The Eight Core Principles of Resonant Leadership
1. All Leadership is example, anything else is coercion.
Resonant Leaders “walk their talk.” This creates a working environment of openness, honesty, and trust. Leading by example is the only way to create emotionally engaged followers. Competent people with a strong self-concept, people capable of being Resonant Leaders, will not be coerced; they will just leave. Research shows that the principal reason good people leave is because of the impossibility of relating well (i.e. trusting) a boss who does not “walk the talk.”
2. We are ALL leaders, all the time.
Simply because our lives are defined by our relationships, we must be aware of our influence on those around us. Independent of our position, formal authority or role, we all have people who admire us and regard us as models. We have more impact on every life we touch than we may ever know. So every relationship has a leadership dimension. Leading is Not Optional! The only question is “will we choose to be a resonant leader or a dissonant leader?” These are our only choices! Every day, in everything we do we make this choice and in this choice we model the way we want our followers – and our leaders – to relate to us.
3. Resonant Leaders are Authentic.
For Resonant Leaders to create emotional loyalty, they must be “real.” They must have the courage –and the confident self-concept – to reveal their humanness and “human-mess.” They must be so comfortable with themselves, who they are – and who they are not – that they can “own” the juicy, idiosyncratic characteristics that make them interesting and authentic. Resonant Leaders are not “well-rounded”, they have “rough edges” that make them real, believable, and admirable. They are not, nor will they follow, leaders who are frauds or are “phonies.”
4. A Resonant Leader has the ability to gain engaged Buy-in.
Without engaged buy-in, coercion is the leader’s only option to get people to do what they want them to do. Coercion may not be explicit, it may be institutional, but it is coercion nonetheless. People do what they do for one of two reasons. They do things because it is congruent with their own Value Structure (their life purpose, values, vision, goals, etc.) or because they are yielding to coercion. People will become emotionally engaged with a Resonant Leader when their Value Structure and the organization’s Value Structure are congruent. This is the necessary pre-condition for emotional loyalty. Alternatively, people become disengaged, withholding their discretionary energy, when their personal value structure and the actual versus stated value structure of the organization are not congruent. To close the gap between the organization’s stated Value Structure and its actual Value Structure, the leaders must 1) lead by example, 2) expect everyone to be individually responsible for the way they relate to others, and 3) be real and authentic including the ability to acknowledge their own limitations and to ask for help.
5. Nothing we experience has any intrinsic Meaning. Its only Meaning is the meaning we choose to attach to the experience.
No two people experiencing the same event have the same reality about it because each person will choose to attach a different meaning to the event. The meaning attached to an event is shaped by our beliefs, especially our beliefs about our self. Understanding that our reality is something we each “make up”, has serious implications for the way we relate to ourselves, the world and everyone else.
6. Life’s journey is all about learning, un-learning and re-learning.
We learn very little when we live in the center of our comfort zone. All learning happens at the edges of our comfort zone. When we are in our comfort zone, we “know the answers.” Which is precisely why we are comfortable! It is only when we don’t know the answers – when we are uncomfortable – that we experience our lessons, i.e.
when we learn – or re-learn – something we didn’t know before, whether it is about our self or about something in our universe. Tom Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence”, made the point eloquently when he said, “Nobody who ever did anything interesting, did it right the first time, or even the last time.” The difference between a lesson and a mistake is the label we attach to the experience. If an experience is labeled a “mistake”, it is to be avoided at all costs, never to be repeated again. A “mistake” is usually accompanied by a lot of negative self talk and self-criticism. If an experience is labeled a “lesson” it is valued, integrated, and cherished. Lessons are repeated until learned. The more we embrace the current lesson with curiosity (“Isn’t that interesting, I wonder what I was thinking …?”) and
non-attachment, the more efficient the learning. “Non-attachment” means our ego, our self-concept, is not attached to the outcome of the experience, i.e. “the lesson.”
7. Life is Binary; “1” or “0”. In every life circumstance, we are either Responsible or a Victim.
In every situation, in every encounter, we are either Responsible for what we experience or we are a Victim of that experience. There are no other options. Since we are at choice as to what meaning we attach to the experience (see Core Principle #5), we are at choice in our ability to respond, i.e. our “response-ability.”
8. We are responsible for testing every core principle, every bit of wisdom before owning it.
Once we act on any delivered wisdom, we own it just as if we created it out of our own reality. As a result, we must test it all, internalize only that which is true to our self-concept and reject the rest.
