I am a yoga anatomy geek and so it is no surprise that I take some of the yoga expressions to heart and look to find applicability in my own life as a business leader, a parent, a spouse and a friend. Root to rise is a common expression yoga teachers and spiritual leaders will cue to mean "focus on your foundation (of the pose), stabilize and ground yourself to then get the strength to lift up, to blossom, to expand". Rooting to rise is especially applicable when you are trying to get the strength and the balance from the ground to anchor yourself in a challenging pose and make it seem effortless. Now that sounds familiar in the complex, turbulent and at times unstable environment business leaders are having to navigate in today’s world characterized by post-covid economic slowdown, adjustment to a hybrid work environment, a rest to vest culture, tech layoffs, etc. A leader who is rooted down to a base, a leader who has built and cultivated a well-nourished foundation will be well-placed to lead a team through thunderstorms, such as the ones companies seem to be currently facing.
We all know authoritarian leaders who don't bring themselves to work, who don't listen (and arguably care), who are unpredictable, inflexible and self-righteous. Think Machiavelli’s Prince ’It is better to be feared than loved (if you cannot be both)’ or (on a lighter note) Simpsons’ Mr Burns’ "Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business." or Miranda Priestly from Devil Wears Prada ‘“Please bore someone else with your questions.” Now these leaders might look like badasses and might even be effective in the short-term and when times are good. However, in the long term, they tend to backslide as people don't want to work with people they fear, and instead they want to work with people they respect, like, and trust. Today’s Gen-XYZ workforce expects a leader they can look up to, they can count on, a grounded leader who will show core strength, confidence, modesty, curiosity and will stay true to their values in good times --- and not so good times.
When crisis hits, the people who stick around and support you are those people you have shown up for and supported during rosier times. We all know that and have experienced that in our personal lives. And guess what? It’s not that different in business. The teams that succeed and get through tough times (in the long run) are those who have shown up for each other - and that tone is set by the leader. In low times, the leaders who are able to navigate the complexities and ambiguities, and most crucially, bring their teams along the ride are the ones who have done the work, ones who have invested in themselves to find what grounds them, what gives them power.
Sp what sets the grounded leader apart? The grounded leader is able to tap into their roots to get energy and stability, to capitalize their core strength to rise and blossom. In their article on grounded leadership, organizational psychologists Bob Rosen and Emma Kate Swann identify the six “roots” that make a grounded leader:
Physical Health (how you live): Keeping you agile in a fast-paced world.
Emotional Health (how you feel): Helping you stay both tough and nimble in uncertain times.
Intellectual Health (how you think): Providing the tools for learning and staying relevant in a complex environment.
Social Health (how you interact): Ensuring you have the relationship skills needed for living in a connective world.
Vocational Health (how you perform): Helping us balance meaningful work and competition in a demanding age.
Spiritual Health (how you view the world): Connecting to the larger environment, and building trust, gratitude, and generosity in a world rife with cynicism.
How can we root to rise? In nature, when a seed is planted in the soil, it needs darkness and nourishment before it can be strong enough to push through the Earth and become what it was meant to become, to rise toward the Sun as a tree, or a plant, or a flower. Think Lotus flower - it’s beautiful but it’s got some not so aesthetically beautiful roots down in the mud. Similarly for us - we need to root down and get into the dirt, into darkness to then find light to rise.
Here are some tips and exercises that will help that journey:
1. Understand your values and honor them too! Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work. In an ideal world, they should align with and determine your priorities, and they can even be used as a scorecard to test your behavior against - am I behaving / acting in line with my values? Am I honoring my values?
2. Face your unconscious biases and be cognizant of them when making decisions: Unconscious biases, or implicit biases, are attitudes that are held subconsciously and affect the way individuals feel and think about others around them. Subconscious attitudes aren’t necessarily as well-formed as coherent thoughts, but they can be very ingrained. Many people have unconscious biases that have been with them since childhood, which they absorb by observing their social, familial and institutional environments. Unconscious biases can color the emotional and rational responses of individuals in everyday situations and affect their behavior.
3. Find your flow and create the circumstances to be in it often: In his groundbreaking work, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlines his theory that people are happiest and most productive when they are in a state of flow. We say we are “in flow” or “in the zone” or “in the groove” to describe a sense of effortless, enjoyable action. Csíkszentmihályi’s model shows the emotional states that we are likely to experience when trying to complete a task, depending on 1. the perceived difficulty of the challenge, and 2. our perceptions of our skill levels. When we have the optimal level of skill and challenge, that is where the magic happens - you find yourself in flow, you don’t know how time flies!
4. MAKE Time for yourself and for what is important: It is a common misconception among leaders that they don’t have time for x (insert something you feel you cannot do because of time limitations). One of my finance professors from INSEAD said in his closing seminar, “You will all be leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, successful parents (and the list goes on), I am sure. One thing that we all have in common and cannot change no matter who we are and how important (we think) we are is the amount of time we have in a day. We all have 24 hours. Noone has more or less. No cheating allowed. Don’t complain about not having time. Empower yourself. Make time for what is important.” Self-care, time for yourself and activities you enjoy doing is meditative. It is mind clearing, dopamine producing (your doctor will congratulate you!) and detoxing! And it’s actually productive in the long run in that you show up as a better leader, a calmer person, a more content, less resentful person which reflects on your team’s success. Make time for yourself!
5. Create and maintain deep social connections: Roko Belic spent 5 years traveling around the world in pursuit of finding the elements of happiness and shares his findings in the highly acclaimed documentary, Happy. The director includes astonishing statistical data displaying how preconceived notions about achieving happiness by being successful are quite wrong. Accordingly, only 10% of our happiness is based on social status, living situation, income, and other materialistic things, while 40% is based on the activities we fill our life with and how we choose to live. The people who are the happiest in Japan, France, USA, Nepal, etc. are those who have deep social connections and nurture connection and togetherness over material possessions.
6. Connect to your Vision and Mission: Know your ‘North Star’, what are you here for, what is it that you want to achieve in life and stay true to that. Our lives as leaders, parents, managers, entrepreneurs, human beings are busy! We have to consciously carve out time to take a moment to reflect (by ourselves, with our teams, with our partners, families) to identify, connect to and later check in and reconnect to our vision and mission.
7. Maintain Tensegrity: I just had to sprinkle in another anatomy jargon! Bear with me here, this is the last one, I promise. According to Wikipedia, "Tensegrity is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other while the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially." Think suspension bridge. So in the body these are bones that float in a sea of soft tissue - they are held in position by tension from your muscles and fascia. That tension is what gives us our flexibility and fluidity, and then the integrity comes from the strength of our bones. Now that you know what tensegrity is, can you make the connection? In a grounded leader, we want to see the flexibility, the fluidity, the movement, (rolling with the punches) and then we want to see the strength, the structure, the principle integrity. What are your strengths as a leader? Where can you flex and move? Where can you stretch and grow? Who can you lean on where you don't feel as strong / equipped? An exercise with a coach or in your own reflection time doubling down on your strengths, and a group chat with your team around everyone's unique strengths can be very helpful in answering some of these questions.
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Hi! I'm Merve. 👋 I help corporate leaders and business owners build high trust, high performance teams, grow their business impact, and advance their careers.
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