by Chris Lowney
The answers to these questions, at least until quite recently, were pretty much none, none, and none. We can draw an obvious conclusion from Goleman's work: it's no wonder that companies suffer erratic results when selecting and forming leaders-most are looking for the wrong skills. Corporate rising stars frequently distinguish themselves by keen intellect, but that's not what equips them to lead. And looking for leaders while focusing on the wrong skills is a hit-or-miss proposition-like picking future opera stars by examining their golf swing.
At least one company did look for emotional-intelligence potential in candidates-and more important, crafted a program to engender it in recruits. In fact, this company was doing it more than 450 years ago. What we're calling Jesuit self-awareness lines up strikingly well with Goleman's notion of emotional intelligence. It's no surprise. Both the Jesuits and Goleman wanted to identify the personal traits essential to successful leadership.
Goleman's five-pronged summary largely describes the "what," the core behaviors and personal traits characteristic of those pos sessing emotional intelligence. The Jesuit approach takes it one step further, identifying not only the "what" but also the "how"-a program for imparting those skills. Central to and irreplaceable in the process were the Spiritual Exercises. Each Jesuit recruit emerged from his thirty-day immersion in the program with invaluable personal strengths, including:
• the ability to reflect systematically on personal weaknesses, especially those manifested as habitual tendencies
• an integrated worldview, a vision, and a value system
• profound respect for other people and for all of creation
• appreciation of oneself as loved and important
• the ability to tune out everyday distractions in order to reflect, and the habit of doing so daily
• a method for considering choices and making decisions
Most managers would love to hire candidates with demonstrable evidence of these six credentials. The trouble is, they don't show up on resumes, and we don't know how to interview for them. Nor do we consider it a company's role to inculcate them. Pointing out that a rash manager's lack of self-awareness is jeopardizing his or her career progress is fine and appropriate for the annual performance review. But showing the same manager a path to greater self-awareness? That's what self-help groups do, not companies!
The result of this helpless, hands-off, and haphazard approach to self-awareness is obvious. Most major companies have notoriously poor track records when it comes to identifying future leaders. Rising stars are anointed only to have their careers derail or stagnate, and rarely because they lack smarts or technical savvy-that's usually what made them rising stars in the first place. Instead, their careers derail because they never understand and therefore can never really address their weaknesses, weaknesses that typically revolve around risk taking, managing and interacting with others, and making judgments-in other words, the abilities and managerial courage that come with mature self-awareness. Or they never acquire the skill of learning on the fly, of constantly processing new information and adjusting course.
Such talent wastage was unacceptable to Loyola. It was hard enough to find aptissimi in the first place. Instead of simply hoping that talented junior stars had the human skills integral to long-term success, he had enough confidence in human nature to believe that those skills could be acquired. And he had a revolutionary process to make it happen.
Most major companies have notoriously poor track records when it comes to identifying future leaders.
CHAPTER 6
The Spiritual Exercises
A Lifelong Development Tool
he ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is on record for making the most extreme claim for the value of self-knowledge: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Though few thinkers today would echo so thorough a condemnation of an unreflective approach to life, there is no doubt that the value of self-knowledge has been rediscovered as almost never before. Selfawareness, always cherished by philosophers, poets, psychologists, writers, and other "reflective types," is increasingly promoted as an indispensable success tool even in the hard-knuckled arena of the corporate boardroom. Executives employ a broad suite of tools in the quest for greater awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, values, and personality traits-from executive coaching sessions and 360-degree feedback solicited from subordinates to the MyersBriggs type indicator and the Enneagram personality type test. Even astrology and personal-growth gurus find an audience among selfknowledge-hungry executives.
No company values self-awareness so profoundly as the Jesuits. It is the foundation of their leadership model. Rather than cycle through self-awareness approaches haphazardly, the company developed and promoted one universal tool for all Jesuits: the Spiritual Exercises.
The Exercises were developed by Ignatius Loyola, based on his own journey toward personal and spiritual awareness. He took note not only of what he learned but also of the reflective practices that led him to those insights. He distilled the most effective of these practices into what might be called a self-awareness "handbook."
It is not a book to be read; one achieves self-awareness not by reading how someone else achieved it but through focused reflection on one's own experience. It's impossible to overestimate the Spiritual Exercises' importance in Jesuit culture. They encapsulate the company's vision and serve as each Jesuit's preeminent personal development experience. Engaging in the Exercises is the uniquely unifying experience of Jesuit life, shared by recruits from Rome to India, from the founding generation through this year's entering class. Jesuits sometimes refer to themselves as "men of the Exercises," implicitly celebrating the camaraderie born of their common spiritual boot camp but more crucially signaling their allegiance to shared vision and values. The Exercises were designed to help individuals choose or confirm a life direction. Yet they prove an equally potent corporate tool: the merest shorthand reference to "the Exercises" allows Jesuit managers to tap a wellspring of energy and goodwill, as well as remind recruits of their unifying value system.
Loyola called them Spiritual Exercises for a reason-they were actions to be done, not rules to be read or studied: "For just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections." 1 The person undertaking them was la persona que se ejercita, "the person exercising him- or herself"-not someone passively reading about Loyola's experiences and insights but a spiritual athlete building his or her own interior resources.
An experienced, impartial "director" guides each participant, not by teaching but by helping each recruit interpret his own experiences. The director doesn't interject his own opinions but is a sounding board who "ought not to incline in either direction but rather,-.-.-. [stand] by like the pointer of a scale in equilib- rium."2 Why the hands-off approach? An early Jesuit handbook for directors pointed out that "it is a lesson of experience that all men are more delighted and more moved by what they find out for themselves. Hence it will suffice just to point, as with the finger, to the vein in the mine, and let each one dig for himself."3 Loyola intuitively grasped what every competent therapist understands about self-discovery and what every quality manager understands about motivation: the switches are on the inside.
The Exercises demand total intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement. Accordingly, they monopolize focus and energy for their thirty-day duration. This means no contact with family, friends, or coworkers; no involvement with work; no reading matter other than spiritual texts; no engaging in casual conversation (even meals are taken in silence). Why strip away so much of life's customary daily activity? Simply because daily habits and occupations easily become preoccupations, a distracting scrim of thoughts, worries, images, and ideas that block genuine introspection. Such was Loyola's conviction in the sixteenth century, before the proliferation of telephones, cell phones, e-mail, radio, television, magazin
es, newspapers, fax machines, billboards, wristwatches, cars, trains, planes, and buses. It's too easy to bob along superficially, distracted by an endless stream of background noise. Loyola purged distractions in order to free time and psychic space.
The Exercises demand total intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement. Accordingly, they monopolize focus and energy for their thirty-day duration.
And so each recruit is left alone with himself. For a month, every day is arranged around four or five one-hour meditations. The rest of each day is cleared for interior percolation of reflections, memories, thoughts, impulses, and convictions that might have been long forgotten, never allowed to surface, not sufficiently ruminated, or simply buried in the muck of everyday preoccupations.
Still, while the Exercises' daily rhythm leaves ample scope for freeform introspection, their progression is anything but random. Rather, the meditations on scriptural events or imaginary scenarios drive relentlessly toward the goal of enabling high-quality, totally engaged human commitment. Of course, Loyola's personal commitment was to Christian service, and the Exercises' thrust and subject matter are emphatically Christian. But they work as a leadership tool not because they are grounded in a religious worldview but because they build the personal resources required for freely chosen, powerful, and successful human commitments of all sorts: to religious goals, but equally to work, life aspirations, and personal relationships. Over the course of a month, trainees deconstruct themselves in order to erect solid personal foundations of self-awareness, ingenuity, heroism, and love.
THE FOUNDATION OF SELF-AWARENESS: "To OVERCOME ONESELF AND TO ORDER ONE'S LIFE"4
The Exercises immediately plunge trainees into an ice-water bath of painfully frank self-assessment, "that I may perceive the disorder in my actions, in order to-.-.-. amend myself, and put myself in order."5 Recruits fasten their seat belts for a hellfire-and-brimstone journey through the sights, sounds, and very whiff of hell, "to see with the eyes of the imagination the huge fires and, so to speak, the souls within the bodies full of fire.-.-.-. In my imagination I will hear the wailing, the shrieking, the cries, and the blasphemies.-.-.-. By my sense of smell I will perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and the rotting things."6
This meditative episode comes along more or less on day two; surely more than a few trainees regret signing up for thirty days of this stuff. Still, Loyola's imagery reflects the religious mentality of a very different era. While many in the late twentieth century retired Satan to all but metaphorical status, he was a real, formidable enemy to sixteenth-century Europeans. The Exercises of Loyola's day painted a world where the unvigilant, lazy, or unreflective could fall into this enemy's cunning snares.
If anything is surprising, it is less Loyola's graphic portrayal of hell than his empowering message that trainees will not be left cowering, miserable, and helpless against the satanic onslaught. Instead, recruits are exhorted to pick up their cudgels and wade into personal battle with what Loyola calls "the enemy of our human nature." The enemy is no match for anyone who has "ordered" himself. How does one order oneself? First, by taking stock of one's weaknesses ("disordered affections"). This selfdiscovery alone sends the wily but cowardly enemy of human nature on the run, for the enemy is like "a false lover" who most fears having his sinister doings brought to light.
We sophisticated moderns might be inclined to dismiss all this as an archaic relic of a romantic and superstitious age. But the imagery conveys rich insight. Contemporary culture has by and large replaced "Satan" with all manner of personal, psychological, and societal demons as the cause of our missteps. These demons include addictions, weaknesses, the media, an unloving childhood environment, bad luck, peer pressure, greed, fear of success, narcissism, loose social mores, stupid bosses, and on, and on, and on. But whether personalized (as Satan), psychologized, or explained otherwise, the "enemy of our human nature" does exist. The bottomline human reality is that everyone falls short of peak potential, and usually for identifiable reasons. As Loyola observes, the enemy of human nature does fear discovery. While our weaknesses remain unacknowledged or closeted away, we are powerless over them. The sometimes painful process of dragging our weaknesses into full light of day by understanding them is the first empowering stride toward conquering them. This self-searching assessment of what Loyola calls disordered affections is an assessment of what a Freudian might call "attachments which impede effective ego functioning." Veterans of Alcoholics Anonymous might call the process a "fearless moral inventory," while others more simply recognize it as "taking stock of who I am, where I want to go, and what's holding me back."
THE FOUNDATION OF INGENUITY: "To MAKE OURSELVES INDIFFERENT"7
A colleague once asked Loyola how long he would need to recover if the pope was ever to disband the Jesuits. Loyola's response surely shocked his questioner, and it quickly found its way into Jesuit lore: "If I recollected myself in prayer for a quarter of an hour, I would be happy, and even happier than before."8
Perhaps there was a smidgen of posturing in his answer. Loyola had built what was rapidly becoming the world's most influential and successful religious organization. Could he see it dismantled and then stroll away whistling after a mere fifteen minutes in prayer?
Posturing or not, Loyola was sending an unambiguous message grounded in the lessons of the Exercises. Jesuits achieved what we today would call ingenuity-a mix of adaptability, daring, speed, and good judgment-only by first cultivating the attitude he called "indifference."
Trainees approach indifference by imagining three different men who have each legitimately acquired the fabulous sum of ten thousand ducats, then considering their varying reactions to their newly obtained wealth. All three feel more than niggling discomfort with their growing attachment to the fortune. There's more to life than money,-.-.-. but it feels so nice to have it. Suddenly it seems impossible to imagine doing without it. The first two types do little or nothing to rid themselves of the wealth that is leading to such inordinate attachment. What does the third type do about the ten thousand ducats? Here is the punch line of the meditation, the person we are to emulate, so the answer seems obvious: he generously distributes the money to the poor and piously rejoices, right?
Wrong. The role model for Jesuit indifference rids himself of the attachment to the money, "but in such a way that there remains no inclination either to keep the acquired money or to dispose of it."9 In other words, the money is not the issue. The problem is slavish attachment to money or to anything else. Inordinate attachments fog one's vision. I might have first pursued a lucrative job so that I could provide for my family, but somewhere along the line the money itself became my goal, and my family became a neglected second. The end became confused with the means. Only by becoming indifferent-free of prejudices and attachments and therefore free to choose any course of action-do recruits become strategically flexible. The indifferent Jesuit liberates himself to choose strategies driven by one motive only: achieving his longterm goal of serving God by helping souls.
Only by becoming indifferent-free of prejudices and attachments and therefore free to choose any course of action-do recruits become strategically flexible.
The meditation isn't about the money; it's about the attachment. And understanding personal attachments means overturning personal rocks to see what crawls out. Attachment to money is usually salve for some other debilitating egoitch: I'm terrified of failing; I need to feel important and be the center of attention; I'm insecure about my real talent and worth.
This is what Loyola was really after: the internal fears, drives, and attachments that can control decisions and actions. Imagine the chief executive who undertakes an ill-advised merger because his ego inflates along with his company's balance sheet-or who backs away from a brilliant merger because he and his counterpart cannot carve out roles commensurate with their enormous egos. Imagine the sixteenth-century Jesuit reluctant to go to China, clinging to the security blanket of working on home turf su
rrounded by friends-or the twenty-first-century professional forgoing a wonderful career opportunity for similar reasons. Consider the controlling micromanager unable to relinquish authority to subordinates-or the person mired in a destructive relationship out of fear of being alone. All are driven by their attachments just as addicts are driven by alcohol, sex, or drugs.
These people aren't indifferent. They are not freely making choices; their inordinate attachments are in control. As a result, they don't in the end choose what will best serve them, their companies, their coworkers, or their families.
Indifference is the right stuff of ingenuity. And once early Jesuits attained it, Loyola usually set them loose to lead themselves. "In all, I much desire a complete indifference; then with this obedience and abnegation supposed on the part of the subjects [i.e., individual Jesuits], I am very glad to follow their inclinations."10
THE FOUNDATION OF HEROISM: MAGIS
Loyola described indifferent Jesuits as "poised like a scale at equilibrium," balanced to consider all strategic alternatives.
They don't remain poised for long.
In another meditation, recruits imagine a king preparing for battle. His ambitions are not modest: "My will is to conquer the whole land of the infidels." He issues a call for followers: "Whoever wishes to come with me has to be content with the same food I eat.-.-.-. So too each one must labor with me during the day, and keep watch in the night-.-.-. so that later each may have a part with me in the victory, just as each has shared in the toil."11
The meditation continues with "Christ the Eternal King" replacing the earthly king and waging a similarly ambitious spiritual battle. His cause is described as so worthwhile, so motivating, and so inspiring that "all those who have judgment and reason will offer themselves wholeheartedly for this labor." 12 Well, actually, they'll do more than just offer themselves wholeheartedly. The meditation continues: "Those who desire-.-.-. to distinguish themselves in total service [will] go further still." 13