At our global NELIS gathering in Japan, June 2018, a few of us discussed key elements/principles of social entrepreneurs/transformative leaders. After these discussions,
I arrived at the 5Ps of transformative leadership, which I would like to introduce here.
Looking at people like, for example, Nelson Mandela, it is quite clear how these 5Ps expressed themselves and enabled him to transform a system. But what, to begin with, is transformative (or transformational) leadership? I guess there are many possible definitions, but for me it is about transforming a system or community of people for the better, keeping the common good firmly in mind. A focus on sustainability, of course, is a precondition for transformative leadership!
The 5Ps of Transformative Leadership
- Principle (or Purity)
- Passion
- Positivism
- Perseverance (or Patience)
- Pragmatism
The principle, or purity
What do you do when you are in a tight or pressed situation — short of money or attacked for your views or beliefs? If you start taking short-cuts, reaching out for easy or grey money, or sell out on your core principles for short term gain, it is unlikely you will be a transformative leader. NELIS co-founder, Tatsuo Akimura, calls this first principle “purity” — how pure and strong is your intention, and are you willing to take even the longer, winding road to achieve your greater goal(s)? I kind of like “purity” because the word makes us feel slightly uneasy; it demands much of us — and that is exactly what is needed with this first principle.
I can personally attest to the power of principle/purity. Setting up one of Japan’s first sustainability consultancies, E-Square Inc., in Tokyo in 2000, the first four year were VERY tough with constant cash flow problems. For 36 months in a row, we could never pay all our bills and often I would personally, be completely out of money. We reached out to new investors, borrowed money both from business partners and financial institutions, and had to ask many creditors to wait, but we never ever made short cuts.
We never relinquished on our business principles of ethics and transparency, and we never tried to obtain grey money, which is so readily available, also in Japan.
One day, when I was also personally in a very tight situation, a lady I knew well called me to her summer house. She suddenly gave me two thick envelopes, both full of cash, saying, “one is a present to you — the other you can borrow from me at no interest and pay back through your entire life.” The amount was more than enough to overcome all the issues I was facing. In the meantime, the debt has been repaid and my relationship to the same lady is very strong and healthy.
I know from that amazing experience that if I had had any hidden motives or were acting for personal gain, this would not have happened. Looking out at the wider world, leaders who achieve truly transformative outcomes, never compromise the greater good (as Churchill said in his later days) and always keep their core principle intact. Not easy to stay “pure”, but by doing so, we may experience quite astonishing support.
- Passion -
It may seem a truism that you need passion to achieve any kind of transformational change; the issue is what kind of passion and how to maintain it. In Japanese, there is a saying that goes, “Nesshiyasukute Sameyasui” — it refers to people who tend to “heat up quickly, cool down soon.” We can all experience these short-lived bursts of passion — and they may be much needed — but what we are talking about here is something that lasts longer. My personal experience suggests there are two key aspects of maintaining passion over time.
One is whether your passion is linked to a greater cause — a major definite purpose (As Napoleon Hill said) — or a massive transformative purpose (a recent buzzword among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs). If your passion is truly connected to a greater purpose, you are much less likely to experience small set-backs and “failures” and much more likely to keep the inner fire going over a long period of time.
But — and this is a BIG BUT — there is one other key factor in maintaining passion — and here I have some tough experiences of my own as well. You need to reset fatigue and manage your health. Period.
When I set up my company (sustainability consultancy) in Tokyo in 2000, I had 72 angel investors and, ultimately, 25 staff — and the feeling both of passion for our cause and responsibility to this people made me work much too hard with way too little rest. Some days, I would get on the first train in the morning leaving 4:34 (I’ll never forget that time) and get back on one of the last, leaving after midnight. Doing this in the long run is physically impossible, and sure enough, I was hit by a serious neck-nerve problem which disabled me and put me completely out of work for two years (I could not even have a ten- minute meeting). So, don’t fool yourself — or believe you can fool your body.
Reset your fatigue on a weekly basis (or shorter if possible) and manage your health wisely. Otherwise, your passion will merely frustrate you as you become unable to act on your vision.
- Positivism-
How could you possibly be 27 years in prison, 18 of those in mostly lousy conditions on Robben Island, and still keep hope intact? What kind of mentality do you need to stay positive despite all that happens to you? The 27/18 years above are, of course, the period that Nelson Mandela was kept imprisoned in South Africa. Positivism is the third key quality of a transformative leader and, to me, has a few related aspects:
- A leader discovers hope, shares it with others and points to the future. You cannot be a transformative leader if you are unable to find hope or if you point only to the past.
- Positivism DOES NOT mean that you have to smile and be happy at all moments, which is impossible. It means constantly “returning to the positive” even after setbacks and hardships.
My co-founder at E-Square Inc., the company I established in Tokyo in 2000, Tachi Kiuchi always said, “Stay Positive!” This became our Golden Rule no. 1 (the four others are below for anyone interested). In reality this means, “train yourself to always be able to return to the positive/find hope/move forward/look to the future rather than being caught in the past,” NO MATTER what situation you are put in.
There are a couple of ways to “Stay Positive” — an important one is to have close partners or collaborators with whom you can always openly discuss any issue and with whom you can truly search for a way out. Another is to seek inspiration in what kept great leaders going — Nelson Mandela, Mikhael Gorbachev, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc. There is almost always some deep inspiration which can help you nurture and build your own positivism. Because positivism is kind of a habit or mental skill that you CAN and SHOULD train if you want to achieve transformational change in any community, society or business ecosystem.
3. The Five Golden Rules (for the staff) of E-Square Inc. (at its founding)
i.Stay Positive
ii. Make a Difference
iii. Action Breeds Results
iv. Be Creative
v. Exceed Expectations
- Perseverance or patience -
We live in an era of instant gratification, hungering for Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers, but transformational change rarely, if ever, happens without the fourth quality of leadership: perseverance/patience. Passion and positivism must be tempered with — or rather brought to fruition through — perseverance/patience.
In a funny way, positivism is what makes persevering possible. By being able to discover the positive in what occurs to you and always nurture hope, you become able to run the long distance without despairing at every little setback. When we had the first global gathering of NELIS in Japan in 2015, my fellow co-founder, Tatsuo Akimura, was quite unhappy with the way things had turned out and proclaimed, “Let us throw whole thing away and start from scratch!” Personally, I was of a different inclination, insisting on finding positive elements and continuing step by step in building NELIS as a global movement,
Now, slightly more than three years from that first gathering, we are still far from our ultimate goals, but NELIS is active in some form or other on five continents with bright plans for Next Leaders’ Summits on four of them in 2019. Forward momentum is great, but without patience you rarely get off the ground or out of daydreaming mode. I do not believe there is magical formula to cultivate perseverance or patience, but one interesting approach is making a long-term roadmap or plan for your own life. My own plan is to live to be 106, which will happen in 2073. I have divided the years until then into sections and review progress every five years. Having a clear long-term plan means that I do not have to rush — a simple, mental trick, perhaps, but the approach has the additional benefit of demanding you to review your life goals and mission regularly. The added requirement, then — as was the case with maintain passion — is resetting fatigue and managing your health!
- Pragmatism-
The final of the 5Ps of transformative leadership is pragmatism. Pragmatism is a cousin of perseverance/patience, but may often seem to be at odds with passion. It is my experience, though, that without pragmatism (when it is needed), you will achieve few real results on the ground.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, modern India’s founding father, was called a “practical idealist”, and perhaps this is what pragmatism in our present context is all about. Merely being an idealist with no regard to reality — to the view of the “other part” — or without a tactical approach to real life issues emerging before him, Gandhi’s purity, passion, and perseverance would have brought him nowhere. Winston Churchill, whose rivalry with Gandhi was one of the defining leadership struggles of the 20th century, has, ironically, also been called “idealist and pragmatist, orator and soldier.” In this case, Gandhi came out as the winner (India gaining independence from its colonizers).
How can you practice pragmatism when your passion may seem to point you away from it? For me, the key issue is always keeping the bigger picture in mind while adjusting you actions or “value proposition” to immediate reality. For example, in the sustainability consultancy I co-founded in Tokyo in 2000, we started with no customers and few connections. Just preaching my belief about sustainability and the future would surely have brought in few if any customers in the Japanese corporate world. And without customers, no business.
So, while it was not always easy for me, I decided to always keep the bigger picture firmly in mind, while working day-to-day on the often nitty-gritty task of persuading large, conservative corporations to buy our services. A few years after our start up, we were working inside huge companies like Hitachi, Nissan or Panasonic with somewhere between 200–300,000 employees on very fundamental elements of their environmental or sustainability strategies. And in some cases, our little, tiny company had truly transformative impact.
In the process, I gradually got the opportunity to meet and influence many top CEOs in the business world in Japan. If you FORGET the bigger picture, though, pragmatism disconnects you from your passion and becomes unbearable. This, perhaps, is where the secret lies…?
The 5Ps described here are: Principle/purity, Passion, Positivism, Perseverance/patience and Pragmatism. There are of course other elements of leadership — basic elements relating to your level of professionalism (the sixth P, perhaps) to be contemplated, but I am quite convinced that if you want to achieve large-scale, long-lasting change for the better, lacking any one of the 5Ps will be a liability to you. Assessing yourself to find your strengths and weaknesses will undoubtedly help you move closer to achieving your goals!
Article by: Peter David Pedersen
