What would change for you if you chose to awaken your ancestral power?
What would change for your family, for your enterprise, for your corporation and for your community?
Three days before we were due to fly to Wellington, New Zealand, my father was gone. He was killed in a car accident late on a Thursday night on the road between Caernarfon and Bangor in North Wales. Losing him broke my heart, I was numb with depression for 2 years afterwards and it was the beginning of the end of my first marriage.
The connectivity to my ancestral power that my father had shown me, gave me the presence that allowed me to navigate my way through two marriages, two divorces and a career of successful delivery in high-risk corporate technology transformations over 30 years.
My achievements, and my ability to recover from hitting rock bottom a number of times, are primarily because of the ancestral power I was gifted by my family ancestors.
In my last transformation project, I was leading 120 engineers and technicians to deliver a $140m new platform where we had a drop dead date that if we missed it would cause the bank to lose its license to operate in 44 countries.
In the last six years I’ve written and published 5x Amazon #1 best-selling books, each of which I wrote the first draft manuscript in just one week.
My personal clients are entrepreneurs and leaders who have achieved lives of delicious adventures through working with me.
It is the presence of connection to the true self within us, and our gifts, that is the foundation of ancestral power.
And it is that ancestral power that I have been drawing on to deal with working in enterprises and corporations for all those years since my Dad died.
It has been keeping me ‘safe’ while allowing me to continue to avoid dealing with my shadows by working there.
I once heard it said in the 1990s that “working in financial services is like being in a sheltered workshop for the middle-class insane.”
If we swap out the phrase ‘middle-class’ and replace it with the word ‘privileged’ then we bring that quote up-to-date.
Awakening to the culture of avoidance in corporations
What does ‘safety’ mean in the context of the privileged masses, like myself, that work in enterprises and corporations?
Safety is not the absence of danger it is the presence of connection.
Safety has not been a feature of our world for generations.
It is a mistaken assumption of modern privilege that we have that “safety” is a necessary condition for high performance in our enterprises and corporations.
In every enterprise I’ve worked in since 1990 there have been toxic managers who have exhibited what could be described as ‘borderline personality disorders’.
What I’m happy to say is that the frequency of the occurrence of these individuals has been reducing over time, but they’re still around.
There’s no doubt that removing the toxic individuals that demonstrate what looks like borderline personality disorders is a good thing. That goes for any organisation.
That’s a moral and ethical expectation around a code of conduct that has a higher bar of expectation for the leaders in the organisation.
And there’s a conflict of interest there that the HR team has to manage with respect to the reputational risks of allowing toxic individuals to continue to operate because the ‘optics’ of removing them may also look bad for the share-price.
Every organisation struggles with this - particularly those that have a culture of avoiding confrontation that these toxic individuals take advantage of.
The low level of authenticity on LinkedIN is a direct reflection of this culture of avoidance in our corporations.
Awakening the ancestral power of creative rebellion
Who has read the book “The Hobbit” by JRR Tolkien? How does Bilbo Baggins operate in the story to save the team?
In this story, Bilbo outwits Gollum, he outwits the wood-elves, he outwits the dragon and in the end he also outwits the leader of the dwarves to create the joint-alliance to defeat the orc army.
Where do you imagine that JRR Tolkien experienced this outwitting approach to dealing with toxic individuals?
He served in the British army in WWI and survived the industrialised slaughter, like my great-grandfathers did.
His underlying message in the plot was “Why slay the dragon when you can outwit it?”
The reason that Tolkien and my great-grandfathers survived WWI is not because they got lucky, it is because they were really good at avoiding the risks that got many thousands of their brothers-in-arms killed.
The issue that we have today, like 100 years ago on the front-line of WWI, is that our corporate culture of “avoidance”, requires that in order to ‘survive’ one has to have the hypervigilance and cunning of a shithouse rat, and in order to thrive it appears to require a borderline personality disorder.
Corporate culture has been avoiding conflict for a very long time, and we really need to emphasise that the change that is needed in our enterprises and corporations is to find our permission to say ‘no’ to the toxic individuals that exploit the conflict-avoidance.
And we need to see real action from the board members of enterprises and corporations in enforcing the code of conduct on themselves first and foremost, and then seeing that properly delegated.
The era of tolerating poor conduct of directors and board-members because of ‘optics’ needs to finish.
Time and time again, the big audit firms have been hammered for ‘sweeping issues under the rug’ and exploiting inside knowledge.
It was KPMG’s turn to get hammered last week.
But these audit firms didn’t do that without collusion from those that engaged with them.
We need to be asking the people that engaged these firms what they knew and when.
If we can ask that question of the King of the United Kingdom about his brother’s disgusting behaviours - then we need to be doing this too with boards of corporations.
Talking about ‘safety’ in enterprises and corporations is a true expression of avoidance. What they really need to be saying is ‘we need to get rid of toxic individuals from the board downwards’.
Mirror-mirror on the wall, who is the most avoidant of them all?
Someone once said “You cannot teach accountability to someone whose entire identity is built on avoidance”.
This person was a clinical professional psychologist, and in my humble opinion, it was an admission of defeat for their modalities.
Or maybe they just had been working with my ex-wife for way too long. :)
The thing is that our relationships, our enterprises and our corporations are a mirror for the psychology of the people who are in them.
My relationship with my ex-wife and my relationship with the enterprises I have worked in were a mirror of my own avoidance.
I had been using this obligation to honour my Dad, and the sacrifices of my ancestors for a long time - and it was empowering both my avoidance and my creative rebellion.
Awakening to the power of the permission to say ‘no’
The plotlines in The Hobbit are Tolkien’s metaphor to describe how we deal with toxic individuals without confronting them.
Tolkien was in the British army during WWI, like my great-grandfathers were. Outwitting toxic individuals in the officer corps is a long-standing tradition in the non-commissioned-officers in the British army. The officers are there to drive the strategic outcomes, and the NCOs are there to ensure that the soldiers survive engagement for as long as possible, and look after each other. Officers that don’t understand this don’t last very long.
In WWII, my grandfather carried on the family tradition of outwitting his superiors, and spent some time in military jail awaiting a court-martial when eventually the charges were dropped. Once the information appeared in the National Archives became public 50 years after the end of the war, then the stories came out about what had been really going on.
As one of my mentors once advised about how to deal with toxic individuals in corporations, “Don’t wrestle with pigs. You’ll get covered in shit, and the pig loves it.”
This is why I call giving ourselves permission to say “no”: creative rebellion.
Because being powerful doesn’t require confrontation, it just requires the inner permission to say ‘no’.
What would change for you, your family, your enterprise, your corporation and your community if you chose to awaken your ancestral power?