Jody Ono
January 15, 2021
[This is Part 1 in a 2-part series. Part 1 discusses personal worldview and its connection to leadership development. Part 2 will discuss worldview with respect to organizations.]
Worldview is an abstract concept with very practical implications: just yesterday, the New York Times ran a piece on “How Trump’s Worldview Is Ingrained in State and Local Republicans.” Despite its importance for how we experience life, most people have never been asked to articulate their own personal worldview. Doing so is a leadership development imperative.
In my leadership development course there are no tests, but there are repeated demands for written responses to open-ended questions. The first topic I ask students to write on is their personal worldview. I warn against providing boilerplate answers, just as students don’t want boilerplate instruction from me, and make clear that I expect fleshed-out, original thoughts surfacing from an emotive deep-dive.
In their responses, I want my students to search their own internal hard drives and installed apps — not just their massive photo libraries and MBA-appropriate file folders. I want them to access their inner dark webs. Why? To drill down to the mantle of their worldview. To articulate, as concretely as they can, some main attributes of the world they see, what is happening there, and how they feel about it.
Most people have never been asked to articulate their own personal worldview. (Quite a few have considered worldview in discussions of religious faith, as most organized religions offer up a ready worldview.) Yet, once asked, most of my students produce profound and thoughtful articulations of worries (climate change) and wishes (reduced inequities) for the world; of arguments for idealism (global cooperation) and for realism (geopolitics); of observations on human goodness (generosity in the wake of natural disasters) and wickedness (opportunism in the wake of natural disasters).
Your personal worldview
Your worldview is an inner universe from which you negotiate every interaction, be it an assiduously planned business meeting or a quick trip to 7–11. Put another way, your worldview is a lens through which you see the world and all of its inhabitants and then, make assumptions, assessments, and judgements about these. It’s the world according to you: for you, what is and what ought to be. Importantly for leadership development, your worldview is a clue to if, how, and to what extent you see people, others.
As a brief and albeit incomplete illustration of worldview I’d like to show you what Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome CE 161–180, writes in his Meditations (2.17):
Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home…
Don’t be too put off. Marcus isn’t always this bleak, but he is candid and that’s what we’re going for.
For something more recent, there is this attributed to David Bowie:
“I’m not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.”
That’s just very good information to have about oneself.
Worldviews can feature more optimism. In a recent Atlantic interview Barack Obama offers:
“What I’ve always believed is that humanity has the capacity to be kinder, more just, more fair, more rational, more reasonable, more tolerant. It is not inevitable. History does not move in a straight line. But if you have enough people of goodwill who are willing to work on behalf of those values, then things can get better.”
Chez Obama, hope rocks on.
What worldview means for leadership
Understanding and articulating your own worldview intentionally is a critical first step in building awareness of the nature and form of leadership you can offer reliably to others. And it is indispensable in building the capacity to be authentic in any given moment, the intuition to know when being authentic is most called for, and the sensibility to know when should counteract or adjust your default settings in order to relate to people constructively.
So, fluency in your own worldview is both a self-awareness skill and a relational skill. Using it well takes sophisticated knowledge of self. You need to try to know all of you — your soaring strengths and your dismal limitations, your intellectual apogees and your basest compulsions.
Your worldview contains big clues to how you will lead others. I have no empirical evidence for this claim, but it is a statement that draws universal nods in the classroom. If we accept it as reasonable, then imperative for formulating a leadership philosophy is to strive deeply and continuously to understand your worldview — in order to predict, shape, and update the way you’ll lead. If you view people as generally honest and well-intentioned, you’ll most likely lead people by affording them some initial level of trust. If, however, your default view of people is that they are conniving and deceitful, as a leader you’ll be hard pressed to build trust with your team, at least in an uncontrived or enduring way. You can always pretend to trust, say my students. Yes, I say, you can pretend to trust, but mull over how that will all play out.
It both takes and builds strength of character to examine your own worldview under a bare incandescent. Once you open up what for many is a new little black box, you just don’t know whether you will emotionally or cognitively agree with what’s in there. For developing your leadership though, it’s better to know, even if some hard introspective work may need to follow. Questioning your own worldview is a courageous act of self-leadership. It will spur your becoming a considered, intentional, independent thinker practicing a coherent leadership philosophy.
Worldview births the why
Understanding your own worldview is also important for finding the famed why, or purpose, or even meaning, which developing leaders are all now urged to do, not wrongly.
In order to identify a why you need to discover what the planets, black holes, galaxies and such are that dot your inner universe. What’s on your radar, your mindmap? What isn’t? At least for leadership development, your “why” stems from your worldview, not the other way around. The same is true of personal values, ideals which a person strives to stand for and lead with. For example: After a deliberate reflective process, I identify one pillar of my professional purpose to be fighting racism, in applied service to the value of equality. Such resolve emerges from a) how I perceive the world and b) of how I believe it ought to be. I don’t first decide to fight racism and then, realize that I see racial inequality in the world.*
Relatedly, understanding of your worldview at least as powerful, perhaps even more, than grasp of context. Context, the setting in which you act (exercise initiative and agency), is worldview’s external counterpart; it comes from the outside. The interaction of these two can create an invaluable source of information about your why.
The importance of tilling
I got a headstart on worldview when, at the wide-eyed age of 18, I read Candide in a French language course at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1985. We foreign students suspected, based on the skinny édition abrégée we were using, that were getting a dumbed-down version of Voltaire’s oeuvre, but no matter. Candide’s celebrated claim “we must cultivate our own garden” stuck with me all the way until I started looking deep into worldview as an element of teaching leadership development. The line is more about taking responsibility for one’s own affairs than about worldview, but for me the word “cultivate” is the most operative.
We all have a worldview that is unique to us, but we are not its original authors. When we’re little, our worldviews are shaped by the biggest influencers in our lives: our parents or caregivers, extended families, teachers. Over time, learning and love and exposure all, hopefully, keep a worldview evolving.
But more than a few worldviews go entire lifetimes unobserved, unexplored, unquestioned. These remain implicit and are unlikely to evolve in substantive ways. Often, these end up as the dreaded “binary” form of worldview — glib, shallow, triaging people into winners and losers, into valuable and worthless, into thinkers and doers. Binary worldviews are the result of a lack of questioning, a resistance to learning, a disdain for self-improvement and unsurprisingly, are prevalent among disciples of anti-intellectual or “anti-elite” movements.
Naturally, we all think and act within the bounds of our existing worldviews; that’s human. The danger of leaving your worldview unexplored, though, is that instead of lending insight and inspiration, your worldview can constrain you as a leader. It can be a real ball and chain, say if it goes un-updated to reflect secular shifts and social norms. The most common forms here are stereotypes, in particular of gender and race. Who wants a leader who drags those around? Especially in these confounding times, leaders must work deliberately to expand those bounds, adding mass to their inner universes.
An unmodern worldview is often what frustrates us about our aging parents, and what can frustrate our kids about middle-aged us. But even more consequentially for leaders, an untilled worldview can limit creativity and the perceived range of possibilities. It can hold us back from taking important steps to improve our lives and well-being.
Try it now
An idea for your 2021. Ask yourself to respond in writing: What is my worldview? What were, and what are now, its major shapers? How do I describe what’s happening around me and out there, and how do I feel about it? Hopeful? Despairing? Depends on my mood? And, very importantly: Ought it to be this way? Or should it look, be different, and if so, how?
Be brutally honest and do not judge yourself. Try simply to be clear. You’ll begin to forge a master key to your own personal practice of leadership. It will probably feel lonely. As Alexandre Dumas writes in The Count of Monte Cristo: “Unfortunately in this world of ours, each person views things through a certain medium, which prevents his seeing them in the same light as others…”
The utter personal uniqueness of worldview is what makes it the heavy lift in leadership development. An evolving leader carries that weight, a long time. You’ll take heart in well-chosen traveling companions, but your worldview will always be yours exclusively to explore and to till, all by yourself.
*For this precious insight, I credit Dr. Tony Brown of the Center for Leadership Excellence, Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets, from whom I learned so many principles of responsible leadership development.
Jody Ono is dedicated to helping people to characterize and express their leadership as a personal practice, an endeavor to which she has applied herself in policy, business, and academic spheres. For five years, as faculty at Hitotsubashi ICS, Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo she taught leadership development to MBA students from some 20+ countries and in executive education programs for Japanese and global companies. Currently, she serves as an Outside Director for Mabuchi Motor Co., Ltd. and is collaborating on leadership development projects with Global Perspectives KK, Japan.
Earlier, based at SITE, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden, Jody worked with international teams on talent development in emerging economies, including in the launch of new economic policy think tanks in Russia and central and eastern Europe. Subsequently, at the Bush School of Government, Texas A&M University, TX, USA, she developed the newly founded Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics, and Public Policy. With the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library as counterpart, she coordinated executive policy and business leadership awards programs before joining the Center for Leadership Excellence, Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets, as an instructor.
Jody is a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (MPP ‘03), New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (MA ‘93), and American University’s School of International Service (BA ‘89).
