During the current lockdown, I like to join members of the wellbeing community in a weekly webinar where we spend an hour with a special guest–an 82-year-old Chinese Tai Chi master, an English poet, a Buddhist meditation teacher. It’s always clear from the comments in the chat that participants are deeply engaged and appreciative of the opportunity to connect as a community to get strength and inspiration delivered in many forms. It feels like a cozy refuge in a violent storm. I leave Zoom feeling restored and glad that the Skoll Foundation made the investment six years ago to join four other organizations in co-creating the WellBeing Project. It’s akin to the way I might feel if I finally bought earthquake insurance—I haven’t—and a few years later my house was destroyed by “the big one.”
This is a moment when, more than ever, we need calm, insightful, non-reactive leadership. We need a deep sense of interconnectedness to bring clarity of thought to the enormous challenges and opportunities facing us. That can be difficult to achieve for social entrepreneurs who are watching revenue streams dry up and funders withdraw support while the needs of the people they serve are greater than ever and the service delivery mechanisms they rely on must be completely redesigned for a new reality.
There’s tremendous uncertainty about what the world will look like on the other side. It’s easy to feel competitive with other organizations pursuing the same funders and to become single-mindedly focused on organizational and self- preservation. But the unprecedented opportunity to use this period of upheaval as an occasion to accelerate progress towards our vision of a sustainable world of peace and prosperity for all will be squandered without leaders who possess the courage, confidence, and collaborative skills required to meet the moment.
When I was an executive at Hewlett Packard, I worked on a search for a new CEO. We hired a psychologist to assess the finalists. I’ll never forget something he said: “All great CEOs are still trying to win the approval of one or both of their parents.” That was a vivid way of articulating the widely held view that unresolved psychological trauma provides necessary fuel to energize top performing leaders and entrepreneurs enabling them to achieve the seemingly impossible.
This is sometimes referred to as the hero model. There are many high-profile examples in the annals of the Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the price of that approach is very high for the leaders themselves and their organizations. In mainstream businesses, there is a financial jackpot if you succeed, but for leaders in the field of social change, struggling with limited resources, often battling heartbreaking injustice, and lacking a lucrative exit strategy, the cost is even higher. Prior to the launch of the Wellbeing project, the Skoll Social Entrepreneurs had long voiced the need for more support with the personal and emotional challenges associated with their work. Many struggled with burnout, major health issues, and strained or broken personal relationships.
The Wellbeing Project offered a vehicle to begin to address this need and to study the relationship between inner wellbeing and transformative social change. Six years into the project as we grapple with the disruption and upheaval wrought by Covid-19 and attempt to shape the emergent reality with an eye towards a sustainable world of peace and prosperity for all, we are well served by the impact of the project on those who have directly participated as well the insights gleaned through the research.
There is a strong correlation between inner wellbeing and the ability to drive transformative social change. Wellbeing includes the experience of wholeness and interconnectedness driving a shift in leadership style toward greater collaboration and humility, leadership that trusts the capabilities of others, seeks diverse perspectives, and shares power. In a zoom meeting this morning we were discussing imperative 21, a global network of coalitions working to change the global economic system to work for all of us and for the long term. This is transformative social change at the highest level. The urgency is palpable as we enter the creation of the “post-Covid-19 reality.” Success in leading transformations such as this will require extraordinary collaborative skill enabled by inner wellbeing.
I’ve been spending too much time on zoom. Time to go outside and experience the interconnectedness of nature to enhance my own wellbeing.
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