Thich Nhat Hanh is the ultimate team builder and he lives with an emotional intelligence that most leaders need more of. If you have not seen his name alongside Jamie Diamond, Mark Cuban and that Tesla guy– Elon is it?—Thich Nhat Hanh is a much respected Eastern spiritual teacher, second to the Dalia Lama for recognizability in the West. He is referred to in many a circle of mindfulness practitioners. He is Vietnamese, has sold 5 million books, and is not a business man. But he has something to teach leaders in enterprises.
Decades ago, Thich Nhat Hanh developed the term interbeing by which he means, in his best Eastern way of living, loving, learning, that we all share a common destiny. We are deeply connected, breathe the same air, have the same genes. Even as we are individuals, which the West teaches so well, we are all one in real ways too.
Every leadership book written the last 40 years, and that makes a lot of them, mentions how leaders have to build teams. High-performance teams in business have their own library of books written about them. All these books highlight trust as a crucial binding ingredient. And yes there are plenty of books written on trust too. And a big obvious truth that is central to trust and teams: all members on the team must believe in their bones that they share a common destiny. They need to act as one unit, without sub-optimizing parts. They need to be a living example of inter-beingness.
Yes, I am taking one human domain, the spiritual and mindful, and crossing into another, leadership for enterprises and teams. This is one way our species learns and grows: one domain’s advancements cross a boundary to blow apart the limits in a second domain with emerging and largely unseen needs. GPS everywhere, people wanting a good side hustle or to be their own boss, and Uber is born. A pandemic plus video-conferencing equals Zoom in every home. That which was formerly irrelevant or foreign in one domain finds a context to take hold and innovate, even dominating if it hits it right. We disrupt and move on.
Neuro-science, a domain-invading discipline almost as wide spread as digitization, supports this interbeing connectedness of us all in some important ways. Here is one way, emphasizing brain hemisphere roles, described by the highly regarded Oxford-and John Hopkins trained, author and neuro-imaging guru Ian McGilchrist (with a legendary TED talk and stop-you-in-your-tracks book, The Master and His Emissary.)
…the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other…
Someday, maybe soon, Thich Naht Hanh’s interbeing innovation will take hold in leadership development domains. Many good middle managers serving and growing their teams, and even some narcissistic ones more interested in climbing the greasy pole, will read about interbeing and then they even start practicing it. We get up from our zoom call and our business analytics, left hemisphere search for efficiency and we look at one at our teammates with the eyes and heart of the right hemisphere. And the team is just enriched with good empirical thinking and the relatedness vibe to make it matter.
As Thich Nhat Hanh himself says, it starts with you and your attitude: “Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.” That is when your right hemisphere will complement that beautiful data-driven side of you, and making that interbeing thing happen, you will add some trust, some lasting connection, to the team who so needs you at your best.