In The Godfather, there’s a key moment when Mafia boss Michael Corleone finally overcomes his scruples and agrees to assassinate two of his family’s key rivals. “It’s not personal,” he tells his brother. “It’s strictly business.”
As business leaders, many of us take a similar pride in separating our personal lives from our business decisions. It’s not just that we don’t let our personal lives interfere with our business commitments. Often, we make a point of being “hard-headed” leaders who don’t let our emotions or feelings interfere with a pragmatic and rational approach to running our organizations.
Only one problem: trying to enforce boundaries between our “personal” side and our “business” side can be massively counterproductive. Suppressing your inner feelings might be a necessity if you’re running a criminal enterprise — but for today’s CEOs, it’s a terrible idea.
A More Integrated Approach
What’s needed is a more integrated approach. Instead of viewing our personal side as distinct from, or even opposed to, our work as business leaders, we need to start viewing our personal and organizational knowledge and success as fundamentally intertwined: things that feed off and mutually strengthen one another.
That means that instead of working to build walls between our personal and business personas, we should work to build bridges between them. Instead of pushing down your personal insights, knowledge, and strengths, aim to bring them to work with you every day — and to work in ways that drive not just organizational success but also lead you toward the kind of fulfillment you need as a person.
When you lead with your whole self, you’ll find that you’re making decisions that align with your core values and beliefs. You’ll find that you’re drawing on all your knowledge and insights to create strategies that lead to better results. And you’ll find that you’re happier, healthier, and more effective as a leader. Instead of dissonance and disconnection, you’ll find yourself more grounded and present in each moment of your day — and that will lead to stronger relationships and better results as you project a more energized and integrated leadership presence for yourself and others.
Embrace Your Humanity
Bringing your more human and personal side to work will impact and inspire others, too. Your employees and colleagues will see — or sense — that you’re fully committing to the work you do together and that you aren’t holding anything back from them. They’ll intuitively seek to emulate that, allowing everyone — you, them, their colleagues, and the organization as a whole — to benefit from the entirety of their knowledge, too.
For leaders, in other words, “strictly business” is a recipe for disaster. When you start leading with your whole self, and not artificially segregating the human and the personal from the business-focused, you can forge stronger relationships and interconnections with everyone around you.
Leading with your whole self is a powerful way to unlock your own potential, but also to foster a new kind of trust and build stronger and more durable bonds — and pathways for sharing knowledge — with everyone around you.
