ABSTRACT
The demand for innovation within organizations is a worldwide concern. The pre-conditions necessary for liberating creativity within the organizational context have been well described, but the means for behaviorally engaging personal creativity “on the ground” within organizations are challenging to the managerial/administrative mindset and, paradoxically as this may seem, also to the visionary senior leadership perspective. Disengagement in the workplace is high. It is necessary to dig far deeper to find the sources of engagement in work and life, down to the wellsprings of emotion, empathy and imagination, and to the roots of both individual and collective sense of purpose. One key issue which may be masked under all the measurement is that empowerment is seen as a neutral concept, a quantifiable factor that is necessarily disconnected from personal values, much the way we conceive of scientific method, regardless that our methods not infrequently have harmful consequences. Empathetic engagement is de-valued and the illusion of logical neutrality is too often disconnected from the real, ethical questions of who benefits from what and how, and why it matters. In this chapter, we posit that we arrive at a spiritual aspect of leadership through two pathways: (1) self-knowledge of values and unleashing of personal creativity through individuation, and (2) participating in values-based phronetic dialogue that synergizes the creative instinct for the good of a community.
