As a leader, do you recognize that your capacity to lead depends upon learning from others? Are you informed by the people around you – receiving their experience and their input regarding your decisions and behaviors? Do you recognize that your success is interdependent with their wellbeing? If it is true that “people don’t work for companies, they work for people,” then it is reasonable to assume that if you are the head of your organization, they work for you. By cultivating your capacity to lead, you are opening your process and recognizing that you are accountable to these people. Are you willing to accept this responsibility for the control that you have over the people that depend on you? Can you see how risky it is to do so without their input? If so, then you are listening, and you recognize that because you have the power of leadership, you are accountable for using your control – responsibly.

Something in the story below reminds us of the need for leaders to listen, even to the smallest of impulses, and of what happens when they don’t:

“Over the years, a practical and materialistic society can usurp the original mystery of childhood. We are sent to school early to “grow up,” to “be serious,” and if we don’t let go of our childhood innocence, all too often the world tries to knock it out of us. A hundred years ago the American painter James McNeill Whistler encountered this attitude in his engineering class at West Point Military Academy. The students were instructed to draw a careful study of a bridge, and Whistler submitted a beautifully detailed picturesque stone arch with children fishing from its top. The lieutenant in charge ordered, “This is a military exercise. Get those children off the bridge.” Whistler resubmitted the drawing with the two children now fishing from the side of the river. “I said get those children completely out of the picture,” said the angry lieutenant. So Whistler’s last version had the river, the bridge, and two small tombstones along its bank.”

Kornfield, J.  (2000).  After the ecstasy, the laundry:  How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path.  New York:  Bantam, p. 9. 10