Positive Leadership

The Management Revolution

Ruth Seliger

• Publisher: Schäffer-Poeschel
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9783791038438
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The idea of management and organisation that has been developed in the days of industrialisation fails in the light of dynamic social and technological developments. Positive Psychology and Systemic Thinking induce new concepts: leadership based on power, leading and developing organisational energy, using self-organisation. In daily leadership practice these concepts stand for excellent performance, job satisfaction and meaningfulness.The first part of this book describes the principles of the "revolution in leadership": The author presents management-related results, models and tools of Positive Psychology and explains the three principles of integrated work (meaning, power, impact). On this basis she creates a suitable image of leadership and develops the principles of Positive Leadership.The second part addresses the practical implementation of Positive Leadership in real-life leadership situations and refers in detail to the three central areas of Positive Leadership: self-management, employee management, management of organisations. For all three areas the reader is provided with theoretically substantiated and proven-in-practice management tools.Additionally, many case studies from the work of the author exemplify the amazing effect of Positive Leadership.

Part 1:
Conceptual and methodological foundations

1. The paradigm shift

»For two thousand years, humanity has believed that the sun and all of the stars of heaven turned around it. The Pope, the cardinals, the princes,

the scholars, captains, merchants, fishwives, and pupils believed

that they were sitting inside this crystal sphere, motionless.

But now we emerge, Andrea, at full speed.

The olden days are over, and a new time has come.«

Bertolt Brecht: Galileo Galilei¹

A Paradigm is a comprehensive view of the world that is prevalent within a society and determines the thought and action of its people. Paradigms are composed of a multitude of assumptions, explanations and principles, which we use for orientation on a daily basis. This is how paradigms guide our thought and our emotion, our perceptions and explanations, and – above all – the behaviour of the people who make up a society. They are passed down from generation to generation, connecting people within a “paradigmatic community” sharing a view of the world that is never questioned. A paradigm is like the grammar of a language: you do not think about it, yet you use it; you think and speak with it and in it. It is difficult to recognise a paradigm – it is a blind spot, and we normally only notice it when it changes.

Paradigms predominantly consist of explanatory models of the world, which are enshrined deeply inside our collective consciousness. We only abandon them when they reach a limit and, thus, lose their primary explanatory function to humankind, or when they are replaced with more recent insights. The paradigm of the Middle Ages and the Catholic Church, for instance, which claimed that the Earth was the centre of the universe, was only invalidated and ousted from its predominant position as the natural science developed and we became capable of observing planets through telescopes.

We are at such a turning point today.

And like most major processes of change, this present paradigm shift brings different speeds, conflicts, and crises with it. We are experiencing this critical flux in different forms and with different contents: as a financial crisis, a crisis of democracy or trust, social disintegration and a widespread crisis of values, an ecological crisis, or a social crisis. Experts have long been speaking of a “systemic” crisis: all of these crises are closely interconnected; they affect one another and cannot be solved in isolation.

Anyone following the media coverage diligently enough may well become overwhelmed with this “crisis hypnosis” and be driven to despair. But we would not be speaking of a “shift” if the “crisis” and the “dying paradigm” had given rise to the first signs of a new worldview, a new understanding of what it means to be human and live a human life – notions that are slowly gaining momentum.

Jeremy Rifkin, brilliant mastermind and political consultant, has interpreted our era as the “third industrial revolution”.

“We are in the middle of a far-reaching change of social structures that is dismantling hierarchies in favour of a lateral distribution of power.”²

We can interpret Rifkin’s words as a 90-degree rotation of our worldview: from a vertical (hierarchic) to a horizontal (cooperative) order, but also as a shift from a differentiating to an integrative worldview. Having turned your point of view by 90 degrees, it is easy to visualise how extensively our world is changing.

Such profound changes take time, and they are terrifying. But do not worry – we have done this before. The paradigm shift currently underway is not the first of its kind, and it will not be the last.

1.1 The worldview of modernity

A look back in history will show us that such processes are a part of human society. Each of us know that the world has changed over the centuries; nevertheless, we believe that things will remain as they are, that our worldview will prevail. And we collectively forget the crises that accompanied earlier paradigm shifts.

Our current paradigm is characterised by the scientific-technological worldview of “modernity”, i.e. of the 15^th and 16^th centuries: an era that ended one thousand and five hundred years of dominance of the Catholic Church over the (European) world, replacing it with insights from the new sciences and technology. When Galileo Galilei gazed through a telescope in 1610, observing the motion of the planets and recognising that it was, in fact, the Earth that turns around the sun and not vice versa, the ecclesiastical worldview of the Earth as the centre of the universe suddenly collapsed. But it took many more centuries and battles until this paradigm was finally buried once and for all.

From this point, not only the paradigm of the Earth-centric universe collapsed – the new worldview changed considerably more. It was the beginning of the dominion of science as the driving force behind our explanation of the world. The renunciation of “faith” and its replacement with a scientific view of the world, referred to as “knowledge”, was a paradigmatic earthquake. Brecht leaves the description of this shift to Galileo Galilei:

“A great enthusiasm has emerged to explore the origin of all things: why the stone drops when it is released, and how it rises when it is thrown. New discoveries are made by the day.”³

After centuries of dominance by the Church and its faith, physics, mathematics, and technology ultimately assumed the leading role in the conceptualisation of the world. These disciplines examined it with a “factual”, “objective” approach; humanity attempted to understand the world in rational terms by observing it, cutting it into small pieces, analysing the pieces, and finally putting them back together. Increasingly powerful technological possibilities were developed in order to investigate increasingly minuscule elements of our world. This was based on the assumption of an ultimate core element that needed to be found and discovered in order for us to understand the bigger picture that makes up our universe.

New values emerged: rationality, reason, and logic became the decisive foundation of the new worldview and the new social principles. Simultaneously, the methodology of scientific research became a part of our worldview and our reality.

Its differentiating and dividing, lacerating and reassembling, its precise examination of all parts of a whole still constitute the basis of our approach to the world, to problems, to solutions.

Our world has been designed around those notions: science has been divided into faculties specialising in their own topics of research. Knowledge has been divided into “subjects”, learning at school into units of fifty minutes. Our hospitals have become departments for individual components of the human body, our work processes are clearly separated, our lives are split neatly into work and life, and we must strive to “balance” the two at all costs. We have created a world of “objectivity” and “differentiation”, and we are surrounded by it on a daily basis; it permanently reflects and confirms our thought processes. It is no longer imaginable that the world could be, or become, different.

The primary function of every paradigm is, on the one hand, to provide us with explanations for the great questions of our time: How did the world come into being? Where do we all go? Its second use is to simplify the world for us and portray it in a more accessible light. Much like the medieval paradigm, the worldview of modernity was aimed at simplification and the reduction of complexity in order to give humans guidance. Science was to provide explicit, clear insights and objective truths, which had been the domain of the Church until then. The idea emerged that it was possible to observe the world as an “objective item”, i.e. an object that was independent of its observer, and make statements about it. The “truth” of the Church was therefore confronted with a new, “scientific truth”.

This new “faith” in “objectiveness”, in “reason” and “the one, singular truth” has remained part of our culture to the present day. It dominates our science, our worldview, our actions, our values.

The core motivation of science, however, was its attempt to predict the future by means of “comprehension” in order to ultimately control the world.

“Newton’s laws of celestial mechanics and Descartes’ coordinates, which enabled scientists to imagine the world as a vast network, gave rise to the impression that everything was explicable in mathematical and mechanical terms. At the time of Napoleon, the French physicist Pierre Laplace could seriously imagine that scientists might one day find a single mathematical equation that would be powerful enough to explain everything.”⁴

The paradigm of modernity, like that of the Catholic Middle Ages, was rooted in the idea of a stable world order. It was this notion that allowed science to formulate new, apparently eternally applicable “laws of nature” and embark on a quest for a “world formula” that would explain everything.

Our capacity for differentiating and analysing, which is supported by increasingly powerful technologies, has heightened our awareness since the beginning of modernity and greatly enhanced our knowledge of the world. Unfortunately, however, our love for discernment has also made us lose sight of contexts. Simultaneously, the paradigm of modernity has brought us the illusion of an “objective truth” and led us to believe that we can simplify a complex world. The central elements of the scientific-technological paradigm are based on “doctrines”:

•the possibility of understanding the world by means of observation and analysis, for instance,

•or the idea that we can make “objective” statements about it,

•the notion of a rigid world order that is reflected in the laws of nature,

•the concept of unequivocal sequences of cause and effect as a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Content
• Impressum
• Preamble
• Part 1: Conceptual and methodological foundations
• Part 2: Positive Leadership in practice
• References
• The author