Synchronicity. The Inner Path of Leadership. Joseph Jaworski
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for their valuable support.
• To my executive assistant, Deborah A. Moore, for her dedication and valuable support on the second edition.
• And finally, to Kazimierz Gozdz and Susan M. Taylor, partners of mine at Generon International, for their wise counsel during the writing of the second edition.
INTRODUCTION
by Peter Senge
For many years I have told people that, although there are a lot of books on leadership, there is only one that serious students have to read —Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf. Most recent books on leadership have been about what leaders do and how they operate, why the world makes life difficult for them, and what organizations must do in order to better develop leaders. These books are packed with seemingly practical advice about what individuals and organizations should do differently. Yet few penetrate to deeper insights into the nature of real leadership. By contrast, Greenleaf invites people to consider a domain of leadership grounded in a state of being, not doing. He says that the first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is profoundly limited. That choice is not an action in the normal sense – it’s not something you do, but an expression of your being.
This, too, is a book that anyone who is serious about leadership will have to read. Synchronicity builds directly on Greenleaf’s thinking and goes further, especially in illuminating the nature of the choice to lead and the deep understanding or worldview out of which such a choice might arise.
For Greenleaf, being a leader has to do with the relationship between the leader and the led. Only when the choice to serve undergirds the moral formation of leaders does the hierarchical power that separates the leader and those led not corrupt. Hierarchies are not inherently bad, despite the bad press they receive today. The potential of hierarchy to corrupt would be dissolved, according to Greenleaf, if leaders chose to serve those they led – if they saw their job, their fundamental reason for being, as true service. For this idea we owe Greenleaf a great debt. His insights also go a long way toward explaining the “leaderlessness” of most contemporary institutions, guided as they are by people who have risen to positions of authority because of technical or decision-making skills, political savvy, or desire for wealth and power.
Joe Jaworski takes Greenleaf’s understanding further. He suggests that the fundamental choice that enables true leadership in all situations (including, but not limited to, hierarchical leadership) is the choice to serve life. He suggests that, in a deep sense, my capacity as a leader comes from my choice to allow life to unfold through me. This choice results in a type of leadership that we’ve known very rarely, or that we associate exclusively with extraordinary individuals like Gandhi or King. In fact, this domain of leadership is available to us all and may indeed be crucial for our future.
I believe this broadening of Greenleaf’s original insight is so relevant today for two reasons. First, Joe’s book shifts the conversation beyond formal power hierarchies of “leaders” and “those led.” Increasingly, hierarchies are weakening, and institutions of all sorts, from multinational corporations to school systems, work through informal networks and self-managed teams that form, operate, dissolve, and re-form. It is not enough simply to choose to serve those you are formally leading, because you may not have any formal subordinates in the new organizational structures. Second, Joe’s book redirects our attention toward how we collectively shape our destiny.
In the West we tend to think of leadership as a quality that exists in certain people. This usual way of thinking has many traps. We search for special individuals with leadership potential, rather than developing the leadership potential in everyone. We are easily distracted by what this or that leader is doing, by the melodrama of people in power trying to maintain their power and others trying to wrest it from them. When things are going poorly, we blame the situation on incompetent leaders, thereby avoiding any personal responsibility. When things become desperate, we can easily find ourselves waiting for a great leader to rescue us. Through all of this, we totally miss the bigger question: What are we, collectively, able to create?
Because of our obsessions with how leaders behave and with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget that, in its essence, leadership is about learning how to shape the future. Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances. When people operate in this domain of generative leadership, day by day, they come to a deepening understanding of, as Joe says, “how the universe actually works.” That is the real gift of leadership. It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.
Exploring such a view of leadership through a book is almost a contradiction in terms. Because this territory can’t be fully understood conceptually, any attempt to digest and explain it intellectually is at best a type of map. And the map is not the territory. To understand the territory, we must earn the understanding, and this understanding doesn’t come cheaply. We all earn it in our life experience. I think this is one part of what Buddhists mean by “life is suffering.” We have to suffer through life, not in the sense of pain, but in terms of living through it.
One way “to live into” these subtle territories of leadership is through a story. When Greenleaf wrote Servant Leadership, he “entered” through Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, an autobiographical account of one man’s journey in search of enlightenment. Along the way, the narrator’s loyal servant, Leo, sustains him through many trials. Years later, when the man finds the esoteric society he is seeking, he discovers that Leo is its leader – so the servant is the leader, and leadership is exercised through service.
Here also Joe enters through a story: his own. The result is an unusual book – rare among leadership books and rare among business books – a personal, reflective account of one person’s journey. This may present some difficulties for readers used to “expert” accounts of leadership that give advice and propound theories. Yet Joe’s insights about leadership and the process by which he came to those insights are inseparable. His life has been his vehicle for learning, just as his learning has been about how leaders must serve life.
Furthermore, this is not just Joe’s story, for Joe’s personal story is interwoven with epochal events in which we all participated. This story begins when his father, Leon Jaworski, became the Watergate special prosecutor. During the investigation, Colonel Jaworski became deeply disturbed by the growing evidence implicating Nixon and his closest aides in the Watergate conspiracy. The only person he felt he could talk to without fear of compromising the investigation was his son Joe, also a lawyer. Father and son asked each other the same questions the nation would soon ask: How could this have happened? How could we have come to this – our highest and most trusted officials acting like common criminals?
Living with these questions eventually led Joe to a remarkable series of undertakings. After several years of wrestling with his calling, he decided to leave the prestigious international law firm he had helped build. He struck off into completely foreign territory – public leadership – and created the American Leadership Forum (ALF). The vision of ALF was to establish a national network of talented and diverse midcareer professionals committed to bringing forth a new generation of public leadership. Today, ALF programs operate in a number of communities and regions in the United States with successful results. After almost ten years, Joe stepped down as chairman of ALF and accepted the position as head of the scenario planning process for the Royal Dutch Shell Group of companies. In this job, he helped shape what many regard as the premier planning process of any large corporation.
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