The Road Within
In Search of Authentic Leadership Behavior
by
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From the Introduction: As a theme of my life, leadership plays a major role. I am, together with many leaders I know, drawn to foster alignment across people. To my experience, alignment stimulates the one-plus-one equals three effects. All of us individually and together benefit from alignment in achieving our individual and collective goals, both in terms of generating results as well as in the happiness in the moment and the fulfilment in the long term. When I see this happening, it makes me feel happy, gives me fulfillment, gives me energy and stimulates me to go on with living my life in all its ups and downs. This book is about “Growing Awareness for Delivering Results.” Growing awareness about behaviour. Mastering behaviour for delivering results. My objective is to build the case of why it is essential for everyone, especially for leaders who have to deal with so many people, to spend quality and quantity time traveling The Road Within. The promise is pragmatic: if I as a leader want results, then thoughts and intentions are not enough. If I want results, I need all my capabilities. If I want results, I’d better not lose energy in suppressing old stuff inside of me, which distorts my perceptions. If I want results, I’d better consciously access all relevant information inside myself. In summary, if I want results, I’d better learn to master the behavior I demonstrate. There is another reason why to me any leader should go this road: learning how to transform behaviour, which often is well-intended but still has a negative impact. Behavior of a leader impacts the lives of many others. Receivers experience behaviour often as more severe, more intense, more influential than intended by the sender. As will be introduced in Chapter 2, the context, nature, and contributions of the leadership role trigger all too easily distorting behaviours in the leader which are passed on to the people around him. Learning about these trigger moments, about the personal, inner vulnerabilities for these triggers, and thus preventing one from demonstrating unintended behaviour is another purpose of this book. Because what I do is what counts. The messages in this book are the result of living my life: through reading, through practise and experiences in my own life, through application with seasoned senior leaders from around the world and receiving their feedback and acclaim. I feel confident about the theoretical base and practical relevance of the material since I have used an extensive inductive, experiential approach as the basis for building the conceptual framework. It has emerged from and went through constant trial and error during intense leadership development programs with more than a hundred fifty senior leaders as well during more than a thousand one-to-one coaching sessions. Most important to me: the participants tell me it works and brings positive change to their lives, to their business, to results. This is an additional purpose of this book: it hopes to be a source of inspiration, love, strength, and vitality in the lives of those who seek their way through the heights and depths of the doldrums of business, in search of achieving results. Part I is titled Going the Road Within — Where to Go? Chapter 1 will give you the background to behaviour. The core question will be: What makes me do what I do? It will be about the role of our senses, the functioning of our brain, and how this information activates our muscles, causing our behaviour. Attention will be given to the memory database we have in our brain, how our brain is loaded with all of our rational knowledge and with all of our emotional experiences. The word “all” is crucial, because the brain has stored all we experienced, from the youngest years of our being, conscious and unconscious. We will see the role these memories together play in our behaviour in the moment — often unconscious and still profound. Chapter 2 introduces how a leader is susceptible to inevitable distortions of his behavior and how these impact him. Particular attention will be given to the confusion of identity with results, to the fear of friction, and to the downside of stress. Part II is titled Going the Road Within – How to Get Through. Chapter 3 will introduce five dynamics leaders are permanently exposed to in everyday life. These dynamics are forces that are present in the background of any organisation, without the people in it necessarily being aware of them. They are comparable with the deeper program layers of a computer: they are there, you cannot avoid them; even stronger, they are essential for success but hardly anyone knows about them and how they impact the functioning, and if they don’t function right, they drag the system into functioning suboptimal, leading over time to the unavoidable crash. In Chapters 4 – 8, each of the five dynamics will be introduced. It will be shown how they ignite behavior. More in particular how they lead to leadership behaviour, supporting or detrimental for relations and performance. Together this will result in a compelling argument for each leader to pay attention to growing his or her authenticity and will learn how one can do this. The final Chapter, by way of epilogue, will disclose the promise for anyone who will go this road — a promise I experienced in my life and have seen materialising with many people I have had the pleasure to work with. Throughout the book, in order to make it practical and concrete, examples will be given. All examples are situations I have lived through privately as well as in my practise. The work-related examples have been altered in order not to disclose any personal, confidential, or private information, including references to any persons or situations. Despite this, any example you think you recognise is because we humans experience in all our uniqueness similar situations. The examples referring to myself, from my private life, happened as I describ
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About the Book
Grow your awareness, master your behaviour and achieve the results you seek. As a leader, you want your vision, goals and targets to generate winning results. There is only one way: through your behaviour. The Road Within takes you on the road less travelled: the one leading to your inner drivers, steering your behaviour. Why go there? Because “What I Do is What Counts”. This book guides you into your inner labyrinth, where intentions are transformed into behaviour. It introduces dynamic forces, impacting you from the outside, ever present in organisations, serving as triggers for distorting your behaviour. The book supports you to regain mastery over your behaviour for achieving results, through a pragmatic, compelling and highly accessible framework illustrated by examples from the author’s personal life and consulting practice. The book challenges you with a daunting promise: if you dare to go within, to liberate your authentic self and gain mastery over your behaviour, your results will grow!
About the Author
For twenty-five years Arri Pauw has been advising and coaching corporate leaders. First ten years as Human Resources executive in Philips and Unilever and since then as partner with the Genesis Consulting Group. He has supported leaders in connecting with themselves and one another for strengthening their relationships and consequently growing results, both personal and organizational. His work is grounded in the belief that every human being is unique. His passion is teaming up with clients in finding and expressing their authenticity. He challenges himself and his clients to take responsibility for personal behaviour and become aware of and improve the alignment between one’s intentions and one’s impact on others. This is his precept: what I do is what counts! His inspiration comes from living life with his wife and his children, as well as from roaming wilderness places around the world. This book is a manifestation of his quest and journey through life.