Citizens: Demonstrate Leadership
How Can I Demonstrate Leadership?
I demonstrate leadership in the city by managing myself appropriately in relation to my life conditions.
I demonstrate leadership by:
- initiating new patterns, processes and structures; e.g. “Imagine the City of the Future” initiatives.
- developing and/or extending existing patterns, processes and structures; e.g. integral approaches to solving homelessness
- making connections with ideas, people and things; e.g. matching up seniors with Millennials to raise funds for a sports stadium.
In demonstrating leadership, I actually depend on three major bio-physical systems. Systems scientist and author, James Grier Miller documented these three systems along with nineteen subsystems (or threads) (which parallel the same nineteen subsystems in all other living systems) as shown[i] in Table 1.
Table 3.1: Human Bio-Physical Systems
| Key Bio-Physical Systems | Detailed Sub-Systems (Threads) |
| 1. Sub-systems which process both matter-energy and information | · Reproducer (eggs, sperm, sex-glands, genitalia and accessory structures)
· Boundary (membranes, skin, hair, cornea) |
| 2. Subsystems which process matter-energy | · Ingestor (mouth, nostrils, skin, jaws)
· Distributor (blood, lymph, vascular systems) · Converter (mouth, teeth, tongue, facial muscles, salivary glands, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, small intestine) · Producer (unknown) · Matter-energy Storage (fatty tissues, liver, gallbladder, bone marrow, muscles, bones, spleen, urinary bladder, lower bowel) · Extruder (kidneys, ureters, urethra, rectum, anus, lungs) · Motor (muscles, fascia, bones and joints of arms, legs) · Supporter ( skeleton, tendons, ligaments, joint capsules, muscles, fascia) |
| 3. Subsystems which process information | · Input Transducer (eyes, ears, chemoreceptors in nose and tongue, nerve endings and receptors in skin, specialized receptors in skin)
· Internal Transducer (postsynaptic regions of neurons, receptor cells in central nervous system that receive and transduce signals about chemical and physical states of the bloodstream) · Channel and Net (blood and lymph vascular systems which convey hormones, central nervous system network of neurons, peripheral and neural network) · Decoder (cells in sense organs, ganglia, nuclei, cortical sense areas, linguistic brain centers, temporoparietal area of dominant hemisphere of brain) · Associator (not known) · Memory (being determined) · Decider (neurons, pituitary and endocrine glands, ventral horn nuclei of spinal cords, motor nuclei of all parts of brain, cortical motor areas, nuclei of cerebral cortex, limbic areas, nuclei and cortical areas of cerebellum) · Encoder (exocrine glands, pheromones, beta coded information, gamma coded symbolic information processing area of dominant hemisphere of brain) · Output Transducer (exocrine glands and parts of extruder which excrete pheromones; components of motor including lips, tongue, soft palate, larynx, lungs, hands, feet, muscles of chest and abdomen) |
How Can I Be An Effective Leader?
Effective leadership is always dependent on my life conditions. Leadership co-emerges with the situations where I demonstrate it. Just as my inner capacities (of emotion, cognition and spirit) evolve with my motivation to change (see What Motivates Intention), my external leadership capacities are also activated by change (See Figure 1). Thus my nineteen sub-systems are always responding and adapting. The greater my self-management, the greater my capacity for managing and leading others.
Figure 1 Evolving Leadership Capacities (adapted from Spiral Dynamics (1996)
Effective leadership produces increasing resilience. This means my capacity to flexibly relate to change in my environment increases — so that I continue to source nourishment, sustain life and reproduce my capacities in others, even under challenging life conditions.
Some of the ways I demonstrate leadership are:
- Apply multiple intelligences in responding to change and developing resilience.
- Use technology appropriate to self and the leadership environment to enhance performance.
- Analyze the structural and social aspects of the leadership environment to determine group/organizational action.
- Embody whole person leadership (acting, reflecting, relating, producing) to respond to opportunities and strategies.
- Demonstrate outer self-consistency, and resilience in times of uncertainty and changing environments.
- Co-create big picture solutions.
- Value diversity in others.
- Model resolution of conflicts and ethical dilemmas.
- Choose the appropriate leadership model(s) (autocratic, democratic, collaborative, servant, integral) in response to life conditions.
- Demonstrate appropriate use of leadership role, style and skill versatility.
- Implement effective change through creating a shared meaning, vision and strategies, creating and leading teams, managing people and tasks, and achieving goals.
Marilyn Hamilton says:
R. Bong Vergara says:
Lia Aurami says: