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Energetic Leadership – a conversation with author Gitte Madelaire
6 Plays2 hours ago
Leading in a way that makes people feel led.
Gitte Madelaire had a successful corporate career, who is now a board member, futurist and author of Energetic Leadership a book in which she proposes that as the world changes at an increasingly rapid pace the world also needs a different form of leadership.
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Gitte explains to host Michael Millward what she thinks that approach to leadership should be.
Their discussion covers
- ·The psychological aspects of work and life that limit how we all think
- The importance of psychological safety in creating the confidence to think outside the box.
- Leading so that people feel led
- Authentic curiosity about the future
- The nine trends in leadership
More information about Gitte Madelaire and Michael Millward is available at abeceder.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Independent Minds' Podcast Series
00:00:05
Speaker
on zencaster Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abyssaida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida.
Exploring Energetic Leadership with Geeta Madalaya
00:00:29
Speaker
Today, Geeta Madalaya and I are going to be discussing energetic leadership.
00:00:35
Speaker
As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, the Independent Minds is made on Zencastr. Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that makes every stage of the podcast production process, including editing and distribution to all the platforms, so easy.
00:00:53
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using zencastr visit Zencaster, visit zencaster.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code, Abbasida. All the details are in the description.
00:01:05
Speaker
Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencaster is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:17
Speaker
Very importantly, on The Independent Minds, we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
Introduction to Geeta Madalair and Her Work
00:01:25
Speaker
Today, my guest, Independent Mind, is Gita Madalair, the author of Energetic Leadership.
00:01:33
Speaker
Gita is based in Denmark. I have visited several times and every time I go, I make sure I make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where I get trade prices on trains, flights, hotels and all sorts of other travel related purchases. You can do the same by using the link in the description, which has a built in membership discount.
Geeta's Career Journey and Motivations
00:01:54
Speaker
Now that I've paid the rent, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds. Hello, Gita. Hello there, Michael. How is Denmark? It's a wonderful day. The sun is shining. Can we start, please, by you just sort of explaining a little bit about your career and what led you to writing this book, Energetic Leadership? Yes, I have been in corporate life until three years ago. So in different industries, retail, I've actually worked in in the yeah UK, in London, in his master's voice music industry. in insurance and in the car industry, and also always with customer-facing areas like value proposition development, customer journeys, and got frustrated about why we are not able to be better at working together in organizations. And I felt that it was getting worse over the years.
00:02:51
Speaker
So I decided that I wanted to try and inspire people in a different way. So I started my own company in 2022 and I wrote the book both because of my frustration, but also because i wanted to give something different to to people and to organization and to try and build the bridge for a better business world.
00:03:19
Speaker
Great, great. And it's a very interesting book, I must admit. It's called Energetic Leadership. Why did you choose that particular title?
The Concept of Energetic Leadership
00:03:28
Speaker
ah The working title was actually different. It was Evoke.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I realized that it was, or my editor changed, you know, you cannot use that one. So we decided it should be Energetic Leadership. Evoke was more that I had been evoked.
00:03:46
Speaker
I had developed myself to sort of a stage where I can truly be myself and also be my purpose in life ah by writing this book and and by by talking about this movement of energetic leadership. um So why did I chose the title, Energetic Leadership?
00:04:09
Speaker
For two reasons. Leadership, because it's about leadership. Business leadership or also your own leadership. as an individual. So that was one thing.
00:04:20
Speaker
And it is a business book. It's a human business book. Energetic, not because it's about being energetic in the sort of you know masculine thing a way of being, you know you're proactive, you're doing things.
00:04:39
Speaker
It's not that kind of the word. um It is the word that's reflect back to that everything is energy.
00:04:49
Speaker
It's physics, that we are energy, all the way down to ourselves, or everything in in on earth is energy. So it's that kind of word.
00:05:01
Speaker
I get what you mean. For me, if you're going to be a leader, you have to make a conscious effort to put energy into your leadership activities. It's not something
Adapting Leadership to Modern Needs
00:05:11
Speaker
that can simply be an add-on to your role. If you are in a leadership role, if you have energy, Leadership responsibilities, regardless of what level, it's about putting the energy in, being a conscious leader, which is part of the subtitle of the book, the consciously leading, putting the energy into leadership activities.
00:05:33
Speaker
You see, for me, I've seen so many leaders who have had the leadership title, usually manager, most of their time is spent doing the job, not leading the people in their team to enable those people to do more of the job.
00:05:48
Speaker
They carry on doing the job that they've always done. o Getting people people to do more in terms do more leadership consciously so that it becomes more part of their daily routine. Yeah, the reason why I'm very much focusing on consciousness is that we have to develop our consciousness.
00:06:11
Speaker
So you could look at this like if you have an iceberg and right now we are only conscious, you know, we have only developed our consciousness to maybe, you know, five, 10%.
00:06:23
Speaker
So we have this huge potential, you know, the, the, the iceberg underneath the water, you could say. so We need to develop our consciousness in order to evoke our potential because we need our potential to thrive, then we are more happy, but also because we need our potential to be able to create new solutions to these challenges we face on earth with climate changes or whatever.
00:06:57
Speaker
yeah So it's it's it's a way of of trying to put light on that actually a lot of good stuff underneath that we have to get up in the open.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yes. I think that's one of the very important points is that all too often new leaders, for example, are leading or managing more than leading in the ways that they have experienced management and leadership, which are based on the ideas of 30, 40, 50 years ago, or even further back in history. And there is a very important point that you make that the world is changing.
00:07:37
Speaker
People are changing. the issues that people are concerned about are changing. And we've seen people now working in different ways, but we cannot manage people who work in different ways in the way in using the same leadership techniques that only partially worked 40, 50 years ago.
00:07:57
Speaker
We have to adopt different approach to leadership. yeah that that's That's really, yeah, ah the point. And also a very important, important part is also that we have sort of created, you could say, a prison cell for ourselves. And we have locked it with our silence, whether it is sad individually or it could be in an organization or in a team or in a society.
00:08:28
Speaker
So we have not, you know, for decades or for centuries, not been very good at talking about how we are doing and what issues we have, whether it's individually or in an organization or societies.
00:08:46
Speaker
And now we are at a sort of point in evolution where we have become a little bit stronger as humans because we have more wealth. We're not starving, ah most of us. ah And that leads us to getting some so kind of strength that we are actually able to look at ourselves and get out of this so-called prison cell and focusing on what is good for us and what is it that I am here to do.
00:09:23
Speaker
Not just to be a human, you know, having children, but what is my purpose here on earth? What is making me happy? What is it I'm going to work doing? so... so It's quite a lot deeper than just ah being led by a manager or a leader. It's really we're going back into getting more alignment with what we are as humans, both our body and our minds. And and eventually in in the book, I call it the soul. You could call it the inner heart, whatever. But we have been disconnected from our core.
00:10:04
Speaker
You make me think, or you you remind me that I am constantly seeing reports which say that people leaving university in all sorts of parts of the world are looking for different types of work, work that says something about them as an individual.
00:10:20
Speaker
What you just said makes me think that we may have lots of people who have that desire to want to do something in a different way to find their purpose or create something that is more them rather than just I'm doing a job.
00:10:38
Speaker
And yet when you describe it as a prison that we've created, it makes me wonder whether people who will say that they want to do that sort of thing actually know.
00:10:49
Speaker
how to go about doing it? I think they are, you know, we are all in in sort of some kind of process of creating it. So also one of the the trends in in the book is about that we, from being more looking at, especially in the Western world, you know, we want to work and then we want to retire and then we'll die.
00:11:16
Speaker
That's the general model that people follow, isn't it? Yeah, that is, but but now we now we are more rebels, more starting to be more like rebels.
00:11:28
Speaker
So it's not about that we do not want to work. Of course we want to work, and we want to work until we die, but we want to work with what is of interest to us.
00:11:40
Speaker
And then we want to have breaks throughout our whole life, you know, so it doesn't mean that, you know, if you check into a big organization and you check out 40 or 50 years later, you might work in different places, you might be self-employed and or employed, or you might have a break for six months or so we want to create our lives in a different way than it has been sort of put on us previously.
00:12:11
Speaker
And that is the shift that's happening. But we, of course, we are searching. How are we doing this? Yes. Yeah. That is the basis of the book, isn't it? That the way in which people are working, wanting to work, wanting to live, how work fits into life and more people working to live rather than living to work means that leaders are going to have to adapt to the people that they want to lead. Otherwise, they won't be able to actually have them on their teams. It's it's as simple as that. The old command and control master-servant type approaches are simply not going to work. And leaders, one of the messages that comes from the book for me is that for leaders, they are going to have to ah think ahead, have the foresight and to look to the future as to how am I going to have to change the way in which I lead people to make, to ensure that the people I want to lead still feel led.
00:13:14
Speaker
And that is ah that's a good point because one of the the skills or competencies that really is lacking a lot in in in the business world, whether it's boardrooms or C-suite or whatever, is the skill to have authentic curiosity for what is happening out there in the future.
00:13:35
Speaker
And it's, you know, some some people will say, okay, you cannot we cannot predict future. No, but we can predict. still set up ah trends and we have mega trends that sort of covers all of us on on Earth and then we will have trends that it's more related to a specific industry or something.
00:13:56
Speaker
But we need to understand the future, both because it's relevant for for leading a company or ourself, but also because we have technology, you know, AI coming like ah with will high speed. So we need to be, as humans, ahead of the you know development. If we do not understand what's in the horizons,
00:14:22
Speaker
then it's really difficult to
Focusing on Internal Sustainability
00:14:25
Speaker
navigate. Yes. You mentioned trends there, and the book describes nine different pivotal trends about around organisation and leaderships and and the things that leaders need to do. We haven't got time to go through all nine. Obviously, just if people want to go through all nine, they can buy the book, obviously.
00:14:44
Speaker
What would you say, of those nine, If people wanted to focus on just one, which one would you say is the is the trend that they need to actually put effort into understanding how that trend will impact them, their business, the people that work for them? What's the number one trend at the moment?
00:15:02
Speaker
I think I would pick the one that is called from external to internal sustainability first. Or you could also say outer to inner sustainability first.
00:15:15
Speaker
And the reason why i i would pick that one is because we as humans have been very good at, or we are very good at looking at outer issues or the outer world, you know, and then relating everything we do to that, or where is the cause of what crisis we have. It's also always related to something away from yourself. So it's almost like, here's the situation, who's to blame?
00:15:50
Speaker
Yes. So the blame game is, you know, it's not about me, it's about everything else or others or whatever. But the the crucial thing in any kind of of development or transformation is the one that you as an individual do with yourself.
00:16:11
Speaker
Whatever so small the the thing that you are doing is, it's very, very important. And that goes back to energetic because you are shifting your energy to something better. You know, you are going up instead of down.
00:16:28
Speaker
We have all these 17 world goals about sustainability. And they are all to do with external issues, which is very relevant.
00:16:42
Speaker
But who is driving or who is going to drive all this? It's the human. So we need to have the human to be in a state where are we are able to do that.
00:16:55
Speaker
and And you could also, if you will if you're into, you know, seeing what indigenous people, how they have their culture and everything, if If you want a community to to be able to be healthy, in all you know the word of healthy, not just physically, but mentally, spiritual, relationally, or whatever, then it all starts with the individual.
00:17:20
Speaker
And then you have the family, and then you have the community, and then you... So so looking after yourself, being self-aware, being also curious about what is happening,
00:17:33
Speaker
That is the most important thing. And then we can always do something. When you talk about individuals there, i don't think you're talking about people being selfish in the same sort of way as might have happened in the 1980s, where it was me, me, me, look at the money I've got, look at the clothes I'm buying, look at the car I'm driving, blah, blah, blah, all those sorts of things.
00:17:55
Speaker
What I think your meaning is that In order to be part of the team, to be part of the community, we have to make sure that we are contributing to the best of our ability.
00:18:07
Speaker
yeah That's true, because what you're talking about in the 80s or 90s or whatever, or still going on, that's really the ego. Yes. The ego driving the agenda.
00:18:18
Speaker
And that is not going back to energy. ah You're not creating good energy, not for yourself or for your environment. Yes. The shift, if you want to do, that's where the inner sustainability, you know, if you want to be really sustainable yourself, you know, healthy, you have to calm your your nervous system.
00:18:40
Speaker
And we are all, you know, the whole 8 billion on earth, we have a stressed nervous system. The first thing we can do is to to calm our nervous system. So yes, it's not about an ego agenda taking off. It's much more about developing yourself, understanding yourself so that you can make those contributions and understanding your limitations as well, I think. I think there's an awful lot of pressure on people to, because so-and-so has done it, this one person has done it, so why don't you want to do it as well? Part of leading yourself and being sustainable
00:19:16
Speaker
as an individual is working out, like you were saying a few minutes ago, working out what it is that you want to do and then finding somewhere that will enable you to live the life that you want to leave.
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, because if you do the, if you take the ego highway, that then you are, you know, trying to copy paste whatever others are doing. And that is really not what your, so you know, your your soul wants.
00:19:44
Speaker
ah Because... it And also if you are stressed, you know your soul is ah is is not part of you. When you're stressed in ah in a situation, you move down the evolution ladder, so to speak, and your focus is on fight or flight. Whereas what you're talking about is that if you understand yourself as an individual, as a leader or someone who's being led, if you understand yourself as an individual, understand what it is that you, or how it is that you want to live your life,
00:20:17
Speaker
and then put yourself in and in situations that enable you to do that, you are reducing the stress that you will feel because you are in a confident situation. I almost said comfortable situation, but you're not in a comfortable situation. you've You've sorted things out so that you can be confident about the life that you're living. And what you're saying in terms of energetic leadership is that leaders need to put the energy into leadership that enables them to understand the people that they are trying to lead, rather than what might have happened couple of decades ago, where
00:20:56
Speaker
Everyone was being managed and they were grouped together as one single entity, a group of people. And now the leader has to think about people as a group of persons.
00:21:09
Speaker
They're individuals, but they work together. Oh, yes. they have You could say you have a company and a company has a purpose. But each individually in each individual in that company, let's say there are hundreds,
00:21:23
Speaker
They have 100 different life purposes. Yes. And
Aligning Purpose with Work
00:21:27
Speaker
now it is not, they're not bricks anymore. They are living people with 100 different purposes that will have to, you know, i wouldn't even say fit in, but they will have to find out if they are going to be an organization together. Yes. So it's it's that kind of,
00:21:49
Speaker
way of navigating in something that is just much more organic. Yes, I totally, I i like the book. is I've enjoyed it and I'm enjoying this conversation. And I think that what we're talking about in terms of energetic leadership, like I say, is putting the energy into leadership, understanding the people that you're leading, but also understanding how the organization fits into its society, its community as well. And thinking of the organization and the people that are part of that organization, the people that create that organization, because otherwise an organization is just ah it's a nothing without the people, but the people exist as part of a community. So the organization exists as part of that community as well. And if you're going to lead an organization within a community, then you've got to know how you fit in today, how you fitted in in the past and understand that community, put energy into understanding that community on all sorts of different levels so that you can continue to be a leader or have a leadership role within that community into the future. And also because we talked about previously about consciousness, when we develop, you know, when we get...
00:23:07
Speaker
a karma nervous system and and we are thriving, we expand our consciousness and then we open to our intuition and and we will be able to much better, I call it, to walk on two legs or feet. Yes. Right now we have created a world where we are running around on the on the the right leg and and, you know, we can do it, but it's really hard and it's not very nice to look at and it's not healthy at all. But getting that balance will create an opening to our intuition. And then we can balance our rational and our logical knowledge with our intuition.
00:23:52
Speaker
And we need that for all the creation that we have to do, you know, finding solutions for climate change and and whatever we want to do. But primarily to be... a joyful human being, which we're not. Well, too often, the I call it the pressures of modern life, I suppose, but we can take ownership of that and finding the right organizations, the organizations that want to create that balance in people's lives, the role of being a leader or not a job title, it's a role. And it's about putting the energy in to being a leader, learning how to do it properly, learning the way to lead, I suppose, and learning to lead in a way that works for you as a leader rather than somebody saying, this is what we do.
00:24:44
Speaker
And it's supposed to work for everybody that you're trying to lead. It's about the adaptability and understanding that only the only part of the individual that you actually know for certain is the part that you can see and like the iceberg the vast majority of that person is beneath the waves and to lead them properly to lead them energetically to put the lead the energy into the leadership which then gives them the energy to do their best work yeah requires you to understand what's beneath the waves and then yeah create an environment that the where it's you know a lot of people use psychological safety right now. You know, you need to be safe, feel safe to to be able to, is it safe to open up and and say what what I want to say? And so if you want to create a healthy organization, you need to have that kind of of safety.
00:25:43
Speaker
ah Yes. and And eventually, you know, we will also be customers in organizations where you have a healthy way of you know driving leading that kind of business. Yes, very definitely.
Book Recommendation: 'Energetic Leadership'
00:26:00
Speaker
It's fantastic book, Energetic Leadership, but it's such a big subject and there's so much to learn. And you've you've done a really great job of making it concise and an easy book to read, taking what are quite complex ideas and putting them into everyday terms, which is, I think, part of Energetic Leadership, isn't it?
00:26:22
Speaker
It is. It's quite simple. We've made it very complex. Yes. I heartily recommend the book. And I do say thank you very much for helping me make such an interesting episode of The Independent Minds about a very interesting book, Energetic Leadership by Geeta Badelaire.
00:26:40
Speaker
Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. been a pleasure. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abbasida, and in this episode of The Independent Minds, I have been having a conversation with Geeta Madalair, the author of Energetic Leadership.
00:26:55
Speaker
You can find out more information about both of us at abbasida.co.uk.
Maintaining Leadership Health
00:27:00
Speaker
There is a link in the description alongside links to Geeta's websites and opportunities to purchase her book, Energetic Leadership.
00:27:10
Speaker
Leaders are always better when they are healthy and an important part of staying healthy is knowing the risks early. That is why we recommend the annual health test from York Test. York Tests provide an assessment of 39 different health markers including cholesterol, diabetes, various vitamins and liver and other organ functions and a full blood count. The annual health test is conducted by an experienced phlebotomist who will complete a full blood draw at your home or workplace.
00:27:39
Speaker
Hospital standard tests are carried out in a yeah UKAS accredited and CQC compliant laboratory. You can access your easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes via your secure Personal Wellness Hub account. There's a link and a discount code in the description.
00:27:59
Speaker
I'm sure that you will have enjoyed this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Geeta and i have enjoyed making it. Please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:28:10
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:28:21
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.