Teilhard proposes that we build a new model of reality, based on a sense of collective responsibility. “The peak of ourselves,” Teilhard tells us, “[and] the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis.”viii Leadership comes at the point of sacred synthesis, as Teilhard, Eisler and Greenleaf suggest with regard to leader as lover, partner and servant. The notion of love as a function of leadership, and the interplay between the individual and collective, speak to the centrality of synthesis in appreciative thought.ix Teilhard suggests that: “after allowing itself to be captivated in excess by the charms of analysis to the extent of falling into illusion, modern thought is at last getting used once more to the idea of the creative value of synthesis in evolution. It is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual, and more in mathematical construction than in calculations and theorems.”x
Spirit and Appreciation
According to Teilhard, improvement in the human organism and human society remains indeterminate, or even insoluble, unless mankind, and, in particular, its leaders, come to acknowledge unity in the universe. Appreciative leaders must fully appreciate the value of a synthetic and integrative rather than analytic way of perceiving and acting in this world. More specifically: “the only universe capable of containing the human person is an irreversibly ‘personalising’ universe—one that blends the secular and sacred.”xi This synthesis, then, becomes the primary challenge associated with appreciative leadership in the 21st Century. Even a secular management guru like Peter Drucker declares that: “management is deeply involved in spiritual concerns—the nature of man, good and evil.”xii
My dear friend and colleague, Gary Quehl has noted, in his essay on the inner world of leadership, that “the human spirit is the important but neglected dimension of leadership.”xiii According to Quehl:xiv
. . . all true leadership is spiritual leadership. It is spiritual because leaders try to invoke the best in themselves and other people, and their best is intimately tied to a deep sense of their self, of their spirit, of what Carl Jung once called the “principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.” When the human spirit is richly at work, the inner and outer worlds of the leader operate in fluid harmony. When the inner spirit falters or fails, however, the leader is often positioned to fail as well.
