Key Moral Leadership Practice #1: Start With a Pause
The hallmark of moral leadership is the Pause.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the faster the world gets, the more we need to pause. Pausing is one of the most essential and most powerful practices moral leaders have to build self-knowledge, relate to the needs of their teams and stakeholders, and move forward in a more deliberate, purposeful, and inspired way. As Emerson once said, “in each pause we heard the call.”
Pausing creates space for leaders to reflect on the world and the situation at hand, reconnect with their core values and relationships, rethink their understanding, and reimagine the future. At first, it’s an investment to build a practice of pausing. But pausing isn’t about time or breaking away from the work at hand. Moral leaders build the moral muscle needed to pause in stride, developing the wisdom to ask the right questions at the right time.
The research in the December 2022 State of Moral Leadership in Business report confirms that the imperative for moral leadership is more urgent than ever. Data collected from 2,500 employees across a variety of sectors in the United States demonstrates a deep desire to work with and for moral leaders. Furthermore, our research found that managers in the top-tier for moral leadership are substantially more likely to pause with their teams.
We live in a world that moves fast. It’s increasingly easy to feel like life is something that happens to us, rather than something that we steer, guided by the compass of our values. Start the Pause.
