Your structure of mind drives your level of leadership.

In a business transformation, as a critical mass of leaders within the organization develops to a new stage, a tipping point is reached, enabling the system to make and sustain a leap from one level to a higher-order of the five levels of leadership and system performance: 1) Egocentric, 2) Reactive, 3) Creative, 4) Integral and 5) Unitive.

Egocentric

The identity at the Egocentric level is “I am my needs.” We are identified with our ability to meet our needs. This identity does not notice other’s (often-competing) needs. We are islands unto ourselves, and we relate to others primarily to get our needs met. Growth at this phase is taking others’ needs and expectations into account. It requires defining ourselves co-relationally, such that our primary loyalty is no longer to ourselves, but to the relationship (friend, parent, family, organization, community). 

Reactive

The ability to hold both our needs and the needs/feelings of others simultaneously is the hallmark of the Reactive level. We learn societal rules and play by them in order to meet expectations. We dive into our chosen professions and work hard on honing our outer game. We gain the Domain Knowledge required to succeed in a chosen field. We create businesses, build careers, climb ladders, get married, have families, and establish the homestead. 

Leaders at the Reactive level often care deeply about their employees and manage and function as benevolent parents or patriarchs/matriarchs. The organization is ordered and efficient. It is competency-driven and mechanistic. It uses all the scientific management tools. Employee input is solicited, but decision-making and creative expression are still vested with top leaders. Leadership is often humane, but lacks the capability of broadly sharing power. People are informed but not involved in decision-making. People feel supported financially and treated fairly, but most are not expected to be involved in important decisions. The institutional style that emerges with Reactive leadership is a large, efficient hierarchy—an ordered and layered bureaucracy. Its political climate requires loyalty and obedience. 

Creative

At the Creative level, we shed some old assumptions that have been running us all our lives; and we initiate a more authentic version of ourselves. By shedding well-patterned assumptions, we start to see the habitual ways of thinking that form the core of the Reactive Mind. They have served us well but are now reaching operational limits—they are not developed enough for the complexity of life and leadership into which we have grown. 

By initiating a more authentic self, we begin to ask new questions: Who am I? What do I really want? What do I care most about? What do I stand for? How can I make my life and my leadership a creative expression of what matters most? We become visionary leaders

Integral

This level of leadership is capable of leading amid complexity. The vision of the Creative leader expands to include systemic welfare—Systems Thinking and Design. The Integral leader holds a larger vision of the welfare of the whole system and becomes the architect of its future. Integral leaders focus on a vision not only for their organization, but also for the welfare of the larger system in which their organization is embedded and interdependent. At this stage, Servant Leadership fully emerges. The leader becomes the servant of the whole. 

Unitive

This is the highest stage of awareness of who we are—a sacred union with All that Is. Spiritual practices, such as meditation and contemplative prayer, accelerate our development through the stages. In fact, the Unitive Self seldom, if ever, develops without a long-term spiritual practice. Initially, at the Unitive level, the self realizes, “I am not the body, nor the mind, but a soul—an essential self in communion with the Divine. As this Unitive Self acts in the world, it becomes a highly effective tool of the spirit. Further into Unitive realization, the astonishing oneness underlying diversity becomes obvious. We ecstatically experience the world as one.

We live in a time of great opportunity and great peril. The next 50 years will be pivotal. We could either create a new and vital global order of planetary welfare or destroy ourselves. With their global reach, business leaders play a major role in the world’s future. The evolution of ever more effective and conscious leaders is not only a business imperative as complexity escalates, but a global requirement.