Activating the Corporate Soul

Ruediger Fox

“When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is;when we treat him as if he already were what he potentiallycould be, we make him what he should be”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

AbstractHaving transitioned from a locally confined endeavor to a complex nonlineardynamic system, our global economic environment increasingly requires organi-zations to constantly transform. But more and more often traditional changeprojects fall short of expectations as huge amounts of energy are burned infighting internal resistance or employees’ disconnect in the process. Transformingcompanies from inside instead of enforcing change from outside can lead to amuch more lasting impact but requires a new evolutionary level of leadership thattranscends our traditional mental models of management.

Soul-driven Leadership is able to activate the core elements of the CorporateSoul through an inclusive process, setting free the necessary self-stimulatinginner drive for integral change to happen. It helps a collaborative culture toemerge and aligns the organization towards a common purpose, making trans-formation “exothermic” and sustainable. Through a process of “Merging theSouls,” it can even ensure that in acquisitions and merger processes, relationshipsare rapidly rebuilt “below the waterline” so that a new organization can instantlypick up momentum.

R. Fox (*)GCH-Institute (Hamburg/Zell am Moos), Zell am Moos, Austriae-mail: Ruediger.fox@t-online.de

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017J. Neal (ed.), Handbook of Personal and Organizational Transformation,DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-29587-9_23-1

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KeywordsAcquisition • Agile • Autonomy • Corporate soul • Merger • Merging the souls •Organizational transformation • Soul-driven leadership • Trust • Values

ContentsOverheating Organizational Transformation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Challenging Our Mental Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Organizational Transformation from Inside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5The Anatomy of the Organizational Soul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Leadership Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Leading from Within . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Soul-Driven Mergers and Acquisitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Volition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

A New Quality of Organizational Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Overheating Organizational Transformation?

In a world where movement is valued much more than presence, where change hasovertaken the positive connotation of consistency, and where speed has become themaster scale for success, some terms that were previously used only in a selectivemanner are almost omnipresent nowadays.

In this spirit, we tend to use the notion of transformation – in line with the Latinroots of the word – in a rather undifferentiated sense to mean any process wherebysomething changes its form from one state to another. Predominantly focusing on theoutcome, we rarely look at some of the specific differences that characterize theprocess itself during the transition.

However, looking closer at various kinds of transformations, we can generallydistinguish between two classes that fundamentally differ in their origins: one type isbased on an autonomous process that only needs an initiating trigger to thenperpetuate, independent of any external influence – whereas the other type vitallydepends on an intentional creator and his/her continuously directed intervention.

This differentiation is well known in physics and chemistry, manifested forexample in exothermic vs. endothermic reactions, and has in its abstract form, interms of human identity, been one of the fundamental questions of philosophy,religion, and science for centuries. However, the secularization of our daily realities,together with a highly evolved human sense of self as an all-powerful shaper of itsenvironment, has pushed this quest beyond our regular awareness.

We seem to unconsciously assume that the nature of the transformation isdependent on its context – whether it originates from a singular impulse and thennaturally emerges in the presence of an appropriate space for evolution – or responds

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to an outer force continuously applied to an unsatisfactory status quo with adetermined intention to overcome inertia.

Observing a caterpillar pupate and reappear in the form of a butterfly, based on thefact that we are unable to identify any outside influence permeating the cocoon, wemost naturally conclude that such a transformation is driven by some sort of“magical” inner programming – one of the yet to be fully decrypted secrets ofevolution that is the outcome of millions of years of mutation and selection.

On the other hand, looking at things that are human-built, our most obviousassumption is that a form of outer drive is also needed to further chance itscomposition, inner functioning, behavior, or shape. Although this is rather logicalfor any inanimate element in our human world, it seems that we extend this generalsupposition to any form of human built organization and derive all our leadershipstrategies from that basis.

Particularly in an industrialized world that has reached an unprecedented level ofspeed of change, it seems obvious that any transformation in this context requires anexternal force and guidance in order to ensure a timely adjustment to the constantlyevolving realities. Even assuming that some inner sense for survival might triggercertain autonomous initiatives, the apparent generally slow speed of evolution seemsby its sheer nature to be insufficient to ensure our timely adaptation to such adynamic environment.

Consequently, organizational change nowadays has become a topic that isstrongly related to the avatar of an active and powerful leader (and his/her executingtroops), either in its original authoritarian manifestation of early military-like sys-tems, in its pacesetting version in the highly competitive environment of the pastdecades, or in a more inclusive form of transformational leadership that has becomethe latest evolutionary variant for cutting edge management.

What is common for all manifestations of this kind of leadership is a high focusand dependence of the process on the personality of the leader him�/herself, asmuch as on a managerial system that enables the active and controlled propagation ofinfluence top-down into the behavior of the organization.

But despite a continuous stream of sophisticated program management tools andan increasing army of external consultant support, it would appear that this wide-spread approach for organizational transformation has reached the limits of itscapabilities. With the growing size of companies and a rising frequency of necessarychanges in direction, more and more organizational transformation processes arefailing as they either overstretch the ability of the organizations to collectively adaptand follow or are slowed down by a rising level of active organizational resistanceuntil they come to a complete stop.

Furthermore, an increasing frequency of such change projects tends to expose theemployees to an emotional rollercoaster. As a result of the induced centrifugalforces, people either hold on even more strongly to what they had known in thepast or – with shrinking adhesion – they let things go, resulting either in dramaticallyrising levels of presenteeism, or high levels of fluctuation, especially with frustratedtalents leaving the organization.

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As a result, the more a transformation is enforced top-down, the more it leads to afast dissolution of the change energy the further down in the organization the changeprocess penetrates, leaving many projects with little sustainable impact and nothingbut a high bill.

Challenging Our Mental Models

Rather than pushing even harder on the accelerator, it might therefore be wise to lookat the fundamental assumptions that are at the roots of this approach in order toevaluate them in the current economic context and eventually seek for potentialalternatives.

To begin with, it can be presumed that the strategy for driving organizationalchange from outside is not a subjective preference of individual managers or a wishto voluntarily invest an extraordinary amount of their energy. It results instead fromthe tacit collective assumption in business that an organization is by default unable toautonomously develop the capabilities required to adjust to a changing environmentfrom inside.

Looking at the conditions for change to happen in an organizational context, threefundamental prerequisites can be identified: the creation of sufficient drive formovement within the organization itself, the choice of the right direction, and theneed for alignment of the entire organization on this path.

All three of them are assumed in traditional management thinking not to beaccessible without an appropriate external intervention. Our traditional mentalmodels of employees are very straightforward on all those criteria:

• Humans in a work context are generally presumed to be driven mainly by theexternal rewards they receive in return for their performance; in the absence ofsuch a motivator, they are expected to fall back into passivity as theirdefault mode.

• Furthermore, employees are assumed to have the need to be directed and guidedthrough clear hierarchical structures. As a natural consequence of performancebased organizational selection processes, the level of competence to give appro-priate guidance is expected to increase with the level of hierarchy – expecting thebest results from subordinates when they follow their leadership.

• And lastly, organizational alignment appears to depend on consistent control dueto the complexity of most organizations and a strong work-sharing practice – butmainly due to a fundamentally assumed lack of reliable commitment.

On this basis, most organizations are built on hierarchies where leadershipdecides on the right strategy and drives change through a process of a systematicinduction of those strategies top-down into respective targets that can be tracked andsurveyed – in line with the philosophy expressed by Robert S. Kaplan and DavidNorton (1996), the inventors of the Balanced Scorecard, which states that “you can

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only manage what you can measure.” In the recent decades, this has become anunquestioned mantra of modern management.

But while this leadership strategy was the secret to success in a world where wecould base our executive business strategies on an almost Newtonian predictabilityof the future, where process robustness was the key efficiency standard for elimi-nating waste through lean thinking, and where we aimed predominantly for trans-actional performance, it is increasingly becoming a hurdle for agility in a globallyconnected world.

In an interrelated dynamic and complex system environment where relevantframework conditions drastically change almost daily, even the most sophisticatedstrategies will be outdated long before their consistent implementation. As a result,failure is less and less often an outcome of a wrong direction chosen initially butrather the result of the inability to respond rapidly and adjust to unpredictedsituations on the way.

Furthermore, the complexity and the high variability of the needs to respondappropriately to the reality increasingly hinder us from specifying the requiredprocesses in advance in sufficient detail and precision. Organizations that attemptto manage their business through rules and regulations are more and more oftenlikely to fail, as they tend to burden themselves with unbearable levels of adminis-tration. By the time full implementation has taken place, the prerequisites havealready changed and therefore might call for quite different reactions than the onesspecified.

Lastly, in a world where the Digital Revolution now follows the IndustrialRevolution, not only are mechanical activities being transferred to machines butmore and more administrative processes are also becoming digitalized. While thisleads to a shrinking scope for factual differentiation, the pressure to excel andinnovate remains. Thus, the key success factors for organizations are increasinglybecoming those remaining activities that can never be standardized: the ability oftheir members in the areas of cognitive performance.

Yet while we all recognize that innovation as much as the ability to maneuverwithin a world of interwoven networks are becoming key for success, the associatedprerequisites in competences like creativity, or the ability to shift from fierce self-focused competition to collaboration by emphatic balancing of mutual interests, canneither be taught nor tracked by any controlling system.

Organizational Transformation from Inside

The inability of farsighted strategies, optimized processes, and tight control to buildsustaining organizational resilience in the future is obvious, and consequentially, thecurrent approach of driving organizational change from outside is reaching quitenaturally the limits of its efficacy. At the same time, the vital need for organizationaltransformation to cope with the dynamics of today’s environment remainsunchanged.

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In the absence of impactful external means, it might therefore be wise to questionthe initial mental models of human behavior in an organizational context that haveled to these strategies and investigate whether in reality organizational transforma-tion, similar to other transformation processes, could alternatively be driven fromwithin.

In line with the identified three prerequisites for change, this quest can be brokendown to the same core questions that are relevant for externally induced transfor-mation to happen: What inner factors could drive an organization to move forward?What inner lodestar can guide an organization to choose its direction? and Whatinner guardrails can align all individuals of an organization into a commondirection?

To begin with, questioning the first assumption that people mainly work for theirfinancial income, the outstanding work of Viktor Frankl (2006) has already providedus with sufficient proof that beyond any material motivation, one of the mostpowerful drivers for human motivation is man’s search for meaning. While this isgenerally accepted and can easily be observed in such industries as social services orthe arts which are known for their high level of personal engagement and low levelof income, unfortunately most of today’s organizations completely lack any potentialin this regard.

This has been caused by two factors that became the core pillars of the economicsuccess story of the past century: extensive work sharing in conjunction withspecialization and the reduction of the notion of success exclusively to financiallyquantifiable short-term performance criteria.

In the search for increasing efficiency, most activities in today’s working life arebroken down to individual tasks and consolidated in such a way among the organi-zational members that through maximizing repetition, a steep learning curve can beachieved. While this Tayloristic system has led in the past 150 years to an unprec-edented increase in transactional efficiency, the connection between the respectivetask and the overall purpose of the organization has become largely lost.

Lacking this connection to the overall organizational mission, work from theperspective of the employee has necessarily shrunk as a consequence to its merefunction of providing the means for living and has resulted in a pattern of individualsstriving to achieve this task in the most efficient way possible. The apparentcorrelation between performance and financial compensation that is one of thecore assumptions of today’s leadership is therefore not a fundamental part ofhuman nature but the self-induced result of a disconnect between most individualwork-related activities and any meaningful function in a higher context.

With organizations becoming increasingly aware of this shortfall, attempts havebeen made in recent decades to mask this deficiency through powerful visionstatements. But in most cases, the effect has been rather limited, as these statementsare rather generic in nature and – explicitly or implicitly – still focused ultimately onthe maximization of financial results. Consequently, they rapidly came under theobvious suspicion that they were only nicely disguised attempts of the leadership tofurther increase performance to the sole benefit of the shareholder – not much to hold

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on to in a search for meaning within a work context that on a factual basis representsfor most people more than half of their waking hours.

In order to provide meaning in a form that could activate an inner drive, such avision would need to comply with three essential criteria: the ability to transcendpurely organizational interests and targets, an ambition that is coherent with theessential values of the majority of the members of the organization, and the possi-bility for individuals to relate to it in a way that each separate task can be understoodas an impactful contribution in the larger context.

To fulfill those factors, the organizational activity must be first of all understoodwithin the next higher level of system complexity. Only in the larger social andecological context can a reflection about purpose credibly transcend the sphere ofself-focus. While this reaches far beyond the traditional definition of organizationalresponsibility, it is a vital prerequisite for the creation of meaning. Solely on thisbasis can the organization understand its overall activity, reaching out towards apositive purpose that is able to resonate with its members’ concepts ofmeaningfulness.

Rather than dictating the mission of the organization top-down, only processing areflective exercise through an intensive and inclusive internal process can ensure thatthe purpose aligns with the specific cultural context of the entire organization, so thatits impact is able to unfold. At the same time, such a process also helps to reestablishthe relationship between individual activities and the larger context. From its startonwards, it will initiate a healing process for the broken connection between workand purpose.

Yet having identified a purpose of the organization that is able to attract the fullautonomous buy-in of all its members, a twin process is needed to also allow thesecond necessary criteria for transformation to emerge: the ability to step back fromprescribed fulfillment of tasks and activate an autonomous inner capability of allorganizational members to make the best possible decisions in the light of a highlydynamic context.

The increasing striving for “Agile Organizations” as the latest cutting-edgedenominator for the next level of organizational efficiency is being marketed asthe perfect turn-key solution for this challenge. Derived from “Scrum,” an iterativeand incremental software development process to confront increasing system com-plexity and requirement dynamics, yet, this new management trend is foremost anacknowledgment of the fact that the current method of hierarchical leadership hasreached its limits of efficiency and is unable to cope with the dynamics of the outsideenvironment.

But it appears rather naïve and wishful thinking to claim that by simply looseningthe structures, organizations that have been led for decades through instruction andcontrol will instantly develop the ability to autonomously act in a self-driven, agileway, as some mainstream management consulting suggests (Aghina et al. 2015).

Despite its linguistic similarity, agility is by far not the opposite of stability, andlearned helplessness will not disappear overnight only by enlarging the maneuveringspace. Eliminating traditional rigidity in a process-driven and controlling environ-ment will above all initially create instability.

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Until an organization is able to relearn taking independent action within the newlygained autonomy in a systematic way, the sudden lack of explicit guidance willinstead lead to passivity, as any self-initiated decision-making is traditionally asso-ciated with taking the risk of making mistakes – which in turn is directly related tothe concept of penalty in our hierarchical organizations.

As a consequence, one of the primary conditions for the functioning of autonomyis the establishment of a bidirectional culture of trust: trust by the supervisingfunction of the ability of the individual to choose and also make the right decision,as well as trust by the individual that he/she will be protected in his/her decision-making by the higher hierarchies so that whatever the outcome of any of his/herwell-intended decisions, he/she doesn’t run the personal risk of being penalized.

While this doesn’t sound complicated, it is important to recognize the sequence ofevents in this trust-building process as part of the human nature. In any hierarchicalrelation, a relationship built on trust always needs to be initiated by the higher levelin an authentic way in order to first create a safe environment that allows trust of theemployee in the newly gained autonomy to gradually build up. Consequentially, theprocess of building a bidirectional culture of trust is sequential with two distinctphases, starting with a leadership initiative of those in power that creates thefoundation for the reciprocal reaction to gradually emerge.

For leadership that has been trained to control (and quite often is exposed to asystem of control and punishment itself), this requires a fundamental shift inmindset, especially under circumstances when accountability cannot be delegatedat the same time as autonomy. Therefore, creating a culture of trust primarilydemands the preparedness of leadership to cope with uncertainty, to openly acknowl-edge appropriate competence in others even on a lower level of hierarchy, and to bearthe risks of mistakes occurring despite best intentions. The latter one is particularlyfundamental, being a core factor in the evolutionary process of nature, but it requiresa shift toward trusting the process and its actors as a collective, rather than relying onthe execution of determined incremental tasks.

Only on such a basis will newly created autonomous spaces allow the emergenceof an overall understanding of the individual roles within the organizational purpose,and the volition that can motivate each member of the organization to autonomouslyorient him�/herself towards the best possible direction and activate an inner drive toeven walk the extra mile.

Organizations that are able to relate individual activities to a common “higherpurpose” – beyond the direct organizational goals – and enrich a loosened hierar-chical rigidity with a culture of trust can activate an inner drive that guides trans-formation in the right direction. They will also exceed by far what traditionalmonetary motivators and hierarchical structures can achieve, as by shifting fromextrinsic to intrinsic motivation, they are able to initiate a phase shift from a mindsetof demonstrated performance to an ambition for authentic engagement.

Having in this way identified an alternative path to initiate drive and ensuredirection in an organization, only one more factor is required in order to initiatetransformation from inside: the ability to align the organization on a joint journey.

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Insofar as the identification of a purpose that transcends the shareholders’ interestand a leadership style that is built on trust already represent a challenge to our currentmanagement mindset, creating an aligned culture needs a further principle shift inwhat we have learned so far to be naturally associated with the role of the individualin a striving organization.

Based on initial models of economy and the practical analogy to the earlydiscoveries of Charles Darwin, competition and the survival of the fittest has becomeinseparably associated with organizational success. After the initial focus on theoutward-facing relationships with the economic environment, gradually this strategywas also embraced as a core factor of success for the inner functioning of anorganization. Promotion based on best competence, bonus schemes that awardpositive results and penalize mistakes, as well as comparative feedback acrossteams are only a few selected symbols of this mindset.

What has been overlooked so far is that a process of selection out of the bestavailable alternatives is only one of the secrets of success of natural evolution. Twomore forces are required in order to avoid stagnation and ultimately extinction: thecapability to innovate by creating completely new alternatives as well as the abilityto cooperate. These have been largely underestimated in an organizational contextdue to their much less aggressive nature.

While the first one is closely associated with the possibility of making mistakesand forms part of the trust culture described previously, the latter one has especiallybeen seen as rather contradictory to competition and as such has been considered asthe weaker option. But recent research in game theory has clearly proven thatcooperation, while it might not be the most successful short-term strategy in indi-vidual interactions, is by far the winning strategy for sustaining success in the longrun (Nowak and Highfield 2012).

And it is the massive increase in the speed of interactions through new means ofconnectivity and the uncontrollable influence of social media feedback that hastransformed our environment in a way that what had long-term implications somedecades ago has become the new short term: social as well as economic interactionaccelerate in an unprecedented way and force us to establish relationships that areable to sustain such a high frequency of interactions over time.

While we need to rapidly shift our learned evaluation process of “taking the bestfor me” in relational interactions to cooperation in the light of this new situation, theweakest point of this strategy is the risk taken by whoever offers collaboration whomay find that his/her counterpart has not shifted to the same approach yet and willattempt to cheat in order to achieve the best short-term outcome for him�/herself.

Although this remains a big risk in game theory within loosely related systems,the transparency and longevity of organizational relations provide the ideal groundfor a collective shift in this regard. By determining a common framework of potentialactions collectively through the establishment of a robust foundation of sharedvalues, a strong culture of cooperation can be built on solid grounds that are notexposed to the constant risk of defection.

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Consequently, a common set of shared values is the third element for transfor-mation from inside to occur. It will allow active cooperation between the membersand keep the entire organization aligned towards a joint movement.

However, a key prerequisite for this is again a wholehearted buy-in of allmembers of the organization into those values. A top-down educational process ofpredefined value codices might achieve a certain level of superficial compliance, butit will not by far be enough to build a solid basis for cooperation to emerge naturally.What is needed instead is a joint and inclusive process for any organization toidentify its core values in order to ensure that the concept of superficial complianceis replaced by authentic commitment.

In summary, if we are prepared to leave some of our mental models of humanbehavior in an organizational context behind – namely the need for a pure focus onshareholder value and the notion of ego-focused competition as the sole strategy tosuccess – organizational transformation does not necessarily need to be enforcedfrom outside. Instead, we can access the alternative option to initiate transformationfrom inside and even get the chance to achieve much more sustainable results.

All that is needed is to identify the three core elements of an organization that leadto this transformation process from inside and accompany the organization in theprocess of living them in its full expression: a shared purpose that transcends theorganizational goals, the appropriate conditions for the collective volition to emerge,and a foundation based on core values that are uncompromised by its members.

The Anatomy of the Organizational Soul

In religions, mystical traditions as well as in philosophy, the uncarnate essence thatcharacterizes a specific living being is typically designated as its “soul.” It comprisesmoral, spiritual, as well as philosophical convictions that influence thinking,decision-making, and action, independent from external factors.

Like individuals, also organizations have lasting, nonexplicit traits that are sharedby the majority of the collective, often vaguely denominated as culture. Independentof their assumed origin – a timeless impulse from the founding idea, a collectivelearning process during history, or the merging of convictions of its recruitedmembers – they are characteristic for that specific organization, determine collectivemental models, generic decision tendencies and actions and therefore represent the“Soul” of the organization.

Due to the specific but timeless nature of the above described three essentialelements of an organization that enable a transformation from within, a sharedpurpose, the core values and the collective volition can be considered as the keyingredients of what can be described as such an “Organizational Soul” or “CorporateSoul”:

• The Purpose of the organization is an ambition outside and above the organiza-tion itself. It shifts the focus from what the direct organizational outcome is towhat it does to relationships within and beyond its scope and defines a role within

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the next higher system in which the organization is embedded – one that tran-scends the organizational interests and relates its mission to a greater good. If anorganization has a purpose, it is aligning to the needs of society, to the needs of theecological environment, and perhaps to the needs of even higher orders ofcomplexity. As such, it offers meaning and meaningful action to all members ofthe organization.

On this next level of complexity, the purpose of a car manufacturer would beelevated towards the advancement of sustainable human mobility; the one of afood company to the provision of healthy nutrition to humanity as a whole.

• Values shape communities. As they represent the unquestionable foundation ofthe organization, they allow for social cohesion to emerge and bind peopletogether around what is most important to them. They are the cultural pillars ofthe community and – implicit or explicit – form the guide rails for behaviors anddecisions but also shape inner attitudes. Forging relationships between people,departments, and teams and developing a deep and true understanding of thevalues embedded in the collective culture is crucial to building a community.

Values in this form differentiate strongly from striking generic normativeclaims as they represent unique and uncompromising building-blocks specificto the organization that are shared by everybody and determine internal andexternal relations and characterize unique traits of the specific organization,e.g., “we care for each other,” “we lead by example,” . . .

• The Volition of an organization represents the subjective driver and leads to areservoir for engagement that is not accessible by external motivational means. Itpropels individuals to work with passion from their heart and no longer considerwork as work but rather as service for a vision that reaches beyond their self-interests. Its foundation is a context shift from enforced external direction to self-determined action to allow willpower to express itself.

Being shared by the members, the volition is also the mainspring of teammotivation. It is at the heart of a collective work-culture that inspires andencourages. Such conditions like “we thrive when we are empowered by trust”or “we thrive when we focus our determination on our purpose” describe theessence of what transforms motivation into action in the organization.

As these three pillars of the Corporate Soul are still rather abstract in nature, theyneed to be simultaneously translated into necessary competences and concrete actionplans that reflect their tangible expression in order to be able to manifest thesetimeless foundations within all organizational ambitions, actions, and relations.Therefore, two more elements build the dynamic bridge to the operational realityof the organization:

• Capacities are the strategies that deliver the values, purpose, and whys of theorganizational function. Capacities need to be built in order to translate theintangible qualities of the Soul in a way that they are able to guide an emergingreality. Capacities consist of skills and abilities, attitudes and behaviors, as well asspiritual insights and knowledge. For the organization, this means that it has to

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create the conditions for the individual to engage in a continuous learning processof translating the values, purpose, and volition into reality. Capacities aredynamic.

When the experiences of acting in the current reality are connected to a deeperunderstanding of the values, purpose, and volition, the organization will oftenrealize that it needs to elevate existing capacities or consider new ones.

• Action Frameworks are the products and services that flow out of purpose,volition, and values and are enabled by the capacities developed in the organiza-tion. It is only through our actions that a soul speaks. When the actions are a resultof all the above, others will recognize the organizational ambition.

Products and services may change as a result of increasing capabilities toengage for the purpose; new products may emerge or they may simply stay butrise in their explicit quality.

To summarize, the key elements of the integral anatomy of an OrganizationalSoul are the Purpose, the Values, and the Volition of the organization, as well as thecore Competences and an Action framework.

As highlighted before, each of these elements of the Organizational Soul cannotbe prescribed top-down in a normative way but needs to emerge from the organiza-tion, ideally through an inclusive, collaborative process in order to reflect the trueessence of the collective. This is valid for its timeless elements of Purpose, Values,and Volition as much as for its dynamic expressions in the form of Capacities andAction Frameworks.

This appears to be in major contrast to a traditional leadership culture thatattempts to achieve predefined results through a largely enforced top-down process.But what type of leadership is required to build such a space for transformation frominside to emerge?

Leadership Evolution

The entirety of human history is a history of leaders who have left their imprint onsociety, with positive consequences but often also with negative ones. What has beenunderstood as “good leadership” or “good governance” has changed over time,although the discussion about it has never stopped. Countless theories arguing thepros and cons of each leadership style have been published, while new labelscontinue to be invented, attempting to reflect the respective level of societal maturityand consciousness.

What is true for society has an equal relevance for economy. A broad range ofleadership styles can be identified that characterize business organizations. In agovernmental context, the restriction to the national playing field and the directdependence on the respective power constellation has led to a constant variation ofmanifestations, from an evolutionary progress to a cultural regression. Businessleadership, on the other hand, with its constant exposure to external competitionhas followed a rather continuous evolution, striving for constantly increasing

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efficiency. Leaving fluctuations in speed and temporary periods of stagnation aside,business can be predominantly seen as a history of continuous progress, as anyregression of one of its players is immediately penalized by its perishing.

With some degree of simplification, four distinct phases in this economic evolu-tion can be identified, each phase adding one additional layer of complexity to theleadership challenge of navigating through them (Fox 2017).

For centuries in human history, economy could be considered more or less static.With the exception of occasional inventions, the main driver for sustainable successwas the handover of traditional knowledge from one generation to the next. Due tothe focus on maintaining and perfecting those specific skills, the correspondingorganizational forms were either individual artisanal operations or small in sizeand largely family-based, typically led by the most experienced person in the specificdomain.

With the growing urban population and the massive expansion of mass produc-tion possibilities enabled by the industrial revolution, the focus shifted towardsrapidly increasing the transactional output. Due to the efficiency gains from stan-dardization and work-sharing, new multilevel hierarchical organizations rapidlyemerged that aimed to ensure consistency through high levels of control and order.Speed became the main characteristic of this phase. The pace of the individual ininitially completing a predefined task, and later assuming a duty at least within thetight constraints of predefined processes, emerged as a new dimension of limitedindividual autonomy.

Heightened competition changed this world in the last decades of the last centuryand resulted in the need for multidimensional success strategies for markets, pro-cesses, and products, in a constant challenge to “win the race.” Prescribed taskfulfillment increasingly needed to be replaced by a process of objective setting thatrequired finding a balance between a multitude of – partly competing – successfactors. Not speed, but the need for continuous acceleration further uplifted thedominant focus for any business endeavor. While still largely segmented withinfunctional organizational silos, this enforced a further increase in the autonomy forthe employees in order to keep pace.

But nowadays, further effort is needed to maintain a leading position, especiallyas regularly disruptive changes do redistribute the cards overnight. In an attempt toensure maneuverability in an increasingly complex environment, hierarchicaldecision processes, and individual performance are reaching their limits. Agile,cross-functional collaboration is required to further improve the organizationaloutput. With the transition to the twenty-first century, we have left the realm ofstatic competence, linear speed, and multidimensional acceleration and entered alevel of economic evolution where performance within complex systems requiresco-creative autonomy on a very new level, one that is able to activate collectiveengagement.

To summarize, leadership in a business context can be historically clustered infour main phases that are representative of gradually increasing levels of autonomyfor the individuals within the organizational environment (see Table 1).

Activating the Corporate Soul 13

While this offers a helpful classification of leadership styles within the businesscontext, it needs to be remembered that – as outlined earlier – any increase inorganizational autonomy is by far not a singular step but rather a complex processof human relations within their hierarchical dependencies.

Conditional to a healthy emergence of autonomy within an organizational contextis an appropriate respective trust relationship between the leader and the subordinate,as only on this basis can control be lifted without the imminent threat of an undesiredoutcome. While this trust relation needs to be mutual, the asymmetrical powerrelationship requires that it can only evolve in two discrete steps.

Even though the aim of agile organizations is that actions and decisions within aspace of autonomy are undertaken by the subordinates, the vital prerequisite for suchaction to be intrinsically initiated is the credible belief of each individual that he/shehas the full trust and protection of the leader (Narayanan 2012). As a consequence,an increasing level of autonomy needs to be initiated by an authentic granting of trustby the leader to the employee. Only on this basis can a reciprocal level of trust of thesubordinate towards his/her supervisor emerge.

Those two steps are vital in every phase of leadership evolution. Therefore,economic history can be generally classified into four phases of increasing auton-omy, each consisting of those two separate sub-steps of top-down trust granting andbottom-up emergence of trust that are necessary for the expansion of autonomy ontothe next level, resulting in eight distinct evolutionary levels of leadership qualities.

For each of these levels, certain key typologies can be identified and distinguishedthat best describe each of those stages, albeit with a certain level of generalization,when looking at the many types of leaders across different (organizational) cultures(Fox 2017):

1. Self-focused Leadership (no trust, no autonomy): The self-focused leaderembodies an almost dictatorial style of leadership. He/she is exclusively focusedon his/her personal interests and is largely self-absorbed, expects people to servehim/her, and takes impulsive and unpredictable decisions based on a narrowworld-view that excludes rather than includes the interests of others. If he/she issurrounded by others, they need to spend the larger part of their time servinghim/her (and the leader’s ego) personally, instead of getting the work done.

Table 1 The four phases of economic evolutions (Fox 2017)

Phase

Economy 1.0 Economy 2.0 Economy 3.0 Economy 4.0

pre AdamSmith

19th/20thcentury after 1980 21st century

Dimensions Static Linear Multidimensional Dynamic

EconomicFocus

Copy Accelerate Win the race Systemic lead withinnetworks

DesignMethod

Repetition Learningcurve

TQM, lean Dynamic adaptability

14 R. Fox

While this style serves the needs of imminent survival, it is barely suitable forany form of organization, as it neither leaves space for autonomy where individualengagement could expand beyond simple obedience nor does it create any pre-conditions for a mutual trust relationship. Its sole focus is the fulfillment ofprescribed tasks that quite often lack any strategic logic in the interest of the whole.

2. Affiliate Leadership (little trust top-down, no autonomy): The rather kin-focusedaffiliate leadership is characterized by, and focused on, the creation of an innercircle of influence. It generates harmony among the closest affiliates, who aretreated like family members, but it lacks ambition for integration with what liesoutside of the kin. The leader is seen as a caring patriarch who leads andmotivates through promoting the sense of belonging, via inclusion or exclusion.Loved and/or hated by the people, the affiliate leader triggers strong emotions andidentification. Rituals, tradition, and a particular code of conduct are valueddearly and often passed on from one generation to the next, with the expectancythat they will continue.

This is also what makes the organization rather slow to adapt, especially in adynamic and increasingly complex environment. While no autonomy is granted,a certain level of trust granted by the leader to the immediate affiliates at leastcreates some preconditions within the kin for retrospective trust to emerge. Asthis trust is up to the personal discretion of the leader, it still does not form asustainable and solid basis for the organization. Success remains therefore oftenlimited to a local sphere of influence, while the outside world is often consideredto be an adversary, which makes this organization still very vulnerable.

3. Authoritarian Leadership (little trust, little autonomy): The authoritarianLeader, often also referred to as commanding or autocratic, acts out of a positionof unlimited power from where he/she commands and expects full obedience tothe policies, procedures and goals he/she dictates. Committed to a particularideology or target, there is virtually no lateral autonomy in the organization buta high level of pressure and control, ensuring compliance with the prescribeddirection. Only the speed needed for completion leaves space for individualvariation. The assumption with this style of leadership is that people need to beled by a strong hand, and that without force and intimidation, employees wouldnot deliver, and would abuse their freedom, leaving the organization in a highlyunproductive state.

However, although it is efficient in delivering the maximum transactionalperformance, this leadership style determines a preset direction. While it replacesconstant task control with regular progress review, the corporate culture that isbased mainly on fear does not allow deeper levels of trust to build up that wouldfoster authentic personal engagement, knowledge sharing, or innovation. Fur-thermore, the high level of pressure quite often puts little focus on regenerationand makes an unsustainable use of its employees.

4. Regulating Leadership (limited trust top-down, little autonomy): A regulating(respectively administrative) style of leadership is based on the assumption thatonly reliable and lean processes lead to quality and efficiency, and they need to behighly regulated. Any potential human lateral variation is eliminated as it is

Activating the Corporate Soul 15

considered imperfect in quality compared to the best possible process design.There is a clear hierarchical organizational structure that prescribes and enforces adefined code of conduct on every level. The employees turn to the rules andprocesses for guidance instead of to a specific leader, and this mirrors thebureaucratic and mechanistic concept that lies beneath this style of leadership.The leader him�/herself is rather invisible and represented more through thesubordinates who execute his/her will.

High levels of auditing activities and process documentation are characteristicfor such organizations, which often refer to the need for safety or the next higherauthority as justification for the high degree of formalism. While the leadershipstyle relaxes slightly towards granting trust in the employees to voluntarily followthe direction, the number of rules, regulations, and processes that replace directtask control slow the organization down, especially in increasingly complexenvironments. The missing space for creativity and knowledge sharing, and theconstraint to linear autonomy only within the tight constraints of the processesstill massively reduce its innovation performance, although job security is veryhigh and creates a certain level of collective confidence.

5. Pacesetting Leadership (limited trust top-down, limited autonomy): Pacesetting(also designated transactional) leaders are highly driven by their personal ambi-tion for success. They want more done in less time and they push the organizationto keep up with their pace. Using extrinsic rewards such as high bonus systems tomotivate their people, they bring the rules of the marketplace into the organiza-tion, by inducing and pushing internal competition between their employees.Alignment and identification is created in order to streamline the forces to win therace against the competition in the market.

Autonomy is expanded in such an environment – as long as it is focused on thesuccess of the company and as long as the employees show high levels ofengagement and commitment. On the other hand, the conviction the leader hasof his/her own outstanding skills and knowledge hinders him/her from grantingan extensive amount of trust in the capabilities of other people. While this style ofleadership creates a highly dynamic and efficient environment that welcomesideas and innovation within the constraints of preset mental models, the level ofperformance pressure on the individual is extremely high and drives organiza-tions to the limits of what they can bear. Trust is accessible to the extent that theindividual employee feels recognized in its competences, but he/she remainsconstantly threatened by an increasing pressure to improve.

6. Participatory Leadership (increasing trust top-down, limited autonomy):A Participatory Leader cares deeply for all employees, making their well-beingand development a major objective of his/her leadership effort. Employees areguided in a coaching fashion that aims for empowerment and self-responsibility.As the leader trusts fully in the competence of his/her people, the level ofautonomy in this organization is quite high, even though the coaching attitudeof the leader remains a principle directive influence. Relatedness is also valuedhighly, so a lot of time is invested in community- and team-building as well as inco-creative learning.

16 R. Fox

While this leadership style is able to create the foundation for a mutual trustrelationship, the decision-making typically takes a very long time and is achievedthrough a broad democratic involvement that aims for collective consensus. As aconsequence, within an omnipresent dynamic of the economic environment, itfosters an omnipresent doubt in the sustainable resilience of the organization.While the well-being factor of the people as well as their self-confidence in thisorganization is normally very high, the organization itself often lacks agility anddynamism in the market place; it easily becomes overly self-absorbed as acollective, risking efficiency-loss on many levels. The leader considers him�/herself more part of the collective and leads from “behind the curtain,” which cancreate a “leadership vacuum.”

7. Transformational Leadership (increasing trust top-down, increasing auton-omy): Transformational Leaders are characterized by their integrity, and a strongcharismatic and caring personality that, once experienced, is never forgotten. Thisstyle of leadership can create a farsighted vision and is deeply committed to anoverall mission that implies a higher purpose and serves a greater good. Theleader leads by example, living in the way that he/she asks the people to do, thusfunctioning as a role model that people look up to and follow.

He trusts all employees, considering them as competent, appreciates theirexpertise, and fosters their personal growth. As a result, they are granted a highlevel of lateral autonomy and are deeply involved throughout the entire scope ofany transformation process – from the identification of the need for change to thecreation of an inspirational vision to the execution of the necessary change – andas such also creates the conditions for tailored autonomy. While this organizationoffers a corporate culture of trust, innovation, and confidence, with a greatimpetus for positive change, it still often lacks continuity, as its success is stronglytied to the personality of the leader, even after he/she leaves.

8. Soul-driven Leadership (full trust top-down, increasing autonomy): Soul-drivenLeadership combines the skills of a transformational leader with the inner atti-tudes and characteristics of a “Servant Leader” (Greenleaf 1977). Rather thanfocused on his/her own view of the ideal strategy to pursue, the leader is deeplycommitted to the Corporate Soul of the organization. He/she serves the greatergood as well as its people through values-guided decisions and actions thatdisplay a high level of wisdom, maturity, and humility.

The employees feel seen and appreciated and strive to contribute to theirfullest capacity within their broad scope of autonomy. Ultimately bydisconnecting the strategy from his/her own world-view, this leader transcendsthe need for leadership (and the attachment to his/her persona) altogether bycreating a self-learning and empowered organization that accepts and respects theCorporate Soul as the guiding principle for all actions and decisions, carryingforward sustainable change independently from the person in power.

While any situational organizational subcontext naturally calls for a tailored styleof leadership and any generalization can only provide generic guidance, one can stillsee that each of these styles represents a discrete developmental stage in an

Activating the Corporate Soul 17

evolutionary process in terms of granted autonomy and the level of mutual trust andcorresponds to a respective evolutionary level of our economy (see Fig. 1).

Due to the high level of autonomy required and the associated need for mutualtrust to transform an organization from inside and lead it towards a sustainably self-motivated state of agility, creativity, and passion, it is ultimately the Soul-drivenLeader that has the competence and skills to embrace the challenges. And it is his/herambition to transcend leadership in its classical form that is able to create sufficientspace for self-organizing systems to emerge that are the precondition for anytransformation from inside.

Leading from Within

As outlined before, the main elements for an organizational transformation processfrom the inside aim to have the same impact as the core factors of change that are thefocus of a transformation process induced from the outside: The connection to apurpose within the next higher system of complexity provides direction, the inner

Fig. 1 Qualitative overview of the key eight phases of leadership evolution

18 R. Fox

volition drives the organization forward and the common values align everybody ona common path.

What fundamentally needs to shift compared to a transformation from outside isthe perceived “locus of causality” in the eyes of the employees for individual action.While traditional change is typically initiated by a leader and the individual can fullylean into the hierarchical order, a transformation from inside is foremost a collectiveelevation process of the entire organization from the bottom-up. Individuals’ actionsare therefore no longer motivated by a striving for compliance with predefinedbehaviors established by higher level hierarchies, or by an ambition to meet expectedpreset targets, but emerge from an inner voluntary engagement and a conviction tobe able to make an impact to the benefit of the collective purpose – founded on theconfidence in the permission to take appropriate action.

For most organizations that are predominantly built on a command-controlculture, this shift represents a fundamental difference for both leadership as well asthe organizational culture itself. While the soul-driven leader represents the ideallevel of excellence in the economic leadership evolution that is able to support atransformation from inside, its competences and skills also require an equivalenthigh level of consciousness within the organizational culture and its members toflourish under such leadership.

Consequently, in most cases the transition from a habit of externally inducedtransformation to the emergence of inner transformation is not a digital switch inculture but requires a synchronized transition process that is comparable to an acceler-ated form of the leadership evolution described before. Step by step, trust needs to bebuilt while autonomy is gradually increased. The speed of progress in such a process isnot only dependent on the organizational size but also largely on the experiencedleadership history and the respective starting conditions and can easily be sloweddown, especially by the tacit presence of organizational leadership traumata.

A soul-driven leader needs therefore not only the ultimate competences totranscend leadership in a highly trust-based environment but has to integrate allprevious levels of leadership skills in a healthy way in order to apply them during thetransition in specific circumstances and gradually accompany the organization on theevolutionary path towards its full capability for transformation from inside throughappropriate means.

Four key phases have shown to be a helpful framework to accompany such atransition step by step:

Drive: Developing a culture of authentic communicationAs all internal organizational relationships are built on a mutual exchange between

individuals that is highly determined by the honesty of its expression, the primaryskills that need to be developed, as a prerequisite for transformation from inside,comprise a culture of authentic communication. In the light of the fact that mosthierarchical cultures are foremost power-focused, internal communication thoughis often far from being authentic, but rather misused as a means to exercise powerwithin a constant competitive struggle to win. The primary focus of the leadershould therefore be to ensure a shift from manipulative to meaningful

Activating the Corporate Soul 19

conversations, as this is key to enabling open and frank dialogue about the innerreality of the organization and to obtaining a collective understanding about whatis needed for progress to occur.

Direction: Expanding energy towards the Corporate SoulOnce this initial step of cultural change has reached a state where it has entered

broadly the organizational relationships and has also become contagious, theorganization – initially composed of individuals – has reached a state where itis ready to transform into a movement. At this point, the organization needs to beguided from a rather procedural cultural change focus on authentic relationstowards a more content-oriented striving where the direction of actions becomesthe center of orientation. Building on the insights discovered during the identifi-cation of the organizational purpose, a more soul-oriented discussion about how itcan continuously improve its manifestation in the world can emerge. Naturally,conversations around the core purpose of the organization will revert to thequestions on the necessary means for its manifestation and should build thenatural ability to determine the capacities and actions needed for the next incre-mental step to occur.

Alignment: Creating and embracing new modelsAfter this new culture has been able to find roots, the focus can be further elevated

towards a more systematic approach to the organizational manifestation. Ratherthan initiating a constant flow of individual actions, the leader can further elevatethe discussion towards a coordinated attempt to create new, more appropriatemodels. This includes a process of learning to think in systems in order toproperly read reality in its full complexity, a conscious dialogue to challengeexisting mental models as much as a controlled process to prototype, experience,and learn from new ways on managing the existing reality.

Evolution: Elevating the perspectiveFinally, the evolutionary process of cultural transformation should be completed by

developing the capability of critical and honest self-reflection and as such transitinto continuously improving progress. Through the evaluation of what has beendone before, the organization will learn how to increasingly create meaning andlearn from its actions. Once established as a regular habit, this last step will ensurethat the organization will remain vigilant and gets aware of changes within theirenvironment that open new opportunities to progress – independent of thepersonality of the leader.

The role of a leader in this process consequently moves from being the initiatortowards being an enabler and ultimately to that of a servant to the Soul of theorganization, whose final task is to create the optimal framework conditions thatallow the individual to personally grow towards his/her best possibilities and to fill inhis/her space within the organization. At the same time, the leader needs to accom-pany the organization on the path to high autonomy and mutual trust, while he/sheremains the guardian of the Corporate Soul.

This not only requires a completely new set of leadership skills but especiallyrepresents a challenge for the personality of the leader. In our fast-moving economy,

20 R. Fox

the pressure for short-term results is continuously increasing, preventing mostleaders from maintaining a long-view on the development of their organizationalculture.

Furthermore, our ambition to be able to measure results in a tangible form anddirectly attribute them to individual actions prevents us from focusing on creating thevital prerequisites for nonquantifiable targets – even if their importance is obvious.In the absence of reasonable measurements for innovation performance, collabora-tion, or the quality of client relations, most organizations instead limit themselves totransactional measures that are contained in their usual controlling tools and makedecisions accordingly – often against their own convictions.

Despite numerous attempts in the recent years to include competencies likeempathy, collaboration, and empowerment into management skills, the avatar ofan ideal leader is still predominantly characterized by its strong fact-based analyticalabilities, its toughness to take difficult decisions in a challenging environment, andits visible impact on the organization.

Training the organization to properly read the reality and trusting it to autono-mously respond in the best way to a dynamic environment, refraining from directintervention, and withdrawing from the imminent self-attribution of success, there-fore requires a highly developed personality that can withstand external pressure andis prepared to take high personal risks in today’s leadership environment – at leastuntil the performance criteria for leadership success are enriched by those yetunquantifiable factors that are decisive for sustainable success in a complex anddynamic environment.

Soul-Driven Mergers and Acquisitions

The process of transformation from inside does not only expand the ability of anorganization to better adapt to the dynamics of a changing environment but is alsoable to facilitate change beyond the familiar borders. In an economic reality whereacquisitions and mergers have become a daily occurrence, this approach is also veryhelpful when it comes to changes of ownership and especially in the case ofconsolidation of previously independent organizations – one of the major root causesfor organizational traumatization.

What seems to be commonly recognized in a family context, when remarriage oradoption challenges a child’s personality with a complete new emotional and socialcontext, has yet barely entered into one of the most impactful domains of corporatetransformation. While acquisitions and mergers have become a huge business formany large consultancy firms, they typically focus on the tangible outside factors insuch a process.

Huge effort is often invested during the due diligence process where the audit ofthe financial numbers and the analysis of the legal framework conditions consume alarge amount of energy in the attempt to understand the core of the business. Mainlyon the basis of these parameters, sophisticated implementation plans are prepared

Activating the Corporate Soul 21

and executed by dedicated M&A-project teams that aim to achieve sufficient“synergies” in order to rapidly create financial return.

The design and composition of these plans does not differ a lot from any othertransformation processes that are induced from outside – except in their highcomplexity, as they leave barely any domain of the organization untouched. Yet,they typically leave one of the most essential elements for future success in anincreasingly complex environment out of the equation: the individual employee.

As the human factor in organizations is typically considered as the most tangibleelement for reducing costs, the core focus in most merger processes is the alignmentand fusion of the foremost separate entities into single operational units and therelease of a noticeable amount of the workforce that is considered “redundant.”Ignoring the respective cultural context, these decisions are made from a predomi-nantly desktop analysis of the organizational factors and usually limit themselves toanonymous headcount figures.

This is in no way surprising as despite frequent lip service to the contrary, theemployee is not recognized in a tangible way as a valued asset in our financialreporting systems and not represented beyond his/her direct costs in our economicequations. With a consistent focus on those financial figures, typically little isundertaken “below the waterline” during these processes.

On the other side, in these instances most interpersonal relationships that havebeen able to build up over a long period of time become massively disrupted by suchbroad interventions. While this was not too relevant in a largely transactionaleconomic system where the individual could be easily replaced, it is increasinglynot the efficiency of the processes but the quality of the relationships that determinethe quality of the outcome of most business endeavors. Therefore, by (uncon-sciously) undermining this foundation, mergers often fall short of expectations.

Those disappointments are not surprising as in the outflow of massive organiza-tional change most relationships are shredded and need years to heal, if this processis not properly supported. This is especially true for mergers where quite oftenpreviously competing organizations are newly set up with the intended goal toharmoniously collaborate on a common task.

What would appear already to be a complex challenge when former enemies aresupposed to become siblings, and new family members join an existing kin, isespecially difficult in the light of an omnipresent threat posed by the underlyingunderstanding that only a part of the previous populations will survive that process.While habitual relationships vanish on a broad scale through disruptive organiza-tional change, fear further undermines the last remaining fragments of trust cultureand prevents fundamentally new trust to build up.

Although the principle challenge of the existential threat will remain, a carefullycrafted process of “Merging the Souls” during a merger process is able to reduce thenegative consequences for the organization as much as for the individuals. On theone hand, valuing the past and building the new reality on a foundation composed ofthe timeless cores of the previous organizations can ensure that relationships are notcompletely disrupted – and that they can rapidly be rebuilt on the fertile soil of whatwas familiar in the past.

22 R. Fox

On the other hand, actively integrating the fundamental basis of the existingcapacities into the future desired state will help to rapidly shift the focus to building anew, compelling reality and creating a vision of hope.

Focusing primarily on the three timeless elements of the Corporate Soul – thepurpose, the values, and the volition – such a merger process from inside comprisesthree steps in each of these aspects: the explicit recognition of the respective soulelement of each party prior to the merger, the identification of a new identity that canbe composed out of those vital factors, and the implementation of this new realityinto the cultural DNA of the organization through aligned action andcommunication.

Purpose: As most mergers typically combine individual entities that have operatedin the same higher complex system, transitioning the initial purpose of each separatepart into a new home is foremost a process that focuses on the analysis of the mergedorganization within that system and identifies the new possibilities of the combinedforces to pursue a useful purpose within this larger context. Ideally and similar to theprocess of organizational transformation from inside, the new purpose shouldrepresent a higher evolutionary state within the next level of system complexitythan the respective individual understandings that existed before.Values: More effort is required to fuse the individual value systems into a newmerged identity. As the values are the foundation for the emergence of trust and themortar for relationships to build, it is especially essential in a merger process thatwhile the new value system needs to embrace all previously separated worlds, thelink to what has been familiar in the past remains undisrupted. Therefore, the keyfocus needs to be on the precise and credible translation between what wasreassuring the organizations before the merger and what is supposed to becomethe new environment.

This is very different to processes where leadership attempts to educate theirorganization on compliance with an artificially composed value system in a top-down process. The merger of values needs to be driven bottom-up in order to be ableto maintain the vital overlap between the personal values of each individual andthe collective culture. Only by anchoring the future culture in what has been knownand familiar before can the new value system appear as a harmonious upgrade totheir previously known identity for everybody in the organization and can lead to awholehearted commitment.Volition: Finally, identifying the specific volition of each team can help to composea tailored new organization where the respective strengths of each culture cancontinue to flourish while the added elements are considered as enrichment for themerged organization in their striving for manifestation of its soul. Rather thancarving out generic headcount numbers, this organizational design process shouldbe very specific for each individual area where needed capacities should be matchedwith the respective volition.

At the same time, its overall ambition needs to be highly inclusive regarding thespecific differences in historic culture and aim for unity in diversity that valuesindividual strength rather than encouraging assimilation. Only through such a

Activating the Corporate Soul 23

process of “merging the souls” is a new joint endeavor able to build on both culturesin a healthy way. It will form the foundation for the new capacities so that actionframeworks can be successfully obtained.

A New Quality of Organizational Transformation

While our traditional mental models about leadership lead us to believe that organi-zational transformation is a laborious process that needs to be driven top-down andrequires a constant investment of management energy, the activation of the Corpo-rate Soul opens the door to initiate change from inside.

This process is able to release yet unused intrinsic organizational energies andcapabilities that create sufficient inner drive to continuously carry forward transfor-mation at the level that is required today in a dynamic complex environment. At thesame time, it provides sufficient guidance for organizational alignment to pursue acommon target and ensures the guardrails needed for a culture of true collaborationto emerge.

Its biggest challenge is the need for a new evolutionary level of leadership that isable to contain the stretch between personal accountability and the need for uncon-ditional trust into the process and the members of the organization, the foundationfor a truly agile organization to flourish.

On the other side, once successfully implemented, the process of activating theCorporate Soul creates organizations that are largely self-guided and are able todevelop a level of performance that by far exceeds any known hierarchical organi-zational model – in singular organizations as much as during a process of mergingmultiple organizational cultures.

Acknowledgment “Building a vision of Hope” and “Soul Driven Leadership” are licensed under aCreative Commons AttributionNoDerivatives 4.0 International License by Refresh InteractionsB.V. (soul.com). Based on work at www.findingthesoul.org and www.soul.com

Cross-References

▶Creating a Flow Organization to Lead into the Future▶Leadership Self Development, Maturation and Meditation: Elements of a Trans-formative Journey

▶The Role of Self-Awareness in Personal Transformation▶The Transformation to Open Heart Skills and Mindfulness in Healthcare Using theINTOUCH Model

▶The Truth About Transformation

24 R. Fox

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Fox R (2017) Bionische Unternehmensführung. Springer International Publishing, HeidelbergFrankl V (2006) Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press, BostonGreenleaf RK (1977) Servant leadership – a journey into the nature of legitimate power and

greatness. Paulist Press, MahwahKaplan RS, Norton DP (1996) The balanced scorecard – translating strategy into action. Harvard

Business Review Press, BostonNarayanan SS (2012) Quid Pro Quo nature of leadership trust formation – a Monadic study from the

subordinate’s perspective. Int J Bus Manag 7(21). Canadian Center of Science and Education,North York

Nowak M, Highfield R (2012) SuperCooperators: altruism, evolution, and why we need each otherto succeed. Free Press, New York

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