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As someone who helps CEOs and leaders become more conscious in their decisions, the bulk of my coaching is with men. This is simply because men dominate the higher echelons of business in the United States, comprising 93.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 79.8% of Board members. As the revenues of Fortune 500 companies comprised 73% of US GDP in 2013 compared with 58% as recently as 1994, the decisions made by relatively few men are having an increasingly large impact on both the US, as well as the other countries in which these businesses operate.
However, these are almost all publically owned business that report their performance on a quarterly basis to shareholders, and whose stock prices rise and fall based on how well actual performance compares with management forecasts. Top management remuneration is also often tied to company earnings, so CEOs and other top management are incentivized to focus their efforts on company profitability above all else, often at the expense of customers, staff and the communities they serve.
A recent example where this became very public was the extreme pressure placed by Wells Fargo management on retail banking staff to open new accounts, resulting in customers being charged for bogus accounts they didn’t open while top management “earned” tens of millions of dollars in annual bonuses. Another example of top management bonus potentials driving unethical behavior was the behavior of investment banks, loan originators and ratings agencies that collectively created the mortgage lending meltdown of 2008, Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the resulting banking crisis and subsequent “Great Recession”.
It’s tempting to feel helpless in the face of the huge economic power of companies that control such a large share of the US economy. However, each of us has the power of individual choice as to how we spend our money. As consumers, we are making business decisions with the money we spend, and those decisions impact the bottom lines of the companies whose products and services we buy. There are numerous examples of popular bloggers using social media to prompt boycotts of large multinationals such as Unilever, General Mills, and Subway, leading to these manufacturers hurriedly changing company practices or replacing ingredients the bloggers had highlighted as undesirable.
These choices also pertain to who we work for. For example, one of my college-age sons chose to accept an engineering internship at Tesla last summer because he loves their Earth-friendly mission, and had the opportunity to work on the ground-breaking Model 3, the first “cool” mass-market electric car.
By “conscious” choices, I mean thinking through choices not just from a purely selfish perspective, but from the wider perspective of how these choices impact others as well. Life is presenting us with an ever-increasing range of issues to consider, with social media democratizing the sharing of information that professional media organizations may not have had the resources to cover.
The First Question to Ask When Facing Difficult Business Decisions
As an energy coach who helps men transform their businesses, relationships and finances, by identifying and changing self-sabotaging thought patterns, I encourage my clients to ask themselves the following question when key choices arise:
“What would love do in this situation?”
And by love, I mean loving for the individual and all others involved, including their business, staff, customers, suppliers, and communities. The more you ask this question, the more conscious you become.
Perhaps you don’t see yourself as a leader, but the truth is we all are in some way. Our behavior gives those we interact with the chance to compare and contrast with their own values, whether those others are our children, our co-workers, or others who just need a little encouragement to choose more lovingly for themselves and others they deal with.
Men have been leading humanity for thousands of years, but often from an underlying fear-based mentality that clung to control, stifled change and discouraged dissent. With the arrival of the Internet and social media we have never had more opportunity to connect with others of like mind, and have tools freely available to share our views on issues important to us and build communities of change agents should we so choose.
There has never been a time when we can up-level our collective consciousness so quickly and, as the dominant gender in the most influential sector of society (i.e. business), men hold the key to accelerating this change. So, if you’d like to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem when making decisions for your business, I encourage you to ask:
“What would love do in this situation?”
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