When we stop and think about life, what truly comes to mind is the attractiveness and 'pull' of people into their sphere of being. Dr. Margaret Wheatley in Leadership and the New science discusses this pull as 'field' of vision.

Case examples abound on this notion of leadership as present. For example, Coach Debra Benton helps executives at companies such as Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, and PepsiCo develop with what she calls executive presence: "the impact you have when you walk into a room, a collection of subtle ... visual cues, including everything from how your clothes fit to how you walk." Even Osama bin Laden's his sister-in-law had to admit, "When he walked into a room, 'you felt it'." Alicia M. Rodriguez, executive coach, consultant and facilitator at Sophia Associates and writer of a monthly column on women in business for the Maryland Capital Gazette, has observed that Hewlett-Packard's CEO, Carly Fiorina, has one of the 4 Ps she refers to: presence. The 4 Ps are: Presence, Paradox, Power and Potential. For Rodriguez, Fiorina has these, regardless of gender.

As organizations become more attuned to the emotional dimensions of the workplace because of the impact, for example, of the research from studies on emotional intelligence, the importance of presence is becoming more apparent: for those who have it, and for those who don't. It was said of Mr. James Kilts, CEO of Gillette Co., that he "wasn't theatrical but he had a presence, and when he spoke people listened." Denise Morrison [in her former job as senior vice-president at Altria Group Inc.'s Nabisco and general manager of its Down the Street Division] said that he didn't just talk about profit growth but talked also about "quality of earnings" thereby challenging managers to achieve profits that could be maintained over the long haul. "It wasn't enough just to get numbers, you had to do it in a quality way that was sustainable."

This notion of presence is especially felt in the realm of spirituality or worldview. In speaking on the topic of 'spiritual economics,' Eric Butterworth writes, "God is not someone to reach for but a presence to accept." Rev. Dr. Arthur Moore, Former University of Toronto chancellor, United Church minister, died on September 8, 2004 at the age of 98. The current president of Victoria University, British Columbia, stated, "He had so much warmth of presence. He paid attention to you. He'd look you in the eyes and those eyes would sparkle. He made you feel you were the most important thing happening at the time." In another case, an obituary in The Globe and Mail described one Robin Fallu who died at the age of 41. It was said that people would find solace in his presence. A mother whose child was dying of cancer in the hospital where Robin was working remarked, "When Robin comes near my bed, I feel better."

Of course we can also recall instances when presence created conflict and turmoil. Jim Collins, author of the best-seller Good to Great, discusses how the virtue of humility was central to the few CEOs who demonstrated what he referred to as Level 5 leadership: putting the organization first and bringing a presence of humility and care for others to the task of leading the organization. When Collins and his research team compared the different companies, the ones that failed to meet expectations showed the presence of a gargantuan ego – a talented yet egocentric leader – but whose organization, as in the case of Scott Paper, declined as time went on.

The question becomes, then, how does one strike a "new balance sheet," one that brings life-giving presence to the task of managing and leading an organization? No matter how we ‘slice this pie,' so to speak, the only answer that has any merit or depth is the one that ancient philosophy has reiterated for centuries: to one's own self be true, or, as Shakespeare puts it,

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

-- Hamlet, ll.78-80

We would like to expand on this notion of presence and personal integrity as essential ingredients to the new balance sheet with an understanding of what we call "response-full living." Too much is at stake to leave managing a department or a company or a home to instinct alone, however valuable gut feeling can be. We see instinct and reaction as co-existing: in their proper place they can be tremendous survival tactics. For example, a mother reacts as her child falls under the wheels of a car and instinct tells her to react NOW!

We must ask the question though, "How often do such circumstances present themselves?" The way some companies are managed, it would seem that every day has to be a 'reaction day,' a day that calls for 'do-and-die' decisions, where reaction and instinct are the managerial mantra. Such tactical skills are vital in times of war, survival, and urgent situations. But we maintain that they should be the exception.

The modus operandi of some companies seems only to work in 'reaction time.' Dell Inc. considers its unrelenting sense of urgency and speed to be its foremost competitive weapon as it assembles 80,000 computers every 24 hours. Dell has created a culture of what one author calls "imposed paranoia": always ready to react as a company to the needs of customers. In Dell time one works in a kind of hyperdrive, a 'grow-or-die' culture.

But, as a general rule, if we apply the ethic of reaction to human relations, we should only expect trouble. The expression that one does not "live by bread alone" could be modernized to read that one does not "live by reaction alone." To come to work every day and be exposed to the presence of urgency in the air all the time is often asking for trouble: medically, psychologically, and spiritually. Crisis mode managing, in other words, impacts the way managers manage the balance sheet. A new balance sheet mindset thinks more in response time vs. reaction time.

We are people fundamentally living in response time. Response time allows for the human dimension of compassion, of carefulness in our human relations, and answers to a higher ethic, a spirituality if you will, where heart-power matters as much as brain-power. It was the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who wrote, "I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room." Living in an age of reaction time doesn't allow for much response-FULLness.

Leadership as Presence

Leadership as presence creates a vastly different ethic of work. Leadership as presence calls forth the best in every employee and provides the context for its manifestation. Our organizations urgently cry out for a new balance sheet, a context where people, pride, and profit work hand-in-hand. A response-full life provides the spiritual and intentional roadmap not only for relationship health, but because of that, for organizational health and profit. In addition, this intentional roadmap to be response-full always comes across as positive presence; it is never artificial.

Some managers may attempt to be response-full, but if they are not being true to themselves, they will create more stumbling blocks than ever. One way to gauge the accuracy of our comments is to note the difference between what we call working and jobbing. We believe that work is fundamentally a vocational choice; a job is what we may have to do in order to earn a paycheck. When we go to work, we bring presence to what we do and who we are; when we go to a job, we may or may not bring presence; we may only bring our energy to do what is absolutely necessary. The reality of what is called 'presenteeism' more than illustrates this point. Presenteeism is the reality of warm bodies being in the office -- or jobbing -- but missing the spirit and passion of working. There is a major difference. People who work and bring presence to what they do will often say, "I love what I do, and I get paid for doing it!"

How does the artificiality of lack of authenticity manifest itself? In his wonderful little book, The I of the Storm, Gary Simmons talks about being centered in the "I of the storm," that is, in the stillness that is our true personal and spiritual home. As in a hurricane where the 'eye' of the storm holds stillness, so also do we. It's on the outer fringes of the storm that tremendous forces can be at work. Leaders with presence come to life from their centers. They don't allow the storms on the fringes or edges to take hold of everything. These leaders become what we call "response-FULL," that is, they respond from their fullness of personhood, from the "I of the storm."

We cannot escape storms; storms and the process of change go hand in hand. Some changes are more momentous than others; hence, such changes create greater storms. In their book, The Power of Impossible Thinking, Wharton School of Business authors Jerry Wind and Colin Crook discuss "adaptive disconnects," what we could call "two ships passing in the night" symbolically. Disconnects are different mental models that keep people from sharing mental maps. Such disconnects can happen in marriage, in the workplace, anywhere where people are. The task is not only to align reality but also to attune oneself to reality as well. Alignment speaks to head; attunement speaks to heart. They are the new X-Y axes of the new balance sheet. It is often said that prayer is speaking to God and meditation is listening. Alignment and attunement speak to this yin-and-yang of life. Responsiveness generates trust; reaction speaks to strategy.

Being response-FULL means that we live and work intentionally. We more often than not work instead of doing a job because we are responding to our vocation, to our calling to be all that we can be. If that calling is not clear, but clouded through emotional impulses, and if a 'yes' is given to a perceived vocation, then the response-FULLness will be artificial at best, or quite damaging at worst. And because life is as it is, we need to attend to the call because the direction in which we should go can also change.

Being response-FULL allows us to be open, even under stress conditions. When we are in emotionally stressful situations, our first tendencies are toward self-protection. Similarly, when we are in emotionally dysfunctional relationships, our tendency is to self-protect before ever becoming lovingly and personally creative in these relationships. If, in childhood, we grew up in an emotionally dysfunctional environment with dysfunctional relationships, this self-protection in and from relationships becomes habitual as the years progress – unless we intentionally do something about these patterns or mental maps.

In adulthood this habit of self-protection may manifest itself only in reflecting and relating, but not really in responding. These are the new 3 Rs for the new balance sheet: Reflect, Relate, Respond. In other words, we think about the relationship (reflection), we interact with others (relating), but we truly do not emotionally engage them (responsiveness). This lack of responsiveness – or the inability to be response-FULL -- has become our habit from childhood. This pattern keeps occurring when our emotional intention is simply to reflect and relate but is unable to embrace the act of responding as well.

Why is this discussion important and how does it connect with the modern workplace? We are maintaining that if a manager has developed a reaction time ethic because of past dysfunctional relationship experiences (often from childhood), then unless otherwise acknowledged and matured, this same 'reactiveness' plunges head-first into the management of the business as well. Many 'high performing' managers breed such as dysfunctional, reactive, crisis mode and costly form of corporate culture. Managers with such a 'reaction time' core belief who have little or no thoughtful and response-FULL relationship-building presence, will unknowingly create this same kind of neediness in their colleagues and employees. The sad part is that all they are doing is replicating and imposing earlier and pattern-based dysfunctionalities that in turn create a knowledge void resulting in an atrophied understanding of the need for response-FULLness in relationships. We name this a 'knowledge void' because knowledge and ideas only foster in an environment of openness, trust, and creative tension (i.e., a response-FULL corporate culture), not in an environment of self-protection, paranoia, and stressful tension (i.e., a reaction-time corporate culture).

This issue is absolutely critical for the future of business since human capital (i.e., ideas, knowledge, innovation) is the sine qua non of success. Although the following comparison may seem harsh, we do know, for example, that since the incident rate of intelligent, healthy sleep-deprived drivers mirrors that of drunk drivers, so too it seems obvious that a leader with limited response-FULLness and presence will limit a corporation's ability to meet long-term expectations and strategic opportunities, even though this leader may be otherwise exceedingly skillful in other corporate matters.

Normal and growth-filled relationships require sharing response-FULL emotional intentions for the relationship to continually grow and develop. Individuals who have been trained to self-protect themselves through painful emotionally dysfunctional relationships cannot respond as frequently and as effectively as required because, by habit, they are reflecting and relating (i.e., interacting) and have an atrophied ability to respond in a personal and thoughtful way. Painfully, at the same time our loved ones demand our greater response rate, our tendency in an emotionally stressful situation is to self-protect, analyze, reflect and relate. In the workplace, this dynamic gets repeated as well.

Those who have been in dysfunctional relationships for long periods of time need to retrain themselves to be response-FULL at a rate that, at first, likely feels uncomfortable and foreign -- ten times more than what is natural for them is likely to be the feeling. Resistance to response-FULLness may come in the form of the following rationalization: "But I've told you how I feel about that," or it may come about through blame-shifting, "You know how I feel about that." But we must break through such a rationalization.

Response-FULLness in the New Workplace

For many people, on a personal basis, developing a more response-FULL life means consciously making time to do the things that their loved ones love to do (e.g., coloring for/with children) and developing a more personal response during this time in order to grow this ability and balanced habit of relating, reflecting and responding that is required to build a normal life-giving relationship. Recognizing and acting on this self-training is likely the greatest challenge of individuals who want to stop blaming their parents, their past experiences or the environment they grew up in. In the workplace, developing a more response-FULL work ethic means consciously making time to listen to employees, embrace the relationship contexts more attentively, and practice leading with presence from a centerpoint inside that mirrors relationship integrity and purpose.

This ethic of response-FULLness is essential for the new balance sheet and the new workplace. In a world where the 'emotional economy' rules and where 'relationships are the new currency,' managers who lack this integrity of response-FULLness simply will not be effective. More and more the call has gone out from business to the business schools telling them that 'soft skills' (such as negotiation, problem solving, presentation and interpersonal communication) are absolutely critical for the new workplace. Parity, a human resources and recruitment company in the UK, in their research, which analyzed around 7,000 vacancies and placements over a 12-month period (2003), found that interpersonal communication was the most sought after skill by employers.

Changing to this new mental model and practice will require serious changes in many companies; the new balance sheet and leading with presence will not always be easy. Lou Gerstner, IBM's former chairman and CEO, in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround, writes, "Changing the attitude and behaviour of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You can't mandate it, can't engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation." Mark Startup, chief executive of Retail B.C., cites a huge demand for soft skills. The problem for him is in finding, for example, frontline workers who have "the necessary soft skills in terms of general appearance, positive attitude and the general presence to deal with customers." Retailers keep telling him that in hiring staff, what they are looking for is 'spark' or that special set of soft skills. Says Startup, "You hear that soft skills are part of your hard wiring, your DNA. But I have heard people say that if an environment is created and a culture is nurtured and systems are put into place for people who want to develop their soft skills, they certainly can."

The Final Message

Leadership as presence creates customers because presence embodies response-FULLness in employees. Response-FULLness is the DNA, if you will, of the new balance sheet; it is also the fuel for a business to build a future worth going to. Don't leave home without it.