How Feng Shui Tips Can Help Us With Leadership

This week I was reading an article about Feng Shui and the importance of clean energy in your work place and home.  I was busy cleaning out my closet and being ‘strong’ about throwing things out, and I wondered how Feng Shui tips can help us with leadership.  That is to say, surely a clear mind helps us see things more clearly.

What is Feng Shui?

Feng Shui is the simple interaction of people and their environments. Feng shui is an ancient art and science developed over 3,000 years ago in China. Specifically, it teaches us how balancing the energies in any given space can create good fortune for people inhabiting it. Actually, fortune might be further defined as better health, successful career, abundance or fulfilling relationships.

Feng means wind and shui means water. In Chinese culture wind and water are associated with good health.  The teachings of Feng Shui are based on the idea that everything is alive with energy or Chi and just the right flow of that Chi is what dictates good or bad feng shui.

How Does This Relate To Leadership?

Well let’s have a look at a few of the Feng Shui tips and see if they can support us in leadership areas.

Air And Communication

Air represents communication and water represents emotions.  Hence, it’s a short leap to consider that creating a working environment with free flowing communication, positive feelings and healthy emotional expression offers a strong foundation for successful business.  In fact, clear communication and positive emotions such as trust and confidence are interdependent.  Accordingly, it’s very hard to feel at ease in a workplace where nobody communicates about what’s actually going on.  Even more so, where employees only communicate by email or messenger.

Placement

The concept of placement is a really powerful one.  Good leadership involves truly assessing the skills and talents of an individual and then placing them in the most appropriate role in the business.  What’s more, sometimes leaders have to place people in roles they don’t necessarily want.  When this happens it’s important to lead the employee to operate well in a certain role.  Truly, people excel when they get the chance to use and flow with rather than against their personality, skills and talents.

Balance And Flow

Then there’s balance.  Designing the most effective teams or partnerships involves bringing the right balance of skill sets together.  For example, 6 highly creative people in the same team might mean brilliant ideas, high energy meetings and limited follow-through.  However, placing individuals with a variety of skills: process and project management, attention to detail, big picture concepts, creativity, financial acumen, introverted and extroverted communicators will create balance in a team.  The end result will be consistent output and organic team development as individuals start to adapt and learn from one another.

Responsibility

Ego & Responsibility.  Encourage your ego to step out of the room in alignment with Taoist principles.  The powerful leader works to showcase his or her team.  In fact, he or she works towards creating the most conducive environment for the optimum team performance.  For example, the leader will set up opportunities his or her team members to excel together and independently.  He or she will aim to create a work environment that feels comfortable, where the team feels optimistic and positive when they walk into work every day. 

Generally, a strong leader can take feedback from the team and work out how to apply that to optimise processes, performance and positive experience.  Moreover, a confident leader will take a step back when they didn’t get the results he expected or hoped for and ask “how did I not manage to create the best environment to succeed and did I choose to put the right people in the right place?  What else could I have done or what could I have done differently”.  Finally, a strong leader will value their role as the observer and guide for the team, rather than consider themselves superior.

Self-Leadership And Self-Management

Self-Management.  Leadership is really about self-leadership.  No matter what we say, people will tend do what we do rather than what we say.  Self-Management is about mindfulness to our own performance and the impact our habits and behaviours have on us and those around us.  Actually, self-care, including a good sleep pattern, physical exercise, mind exercise, alone time for reflection and a balanced diet should be a top priority.

Observation And Learning

Observation & Intuition.  It’s useful to listen to our gut and sniff out energy blocks (stuck record communication or GOSSIP).  Furthermore, it’s also useful to identify where energy is flowing too fast (it feels chaotic and people are panicking). 

Busy people in an open communication environment rarely have time or need for gossip and chaos can often be diluted when big tasks are broken down into small tasks and placed in an easy to follow process. 

Empowering leadership involves the ability to take a step back and look at what’s REALLY happening right now, assessing all energies involved, rather than living in the potential of what might happen in the future.  Moreover, once we think we’ve identified that truth, we want to manage our emotions around that and then when we find a place of calmness, we want to ask the following questions:

• What’s the best way forward from here?
• How many options do we have?  Are there options that we’re not considering?
• Are there opportunities existing within this situation?
• Can we document the process that has led us here and do we want to replicate this or take a different path next time?
• What’s working and what doesn’t seem to be working?  What could be causing these outcomes?

Energetic Flow

Quite simply, life is energetic FLOW.  Relating to the Feng Shui concept of energy or Chi.  It’s always flowing and it’s not directly related to you personally.  Frankly, it just is what it is (one of the most challenging concepts that leads us towards ACCEPTANCE). Therefore, the less you take life personally, the more easily it can flow through you. As a result, holding on lightly is helpful. Conversely, holding on tightly is not – CONTROL is an illusion of the EGO.

Can Feng Shui Tips Help Us With Leadership?

Feng Shui is a process not an event.  Just like leadership it can take time to get everything in the optimum place.  It’s a testing and feedback process of working with the facts, observation and intuition.

In the words of the lovely Deepak Chopra “The flow of life doesn’t sort itself into plus and minus columns. Everything has its own intrinsic value, measured in energy, creativity, intelligence, and love. To find those values, a person must stop asking, “What good does it do me?” Instead, you witness what happens, finding fascination in all of it.”

I’m sure I’m not the first person to draw these conclusions and you may also want to consider the less abstract approach to Feng Shui in the workplace by working out your Kua number and getting your hands on a Bagua.  This is NOT my area so I’m sharing with you the website that’s currently exercising my brain cells: KEN LAUHER.

Enjoy your investigations!