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.