Becoming an effective leader is not just about charisma and authority but also wisdom and intellect. Senior Organization Development Consultant Karen Wilhelm Buckley of Communicore Consulting sits down with Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner to talk about cultivating wise leadership. She explains how this requires inner commitment to always take action with intention, purpose, and authenticity. Karen discusses how leaders should act when their vision clashes with the rest of the team and the power of pursuing deeper and steadier development. She also shares how to use the five levels of consciousness in leadership to guide others on making a real difference in the world.
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On Wise Leadership With Karen Wilhelm Buckley
With us, we have Karen Wilhelm Buckley. Karen is committed to cultivating conscious awareness and leadership. Partnering with leaders and their organizations over many years, they develop wise leadership, skills, strategies, and presence to cultivate committed performance and effectively drive change through Communicore Consulting. Karen has hosted many women’s forums in the US and in Europe. She brings together women leaders effectively working towards a sustainable, caring, and regenerative world.
Welcome, Karen.
Thank you.
When I think of you, the first thing that jumps off me is wise leadership, conscious leadership, a quality and a capacity that takes people and opens spaces for them. I’ve experienced that myself with you and the wisdom you bring to those spaces. I would love for our audience to learn a little bit more about, what does that mean for Karen? What does wise leadership mean?
Thank you, Ina and Bonnie. I’m glad to be here. This is good work you’re doing. I began this simultaneous path of seeking wisdom and at the same time, seeking leadership because our world needs leaders. It needs leaders that are wise rather than leadership that’s producing more widgets. Although some widgets are wise in terms of their impact on the environment or people. I offered my first seminar, bringing those together at an AHP Conference many years ago. I’ve committed myself to challenging leaders to be effective as well as to be wise. I have a very simple definition of leadership, which is the willingness and ability to take action on that which matters most to you.
You think about your willingness. I have a client right now who recognized she wasn’t willing to lead part of the division. She was mad that it had been put under her at some deeper level, so she wasn’t bringing her full capacities. Her ability couldn’t be activated. She wasn’t taking effective action because she wasn’t willing. That willingness, that yes, and that inner commitment is essential for any leader to be able to make a difference. In my experience, as that gets clear, that willingness and trusting your own ability, and then taking action, even if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing, the resonance of your leadership and capacity naturally grows.
I work in terms of three aspects to develop, which are your authentic presence, coherent intention, and effective action. Authentic presence is that capacity to be awake and aware, be calm in yourself, trust yourself in the here and now, feel safe in the here and now inside yourself, and then show up. Coherent intention, as I mentioned, is about commitment. It’s about clarity internally in alignment with what matters most to you and your real commitment.
Shifting the mindsets that are out of alignment with that commitment and strengthening the mindsets that are in alignment with that commitment because your mind, thoughts, and mindset directs your behavior which directs your results. If we’re not clear on the commitment and we haven’t aligned our mindsets with that commitment, then we’re scattering our efforts. We’re going in different directions. That prevents us from being able to take effective action and acting within a context of what has meaning and purpose for us hopefully towards a healthy global community for all of life.
A wise leader then is someone who is authentic, coherent, aligned, and takes effective purposeful action, would you say so?
Yes. I think the only other thing I would say is it’s not just being authentic. It’s bringing an authentic presence. I would differentiate that. Some people interpret being authentic as saying, “I like that. I don’t like that.” It’s this frankness. They equate it with frankness. I’m speaking more in terms of that internal place of centeredness and internal steadiness. Not because you’ve evolved to any great level, but because you’ve chosen to trust yourself at that deep level. You bring a presence, then you’re settled in with your coherent alignment and with what matters most to you. Also, getting up every morning and taking effective action.
Being authentic means you have chosen to trust yourself and gained a coherent alignment with what matters most to you.
It’s an embodied way. In a way, that’s how you speak to wise leadership or a wise leader. You bring and weave together these three ways or capacities.
As a coach, that’s what I’m always doing with myself and it’s what I’m always doing with leaders, teams, and the whole system. I’m also an OD consultant. I’m always working on that for the whole team because a team can have an authentic presence or not. They can be mindful, awake, aware, or not.
In your definition, it’s about being able to drop into that place of knowing what’s right for you and then taking action. You gave an example of someone who what was right for them was not what was right for the company. What happens if what’s right for me doesn’t fit with either the team I’m on or the company I work for?
When I first started consulting, when I went beyond working with systems and teams, which I did at the beginning, and I went into working with individuals, I found I was coaching individuals out of their companies or teams. I realized that wasn’t what I was hired to do. Also, these people who had a passion and a clear sense of a difference they could make, I wasn’t helping them make that difference where they were because I saw, “If you’re not in alignment with it, then I guess you better go do something you’re in alignment with.”
I would find they’d come back to me and they wouldn’t be in alignment with the next place or the next place. What I found was, like this client that I was mentioning, it’s not that she doesn’t want this part to succeed. It’s that she had some resentment about the way it happened. There’s this great saying, “If you want to be powerful, be complete.” What we did was we went through a completion process so that she could work through and acknowledge what happened.
Forgive herself for saying yes, instead of staying in the negotiation. Handle whatever frustration she had, understand the bigger picture and system, how it happened, and why it happened, and get to the point of saying what needed to be said to herself or to somebody else in a productive way, and getting over it. What was blocking her was her frustration more than it was her true heart in terms of, “Was she willing to take this on?” It was a very viable part of the business that ended up bringing her some good kudos and a capacity to make a bigger difference.
It wasn’t about changing the way the organization looked at it or changing out of that particular role so much as dealing with the emotions around that change.
I’m always asking, “What’s your commitment? What’s missing to fulfill your commitment?” A lot of times, what’s missing is a wholehearted yes. What she was missing was a willingness. Once we took the willingness apart, we could get down into there. We could pretty easily discover that in that instance, it was feelings. In somebody else’s instance, it might be a lack of resources that’s missing. They’ve been given a task that’s not doable given the amount of resources they’ve been given. There could be lots of different things that are missing. It’s very pragmatic things. Our internal state certainly directs our attention.
I’m going back to your work with leadership and wise leadership. This was one example. I’m thinking about the consciousness of the leader and how consciousness and wise leadership are connected. Again, you provided a framework and a definition around wise leadership, particularly focusing on that embodiment and then taking aligned, coherent, and effective action. How does the consciousness of the leader come into play here?
I know you’re a wonderful designer because I’ve seen a lot of your work in providing language and models for thinking about consciousness and not just consciousness. I know you work with women leaders as well, and that’s a nuance there. Can you say more about this connection to wise leadership, consciousness, and any ways that you have to make sense of that?
To me, one level of consciousness is our capacity to be awake and aware in whatever situation we’re in. From that capacity to self-manage or become awake and aware of when there’s something internally that’s holding us back from taking effective action or something in the environment that’s holding us back from accomplishing that, which matters most to us. Not only to me, but it’s usually that there’s an us there since interactions are where most of life occurs. As we can develop that mindfulness and that capacity to use our observing mind to watch the spiraling and rippling effects of our body, our emotions, our sensations, sometimes they’re below or beyond feelings, they’re simply sensations of constriction, excitement, warmth, or a fire that ripples out.
That ability to be able to choose our responses consciously, if not in the moment, then maybe later, we can begin to conceive of a new future instead of repeating the past. That’s where we get stuck so often. We are repeating the past because it’s what we’ve known. It’s not easy to begin to envision a vital future to begin to create towards the kind of future that would have even more meaning and purpose for us. I would hope for the world as a whole. I do work with and think in terms of the five levels of consciousness in leadership. Sometimes I bring these forward directly with a leader. Most often, I don’t. I simply know that I’m working through them.
The first level that I work with is mindfully creating effective results. That might look like teaching leaders how to be clear in their expectations and how to reach agreements. You’re operating from agreements instead of simply saying what you want and then walking off, which way most leaders do. There’s this randomness in the communications.
Instead, working to recreate effective agreements means that everybody is taking effective action together and negotiating that if those agreements aren’t being reached. When you can reach effective agreements, then you can start to surface what are some of the commitments that we’re living from. You might surface the commitment, and then what are the agreements that are going to help us fulfill on that commitment and begin to work together to build a new future.
The second level of consciousness is global thinking. One organization that I have worked with for many years. I typically work with people for ten years or more. I work with the leadership team and each of the individuals within the leadership team. As new people come on board, I work with them to help bring them into the team and up-level their capacity to create effective results.
We move into the second level of consciousness beginning a global thinking, recognizing your own firm or your own organization’s relationship with the rest of the world and what impact you might be having. In this instance, it came out of a vision that women could be treated differently in the financial planning or the wealth management industry in the profession. The way the industry was set up was not cultivating a capacity in women that was already there to be smart about money, make their own money decisions, or be a full partner in the money decisions.
This global thinking led to articles and to being quoted in Forbes and all kinds of different things because all of a sudden, the firm president was articulating this vision of women and their capacities in wealth management that hadn’t been articulated before. All of a sudden, she was taking the globe into her hands. She was looking not only in America with women who have significant wealth but also internationally and cross-culturally at how women and their relationship with money is so key to what Grameen Bank and others have found. When you develop the capacity of women, the whole village flourishes, the whole town flourishes, and the whole country flourishes.
It’s interesting I move this to the third level because oftentimes, it takes a bit before people are willing to quite go there. It’s developing what you do so well. I don’t know you well yet, but it’s the individual sensing. It’s that sensing of body wisdom. It’s that tapping into what is known and beginning to trust what you know, your insight, and your intuition.
Not only the intuition that comes from the amalgamation of experience. It’s bringing together all the years of whatever you’ve done, whether you’re 20 or 60. You have experience that leads to these insights or intuitions that aren’t necessarily linear thought from that experience, but they’re a new synthesis. There may also be an intuition that comes from a broader body of wisdom. Sometimes, our bodies know things that our minds don’t know. There may be the kind of intuition that also comes from a wider sense of knowing.
That takes us to the transcendent knowing, which is the fourth level. When we begin to cultivate even more directly the inner side of leadership. Maybe we go for a run in the middle of the day in order to open back up that capacity to see the bigger picture. Perhaps we have art in our office, or I have a garden in front of me that when I sit and gaze out at the quince, the maple, and the azalea that are before me here, it opens my heart back up. It reminds me of my interconnectedness with all of life. My decisions, my plans, and all of that begins to then come back into that relationship. It’s like walking in a gorgeous forest, and all of a sudden, your brain shifts and you have an insight about something that you’ve been struggling with.
For some people, it’s music or art. Whatever that is that opens the doorway for that transcendent knowing. I find it very important that inner sensing occurs first, global thinking occurs first, and the capacity to take effective action. Otherwise, you can get into transcendent knowing and be out in the clouds and not bring it through into something that’s useful in the world. That makes a difference in the world.
The fifth level of consciousness and leadership is the hardest. It’s collective acting. It’s bringing all that capacity for personally effective action, global thinking, and having a big sense of what can make a difference in the world. It’s that inner sensing, being able to track your body, knowing when you’re going into reaction, and when you’re in a grounded and steady space. It’s that transcendent knowing and receiving the intuitions and taking all of that into working with other people in effective synergy.
Years ago, I facilitated a meeting in DuPont, a meeting in Santa Clara County, which is what then became known as Silicon Valley in a spiritual community and in a nonprofit. In the spiritual community, everybody was so transcendent and so conscious in that way that their capacity to take effective action and to collectively act was limited. It was painful to see it because they had so much insight and information to bring forward into the world. DuPont, their vision, their global thinking, and their transcendent knowing were limited, but they were good at collectively acting. Also, they took what they did know and effectively pulled it into creating a new future for themselves and their people.
I’m curious about the spiritual community. How do you work with them to bring this transcendent experience and knowing into a place of collective action?
I’ll tell you the story of what happened. I was standing at the front of the meeting room in their meeting house. I was listening to them and I was trying to figure out what was going on. This was early enough in my career that I was thinking, “Is this me? Is this them? What is this?” All of a sudden, I looked down and realized I was holding a red pen and I’d been highlighting some things on the flip chart. It was dripping on the bricks below.
It was one of those wake-up calls because I use any information that comes in in those moments. It was one of those wake-up calls that something was hurting here. That’s what I was recognizing, but I couldn’t quite name it because it all sounded so transcendent and beautiful. What I came to recognize was that they each had very profound guidance that they were receiving. Their guidance was in competition with each other and they were having what I would call guidance wars. It’s like, “My guidance says.”
What we came to recognize once I named it, you’ve got guidance that’s saying this and you’ve got guidance that’s saying this. You guys have been battling it out underneath while you appear to be nice to each other because that’s the way you want to appear. I think you’re done working together. What about if you split and you became two organizations? I don’t think I said it quite like that, but that’s essentially what I said. They looked at each other and they said, “We’re done.” It took a few meetings but over time, they recognized they had fulfilled their mission together.
One of them kept that organization and the other went off to find something else that was completely aligned. Some of the people went with her and some of the people stayed with him. They both had two viable and fabulous organizations. That way, they took effective action, but they needed to get back to getting clear on what each of their commitment was and what agreement they did or didn’t have. What was missing was an agreement.
That is so interesting. Thank you for that story. It loops back to the first question I had which is, “What happens if you’re alignment if the information you’re getting on the inside doesn’t work with the organization you’re with?” I’ve now heard a few different examples. Sometimes, it’s a matter of looking at the way in which a shift has occurred and emotional regulation or working through that. Other times, it may mean taking a very different action, whether it’s changing the organization itself or moving out of the organization.
A third strategy that I recommend on a regular basis is to start working on the system. If what you recognize is that there’s something you are committed to, and you actually believe it’s a real potential for the organization, or that purpose is alive in the organization, the systems aren’t aligned around it. Start looking for who else shares that purpose and begin to work behind the scenes to simply build a common set of understanding and enliven that understanding within the organization. Not from the place of making wrong, but from the place of bringing forth which is a broader and bigger vision or a more aligned vision for the organization.
Sometimes at first, that sounds like you’re being a naysayer or you’re pointing out something contrary. You need to figure out who your key influencers are and realign your own sense of it through those conversations, listening carefully, and considering what questions you might ask. That over time begins to open the capacity for others to speak about what matters to them as well.
Often you’ll find, not always certainly, it may be that you find there is no alignment with what it is you’re absolutely called to do and want to create in the future and you should go do it somewhere else. Often you’ll find that what is stirring inside, I often have found in my clients over 30 years of doing this, is something that’s stirring within the organization. However, it takes that level of collective acting of even working behind the scenes a bit to find out whether that lives in the hearts and minds of others or it is something.
I want to take it back to you and your own experience. When you were talking earlier about those three capacities, you also said, “That’s the kind of thing I also do for myself as I facilitate conversations.” A two-fold question, how do you work with yourself to embody those capacities? What is your commitment at this time? You’ve also spoken a lot about commitment and how leaders have to be committed. What’s your commitment at this time?
I wake up each morning, and to give you a brief summary, I have a body-sensing practice that I do before I get out of bed so that I make sure that my consciousness is in relationship with each part of my body. It’s an embodying practice simply starting at the base in the pelvis and each level, bringing myself into conscious awareness. I’m doing that throughout the body, and then becoming aware of the field that is me as an individual and allowing that field to be full.
I’ll then get up. On some mornings, I have an opportunity to go sit at the meditation table that I’ve created in the corner of our bedroom. I have a candle and a few things that matter to me there. On some days, I sit there and I enjoy the silence. I work to find my breath from my nose to my heart, to my abdomen, back up to my heart, to my nose. To find that simplicity of rhythm. While watching, my mind go 100 different directions and comes back to that rhythm.
On other days, I step outside and greet the directions. Many years ago, I was introduced to the reality that we live on Earth. Earth is round and we have directions. We have simply East, South, West, North, the Earth, and the sky. To stand in that knowing, it’s a sacred place of where I am at this time. I go for a walk, take the dog for a walk, or something.
Each of those, at some point during that morning practice, I repeat my commitments to myself and what is relevant at that time. I have commitments for family. I have commitments for the Earth. I have commitments to the people and organizations that I work with. That commitment, as I said at the beginning, it’s around bringing out the potential wisdom in each person because I find that it’s there and it’s so seldom asked for, invited, and cultivated.
My commitment is to listen to my own wisdom. When I’m not wise to recognize it and be not wise for however long I’m not wise, and then get wise again. Do what it takes to get some broader perspective and figure out what’s going on or why I’m snipping at the dog. I walked into a client system and overstepped my bounds telling them something they needed to be doing. I thought, “What was going on for me? I have to take a look.” I’ve worked with them for a long time, but I circumvented hierarchy and I know hierarchy is important there. I was like, “What was going on?” I was more committed to being right than I was to being wise in that instance. I didn’t step back to pace what I was doing.
I hear now and earlier, when you were describing this pen that was dripping the red ink, two different examples of looking very honestly at your own self and recognizing something in yourself that needs to shift. For me, that is the wisdom of getting to a place and being able to look and recognize it. In the first example, you were very young in your career. Here, it’s a different time in your career, and looking at how you’re showing up in these different places.
That self-awareness is the ground from which wisdom arises.
You mentioned earlier and I noticed it in a lot of the written materials about you this statement that you have worked with clients for a long time and that stands out for me. We live in a world that wants things quick, go to a weekend seminar, be certified in something, and know something. It’s so counter to that to say, “I work with clients for a long time.” Can you speak to that for a moment?
It’s not counter because there may be people whose commitment and belief is that they will get what they need in a short period of time. That’s great. It’s not my commitment. My commitment is a deeper steadier change. I spent the early years of my career watching colleagues and being involved in organizational transformation efforts that were fast, came from the top, proposed transformation, and looked like another top-down initiative that was going to drive the organization in a particularly new direction.
Many of those initiatives didn’t stick. I had to have a real abrupt awakening for myself. It was an ethical moment, a questioning of my integrity, and a great definition of integrity that I love is workability. It’s not a moral thing. It’s workability. This machine has integrity. If my car didn’t have integrity, that’s why it’s in the shop, because the machine is not working well or the parts aren’t working well together. I didn’t see the change. I developed my change model many years ago. I was applying it to organizations. My change model is about the inner experience of change. I kept watching and thinking they’re not the way in which these changes are being planned and executed is not working with our human nature and with our nature as a system.
If we don’t work with nature and we work against nature, then there are always unforeseen consequences and there are always points of resistance to the change. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole too far, but it’s like the Army Corps of Engineers putting walls in rivers that had a natural circuitous flow to them over millennials. They put these walls in. What it does is it creates a faster momentum because the river no longer has that natural flow. All of a sudden, you get floods and other unforeseen consequences. If you leave it in its natural flow, these farmer’s fields get taken. At some point, this farmer gets more land because that’s the way the river works. It’s depositing land here and it’s taking land here depending on how that flow is going.
If we don’t work with nature and act against it, there are always unforeseen consequences.
I got a little off of my metaphor there, but it’s an important metaphor because we are nature. As humans, we are nature and nature is all around us. If we work with our nature, we are able to create results that matter to us and are generative in the world around us. Now I’m trying to get back to your original question. Go back to the original question for me. I got so caught up in my metaphor.
You’re speaking exactly to it. The need to work with clients for a long time as opposed to fast.
If I’m working short with them, then what I feel like I’m doing is erecting walls to help them find places where they run into themselves. That works. For some temperaments, that can work. It’s to give them the shock treatment or actions they need to take, whether they feel like it or not. For some temperaments, that can work and it can create an opening and it blows open their way of resisting or holding themselves.
For the most part, I find that we evolve over time and we evolve as participants in evolution. We have a natural evolution and there’s evolution of the whole Earth that we are participating in, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Many years ago, I made the decision after having a couple of longer-term clients. Three years at that point, I said, “These are the people I like working with.” One of the early proverbs I learned and learning how to facilitate meetings was to go slow to go fast. It’s still applicable because as we allow nature and as I can go slow with people and work with them, then we begin to gain momentum and it begins to go.
If they gain momentum, they start creating results. They never thought it possible. The wealth management firm I mentioned before, we’ve worked together for thirteen years now. It’s such an honor and privilege to work with them. They not only developed this whole body of work on the importance of expertise and empathy in wealth management and how that can change every meeting that you have with your investment manager. Also, they became a B-Corp and they’re very active in the B-Corp community and bringing the values and all of that into their investments and their increasing ESG investments. It has become a voice for the power of circles and for considering the human nature of aging, rather than having it be something that’s fairly superficial.
It’s the amount of depth and breadth that they are bringing into. Now, every Instagram post that they do, every article that they’re quoted in, and all of that has a natural evolution of energy, power, and the difference that it makes because we’re working together over time. I’m always listening for what matters most to them. That’s what I’m always listening for. I’m helping them hear it because once they get it and trust it, they do take action. I may need to nudge action a little bit because sometimes the fears come in when it matters that much.
I watched a movie and it’s a documentary called River. I think you would enjoy it because the metaphor you used speaks exactly to that. They talk particularly about the wild rivers and how when we build these dams or the walls, as you were saying, you cut the flow or the natural rhythm of the river. Bonnie, this is the work you do, restoring the natural rhythm with people. What happens is that nature, the flora, and the fauna start stagnating, and that creates a lot of problems and issues. It might be that quick fix, which we have been enjoying for other reasons, but then in the long-term, look at the consequences and where we are.
We’re right at the time of closing. We’ve been having a rich conversation. Before you leave, I do want to know, because you were earlier talking about your garden and you started naming several of the plants in your garden. I know you have a love and you take good care off your garden. I’m curious about the quince tree. Did you plant it? What was the choice? What made you plant a quince tree?
It’s a bush in California. There may be a variation that’s a tree. This quince was actually here. When I had them put up a fence when we moved in, we had one young child and the second was going to be coming soon. I had them put up a fence so that we would have a backyard that was closed off from the front yard, which is closed off from the street. I had them very carefully erect the fence on that side of the quince. At that point, this was a playroom, but my office was elsewhere. The quince seemed miraculous to me, having grown up in Montana and Colorado, that you could have something that produces such intriguing flowers.
It’s interesting to me that you would ask that, but you often hear me speak about it probably because I watch it throughout the seasons and it’s the first thing to bloom in the spring, the quince and the purple vine behind it. It keeps reminding me to step into global consciousness. It keeps reminding me that I am part of the whole and that I am one interconnected with all life. When I know that, then I’m easily committed to the greater good.
Beautiful. I don’t know. I love quinces. I don’t find them very often here in the market. That’s what somehow got my attention. I said, “I wonder because I don’t see a lot of people having quinces in the gardens.” In Albania, it was a very popular thing to have it. Karen, thank you so much for this time and for sharing your wisdom with us.
Thank you, Karen.
Thank you so much, Ina and Bonnie.
Important Links
- Communicore Consulting
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/KarenBuckley/
- https://CommunicoreConsulting.com/Blog
About Karen Wilhelm Buckley
Karen Wilhelm Buckley, Communicore Consulting, is a member of the Conscious Leadership Guild and Founding Steward, of the Global Consciousness Institute. Consultant and Executive Coach Karen brings forth an expanded consciousness and practical mindfulness in leaders and organizations, through professional and organizational development. For over three decades her clients have developed wise leadership – the skills, strategies, and presence to cultivate committed performance and effectively drive change. An integration of spirit and business informs her long-term work with retainer clients. Karen’s US and European talks and leadership forums invite leaders to recognize the necessity of their wisdom, power, and leadership for a sustainable, healthy and loving world.