79: End of Bossism: Servant Leadership Comes of Age with David Thomas Guerra , Transformist

ShownotesIn several episodes of The Elephant in the Room podcast I have spoken with CEOs, academics, influencers on what leadership means. This is a part of my own quest to understand leaders and leadership by listening to others and to redefine it through the lens of my own experience. In this episode of the podcast I speak with @Dave Guerra the author of best seller ‘Super Performance’, a transformist and a proponent of servant leadership. In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about 👉🏾 Exploring what leadership actually means - is it a position? A set of skills or behaviour?👉🏾 The relevance of words like powerful, commanding, fearless, bossman in today’s context👉🏾 Resetting the expectation of/from leaders and leadership👉🏾 Servant leadership - challenges/risks associated with the idea 👉🏾 Building cohesive cultures in a world in a constant flux👉🏾 Authentic leadership, Conscious leadership, Ethical/Moral Leadership and Servant Leadership“And if you look at the planet and the state that the planet is in, I would say, like we discussed in our original conversation, we have too much yang energy, not enough yin energy, too much control, not enough liberation, too much management, not enough leadership. And so the real problem is a paradigm that we are still tethered to, especially in a western society, this paradigm of organisation as machine, a mechanistic paradigm that presupposes that you can engineer an organisation or anything into perfect efficiency, but that's not true.” Memorable Passages from the podcast👉🏾 My pleasure Sudha. 👉🏾 Yeah, I thought about this in preparing for this conversation and every time I have to answer that question, I have to think about it again, because I think that's been an inquiry my whole life around who actually am I and what am I really about?👉🏾 And I think what I've kind of come to is, I'm really a seeker of truth. I am just deeply curious to understand how things work, and in particular I developed a deep curiosity for how is it that business works and what is it that makes business successful very early in my life. 👉🏾 And then I went to college to kind of learn about business and get a business education and then came out of college and I still didn't feel comfortable that I understood business. I guess I would say I had a mechanical appreciation, but I didn't have a practical appreciation of business. And then I went to work for companies and especially very large businesses and that provoked me even more around understanding how business operates.👉🏾 And I have to confess, I was really confused for many years around how things worked in business, because a lot of what I saw didn't make sense to me Sudha. It kind of left me with this frustration that a lot of what I had set my life up for, my career for, was not really proving out to be very fulfilling or meaningful, or kind of makes sense to me. And so then I stumbled into this territory of quality and it was like I'd been to the promised land and I finally found something I could kind of grab onto that kind of hung together for me, that made sense. 👉🏾 And then I learned a lot from W. Edwards Deming, and then Peter Drucker and many others. I would say in that I formed my company, Corpus Optima, some 27, 28 years ago I kind of generally would fall into