Human Doing vs. Human Being

by Philip Bailey
Originally published in Contact Professional,
November/December, 2006. Reprinted with permission.

Henry Ford once mused, "Why is it that when I only need a pair of hands, I get a whole human being?" Contrary to Ford's view, most employers want more than a pair of hands from their employees. They want the whole person including the skills, talent, motivation, commitment, cooperation and brains of the people they hire. To accomplish this goal requires effective leadership. Only when leaders are able to engage the whole person – both head and heart – are they able to inspire discretionary effort and turn good performance into great performance.

Leadership Starts on the Inside

Socrates' dictum, "Know thyself," has lost none of its relevance in the past 2,400 years. Even today's business leaders need five essential qualities/abilities that are best discovered by following Socrates' invitation to look within. They are:

A desire to be more effective on a personal and a public level
Knowledge of one's strengths
Awareness of one's weaknesses
Ability to obtain candid feedback on one's own behavior
A vision of what one wants accomplished and the ability to articulate it.

This forms the core curriculum of "Executive Leadership 101," a life-long class from which there is no graduation ceremony.

Head Sense, Heart Sense

One's abilities to think rationally, to communicate and to act are often referred to as "head sense." Western society reveres and rewards these qualities. Individuals are taught that one becomes what one wants to be through continuous "doing." This explains why movies have an over-abundance of action heroes and few, if any, introspective ones.

"Heart sense," on the other hand, is comprised of emotions, feelings and instinctive needs. It is profoundly non-rational. Emotions and instinctive needs are core aspects of every individual's essential "being-ness." When business executives ignore these qualities in themselves and their employees and try to lead from the head alone, the results are always disappointing. Why? Because emotions are the critical gateway to gaining the commitment of other people. To inspire trust and commitment, one must speak to the emotions first, and then all else follows. The difference between leading from the head versus the heart is the difference between doing something and being something. An excellent leader must be able to do both.

The Leadership Journey

The leadership journey starts with "know thyself" and proceeds to "understand others." Wachovia Corporation's, Steve Boehm, is familiar with this journey of personal development. Boehm has been with Wachovia, one of the nation's largest diversified financial services companies, for over thirteen years. For eight years, he ran Wachovia Direct Access, a state-of-the-art customer contact center employing six thousand people in fifteen locations. Boehm was instrumental in building Wachovia Direct from the ground up, a creative task he is re-performing in his latest role as President of Wachovia Card Services, a new venture under the Wachovia banner.

Boehm considers heart sense the most important quality of inspired leadership. "Leadership is about improving the capability of individuals and teams to produce better and better results over time," Boehm says. "You do this, among other things, by setting a good example yourself and by coaching people, not trying to control them." A good coach points out where a person is doing well, and not so well, Boehm explains, but the ultimate goal is to liberate people so that they can improve themselves.

"A demonstration of personal integrity is essential," Boehm says, "and that can only come from self-awareness. But interacting with other people requires you to try to understand them. It's about meeting people where they are, not where you are." This requires a leader to be an excellent listener, an observer and a seeker of ever-increasing awareness about people and what motivates them.

Several years ago, Boehm had a powerful personal epiphany that forever changed his own leadership goals. "Early in my career, I thought my job was to be the person who knew everything about everything." In a singular moment of clarity, however, he saw the utter impossibility of that role and started along a different path. "On that day, I decided I wanted to become the person responsible for getting the most out of a group of people, and to do so from a position of humility, not from a position of knowledge superiority," Boehm recalls.

Boehm sees himself as "a work in progress" rather than a master of these skills. "Am I the best coach or the best listener I could be? Am I finished with my own development? Nothing could be farther from the truth! My path to leadership effectiveness is directly linked to the process of continuing to push myself in that direction."

Henry Ford may not have understood what Boehm is getting at, but it's safe to assume that Socrates would have agreed with every word.

About the Author