The heartbeat is the first rhythm that we ever hear in life.
Even when we are in your mother’s womb, it’s the sound that lulls you to sleep, even before you hear the first lullaby of your life spilling from your mother’s lips. It’s the sound that probably instil in you for the first time the idea of momentum- of progress and passion represented by the incessant beating that works as a clarion call to live, to battle adversaries and triumph over challenges.
The rhythm of progress is the beating heart of life
Put another way, it’s the rhythm of life itself, the harmony that carries the tune of existence onwards.
And yet, even with the presence of such a rhythm that’s inherent to us, we sometimes feel as though we have lost the rhythm of life. This is especially true with our professional lives- an arena in which many things are beyond our control. This loss of rhythm could be especially damning for leaders in organizations.
For leaders carry a dual burden: keeping the rhythm to guide their own professional life and the rhythm that would help them guide their team or organization.
Losing rhythm- the reasons
From a leader’s perspective, there are two important reasons why they may lose the ever-essential rhythm that gives momentum to their professional life.
The first reason has to do with the aspect of decision-making. While the importance of decision making remains the same in organizations as ever, what has changed in the twenty first century is the complexity involved in the same. The heightened complexity is almost completely the result of the often overwhelming amount of information that one has to assess before coming to a decision.
This frequently results in the wrong decision to be made. This obviously isn’t caused by a dearth of information to base the decisions on. On the contrary, as mentioned before, the volume of information could be overwhelming.
But the problem is that one ends up giving more importance to the wrong bit of information, or focuses on the wrong aspect of the operation while formulating the decision.
A series(even if intermittent) of such wrong decisions eventually leads to a arrhythmic professional life.
Another key reason for the disruption of rhythm is the dissonance among the team members who function under you. This dissonance in turn could have multiple reasons- a lack of clarity regarding one’s role in a project is an example. Such a scenario may see one team member doing what another team member ought to be performing, thereby causing unwanted professional ire between them. Another reason could simply be that the team members aren’t completely aware of each other’s strengths and aspirations, which in turn causes them to maintain a certain distance with each other. And this distance, even though it may seem logical to the team members, is rarely good news for the project at large.
The onus will be on the leader to rectify this situation by improving the team’s cohesion.
Regaining rhythm with True Personal Vision
Now that you have seen the two major disruptors of rhythm, let’s look at how you could tackle the problems.
The first reason, if your emember has to do with wrong decisions. And this could be solved if the leader realizes his or her True Personal Vision.
True Personal Vision, is the vision that could be found in your own self and nowhere else in the universe. It’s the Vision that you are meant to manifest in the real world, the discovery of which gives you a clear destination to guide your organization towards.
Temenos Vision Lab or TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility which helps you realize your True Personal Vision. Using proprietary tools, TVL is conducted by some of the best leadership coaches in business with extensive experience in conducting transformative sessions.
Once you realize your True Personal Vision, it forms the basis for your strategic decisions and therefore the chances of taking the wrong decision are minimized.
The second problem that we discussed- the dissonance between team members- could be solved with the discovery of Compelling Shared Vision. It is the common objective towards which the members of a team should move towards, the discovery of which is made possible in TVL.
In the course of this discovery, the team members are encouraged to share their greatest aspirations and challenges they have overcome in the past with other team members. This bolsters mutual understanding and team cohesiveness, thereby solving the second problem that we discussed.
This is the second in a series of three posts that examine the centrality of a sense of rhythm to life- both professional and personal.
