Executive Coaching: On Integrated Leadership

We’re all leaders in some capacity. Each of us exercises our power in order to influence the

environment and people around us through the particular authority we embody and exert.

Whether your role is that of a CEO, stay-at-home-parent, entrepreneur, project manager, client specialist, instructor, administrator, or something else, you have influence. This may be by virtue of your position within your organization or by virtue of your connection to others in

relationship. In other words, your influence may come through either Positional Authority or

Relational Authority (we all have a mix). This means that your effectiveness, impact, and legacy as a leader not only have to do with the orders you give or accomplishments you direct, but through the impression you left both upon and within others by your very presence.

The significance of presence as it relates to authority, influence, and leadership is not to be

overlooked. Ancient rhetoricians saw effective communicators as being skilled in 3 main areas:

• Logos: The content of the speech, appeals to reason, grounding in truth.

• Pathos: The emotions of the communication, appeals to feelings, delighting the ears.

• Ethos: The character of the speaker, trustworthiness, credibility, authority, substance.

The most vital of these has always been Ethos. This trait of communication is ultimately the key component that shapes how people receive you. Ethos is what grabs people’s reason, what stirs the heart, and what ultimately inspires action. This means that in terms of leadership, integrity of heart and personal character will always trump expert knowledge (logos) and celebrity notoriety (pathos). Therefore, becoming a person of a certain sort ought to always be our goal, contrary to merely gaining notoriety or accumulating knowledge. This sort of Ethos-oriented person has a weighty presence-- one that is felt, inspires, encourages, and that stirs up trust and confidence within others.

The Latin term for this weightiness is “gravitas”. The ancient Hebrews referred to this as “kavod” (כבוד) or, “weightiness”, “heaviness”, “importance”, “respect”, “honor”, even “glory”. In ancient Hebrew Scriptures, even God is described as having “kavod” and his human creatures who trust in Him are described this way as well. Today, we might call this “charisma”. American teenagers of 2024 refer to this as “’Rizz”.

Have you got ‘Rizz?

The key with becoming a person of this sort has less to do with applying various technical

behavioral tweaks, and more to do with applying holistic adaptive change (Heifetz & Linsky,

Leadership On The Line, 2002) to one’s approach to all of life. While “all of life” may seem a bit drastic, remember that we live as integrated creatures in an integrated world. Any

demarcations, silos, or hermetically sealed chambers we manufacture between various areas of life are just that, manufactured.

In the words of Loehr & Groppel, human beings were designed as “fully integrated, multi-

dimensional energy systems.” We’re a psycho-somatic unity, so we need to tend to the various areas that make this up-- our “component parts”. “Individuals are holistically designed. Performers come to work with bodies, emotions, minds, and spirits. They are innately fully integrated-- that is, their bodies are not disconnected from their feelings, thoughts, values and beliefs, no matter how fervently we may wish it were so,” (Loehr & Groppel, The Corporate Athlete Advantage, 2008, p7).

This means that to truly grow in ethos, character, gravitas, kavod, and even ‘rizz we need to

focus our upgrading efforts on, well, everything. We’re talking development in worldview, growth in character, deepening of self-knowledge, improvement in physical health & fitness, commitment to relationship, maturity in emotional intelligence, gaining understanding of relational systems and emotional processes between people, knowing how to exercise our authority for positive change, and finding a way for all of this to work its way out in our positive impact on the world.

This is, essentially, a teleological effort because this is an effort focused on discovering and flourishing in your raison d’etre, your purpose, your ikigai (ee-key-gai), your ultimate ends, your telos. At its core then, this process of discovery and growth is deeply spiritual and requires great exertion and focus of our spiritual energy.

“Spiritual energy” isn’t necessarily about our religious commitments and efforts, but our “energy of purpose” (Loehr & Groppel). Ultimately, we want to raise our performance levels, and this formula involves investment of our physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy. Yet, many corporate management systems generally only hone in on the realms of mental and perhaps physical energy because these are the easiest to isolate as sources to profit maximization.

To be integrated means to be whole, to have integrity, to have unity of heart, body, purpose, effort, and to have fidelity to all of this when inevitable storms come and suffering results. Integrated leaders are weighty leaders who have values and virtue to guide them as they prioritize their relationships, serve others through their gifts and strengths, learn from others in their failures and weaknesses, leverage their lives to positively impact the world they live in and have benefited so much from, and to experience joy and fulfillment in the process. This is what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, “flourishing”, and what they saw as the ultimate telos.

 “The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us.” ~ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

This telos of becoming “the best thing in us” does require an entry point and structure to focus the energy we’re investing in our own development. Life moves like a constantly spinning merry-go round, so encouraging someone to exert themselves on “everything” can very quickly become so overwhelming that accomplishing nothing can result. One may never actually jump on to the merry-go-round, but watch it spinning feeling too intimidated to grab hold. Where do we begin?

STRIVE Performance has structured our approach into five broad components to help you grab hold of the merry-go-round and jump in to your ongoing personal development. Be careful not to view these categories as progressions on some linear trajectory. We never stop becoming, our paths will always involve the repetitive efforts of reflective practice in order to continue maturing throughout our lifetime. Instead of linear growth, imagine a widening cyclone of life-long maturity, reflection, practice, etc.

In this series of articles introducing MyDesign (our proprietary assessment and executive coaching approach), we’ll walk this path of development through viewing our lives through the lenses of these 5 Components:

• On the Self

• In Relationships

• With the Team

• Through the Institution

• For the World

In 1994 Steve Jobs reminded us that we each have a unique gift to offer others for their flourishing and to press into this world to actually see something come out the other side, to bring a change in some constructive way. This is your calling and involves the investment in and development of your whole Self in the process. 

For next steps you might think about:

• How well integrated am I as a person and leader?

• How well is this "flourishing" woven into my experiences within each of those 5 Components?

• What can I do to feed the growth in these areas, or what might I need to do to start the process?

• Have I experienced this sense of "telos"/"purpose" before in my life? How might I regain this, or invigorate this, or become more grounded in this?

Daniel Herron is the founder of Strive Performance, an Indianapolis-based consulting and coaching firm specializing in organizational culture, team wellness, and whole-life integrated wellness coaching. To learn more about Strive Performance's assessment and coaching process, get in touch. We’d love to listen: https:///www.strive.fit