Who Would You Follow - and Why?

Episode 8 marks a turning point in CEO Exercises. After seven episodes devoted to self-awareness and inner freedom — the "First Week" of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises — Mike McDonnell pivots into new territory: actively building leadership capability. This episode draws on the "Second Week" and adapts one of its most important meditations, Ignatius's Contemplation of the Kingdom of Christ, also known as the Call of the King.

 After recapping the arc of the series so far, Mike guides listeners through a meditation exercise centered on three leaders, each extending the same offer to join them on a mission deeply appealing to you and aligned with your ultimate purpose. The first is the worst leader you ever worked for; the second is the best; and the third is Jesus of Nazareth, considered purely as a leader rather than a religious figure. For each, you examine the what, the why, and the how of their leadership, identify their most and least positive qualities, and decide how — and why — you would respond to their call.

 The exercise is ultimately about clarifying your own leadership model. Mike shares his own answer: Humility, selflessness, freedom from disordered attachment, and love for the people right in front of you — all of it fused with a relentless commitment to the mission.

He insists this is not a soft alternative to high performance but a high-performance model itself.  The episode closes by reconnecting the Second Week to the First: you don't change by being told what you should do. You change by coming to truly desire something greater than what you've been settling for, and then doing the work to get there.  Leadership at its best, Mike argues, is not a management technique but a spiritual achievement.

Transcript

The Intro

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Picture the best leader you ever worked for, right now, before we start. Not the one with the most impressive title, the one who actually changed something in you. The one whose example you still reach for, sometimes without realizing it, when you're facing a hard moment of your own. Hold on to that image of that person. We're going to need them today. Because today we begin a pivot. The first seven episodes gave you frameworks for self-awareness and inner freedom. Now we move into new territory, building leadership capability. And today's exercise is an evaluation of three very different leaders and of your own reaction when each of them asks you to follow them. We're going to put those three leaders side by side. We're going to think deeply about how they led and what that means for whether you'd follow them. Three leaders, each calling you to join their mission. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises. Let's begin. Since

Recap of the Arc of the Podcast

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we're at a transition point as I just described, let me briefly recap where we've been and look at where we're going. The premise of CEO exercises is simple, even if its implications are not. The spiritual dimension of a leader is at least as important as the mental and physical dimensions. And on most days, I'd argue, more important. You invest in your mind, you read, you think, you analyze, you strategize. You invest in your body, the sleep, the diet, the workout routine. But very few leaders have given the same serious, sustained attention to their interior life. That part of them that everything else actually runs on. And that dimension is rarely addressed adequately in conventional leadership development. We covered why in episode three. The interior life doesn't survive the trip into a survey instrument or a competency rubric. So the field quietly decided that it wasn't quite real or wasn't quite in its scope. The result is a generation of leadership development that's extraordinarily sophisticated about the outer game and surprisingly underdeveloped about the inner one. This podcast tries to fill that gap. It draws on the 500-year-old tradition of Ignatian spirituality, which, as I keep insisting, is the opposite of otherworldly. It's intensely practical, deeply field-tested, and built for engagement with the real world. Ignatius wasn't a hermit on a mountain. He founded and ran a growing international organization, and he worked with the highest levels of secular and religious power during the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. He authored roughly 7,000 letters across a vast communications network. He gave the spiritual exercises to royalty, to merchants, to religious women and men, to wealthy benefactors. He led from his inner life, and he projected that leadership out into the entire world. To help fill this gap in the development of our interior lives, we're taking the tools, practices, and insights of Ignatian spirituality and adapting them into secular exercises for business leaders, for leaders of any kind, and honestly for everyone. That word secular is deliberate. I made a choice at the very start of this podcast to begin with the secular adaptations of Ignatian spirituality. Why? Leadership badly needs spiritual development. But for many of the people I most want to reach, the word spirituality arrives preloaded with unwelcome baggage. These are two worlds that, as I said in episode one, almost never get invited to the same dinner party. So I started where I thought I could be heard by leaders out in the world. There will be another season of CEO exercises where I'll keep Ignatian spirituality in its full Christian faith-based context and apply it to leadership. That's how I practice spirituality myself, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that with you. It's a different project for a different time, but it's coming. As I said at the top, today's episode is a turning point. We're moving further into the spiritual exercises now. In the first seven episodes, we covered a lot of ground to help you build greater interior clarity and freedom. Episode one, the ceiling. The provocation that started the podcast. The ceiling on your leadership isn't external, and it never was. It's internal. And we named what sets the ceiling disordered attachments, things we cling to that distort our vision and compromise our judgment. Things like our need for status or for approval or the need to be right, or the fear of looking weak. Episode 2, the examine. The foundational practice. Five steps, 15 minutes, every day. Gratitude, petition, the review of your interior movements, an accounting of where you fell short, and a look ahead. The daily discipline of reading your consolations and desolations is data. Episode three, the question beneath the question. This is the episode for skeptics. The argument that the spiritual dimension is real, that it's constitutive of great leadership, and that the patterns the derailment research keeps documenting, lack of self-awareness, arrogance, the inability to take feedback, the absence of backbone are not skill deficits. They're problems of the interior life that no behavioral training has reliably solved. The leadership failure rates have not really changed. Episode 4, the guided examine. A recording to walk you through the practice itself, so it became something you could do with my voice alongside you the first few times, rather than just a concept. Episode 5, the Foundation, Bedrock, your cognitive operating system. The thing you look through, not at. We worked through Ignatius' principle and foundation, the concept of indifference as a balanced scale, and the four questions about who you are when the scorecard is empty. Episode six, the architecture. Look back across the whole structure, and a deeper encounter with the foundation is something that lives not just in your beliefs, but in your nervous system, and reveals itself most clearly under exactly the pressure you most need it to withstand. Episode seven, the field notes, the annual walk through your whole professional history, period by period, cataloging your best self and your worst, then doing the pattern work, finding the signal and the noise, where we learn that strength and shadow often travel together. These are fundamental frameworks, practices, and insights, and you'll need to keep working with them every day, every year. It's a continuous process. But now we're going to add something. A series of episodes focused less on self-awareness and inner freedom, and more on your growth as a leader. And let me be clear, one does not displace the other. This is a single system of exercises, all working together synergistically. Let me make a brief aside here for those of you with some knowledge of Ignatian spirituality, or frankly anyone curious about how this podcast parallels the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. Spiritual exercises are organized into four phases. Ignatius calls them weeks, but they really don't map to calendar weeks. They're movements, more like movements in a symphony than days on a clock. And everything we've done across the first seven episodes has been drawn from the first of those four movements. It is called the first week in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. We're now moving into the territory of the second week. Until now, we've been deepening our self-awareness and inner freedom, and we'll keep doing that. But now we're adding exercises that draw from the second week using meditations to help cultivate leadership capabilities that work in synergy with that self-awareness and freedom. So let's have some fun with this next exercise. Today's exercise

"The Three Calls" Meditation Setup

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is adapted from one of the most important exercises of the second week. Ignatius called it the contemplation of the kingdom of Christ, sometimes the call of the king. You're going to consider three leaders. Two of them you know because you worked for them. Each leader is offering you the same opportunity to come work for them on a mission that's deeply appealing to you and fully aligned with your ultimate purpose. This offer is identical in every case. You'll look at each of them through the lens of the what, the why, and the how. What did this leader accomplish in terms of mission, results, actual delivery, why they did it, what drove them from within, and how did they lead, the manner, the means, what was it actually like to be led by them? You'll identify their most positive and least positive leadership characteristics, and then you'll give each of them your answer to their call and explain why. Let me guide you through the exercise now. I'll give you a few minutes with each question to contemplate it. We'll go faster than you should when you do this for yourself, but experiencing it with me, even at speed, may be more useful than just listening to me explain it.

"The Three Calls" Meditation

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So let's start finding a quiet place where hopefully you won't be too interrupted. Give yourself 30 to 45 minutes, sit comfortably, take some deep breaths, and let the noise of the day settle. Now clarify your objective. You want to identify and understand the real leadership traits of each of these three leaders and discover how and why you would respond to each one's offer. The first leader you're examining is the one you've worked for, whom you'd rank lowest in overall effectiveness and in your desire to follow them, your least favorite in both effectiveness and followership. Now ask yourself, what are the one or two most positive qualities of their leadership, and the one or two most negative or least positive qualities? Think about things like revealing moments, how they treated someone who couldn't help their career, how they took bad news, how they responded to being challenged, how they reacted to someone else's success. You get the idea. Go ahead now and think this through. And now, how will you respond to their offer? And why? Your most favorite in both effectiveness and followership. Who is it? Now ask yourself the same question. What are the one or two most positive qualities of their leadership, and the one or two most negative or least positive? Again, look at those revealing moments. How they treated someone who couldn't help their career, how they took bad news, how they responded being challenged, how they reacted to someone else's success. Now for the third leader, I'll ask you to stretch a little, depending on where you stand. Stay with me, this is not a trick question. Bring Jesus of Nazareth into your mind as the third leader. Consider him purely as a leader, making you that same offer to join him and work beside him to accomplish a mission that's important to you. You don't have to believe anything theologically about Jesus to do this part. Set those questions aside. We're only considering him as a leader, calling you to a mission that's profoundly important to you and aligned with your ultimate purpose. Point is simply his leadership, his ability to accomplish a mission and to gain followership. Examine the model on its merits, the way you'd study any case. Now ask yourself what are the one or two most positive qualities of his leadership and the one or two most negative or least positive relative to effectiveness and followership. As you think about this, let me give you some background information on his accomplishments to help you in the evaluation. He took a tiny band of unremarkable followers, fishermen, a tax collector, a treasurer, a political radical, nobody you'd have recruited. He had no capital, no institutional power, and no technology. And through them he launched a movement that outlasted the empire that executed him and reshaped a large part of the world for 2,000 years. And here's some of his reported behaviors: kneeling to wash his followers' feet, the leader doing a servant's job, refusing power when it was handed to him, absorbing hostility without retaliating, telling people difficult truths they didn't want to hear, treating the people everyone else discarded as the most important people in the room. So, what are the one or two most positive qualities of his leadership, and the one or two most negative or least positive relative to effectiveness and followership? So, how would you respond to his offer and why? Now, considering all three leaders and their best capabilities, ask yourself what you would want people to say about you, your best and your least best leadership qualities. You might not have those qualities fully developed yet. This question is more about what you think is most important to you.

Commentary on "The Three Calls" Meditation

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So that's the meditation. I recommend you repeat this exercise on the three leaders as often as you can for the next week, and then periodically into the future. There is a real richness here. Evaluating leaders, feeling in your mind, body, and inner depths what capabilities affect you the most, both positively and negatively. Thinking about your own leadership model as you want it to be. Dwell on this exercise. Absorb the insights on leadership and on followership. Start to integrate these insights into your practices of the daily examine, the foundation, and the field notes. I'll tell you my own response to that question of what qualities are most important to me. I've done this exercise many, many times. What strikes me every time is that the qualities that make Jesus' leadership so compelling are the very qualities I admire most in the best human leader I ever worked for, only without the ceiling. My best human leader was selfless, but not entirely, free, but not completely, loving toward his people, but with a few disordered attachments still running quietly in the background. This third model is what my best leader was reaching toward. You may experience it differently, and that's absolutely fine, but I'd suggest that maybe the qualities at the heart of Jesus' leadership humility, selflessness, inner freedom, unconditional love, and a passion for results, of course, bordering on the extreme, are among the highest expressions of the leadership you already told yourself you'd follow. For me, I keep coming back to four qualities. I offer them as my answer, not yours. A leader of deep humility, whose identity doesn't depend on being the hero. A leader of selflessness, whose drive for results is fierce, but isn't ultimately about themselves. A leader of inner freedom, free from the disordered attachments that tilt the scale and distort the judgment, exactly as we discussed in episode five. And a leader who loves the people they lead, in the demanding, truth-telling, self-giving, self-sacrificing sense of that word. Humility, selflessness, inner freedom, love. That's my model. Yours may be worded differently, and it should be. It should be yours. But understand this: this model is not the gentle, nice alternative to a high performance model. It is a high performance model. As I said in episode five, it's an and, not an or. Performance and foundation, held in creative tension, each one strengthening the other. Anyone who walks away from this exercise thinking results matter less than having these traits has misunderstood it. These traits aren't softness. They're constitutive of great leadership. They're what lets you call the play that needs to be called, read the room, engage the hearts and souls of your team, take the intelligent risk, and see situations and decisions clearly even when the stakes are high and your reputation is on the line. You don't grow into this model through willpower or good intentions. You grow into it through the practices we've already built. The examine shows you day by day where you departed from the model and where you lived up to it. The foundation work anchors your identity in something durable enough that you can afford to be free. And the field notes reveal the patterns that pull you away from the leader you want to be. These exercises point you toward the destination.

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The daily, weekly, and annual practices are how you travel there.

Closing

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So let me bring this all home.

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What we did today was at its root an exercise in desire. Ignatian spirituality understands something conventional leadership development almost entirely misses. You don't change by being told what you should do. You change by coming to truly desire something greater than what you've been settling for, and then doing the work to get there. Here's what I've come to believe after nearly 40 years of working this integration. The leadership model you're drawn to in your best moments, the one you'd follow anywhere, the one that made you more yourself while the work still got done, is not a management technique. It's a spiritual achievement. Humility, selflessness, freedom from disordered attachment, and love for the people right in front of you. All of it fuses with a relentless commitment to the mission. Those are exactly the interior qualities this whole podcast has been about. And as I've said before, the very same qualities the Ignatian tradition says bring you closer to God are the qualities that make people willing to go through the walls for you and that get the hardest things done. That's the power of Ignatian spirituality and leadership. Until next time. Thank you for listening. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises.