Psychedelics and leadership
Many of us go through life imagining we aren't good leaders because we don't act a certain way. For me, it was that I wasn't aggressive enough. Over the past few years, a couple of things changed my perspective on this. I didn't intentionally make psychedelics part of this process, but I think my experiences have contributed, nonetheless.
One turning point was undertaking the La Trobe Business School Leadership Professional Development Program (LBSLMP). This course confirmed many of the approaches working for me in my nonprofit role and gave me the confidence to extend myself in this direction.
Volunteering in leadership positions over the past two years has been a big part of my shift in thinking. It's not just the experience of responsibility, though that helped. The fact that we are all choosing to give up our free time to work on a joint project makes a huge difference.
Managing and leading a volunteer organisation like the Australian Psychedelic Society is not something you can do using a transactional leadership style. This approach is where leaders motivate their people to do things based on what they give or withhold – pay or punishments, praise, or the cold shoulder. This carrot and stick approach is ill-suited to any environment, and everything I've learned about how to lead says that it's a bad idea. But if you think you can deploy this style in a volunteer environment, think again! You can't say, "do this, and I'll pay you more" because none of us get paid. Nor could I pay my team any less. And any non-economic punishment I could think of would have precisely one result, which would be to have at least one less volunteer. Transactional leadership is typified by stratified power relations, organisational inflexibility, and resistance to change. None of these are helpful when running a nonprofit organisation in an emerging sector like psychedelics!
What does work in these circumstances?
Transformational leadership takes a different approach. Instead of the authoritarian use of reward and punishment, transformational leaders inspire motivation by sharing their vision for the future, increasing the skill and confidence of the people on their team, and building trust-based relationships with them. I put much effort into these things, though I would like to have more resources available to help people on the team upskill if that's what they want to do. Building trust in relationships within the group is the most critical factor.
Trust is even more vital in creative leadership. Creative leadership is a style where leaders do not issue orders. Instead, they are consultants or facilitators for their teams. In this role, leaders simultaneously allow team members the autonomy to have ownership of the problem they are working to solve and collaborate with them where needed. This model works by prioritizing the conditions that allow team members to find creative solutions and produce novel outputs.
Now, this is something that has worked for us. But it requires very high levels of trust. You need to be comfortable letting teams do their thing without looking over their shoulder and checking on them. It also helps to be intellectually humble. The bunch of people you have working on something is better placed to solve the problem than you are. (Because if you could do it yourself, you already would have!)
Don't second-guess your people! Put your energy into creating the conditions under which they'll thrive, and let their talent and motivation (that you've helped develop by articulating the organisation's vision) do the rest.
How do psychedelics figure into this? I don't think they can take all the credit, as my study of philosophy has been a significant influence. But here is what I suspect:
To articulate a vision, you've got to, at least, have one. And, in psychedelics, this vision needs to be of a world that doesn't yet exist. Psychedelics are good at producing the kind of thinking that can drive this. Connected to this is the idea of Beginners Mind. In psychological terms, this mindset is typified by divergent thinking, where free-flowing and nonlinear thought processes lead to unexpected ideas and connections. Identifying when tradition limits our thinking is vital for innovation and leadership in a rapidly changing world. We are at a time when the past is not always a reliable guide to how we should approach the future. Our assumptions about what is or is not possible are no longer reliable.
But, whatever you come up with, you also need to connect it back to the world as it is; to show that it's possible to get from here to there. So, it can't be all cosmic realignments, global awakenings, and socialist utopias where there's no real sense of how the transformation occurs. Switching from divergent to convergent thinking is, in my opinion, facilitated by mindfulness and being deliberate about what modes of consideration you are engaging in.
Leadership, the way I think about it, means being humble. And some experiences I've had, particularly that one with the Salvia, make it hard to be egotistical about my place in the universe. But I'm aware of the possibility of mystical experiences bolstering narcissistic egos and facilitating spiritual bypass, so maybe this doesn't always generalise to all psychedelic users.
What I think made a difference to me is how my relationship with fear changed. This wasn't instant and didn't happen on my initial contact with psychedelics. LSD produced, for me, fantastic visions and pretty colours. But as soon as I turned inward, in the latter part of the trip, I'd instinctively sense things I wasn't ready to face and get caught in loops of panic.
Psilocybin mushrooms, on the other hand, were utterly different. I usually felt calm and preternaturally still. I did feel profound fear once, though, and that experience changed my perspective. I found I could sit with my anxiety, get inside it, and discover what was at its root. I was genuinely scared. But I didn't try to avoid it, and I didn't panic. The whole experience was utterly unpleasant but distinctly life-affirming.
Why is this relevant? For me, leading means embracing the possibility of failure, not just my own, but of a whole group of people I care about and who look to me to help get us to the future we desire. I'm never going to be the kind of person who is totally convinced that they're right – philosophy cured me of that. But I was the kind of person who was crippled by the thought: What if I'm wrong?
I try very hard not to get things wrong. I'm not callously indifferent or relaxed about it. But the possibility no longer paralyses me with fear.
As my instructors at La Trobe would say, leadership starts with leading oneself.
Before anyone starts thinking I'm some enlightened guy living a perfect life – I'm not! I often get scared, avoid things that feel hard, or feel irrationally angry that the universe doesn't exist in a way most convenient for what I think I want. And I frequently fail to follow my own advice.
But when it comes to getting a group of people to head in a certain direction, I feel like I have things slightly more figured out than I used to.
