in my environment increases — so that I continue to source nourishment, sustain life and reproduce my capacities in others, even under challenging life conditions.
Some of the ways I demonstrate leadership are:
- Apply multiple intelligences in responding to change and developing resilience.
- Use technology appropriate to self and the leadership environment to enhance performance.
- Analyze the structural and social aspects of the leadership environment to determine group/organizational action.
- Embody whole person leadership (acting, reflecting, relating, producing) to respond to opportunities and strategies.
- Demonstrate outer self-consistency, and resilience in times of uncertainty and changing environments.
- Co-create big picture solutions.
- Value diversity in others.
- Model resolution of conflicts and ethical dilemmas.
- Choose the appropriate leadership model(s) (autocratic, democratic, collaborative, servant, integral) in response to life conditions.
- Demonstrate appropriate use of leadership role, style and skill versatility.
- Implement effective change through creating a shared meaning, vision and strategies, creating and leading teams, managing people and tasks, and achieving goals.
For more ideas and references check out the Internet Resources at the Integral City Discovery Zone, Intelligent Book Shelf and Integral City Shopping Cart.
For other aspects of the QOL Citizen click on these links:
- Motivate Intentions
- Discover the Complexity of Community
- Demonstrate Leadership
- Work for Quality of Life
[i] Miller, James Grier, Living Systems, McGraw Hill, New York, 1978, p. 365
[ii] Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, Blackwell, MA, (1996)