Magnanimous Leadership

Leading with our hearts fully engaged

Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide to forever have your heart go walking around outside your body.

- Elizabeth Stone

I occasionally hear people suggest that a solution to our global problems, particularly those concerning issues like war, lies in a gender rebalancing in world leadership. I don't believe this, alone, would be effective. Why? Because our current, cultural orientation tends to be one where the masculine spirit leads, and toxic masculinity often appears to prevail. This means we still haven’t solved the sociopath problem which in turn, affects men and women similarly with women feeling just as disempowered as men do by pathological leaders. So many women, like many men, adopt the power over approach to life because few of us feel empowered by life. 

Peter Limberg, in Own Your Power, describes it this way:

People possessed by power (aka archetypal sociopaths) are dangerous. People with no power literacy are also dangerous, becoming easy marks and cannon fodder for sociopaths. An adjacent phenomenon to power illiteracy is people not “owning their power,” aka not recognizing their current power and the responsibility for using it for good. To own one’s power, having a nuanced sense of power is good. In the literature on power, a four-part distinction of power is frequently discussed: Power-over, Power-with, Power-toward, and Power-within or being empowered.

He goes on to explain:

Power-over is influencing other people’s options, power-with is being influential with other people, power-toward is influencing toward accomplishing something, and power-within is having influence internally, aka intellectual and emotional agency. We all have a certain degree of power with these facets, and one’s power configuration will change in each context.

Our sense of power varies between settings, such as feeling empowered at home but powerless at work. This fluctuation is influenced by factors like the people we interact with, the circumstances we're responding to, our personal history, and life experiences, as well as current internal and external support. For this reason, becoming power literate is necessary in order to spot those who are manipulating us for their personal gain. In addition, we must also identify what gets in the way of accessing our intellectual and emotional agency. This is our individual work to do.

On the other hand, we find ourselves in the midst of a metacrisis. As part of our collective work, we need to envision a new form of leadership—one that steers us away from a growth-oriented, competition-driven existence toward a collaborative approach centered around self-restraint. I propose that this new kind of leadership involves the heart being fully engaged. This way power flows through us to support life-affirming endeavors, rather than from us to merely satisfy our ego gratifications.

As many of my readers are aware, I consistently encourage the foregrounding of the mature feminine spirit in our individual awareness as well as culture at large and I suggest seeking guidance for this new orientation in biology. I have arrived at this conclusion from my perspective as a woman and mother. By leading with my heart, I feel empowered to guide others toward life-affirming goals, as I have created, nurtured, and sustained life through my body and therefore, feel a sense of preciousness towards it.

While I have very caring men in my life, men who are at least as caring as the many women I am close to, I observe that they care differently than women. I've also noticed this through my ongoing psychotherapy work with clients, where I've been privileged to delve into the inner experiences of others over time. For example, I frequently hear about the tension between women and men as they attempt to navigate the delicate and difficult territory of child-raising. She is tuning into what their child needs and he is working to assure that their child is prepared to meet Reality. Both approaches are necessary for the raising a child into a healthy adult.

However, I observe that many mothers, particularly those deemed good enough, possess a wonderful ability to be emotionally attuned to others. They are conscious of and empathize with people's feelings and emotional needs. In other words, they possess an understanding of what it means to be interconnected and their actions quite often reflect this. This is love as Iain McGilchrist so beautifully points out.

Imagine world leadership infused with love. How would this type of leadership transform our current state of affairs?

If we are going to imagine this scenario, then it important to recognize that with every gift comes a limitation. We all know that too much empathy can lead to over-indulgence. This is what we could consider the low-side of the feminine. It involves a tendency to overly shelter, going beyond infancy, which can result in fostering "learned helplessness" among those under her care. This dynamic manifests not only within families but extends to societal contexts as well.

Contrastingly, a mature feminine approach acknowledges the evolving needs of her child. As the child matures, she metaphorically extends the umbilical cord, gradually redirecting her love and attention inward and to other important endeavors. This process hinges on trust—trust in her child's ability to integrate her teachings, trust in herself to discern when and how much to release control, and trust in her husband, the child's father, to share in the uncertainty which is always present in the growth process.

Moreover, the masculine caring aspect is just as pivotal for human development. It entails providing and protecting, especially during the child’s early years, and when the child is ready, guiding them into the world to unveil the realities of life. In this way, the partnership between the feminine and masculine ensures a balanced progression, acknowledging that uncertainties exist when loosening the maternal reins and emphasizing the collaborative responsibility of both parents in shaping the child's journey. How this gets expressed in families is messy at best. It's no wonder that it gets even more distorted when scaled up.

This is where I envision collective leadership making a difference. Distributing power among group members ensures that no single individual can monopolize it, provided that individual members are power-literate. While collective leadership requires sharing a common vision, identifying a noble mission, and aligning with a shared purpose, I believe both the distribution of power and the collaboration between mature feminine and masculine skills need to be central for this new paradigm to be effective. My hope is that, in doing so, this approach could pave the way for a new orientation—one where magnanimous leadership, leading with the heart fully engaged, not only transforms individuals but impacts the world we live in as well.