Personal Mastery in the Organization

By: Dr. Bill Anton

Because most business organizations are composed of leaders whose early compromises led to an instrumental view of reality, competition among businesses is experienced as a logical consequence and energizes striving.

“Being first” is more important than being excellent and is often achieved at the expense of other people. The alternative model emphasizes striving for the optimal development of all people in the organization as a precondition to interpersonal effectiveness in pursuing business aims. Ironically, a focus on developing people frequently results in “being first” because of greater organizational consciousness, not as a goal in itself, and is likely to be more sustainable.

While an organization can hire workers and mid-level leaders who are more skilled in various domains than existing top leadership, their functional access to their own creative energy is limited by top leadership’s level of personal mastery, which must be gained through self-knowledge.
A leader’s decision to follow a narrow, predictable, instrumental path not only limits access to their own creative energy but also, and more importantly, limits what can be achieved in the organizations they lead. Interpersonal effectiveness is the output and is influenced by the leader’s level of self-awareness.

The more rigid our defenses and mental models, the more our interactions with others constrain their ability to be creative. Rigid mental models tend to constrain the responses of others; when we are rigid, we narrow the responses of others from more differentiated to less differentiated.
Workers’ freedom to be creative in the presence of a leader and fully express who they perceive themselves to be is, in total, a measure of their leader’s psychological health and maturity.