Benefits from Beingful Leadership

As management scholars Louis Fry and Mark Kriger point out, this journey of centering in Being becomes a source of inspiration for every other aspect of business leadership, such as spiritual perception, moral sensitivity, leadership values, and leadership skills and actions. As a result, Being helps guide these aspects, even as it transcends them in ways that people who are spiritual, religious, agnostic, or even atheistic can relate to. Through Being, all levels of business leadership could improve. This is why Beingful leadership is the highest level of business leadership.

Another important and comforting point to recognise is that you don’t need to be fully centered in Being to see these benefits. The journey itself leads to profound changes, as my own experiences have shown me clearly. While many of these personal experiences are described in the next part, here I want to describe one simple but important personal benefit an increase in personal productivity. It is a benefit that I first recognized when the Upanishads came into my life in the last year of my doctoral studies. They enabled me to finish my studies in the limited time that was available before I had to take up the academic job that awaited me.

Even now, I don’t quite know what it was about the contemplation of Being that made me work so productively. Perhaps it was the clarity that it brought to my mind because it stilled a deep restlessness that distracted me from my work. Perhaps it allowed me to hold in perspective and even transcend the perfectionism and other barriers that got in the way of finishing my work.

 In the years since, this journey has provided me with a higher sense of belonging and purpose and my own higher reality that connected me to the higher bird of Being. It is of profound value and affects everything I do, however incomplete my journey has been.

Business work has the potential to be as helpful for us as rituals were for our ancestors. If business is to reconnect with the world, Beingful leadership requires us to reflect on two fundamental beliefs about the larger context, or higher reality, of business: what are the larger relationships of business, and what is the shared purpose of business leadership?