Our mission here at Self Emergence is to scale depth of character by transforming the coaching process and giving people at all levels of an organization access to coaching tools, practices, and supportive community. By depth of character we mean developing self awareness and awareness of community and industry dynamics and potential, empathic concern for more and more stakeholders, persistence in the face of great challenges, and the ability to recognize and commit to worthy goals and inspire others to do the same. We expect that, as a result, organizations will become places of flourishing, growth, maturity, deep ethical consideration, and vehicles for increasing wellbeing in the world. We’re taking this lofty goal seriously, for while we think it will be difficult to get organizations nationally, and eventually globally, to set increasing depth as a core part of their mission, we also think it’s possible, and that the positive results would be significant.
Across companies, values and cultures can vary widely. Some companies are already working towards these values, or already see them as central to their success, but most do not. Consider, do your managers give you tools to cultivate increasing awareness of your own mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns, access their roots and transform negative habits into positive virtues? Do they encourage you to care more not just about the success of the company, but about the wellbeing of employees and everyone else the companies’ actions affect? Do they support and challenge you to bring your best everyday specifically to make more and more deeply worthy and meaningful contributions to your local and extended communities? Do they take pride in wisdom and ethical concern? Is that where they locate their own value and the value of the company?
The heart of all of these issues may be too intimate, too close to what we think is most important, or too heavy or scary to bring explicitly into company culture. Perhaps companies don’t see these values as their responsibility or lack the inner resources to address them. Or, perhaps the central obstacle is more mundane: that organizational leaders and company cultures simply cannot see these character traits. And if they can’t see them, companies can’t value them. Thus, one of the things we have to do along the way to way to accomplishing our mission is to make depth of character more visible.
Giving individuals and teams the tools to develop their character and leadership in an ongoing way, which we do with the Emerge! app and multi-week leadership development facilitation, is part of this. But we’re working on other ways to give organizations and employees the vision to see their own depth of character. We’re excited about the potential of these tools to integrate into our other offerings to create a whole system that easily measures, tracks, and supports increasing depth and maturity. Such a system will give companies a much stronger grounding on which to value their people’s wellbeing and growth generally, and leadership development specifically. Imagine if first quarter metrics became a little less flashy, and a little less seductive as stand alone goals, as maturity and wellbeing themselves became a little more obvious and visible. It will also train people’s individual capacities to center depth of character in the way they view and evaluate people outside of their companies too, including ourselves, helping us to remember and value our subjective qualities, rather than commodify ourselves and tie our value only to objective, easily assessable accomplishments.