Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                       October 26, 2014

 Human alienation results from treating learning as a commodity, staff as “capital,” students as consumers, and economic rationality as the premier learning modality. An ahimsa-enhanced organization provides its people genuine opportunities for right livelihood, providing human relationships, work experiences, and learning moments that enrich the employee beyond competitive compensation and benefit packages. Right livelihood means more than achieving a fair wage; it means that one’s work does no violence to one’s being, deepening a sense of possibility, encouraging the creative spirit, and leading to private and public lives of integrity beyond institutional “brand identity.”

Ahimsa is no pathway for the frail. It requires dispassionate caring without advantage and ongoing, rigorous rectification of the mind-body-spirit of the person we are and are becoming with and on behalf of others. It requires an enormous act of the cognitive imagination that allows us to see the good, the beautiful and the true in diverse others, and as such, provides an antidote to organizational racism, sexism, sexual minority harassment, and all forms of misanthropy.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                        October 20, 2014

Within Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, ahimsa is a principle of nonviolence and fundamental respect for oneself and others. How might ahimsa be realized as a leadership principle and general platform for human interactions across an organization? As a principle of organizational leadership, it is to be understood by granting it a wide berth. Ideally, nonviolent interactions give rise to relationships that do no harm to one’s mind-body-spirit. Working within such cross-functional relationships, personnel are free from intimidation, harassment, bigotry, and sexual-minority discrimination.

When leadership communicates strategies, priorities, and duties in an organization committed to ahimsa, people understand standards of performance by which they will be evaluated. When an organization is liberated from the harmful view of employers merely in terms of a “return on investment,” employees can work together guided by policies and practices of mutual respect, tolerance, ecological consciousness, and self-development – as opposed to mindless conformity to custom, procedure, or policy.

Working with others in the living system that is an organization requires respectful engagement with others as extensions of one’s own health, safety, and inter-relational being. Ahimsa requires an aspect of emotional intelligence – minimally, the capacity to delay personal gratification and fulfillment on behalf of others and the common good. It calls for leaders to embody self-mastery and mental calmness. An organization that is guided by ahimsa develops leaders in place who make decisions close to the origin of problems, rather than looking to executives as exclusive sources of knowledge or solutions .

(To Be Continued)

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                             October 7, 2014

A college is a living system of interdependent parts wherein no one works, let alone thrives, in isolation. Institutional health is related to the quality of dialog at all levels of exchange. It is the duty of senior leadership to fashion multiple venues where people openly engage diverse intellectual and aesthetic views, forming linkages of caring and collaboration with which to leverage one another and their campus upward. Senior leaders must do more than simply announce decisions; they should present all major issues facing the campus, pointing to options and discussing important implications of choosing one path over another.

To support leadership-in-place, I strive to embody a thinking mind publicly at work, modeling strategy creation processes. In this way, our collective thinking about the why of what strategically matters get encoded in the organizational ethos, laying down tracks of future action. We need to leverage distributed capacities to learn on the job with and from one another. We must respectfully confront one another with the freedom to choose to co-create a desirable future for which we share responsibility, embracing diversity in style and approach. A leader of co-creators endeavors to provide faculty and staff ongoing occasions to engage this freedom, where creativity drives results and ideas are the core of strategic and competitive advantage.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                             October 1, 2014

I support a distributed model of leadership as a collective intelligence that invites constituents to lead from their respective positions, regardless of official status. A conventional model of heroic leadership that empowers but one person/party in ways that colleagues cannot bring different or new information forward is ineffective. I encourage faculty/staff to advise, mentor, and instruct one other, as acts of daily leadership, collegiality, and ethic of caring as a response to the question: “Who are we going to be at work?” Leadership in that form humanizes what is a high-stakes, end of year performance assessment and encourages sustainable self-improvement slowly over time.

Self-regulation is essential to multiple forms of leadership in the context of shared governance. Successful leadership results from what we do and how we do it, but also from tracking the impact our intentions and attention have on organizational relationships and outcomes. Leadership at all levels must be engaged in ongoing reflective practice, listening, and interior growth, tracking the effectiveness of how we show up in the job, aligning our personal development missions with the institutional mission. Successful shared governance presupposes a relational sense of self, and since one’s work is fundamentally with others the quality of one’s work is based on ideas and projects we create together.

By engaging in cross-functional relationship building, I learn of  strengths and aspirations of others, aligning them to strategic priorities and advocating their resourcing. To support faculty and staff development and retention and maintain a continuity of effective governance, I strive to build leadership and talent engines, matching human capacities to opportunities, present and emerging. Not to be aware of the inventory of people’s abilities and skills jeopardizes workforce health and institutional effectiveness. I support a meritocracy of ideas with the charge that everyone at the table comes as active participants, assuming responsibility for value creation and direction setting.

(To be continued)