What is leading?

Are we talking about pushing people to do what we want them to do? Or rather, are we talking about inspiring people to want to do what they know how to do?

Push? Inspire?... that is the question.

Here we postulate two paths of action with different consequences and results. Before deciding which path I find more effective in 21st-century organizations, we need to understand a bit about what a human being is in order to base what we will later propose for organizations that want to be efficient in the future and, in this way, can preserve their survival.

A ship captain takes many years to learn how to effectively govern his vessel. What does he study for so long? He studies the environment in which he will move (currents, winds, tides, geography, etc.), he studies the structure of the ship he will manage (hull, sails, rudder, etc.) so that he knows how it reacts to the environment it finds itself in, and all this will allow him to govern it effectively.

To lead an organization should be the same. But I believe this is not the case in our culture. We are taught a lot in university about the environment (supply, demand, production, marketing, finance, etc.) but nothing about the structure, that is, nothing about the kind of beings that human beings are and that we are going to lead

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I think this is one of the main obstacles that today's leaders face. They don't know because nobody taught them and often they just reproduce ways of managing people that they learned in their professional career and that are ineffective in the long term because they deny the human aspect and cause suffering.

What is a human being?

There are many ways to answer the question of what a human being is. One is by pointing: "you" or "me". Another is by showing what constitutes us as humans, pointing out what are the constitutive conditions of what we call a human being.

If one wonders about the constitutive conditions of the human, and when that arises, one goes back to the first lineages of hominids that existed 3 million years ago and that began to preserve a certain way of living. It is not our genetics that makes us human, but it is a particular way of living. That way is living immersed in coordinations of behavioral coordinations, that is, living immersed in language. Everything we do as human beings we do in networks of conversations, that is, in an intertwining of language and emotions.

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This tells us something else, that human beings live in multiple dimensions. We are human insofar as we operate in language, but we are also mammalian animals if we attend to the biological domain.

Like all animals, we are emotional beings, meaning the path our life takes is oriented by our likes, our preferences, our fears, in short, our emotions. As humans existing in language, we have reason, logic that allows us to construct arguments and explanations to account for what we do. But we must be aware that we use reason to justify, or sometimes deny, our emotions.

For language to emerge among those first hominids, a necessary condition was coexistence, being together coordinating our actions, for the pleasure of being together, living in families, in small human groups. For this to be possible, a certain emotion had to occur, which I already talked about in my previous article. Love. Love defined as "The domain of relational behaviors in which the other appears as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself", that is, that the other has presence for one and that presence is