LEADERSHIP- A humanistic perspective.

In today’s corporate world, there is a lot of buzz about two words, Professionalism and Leadership.

For a majority of people, one aspect of being professional is to act in a defined and expected manner, even if they are experiencing something else at that moment.  

For them, being professional means to have the ability to wear a mask, or may be many masks, every day;  mask of being perfect, mask of being strong, mask of being practical, mask of being hard task master and most importantly mask of being not having feelings and emotions at the work place.

I am not sure if this facade is of any help to the person, maybe or maybe not.

But one thing is sure that this must be creating lots of pressure and stress on the person. It is not easy experiencing in one way and acting in a different way. The situation becomes more challenging when the person starts identifying with the masks. He thinks his masks are real.

With time this person with different masks, starts leading people. 

As far as I understand about leadership, it is a helping profession. A leader helps his team members to grow and develop their potentials. A leader achieves this goal by developing a genuine and trusting relationship with his team members.

Now the question is, can this person, who is disconnected with his inner-self, be able to develop a genuine and trusting relationship with others? When he is not, he fails to achieve his leadership goal.

As per Rogers, a renowned humanistic psychologist, there are three fundamental conditions for all helping professions.

Empathy

Unconditional positive regard

 Genuineness.  

These conditions are actually the attitude of the helper towards himself and towards the person he helps.

A helper can only help if he is able to accept himself as he is. In Rogers words, “a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which he/she would like to function.”

He understands that a person cannot change unless he/she thoroughly accepts what he/she is now.

Once that acceptance is there change comes naturally.

A helper then shows this acceptance towards others whom he is helping.

People stop pretending to be someone else if they feel understood and accepted. They gradually drop their masks and move towards self awareness, personal growth and self actualization.

When a parent develops a relationship with his/her child based on the attitude of warmth, genuineness and acceptance, the child becomes ‘self-directing’, ‘socialized’, and ‘mature.’

When a teacher develops a relationship with his student based on this attitude, the student becomes ‘self-sufficient’, self-initiator’, ‘confident’ and self-disciplined.

When a leader creates such a relationship within his organization, his team becomes more ‘responsible’, more ‘creative’, more ‘adaptive to change’ and more ‘cooperative.’

As Rogers pointed out, this masked professionalism is actually interfering in developing genuine relationship with others and as a result affecting the growth of individuals and organizations.

It will be a real achievement if people are able to learn those core and fundamental principles of trusting relationship with self and others.

Reference: ‘ON BECOMING A PERSON’ by Carl R. Rogers.